This a first pass review that’s just sort of organizing my thinking about this post.
This post makes a few different types of claims:
Hyperselected memes may be worse (generally) than weakly selected ones
Hyperselected memes may specifically be damaging our intelligence/social memetic software
People today are worse at negotiating complex conflicts from different filter bubbles
There’s a particular set of memes (well represented in 1950s sci-fi) that was particularly important, and which are not as common nowadays.
It has a question which is listed although not focused on too explicitly on its own terms:
What do you do if you want to have good ideas? (i.e. “drop out of college? read 1950s sci-fi in your formative years?”)
It prompts me to separately consider the questions:
What actually is the internet doing to us? It’s surely doing something.
What sorts of cultures are valuable? What sorts of cultures can be stably maintained? What sorts of cultures cause good intellectual development?
...
Re: the specific claim of “hypercompetition is destroying things”, I think the situation is complicated by the “precambrian explosion” of stuff going on right now. Pop music is defeating classical music in relative terms, but, like, in absolute terms there’s still a lot more classical music now than in 1400 [citation needed?]. I’d guess this is also true of for tribal FB comments vs letter-to-the-editor-type writings.
[claim by me] Absolute amounts of thoughtful discourse is probably still increasing
My guess is that “listens carefully to arguments” has just always been rare, and that people have generally been dismissive of the outgroup, and now that’s just more prominent. I’d also guess that there’s more 1950s style sci-fi today than in 1950. But it might not be, say, driving national projects that required a critical mass of it. (And it might or might not be appearing on bestseller lists?)
If so, the question is less “are things being destroyed / lost” and more “are the relative proportions of things changing in a way that affects the global landscape?”
Jimrandomh once hypothesized, off-the-cuff “maybe great civilizations are formed during the window in between they develop the ability to filter people for intelligence, and that filtering-mechanism getting somehow co-opted or destroyed)” which feels potentially relevant here.
I think most of these questions suggest lines of research to figure out what’s actually going on, but I’m not sure if I could figure them out meaningfully within the next couple weeks.
Appendix: Claims this article makes, or considers, or seems to assume:
Human general intelligence software may have been developed memetically (as opposed to biologically/evolutionarily?)
Feral Children exist (define feral children?)
The Internet is selecting harder on a larger population of ideas, and sanity falls off the selective frontier once you select hard enough.
(see also “scientists publishing papers or college students”)
Radio, television and the internet selects more harshly for hedonic memes
We’re looking at the collapse of deference to expertise
Print magazines in the 1950s could print more complicated/nuanced takes on things
Hyperselection of memes might cause habits like:
When someone presents a careful argument, do you listen and make a careful response? or laugh?
Does your cultural milieu give you any examples of people debating consequences of paths and choosing the best one?
Old science fiction provides good socialization (esp. with the habit “when encountering new ideas, check if it’s good and incorporate it”)
This a first pass review that’s just sort of organizing my thinking about this post.
This post makes a few different types of claims:
Hyperselected memes may be worse (generally) than weakly selected ones
Hyperselected memes may specifically be damaging our intelligence/social memetic software
People today are worse at negotiating complex conflicts from different filter bubbles
There’s a particular set of memes (well represented in 1950s sci-fi) that was particularly important, and which are not as common nowadays.
It has a question which is listed although not focused on too explicitly on its own terms:
What do you do if you want to have good ideas? (i.e. “drop out of college? read 1950s sci-fi in your formative years?”)
It prompts me to separately consider the questions:
What actually is the internet doing to us? It’s surely doing something.
What sorts of cultures are valuable? What sorts of cultures can be stably maintained? What sorts of cultures cause good intellectual development?
...
Re: the specific claim of “hypercompetition is destroying things”, I think the situation is complicated by the “precambrian explosion” of stuff going on right now. Pop music is defeating classical music in relative terms, but, like, in absolute terms there’s still a lot more classical music now than in 1400 [citation needed?]. I’d guess this is also true of for tribal FB comments vs letter-to-the-editor-type writings.
[claim by me] Absolute amounts of thoughtful discourse is probably still increasing
My guess is that “listens carefully to arguments” has just always been rare, and that people have generally been dismissive of the outgroup, and now that’s just more prominent. I’d also guess that there’s more 1950s style sci-fi today than in 1950. But it might not be, say, driving national projects that required a critical mass of it. (And it might or might not be appearing on bestseller lists?)
If so, the question is less “are things being destroyed / lost” and more “are the relative proportions of things changing in a way that affects the global landscape?”
Jimrandomh once hypothesized, off-the-cuff “maybe great civilizations are formed during the window in between they develop the ability to filter people for intelligence, and that filtering-mechanism getting somehow co-opted or destroyed)” which feels potentially relevant here.
I think most of these questions suggest lines of research to figure out what’s actually going on, but I’m not sure if I could figure them out meaningfully within the next couple weeks.
Appendix: Claims this article makes, or considers, or seems to assume:
Human general intelligence software may have been developed memetically (as opposed to biologically/evolutionarily?)
Feral Children exist (define feral children?)
The Internet is selecting harder on a larger population of ideas, and sanity falls off the selective frontier once you select hard enough.
(see also “scientists publishing papers or college students”)
Radio, television and the internet selects more harshly for hedonic memes
We’re looking at the collapse of deference to expertise
Print magazines in the 1950s could print more complicated/nuanced takes on things
Hyperselection of memes might cause habits like:
When someone presents a careful argument, do you listen and make a careful response? or laugh?
Does your cultural milieu give you any examples of people debating consequences of paths and choosing the best one?
Old science fiction provides good socialization (esp. with the habit “when encountering new ideas, check if it’s good and incorporate it”)