I suspect that there’s a particular sort of spirituality-adjacent recreational philosophy whose practice may make it easier to examine the meta-organisms you’re describing. Even with it, they seem to often resist being named in a way that’s useful when speaking to mixed company.
Absolutely. I used to feel victimized by this. Now I just build immunity, speak freely, and maybe some folk will hear me.
Can you point out some of the existing ones that meet your definition of Friendly?
That’s a beautiful question.
It’d be my pleasure.
I tend to focus more on the unFriendly ones since they actively blind people. So I’ve thought in less detail about this branch of the memetic zoo. But I’ll share a few bits I think are good examples:
The art of knowing. Greek “mathema”, Latin “sciencia”. This is a wisdom thread that keeps building and rebuilding clarity & sanity. It’s the core seed of deeply and humiliatingly sincere curiosity that gave birth to mathematics & science.
Not to be confused with the content or methods of modern social institutions though. Anytime you ossify parts of Friendly memes (like with RCTs or “the scientific method”), they provide an attack surface for Goodhart and thus for unFriendly hypercreatures. As a rule, unFriendly egregores lose power and “food” when truth rings through clearly, so they keep numbing and fogging access to the art of knowing wherever they can. (Ergo why e.g. most math classes teach computation, not math, and usually they do so via dominance & threat and in ways that feel utterly pointless and body-denying to the students.)
I think this is the core breath of life in Less Wrong. A deep remembrance that this is real and matters. (Sometimes LW drifts toward ossification though. Focus on Bayes and biases and the like tends in this direction.)
Mettā. Not the meditative practice of loving-kindness, but what which those meditations cultivate. The kindness with no opposite and no exceptions. The Buddha called this an “bramavihara”, which you can translate as something like “endless abode”. It’s something like the inner remembrance of Friendliness that’s felt, not (just) understood, such that it shapes your thinking and behavior “from below”. Much like the art of knowing, this is something you embody and become, not just cognitively understand.
Death’s clarity. Super unpopular in transhumanist circles because of the “death” part. It’s super rare to hear people point at this one without going full deathist. (“Death is what makes life worth living!”) But the fact remains, losing something precious tends to cut through bullshit and highlight what really, truly matters. If you can trust that and breathe through the pain and survive, you come out the other side clearer. You don’t have to wait for Death to seek this clarity. Lots of spiritual traditions try to lean this way (e.g. “Memento Mori”) — but like with science and mettā, there’s some tendency to ossify the practices. Part of death’s clarity is in the willingness to trust the unknown.
BJJ/MMA pragmatism. Somehow a level less abstract than the above, arguably a child of the art of knowing. Both BJJ and MMA face something real and ground their ideas in that reality. Can you force a submission? Can you dish out blows without taking too many yourself? You can’t think your way around that: either it happens or it doesn’t. The empirical “Show me” tone in these arts cuts through stupefaction by pointing again and again at reality.
The Friendly thing here is the culture of training, not the fighting arts per se. The same thing could apply to chemistry or carpentry. Basically any non-bullshit skill that has some hard-to-miss embodied sign of progress.
The right to a relevant voice in one’s governance. This emerged most clearly in the Western Enlightenment, especially in the USA. The idea that if some egregore (especially the government) has power over you, then you should have influence over that egregore too, or be able to opt out of its influence. This is pretty explicitly a meme about (one strategy for) hypercreature alignment.
And as is par for the course, the stupifying ecosystem evolved attacks to this. Corporate special interests gridlocking government, the role of the town square now held in private tech companies’ censorable platforms, and the emergence of forces like cancel culture are all corrosions. This is, in my mind, the main risk of wokism: It’s actually trying to hunt and kill access to this meme.
In general, Friendly hypercreatures just don’t act the same way as the unFriendly ones, with evolved arguments that hook people emotionally and with people identifying strongly with one side or another. They instead tend to loosen identity and encourage clarity, because they spread by actually offering value and therefore do best when their host humans can see that clearly. Most identities are stupid attack surfaces.
As a result, they don’t clump people together around a behavior nearly as much as unFriendly patterns do. Instead they usually work more like fields of intelligence. The way anyone can prove a math theorem and see the truth for themselves and thereby be immune to all social pressure. That’s not localized. That’s limited purely by someone’s capacity-plus-willingness to look at reality. The “clumpiness” of social unity happens from having a culture that values, encourages, and develops methods for pointing people back at reality. No social pressure/threat needed hardly ever.
Absolutely. I used to feel victimized by this. Now I just build immunity, speak freely, and maybe some folk will hear me.
That’s a beautiful question.
It’d be my pleasure.
I tend to focus more on the unFriendly ones since they actively blind people. So I’ve thought in less detail about this branch of the memetic zoo. But I’ll share a few bits I think are good examples:
The art of knowing. Greek “mathema”, Latin “sciencia”. This is a wisdom thread that keeps building and rebuilding clarity & sanity. It’s the core seed of deeply and humiliatingly sincere curiosity that gave birth to mathematics & science.
Not to be confused with the content or methods of modern social institutions though. Anytime you ossify parts of Friendly memes (like with RCTs or “the scientific method”), they provide an attack surface for Goodhart and thus for unFriendly hypercreatures. As a rule, unFriendly egregores lose power and “food” when truth rings through clearly, so they keep numbing and fogging access to the art of knowing wherever they can. (Ergo why e.g. most math classes teach computation, not math, and usually they do so via dominance & threat and in ways that feel utterly pointless and body-denying to the students.)
I think this is the core breath of life in Less Wrong. A deep remembrance that this is real and matters. (Sometimes LW drifts toward ossification though. Focus on Bayes and biases and the like tends in this direction.)
Mettā. Not the meditative practice of loving-kindness, but what which those meditations cultivate. The kindness with no opposite and no exceptions. The Buddha called this an “bramavihara”, which you can translate as something like “endless abode”. It’s something like the inner remembrance of Friendliness that’s felt, not (just) understood, such that it shapes your thinking and behavior “from below”. Much like the art of knowing, this is something you embody and become, not just cognitively understand.
Death’s clarity. Super unpopular in transhumanist circles because of the “death” part. It’s super rare to hear people point at this one without going full deathist. (“Death is what makes life worth living!”) But the fact remains, losing something precious tends to cut through bullshit and highlight what really, truly matters. If you can trust that and breathe through the pain and survive, you come out the other side clearer. You don’t have to wait for Death to seek this clarity. Lots of spiritual traditions try to lean this way (e.g. “Memento Mori”) — but like with science and mettā, there’s some tendency to ossify the practices. Part of death’s clarity is in the willingness to trust the unknown.
BJJ/MMA pragmatism. Somehow a level less abstract than the above, arguably a child of the art of knowing. Both BJJ and MMA face something real and ground their ideas in that reality. Can you force a submission? Can you dish out blows without taking too many yourself? You can’t think your way around that: either it happens or it doesn’t. The empirical “Show me” tone in these arts cuts through stupefaction by pointing again and again at reality.
The Friendly thing here is the culture of training, not the fighting arts per se. The same thing could apply to chemistry or carpentry. Basically any non-bullshit skill that has some hard-to-miss embodied sign of progress.
The right to a relevant voice in one’s governance. This emerged most clearly in the Western Enlightenment, especially in the USA. The idea that if some egregore (especially the government) has power over you, then you should have influence over that egregore too, or be able to opt out of its influence. This is pretty explicitly a meme about (one strategy for) hypercreature alignment.
And as is par for the course, the stupifying ecosystem evolved attacks to this. Corporate special interests gridlocking government, the role of the town square now held in private tech companies’ censorable platforms, and the emergence of forces like cancel culture are all corrosions. This is, in my mind, the main risk of wokism: It’s actually trying to hunt and kill access to this meme.
In general, Friendly hypercreatures just don’t act the same way as the unFriendly ones, with evolved arguments that hook people emotionally and with people identifying strongly with one side or another. They instead tend to loosen identity and encourage clarity, because they spread by actually offering value and therefore do best when their host humans can see that clearly. Most identities are stupid attack surfaces.
As a result, they don’t clump people together around a behavior nearly as much as unFriendly patterns do. Instead they usually work more like fields of intelligence. The way anyone can prove a math theorem and see the truth for themselves and thereby be immune to all social pressure. That’s not localized. That’s limited purely by someone’s capacity-plus-willingness to look at reality. The “clumpiness” of social unity happens from having a culture that values, encourages, and develops methods for pointing people back at reality. No social pressure/threat needed hardly ever.