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Well I'm not saying the Amish are "successful" in any sense of morality or human flourishing; I'm making no claim on that. I'm just saying they multiply fast. N

Well I'm not saying the Amish are "successful" in any sense of morality or human flourishing; I'm making no claim on that. I'm just saying they multiply fast. Not a judgment, just an observation. I agree the pathway would definitely change. You'd see pushback. It's not like the Amish will be 300 million in their exact current format. So let's say that does happen and the Amish start getting targeted for "embrace, extend, extinguish", or some variation of semi-forced immigration and assimilation. Amish aren't homogenous. Some of them would be taken by this, assimilate, and drop birth rates. Some would not. Whatever characteristics made that last part not assimilate would then get replicated into a larger and larger population share. And the process continues. We may see several phases of this, but at the conclusion of the process, the evolutionary logic leads to a certain result: A population who are absolutely, totally immune to any influence that would assimilate them into a negative-birthrate culture. And that population will rapidly expand until it hits physical limits. The reason I think this is inevitable is because evolution is relentlessly adaptable, while the countermeasures are fairly static. It's like a new antibiotic. Even if it works really well, the bacteria's evolutionary process will just keep trying and trying until it finds a new replication pathway. The replicators can adapt forever while the force that is stopping them cannot.

iamnothere 7y ago
A thoughtful response, and I think you are right in that not every Amish sub-community would be assimilated. This is already happening; there was a chapter in Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants" that describes the differing perspectives within the different Amish communities on things such as technology. There are some Amish communities that resist almost all modern tech; these communities are probably more likely to stay small over time (hard to attract and keep members), but I imagine they are also less likely to be absorbed into modern society than the rest of the Amish population. To me, it appears that some sub-subcultures manage to maintain their identities by putting up huge barriers to entry; the more costly they are (in terms of personal sacrifice), the more likely that the culture will maintain its identity, up to a certain point. Robin Hanson has described this a fair amount as well. Some cultures have a "price of admission" that can't be easily faked (I forget his term for this) in order to protect their group resources against disloyal outsiders who may take advantage of the group. This explains a lot of the bizarre, contradictory, and otherwise illogical practices that you see in these insular cultures.

iamnothere 7y ago

A thoughtful response, and I think you are right in that not every Amish sub-community would be assimilated. This is already happening; there was a chapter in Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants" that describes the differing perspectives within the different Amish communities on things such as technology. There are some Amish communities that resist almost all modern tech; these communities are probably more likely to stay small over time (hard to attract and keep members), but I imagine they are also less likely to be absorbed into modern society than the rest of the Amish population. To me, it appears that some sub-subcultures manage to maintain their identities by putting up huge barriers to entry; the more costly they are (in terms of personal sacrifice), the more likely that the culture will maintain its identity, up to a certain point. Robin Hanson has described this a fair amount as well. Some cultures have a "price of admission" that can't be easily faked (I forget his term for this) in order to protect their group resources against disloyal outsiders who may take advantage of the group. This explains a lot of the bizarre, contradictory, and otherwise illogical practices that you see in these insular cultures.