Totally get where you’re coming from and we appreciate the feedback. I personally regard memetics as an important concept to factor into a big-picture-accurate epistemic framework. The landscape of ideas is dynamic and adversarial. I personally view postmodernism as a specific application of memetics. Or memetics as a generalization of postmodernism, historically speaking. Memetics avoids the infinite regress of postmodernism by not really having an opinion about “truth.” Egregores are a decent handle on feedback-loop dynamics of the idea landscape, though I think there are risks to reifying egregores as entities.
My high-level take is that CFAR’s approach to rationality training has been epistemics-first and the Guild’s approach has been instrumental-first. (Let me know if this doesn’t reflect reality from your perspective.) In our general approach, you gradually improve your epistemics in the course of improving your immediate objective circumstances, according to each individual’s implicit local wayfinding intuition. In other words, you work on whatever current-you judges to be currently-critical/achievable. This may lead to spending some energy pursuing goals that haven’t been rigorously linked up to an epistemically grounded basis, that future-you won’t endorse, but at least this way folks are getting in the reps, as it were. It’s vastly better than not having a rationality practice at all.
In my role an art critic I have been recently noticing how positively people have reacted to stuff like Top Gun: Maverick, a film which is exactly what it appears to be, aggressively surface-level, just executing skillfully on a concept. This sort of thing causes me to directionally agree that the age of meta and irony may be waning. Hard times push people to choose to focus on concrete measurables, which you could probably call “modernist.”
I personally regard memetics as an important concept to factor into a big-picture-accurate epistemic framework.
Reassuring to hear. At this point I’m personally quite convinced that attempts to deal with epistemics in a way that ignores memetics are just doomed.
I personally view postmodernism as a specific application of memetics. Or memetics as a generalization of postmodernism, historically speaking.
I find this weird, kind of like saying that medicine is a specific application of physics. It’s sort of technically correct, and can be helpful if you’re very careful, but seems like it risks missing the boat entirely.
Postmodernism totally is a memeplex, but it’s a special kind that almost entirely focuses on shaping the evolutionary terrain for all other memes. Many memes try to do that, but… well, for instance, atheism became possible because of modernism. And cancel culture became possible because of postmodernism. Many memes try to do this terrain thing, but the thing defining (post)modernism as interesting is the depth.
I mean, the fear that things might turn into cults comes from postmodernism. And you’re subject to that fear such that you had to address it in your OP.
I get the sense that you’re pretty aware of these dynamics. I just want to emphasize that while (post)modernism is indeed something like a special case of memetics, I think it deserves some special attention since it’s affecting the context in which you’re trying to do memetics.
My high-level take is that CFAR’s approach to rationality training has been epistemics-first and the Guild’s approach has been instrumental-first. (Let me know if this doesn’t reflect reality from your perspective.)
Well… mmm… it doesn’t quite. It’s an… okay-ish first approximation though.
CFAR wanted to focus on epistemic rationality, but no one was interested in practice. We kind of had to sneak our best guesses about epistemic rationality in the back via what amounted to self-help techniques.
“Oh, you have trouble motivating yourself to do extra work? Rather than just jumping in with a hack, let’s see if we can explore why you’re having trouble. Oh, oops, looks like we just dissolved your whole reason for doing the task in the first place.”
Our measures of success weren’t really things like whether people started and kept to exercise programs. We were way more interested in whether they were getting clear insights and rearranging their lives in ways that make deep sense. We could never clearly define this but we had the illusion of a shared-ish intuition here.
So in terms of our target, I guess it was kind of epistemics-first?
But I think if we had been really serious about getting epistemics right, we would have done something quite a bit different. A lot of what we did was based on us fitting to the constraints of being (a) entertaining and (b) at least seemingly effective.
In retrospect I think CFAR dramatically failed to take Goodhart nearly seriously enough.
(That, by the way, would be my one main pithy warning to anyone trying to do a CFAR adjacent thing: Nothing you do will matter in the long run if you don’t sort out Goodhart drift. Really, truly, I advise taking that super seriously, and not becoming complacent by focusing on your confidence that you’ve solved it well enough.)
Totally get where you’re coming from and we appreciate the feedback. I personally regard memetics as an important concept to factor into a big-picture-accurate epistemic framework. The landscape of ideas is dynamic and adversarial. I personally view postmodernism as a specific application of memetics. Or memetics as a generalization of postmodernism, historically speaking. Memetics avoids the infinite regress of postmodernism by not really having an opinion about “truth.” Egregores are a decent handle on feedback-loop dynamics of the idea landscape, though I think there are risks to reifying egregores as entities.
My high-level take is that CFAR’s approach to rationality training has been epistemics-first and the Guild’s approach has been instrumental-first. (Let me know if this doesn’t reflect reality from your perspective.) In our general approach, you gradually improve your epistemics in the course of improving your immediate objective circumstances, according to each individual’s implicit local wayfinding intuition. In other words, you work on whatever current-you judges to be currently-critical/achievable. This may lead to spending some energy pursuing goals that haven’t been rigorously linked up to an epistemically grounded basis, that future-you won’t endorse, but at least this way folks are getting in the reps, as it were. It’s vastly better than not having a rationality practice at all.
In my role an art critic I have been recently noticing how positively people have reacted to stuff like Top Gun: Maverick, a film which is exactly what it appears to be, aggressively surface-level, just executing skillfully on a concept. This sort of thing causes me to directionally agree that the age of meta and irony may be waning. Hard times push people to choose to focus on concrete measurables, which you could probably call “modernist.”
Great, glad you appreciate it.
Reassuring to hear. At this point I’m personally quite convinced that attempts to deal with epistemics in a way that ignores memetics are just doomed.
I find this weird, kind of like saying that medicine is a specific application of physics. It’s sort of technically correct, and can be helpful if you’re very careful, but seems like it risks missing the boat entirely.
Postmodernism totally is a memeplex, but it’s a special kind that almost entirely focuses on shaping the evolutionary terrain for all other memes. Many memes try to do that, but… well, for instance, atheism became possible because of modernism. And cancel culture became possible because of postmodernism. Many memes try to do this terrain thing, but the thing defining (post)modernism as interesting is the depth.
I mean, the fear that things might turn into cults comes from postmodernism. And you’re subject to that fear such that you had to address it in your OP.
I get the sense that you’re pretty aware of these dynamics. I just want to emphasize that while (post)modernism is indeed something like a special case of memetics, I think it deserves some special attention since it’s affecting the context in which you’re trying to do memetics.
Well… mmm… it doesn’t quite. It’s an… okay-ish first approximation though.
CFAR wanted to focus on epistemic rationality, but no one was interested in practice. We kind of had to sneak our best guesses about epistemic rationality in the back via what amounted to self-help techniques.
“Oh, you have trouble motivating yourself to do extra work? Rather than just jumping in with a hack, let’s see if we can explore why you’re having trouble. Oh, oops, looks like we just dissolved your whole reason for doing the task in the first place.”
Our measures of success weren’t really things like whether people started and kept to exercise programs. We were way more interested in whether they were getting clear insights and rearranging their lives in ways that make deep sense. We could never clearly define this but we had the illusion of a shared-ish intuition here.
So in terms of our target, I guess it was kind of epistemics-first?
But I think if we had been really serious about getting epistemics right, we would have done something quite a bit different. A lot of what we did was based on us fitting to the constraints of being (a) entertaining and (b) at least seemingly effective.
In retrospect I think CFAR dramatically failed to take Goodhart nearly seriously enough.
(That, by the way, would be my one main pithy warning to anyone trying to do a CFAR adjacent thing: Nothing you do will matter in the long run if you don’t sort out Goodhart drift. Really, truly, I advise taking that super seriously, and not becoming complacent by focusing on your confidence that you’ve solved it well enough.)