Here’s a take on why it’s gotten harder to form and maintain beneficial institutions and social structures, using my favourite lens: Memetics.
(I mentioned this briefly on the group call, but I missed part of the model before, and can expose it to more people here)
Enough people have a preference for hosting memes which are broadly prosocial, build a legacy, etc, and for co-operating with others who have this kind of preference to create self-sustaining cultures, so long as you get founding right and people can generally distinguish prosocial memes from others
People over time have a roughly stable personal ability to distinguish memes that have good effects from ones more optimised for spreading at the cost of important norms
Technologies have progressively lowered barriers to communication, allowing
More rapid evolution of memes which are better at fooling the distinguishing mechanisms while actually being hyper-optimised for self-promotion and disabling parts of the social environment’s memetic immune system (e.g. fear of call-out/cancel culture reducing the ability of subcultures to reject it and related memes, even when there would normally be antibodies reacting to a meme’s effects).
These highly optimised memes to be more rapidly spread into local cultures. A stable system need a certain dose of a virus or memeplex to become infected rather than petering out against the local background culture. A system gets a founding dose of alien memes much more often when new members maintain stronger connections to their old tribe (reinforce old memetic patterns), is broadly more exposed to flows of memes, and when likeminded people can more easily find each other to form a locally reinforcing group.
This means that on an individual level people end up less able to sort valuable thought patterns like old NYT’s culture from viral patterns, and on a cultural level are less able to maintain “cell walls” against memeplexes competing for space in their substrate’s brains.
I also think there some stuff around having hyper-optimised memes delivered by a hyper-optimised Out to Get You attention economy cutting into the free mindspace which is important for distinguishing prosocial from self-promoting memes, so maybe we’re also getting worse at that at the same time as the job gets harder in several ways.
The Cost of Communication covers a very similar argument in a lot more detail, particularly with stronger grounding in memetic theory:
The basic argument of this post has 4 main components:
Memetic Immune Systems: Just like there is a biological immune system for viruses, there may be a memetic immune system that decides which ideas, a.k.a. memes, are adopted by the individual. This memetic immune system would not select for “good” or true ideas. It would select for ideas that are beneficial to the carrier’s germline.
Increased Memetic Competition Selects for Attention-Grabbing Memes: Memes spread via attention; it is a resource they require and compete for (Chielens, 2002). Increasing our ability to communicate with each other means that memes can spread more easily, by definition. Increasing the ability of memes to propagate means they have to compete with a wider range of memes for the same attention budget. This selects for more and more competitive and attention-capturing memes. The selection for competitive memes can produce very dangerous ideas that are successful in spreading despite being negatively correlated with humanity’s well-being. Also discussed in this sub-section is the effect increased communication bandwidth seems to have had on social media addiction and local news organisations: not good.
Memetic Kin Selection and the Emergence of Groups: Memes are unlike biological genes in that they can rapidly signal their presence in a carrier. Therefore, they can take moment-to-moment advantage of relative levels of perceived memes in the local population to adopt their spreading strategy. This leads to some interesting behaviours, e.g. in-group/out-group dynamics, preference falsification, mobs of non-genetically-related individuals, etc.
The Problem of Critical Density and the Evil Triad: Some memes are detrimental to the well-being of the general population. In other words, they are “bad” ideas, negatively correlated with humanity’s well-being. For a subset of those memes, it takes time to figure out why they are bad and for competing memes to emerge. However, because of the ability of memes to coordinate with copies of themselves (Point 3), memes can reach a critical density in a population. At that point, arguing against them becomes very difficult, e.g. you are arguing against a mob, against dogma, etc. As such, in the case of dangerous memes reaching critical density, the speed at which memes can spread may pose a public health risk. Additionally, if these memes spread via polarization, then arguing against them can be ineffective. To combat these kinds of “Evil Triad” memes, it may be that memetic social distancing, i.e. reduced communication between individuals, would be a successful strategy.
Here’s a take on why it’s gotten harder to form and maintain beneficial institutions and social structures, using my favourite lens: Memetics.
(I mentioned this briefly on the group call, but I missed part of the model before, and can expose it to more people here)
Enough people have a preference for hosting memes which are broadly prosocial, build a legacy, etc, and for co-operating with others who have this kind of preference to create self-sustaining cultures, so long as you get founding right and people can generally distinguish prosocial memes from others
People over time have a roughly stable personal ability to distinguish memes that have good effects from ones more optimised for spreading at the cost of important norms
Technologies have progressively lowered barriers to communication, allowing
More rapid evolution of memes which are better at fooling the distinguishing mechanisms while actually being hyper-optimised for self-promotion and disabling parts of the social environment’s memetic immune system (e.g. fear of call-out/cancel culture reducing the ability of subcultures to reject it and related memes, even when there would normally be antibodies reacting to a meme’s effects).
These highly optimised memes to be more rapidly spread into local cultures. A stable system need a certain dose of a virus or memeplex to become infected rather than petering out against the local background culture. A system gets a founding dose of alien memes much more often when new members maintain stronger connections to their old tribe (reinforce old memetic patterns), is broadly more exposed to flows of memes, and when likeminded people can more easily find each other to form a locally reinforcing group.
This means that on an individual level people end up less able to sort valuable thought patterns like old NYT’s culture from viral patterns, and on a cultural level are less able to maintain “cell walls” against memeplexes competing for space in their substrate’s brains.
I also think there some stuff around having hyper-optimised memes delivered by a hyper-optimised Out to Get You attention economy cutting into the free mindspace which is important for distinguishing prosocial from self-promoting memes, so maybe we’re also getting worse at that at the same time as the job gets harder in several ways.
The Cost of Communication covers a very similar argument in a lot more detail, particularly with stronger grounding in memetic theory: