I kept changing the title and moving between draft and public, after reading the description of Shortforms, it seemed super obvious that this is the best format.
Shipping chapters as self-contained posts
Ideally, this will be like an annotated map of many many posts. The more ideas exist as links, the more condensed and holistic this post can be. It also lets me treat ideas as discrete discussable objects, like this: “I believe X as I argued here <link>, therefor Y <link>, which maybe means that [...] ”. Also, things existing as links makes this post more flexible and easier to iterate on.
Todo
Turn the TikTok case study and Bifurcation chapters into their own posts.
Collection of effects and phenomena.
Bifurcation of communities
1) increases total energy, because some people will enjoy talking more in the niche community
extreme case: imagine a party of only introverts where everyone is in 1 big group, versus everyone talking exclusively in pairs <-- massive difference in total conversation-energy expended (leading to more “idea-evolution/memetics/coordination/whatever tf im supposed to call it”)
2) fewer agents == individual outputs reach more of the community with less loss of resolution, and higher iteration speed (or “applies bigger relative update to the global state”) --> faster evolution of ideas (and the ideas that *are* good in a broader way, can still be shipped to the main community, which is cool)
TikTok case study: Less agency --> more alien memetic processes?
Tiktok scrolling basically has 1 action: “how long until you scroll?”, it’s a single integer value with a pretty small range (video length) and often it’s actually a boolean: “did you immediately scroll further?”.
(There are a bunch of other actions too, but they’re negligable in terms of how important they are for the algorithm, and how many of decisions in terms of quantity are formed by these: like, comment, input search term, click channel, share, close app)
Compare this to a conversation, where you have word choice, intonation, topic choice, social cues about what you find interesting, it’s a set of very high-dimensional pieces of information that you share repeatedly and they all have a big effect, crazy amounts of agency.
You can make a similar analysis on the “supersets” of both of these.
the entirety of Tiktok and how viral videos and hashtags spread and how they influence humans, compared to, when people start getting annoyed by how their friendship is going, they can explicitly talk about it and steer it or abort mission.
Conversations very much *do not* feel like “runaway memetic phenomena”, they feel like 2 people converging on their values (finding out they dislike each other is included, advancing a dialogue while subtly learning about each other is included).
A dialogue is ruled by human will, Tiktok scrolling is ruled by the recommendation algorithm and more broadly, some alien process of meme spread that we don’t understand or control, it’s not even purely explained by recommendation algorithm. I doubt that even the recommendation algorithm plus the decisions of the engineers of the algorithm and the entire TikTok codebase would explain it very well.
Blurry terminology I want clarity on
These 3 things are all different, but they feel very similar, so I want to describe them in more detail at some point: - memetics - coordination - increasingly clear definitions and concepts
For one, coordination is a about how agents in a system relate to one another, whereas “clarity of concepts” and “memetics” are more like names of topics.
Memetics and iteration of ideas
Meta
Publish or keep as draft?
I kept changing the title and moving between draft and public, after reading the description of Shortforms, it seemed super obvious that this is the best format.
Shipping chapters as self-contained posts
Ideally, this will be like an annotated map of many many posts. The more ideas exist as links, the more condensed and holistic this post can be.
It also lets me treat ideas as discrete discussable objects, like this: “I believe X as I argued here <link>, therefor Y <link>, which maybe means that [...] ”.
Also, things existing as links makes this post more flexible and easier to iterate on.
Todo
Turn the TikTok case study and Bifurcation chapters into their own posts.
Collection of effects and phenomena.
Bifurcation of communities
1) increases total energy, because some people will enjoy talking more in the niche community
2) fewer agents == individual outputs reach more of the community with less loss of resolution, and higher iteration speed (or “applies bigger relative update to the global state”) --> faster evolution of ideas
(and the ideas that *are* good in a broader way, can still be shipped to the main community, which is cool)
TikTok case study: Less agency --> more alien memetic processes?
Tiktok scrolling basically has 1 action: “how long until you scroll?”, it’s a single integer value with a pretty small range (video length) and often it’s actually a boolean: “did you immediately scroll further?”.
Compare this to a conversation, where you have word choice, intonation, topic choice, social cues about what you find interesting, it’s a set of very high-dimensional pieces of information that you share repeatedly and they all have a big effect, crazy amounts of agency.
You can make a similar analysis on the “supersets” of both of these.
Conversations very much *do not* feel like “runaway memetic phenomena”, they feel like 2 people converging on their values (finding out they dislike each other is included, advancing a dialogue while subtly learning about each other is included).
A dialogue is ruled by human will, Tiktok scrolling is ruled by the recommendation algorithm and more broadly, some alien process of meme spread that we don’t understand or control, it’s not even purely explained by recommendation algorithm. I doubt that even the recommendation algorithm plus the decisions of the engineers of the algorithm and the entire TikTok codebase would explain it very well.
Blurry terminology I want clarity on
These 3 things are all different, but they feel very similar, so I want to describe them in more detail at some point:
- memetics
- coordination
- increasingly clear definitions and concepts
For one, coordination is a about how agents in a system relate to one another, whereas “clarity of concepts” and “memetics” are more like names of topics.