Though three weeks ago I outlined a story of the long-term history of changes to moral authority, I decided to study this in a bit more detail. So I collected this list of 20 candidate sources of moral authority: Activist/interest group, Hereditary elite, Artist/musician/storyteller, Business-leader/employer, Famous, Civic-frat/clubs/assoc, Doctor/therapist, Family/elder, Peer/Community, Govt leader/org, Heart/Conscience, Law, Market prices, News/Media, Public intellectual, Priest/Church/Sacredtxt, Scholar/scientist, School/teacher, Tradition, Warrior/Military. Then I asked three LLMs to rate the strength of each source (wrt max 100) in each of the six time periods between the dates 5KBC, 1AD, 1400, 1750, 1910, 2000, 2026. Here are their medians, with peaks highlighted in red, sorted to show the time progression, and by strength:

Notice some patterns. The ancient and modern eras were pretty different, and each of these eras can be split into early and late versions, which have mildly different sources. The ancient world changed from early, when tradition, family, and community peaked, to later, when priests, aristocrats, and warriors peaked. The modern era changed from early, when states, law, scholars, schools, and public intellectuals peaked, to later when hearts, activists, celebrities, news, and medicine peaked. Community (via social media) has also peaked again in the late modern era. Civic clubs peaked in a very early modern period.

Note that most ancient sources are still important in the modern era; what changed was that the modern era added many more sources. Thus sources have become a lot less concentrated over time. In the first period there were only 6 sources >50, while in the last there were 12. Only once source, artist/musician/storyteller, didn’t change much in strength over history.

In my prior post I said that to fix cultural drift we will need to rely a lot more on speculative market prices as sources of moral authority, but I didn’t know how that could happen. Here we see that though business and market prices have been rising in strength over time, the are still rather weak. But at least the trend is hopeful.

Note that the recent change in modern era trends could be seen as maladaptive.