wtf is culture?

Culture describes the conventions of a community, which guide individuals into regular behaviors and provide communal meanings and values.

David Lewis's now canonical idea is that conventions form in the process of trying to solve coordination problems.

high culture : the serious, intellectually-rigorous, and often difficult art forms celebrated in museums, galleries, symphony halls, opera houses, and academies. High culture is supposed to have “permanent value” and provide standards of excellence.

Communal culture is an unconscious storehouse of behaviors, rules, and norms that guide individual lives.

For sociologist Georg Simmel, culture is “the development of human nature beyond its natural state.”

Following philosopher David Lewis, conventions are (1) regular (2) well-known, and (3) socially accepted behaviors that individuals follow and expect others to follow.

Conventions start as coordination problem solutions but are quick to become social norms. And as everyone follows them to some degree, they create the behavioral patterns we associate with those groups.