There’s also the skulls to consider. As far as I can tell, this post’s recommendations are that we, who are already in a valley littered with a suspicious number of skulls,
turn right towards a dark cave marked ‘skull avenue’ whose mouth is a giant skull, and whose walls are made entirely of skulls that turn to face you as you walk past them deeper into the cave.
The success rate of movments aimed at improving the longterm future or improving rationality has historically been… not great but there’s at least solid concrete emperical reasons to think specific actions will help and we can pin our hopes on that.
The success rate of, let’s build a movement to successfully uncouple ourselves from society’s bad memes and become capable of real action and then our problems will be solvable, is 0. Not just in that thinking that way didn’t help but in that with near 100% success you just end up possessed by worse memes if you make that your explicit final goal (rather than ending up doing that as a side effect of trying to get good at something). And there’s also no concrete paths to action to pin our hopes on.
“The success rate of, let’s build a movement to successfully uncouple ourselves from society’s bad memes and become capable of real action and then our problems will be solvable, is 0.“
I’m not sure if this is an exact analog, but I would have said the scientific revolution and the age of enlightenment were two (To be honest, I’m not entirely sure where one ends and the other begins, and there may be some overlap, but I think of them as two separate but related things) pretty good examples of this that resulted in the world becoming a vastly better place, largely through the efforts of individuals who realized that by changing the way we think about things we can better put to use human ingenuity. I know this is a massive oversimplification, but I think it points in the direction of there potentially being value in pushing the right memes onto society.
The success rate of developing and introducing better memes into society is indeed not 0. The key thing there is that the scientific revolutionaries weren’t just as an abstract thinking “we must uncouple from society first, and then we’ll know what to do”. Rather, they wanted to understand how objects fell, how animals evolved and lots of other specific problems and developed good memes to achieve those ends.
I’m by no means an expert on the topic, but I would have thought it was a result of both object-level thinking producing new memes that society recognized as true, but also some level of abstract thinking along the lines of “using God and the Bible as an explanation for every phenomenon doesn’t seem to be working very well, maybe we should create a scientific method or something.”
I think there may be a bit of us talking past each other, though. From your response, perhaps what I consider “uncoupling from society’s bad memes” you consider to be just generating new memes. It feels like generally a conversation where it’s hard to pin down what exactly people are trying to describe (starting from the OP, which I find very interesting, but am still having some trouble understanding specifically) which is making it a bit hard to communicate.
There’s also the skulls to consider. As far as I can tell, this post’s recommendations are that we, who are already in a valley littered with a suspicious number of skulls,
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZcpZEXEFZ5oLHTnr9/noticing-the-skulls-longtermism-edition
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/
turn right towards a dark cave marked ‘skull avenue’ whose mouth is a giant skull, and whose walls are made entirely of skulls that turn to face you as you walk past them deeper into the cave.
The success rate of movments aimed at improving the longterm future or improving rationality has historically been… not great but there’s at least solid concrete emperical reasons to think specific actions will help and we can pin our hopes on that.
The success rate of, let’s build a movement to successfully uncouple ourselves from society’s bad memes and become capable of real action and then our problems will be solvable, is 0. Not just in that thinking that way didn’t help but in that with near 100% success you just end up possessed by worse memes if you make that your explicit final goal (rather than ending up doing that as a side effect of trying to get good at something). And there’s also no concrete paths to action to pin our hopes on.
“The success rate of, let’s build a movement to successfully uncouple ourselves from society’s bad memes and become capable of real action and then our problems will be solvable, is 0.“
I’m not sure if this is an exact analog, but I would have said the scientific revolution and the age of enlightenment were two (To be honest, I’m not entirely sure where one ends and the other begins, and there may be some overlap, but I think of them as two separate but related things) pretty good examples of this that resulted in the world becoming a vastly better place, largely through the efforts of individuals who realized that by changing the way we think about things we can better put to use human ingenuity. I know this is a massive oversimplification, but I think it points in the direction of there potentially being value in pushing the right memes onto society.
The success rate of developing and introducing better memes into society is indeed not 0. The key thing there is that the scientific revolutionaries weren’t just as an abstract thinking “we must uncouple from society first, and then we’ll know what to do”. Rather, they wanted to understand how objects fell, how animals evolved and lots of other specific problems and developed good memes to achieve those ends.
I’m by no means an expert on the topic, but I would have thought it was a result of both object-level thinking producing new memes that society recognized as true, but also some level of abstract thinking along the lines of “using God and the Bible as an explanation for every phenomenon doesn’t seem to be working very well, maybe we should create a scientific method or something.”
I think there may be a bit of us talking past each other, though. From your response, perhaps what I consider “uncoupling from society’s bad memes” you consider to be just generating new memes. It feels like generally a conversation where it’s hard to pin down what exactly people are trying to describe (starting from the OP, which I find very interesting, but am still having some trouble understanding specifically) which is making it a bit hard to communicate.