TLDR: Here’s all the ways in which you’re right, and thanks for pointing these things out!
At a meta-level, I’m *really* excited by just how much I didn’t see your criticism coming. I thought I was thinking carefully, and that iterating on my post with Claude (though it didn’t write a single word of it!) was taking out the obvious mistakes, but I missed so much. I have to rethink a lot about my process of writing this.
I strongly agree that I need a *way* more detailed model of what “memetic evolution” looks like, when it’s good vs bad, and why, whether there’s a better way of phrasing and viewing it, dig into historical examples, etc.
I’m curious if social media is actually bad beyond the surface—but again I should’ve anticipated “social media kinda seems bad in a lot of ways” being such an obvious problem in my thinking, and attended to it.
Reading it back, it totally reads as an argument for “more information more Gooder”, which I didn’t see at all. (generally viewing the post as “more X is always more good” is also cool as in, a categorization trick that brings clarity)
I think a good way to summarize my mistake is that I didn’t “go all the way” in my (pretty scattered) lines of thinking.
You’re on your way to thinking critically about morality, coordination and epistemology, which is great!
Thanks :) A big part of why I got into writing ideas explicitly and in big posts (vs off-hand Tweets/personal notes), is because you’ve talked about this being a coordination mechanism on Discord.
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!
TLDR:
Here’s all the ways in which you’re right, and thanks for pointing these things out!
At a meta-level, I’m *really* excited by just how much I didn’t see your criticism coming. I thought I was thinking carefully, and that iterating on my post with Claude (though it didn’t write a single word of it!) was taking out the obvious mistakes, but I missed so much. I have to rethink a lot about my process of writing this.
I strongly agree that I need a *way* more detailed model of what “memetic evolution” looks like, when it’s good vs bad, and why, whether there’s a better way of phrasing and viewing it, dig into historical examples, etc.
I’m curious if social media is actually bad beyond the surface—but again I should’ve anticipated “social media kinda seems bad in a lot of ways” being such an obvious problem in my thinking, and attended to it.
Reading it back, it totally reads as an argument for “more information more Gooder”, which I didn’t see at all. (generally viewing the post as “more X is always more good” is also cool as in, a categorization trick that brings clarity)
I think a good way to summarize my mistake is that I didn’t “go all the way” in my (pretty scattered) lines of thinking.
Thanks :) A big part of why I got into writing ideas explicitly and in big posts (vs off-hand Tweets/personal notes), is because you’ve talked about this being a coordination mechanism on Discord.
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!