I think you completely missed the angle of, civilizational coordination via people updating on the state of the world and on what others are up to.
(To be fair I literally wrote in The Gist, “speed up memetic evolution”, lol that’s really dumb, also explicitly advocated for “memetic evolution” multiple times throughout)
Communication is not exactly “sharing information”
Communication is about making sure you know where you each stand and that you resolve to some equilibrium, not that you tell each other your life story and all the object level knowledge in your head.
Isn’t this exactly what you’re doing when going around telling people “hey guys big labs are literally building gods they don’t understand nor control, this is bad and you should know it” ? I should still dig into what that looks like exactly and when it’s done well vs badly (for example you don’t tell people how exactly OpenAI is building gods, just that they are).
I’d argue that if Youtube had a chatbot window embedded in the UI which can talk about contents of a video, this would be a very positive thing, because generally it would increase people’s clarity about and ability to parse, contents of videos.
Clarity of ideas is not just “pure memetic evolution”
Think of the type of activity that could be described as “doing good philosophy” and “being a good reader”. This process is iterative too: absorb info from world → share insight/clarified version of info → get feedback → iterate again → affect world state → repeat. It’s still in the class of “unpredictable memetic phenomena”, but it’s very very different from what happens on the substrate of mindless humans scrolling TikTok, guided by the tentacles of a recommendation algorithm.
Even a guy typing something into a comment box, constantly re-reading and re-editing and re-considering, will land on (evolve towards) unpredictable ideas (memes). That’s the point!
So I’ve been thinking more about this...
I think you completely missed the angle of, civilizational coordination via people updating on the state of the world and on what others are up to.
(To be fair I literally wrote in The Gist, “speed up memetic evolution”, lol that’s really dumb, also explicitly advocated for “memetic evolution” multiple times throughout)
Communication is not exactly “sharing information”
Communication is about making sure you know where you each stand and that you resolve to some equilibrium, not that you tell each other your life story and all the object level knowledge in your head.
Isn’t this exactly what you’re doing when going around telling people “hey guys big labs are literally building gods they don’t understand nor control, this is bad and you should know it” ?
I should still dig into what that looks like exactly and when it’s done well vs badly (for example you don’t tell people how exactly OpenAI is building gods, just that they are).
I’d argue that if Youtube had a chatbot window embedded in the UI which can talk about contents of a video, this would be a very positive thing, because generally it would increase people’s clarity about and ability to parse, contents of videos.
Clarity of ideas is not just “pure memetic evolution”
Think of the type of activity that could be described as “doing good philosophy” and “being a good reader”. This process is iterative too: absorb info from world → share insight/clarified version of info → get feedback → iterate again → affect world state → repeat. It’s still in the class of “unpredictable memetic phenomena”, but it’s very very different from what happens on the substrate of mindless humans scrolling TikTok, guided by the tentacles of a recommendation algorithm.
Even a guy typing something into a comment box, constantly re-reading and re-editing and re-considering, will land on (evolve towards) unpredictable ideas (memes). That’s the point!