A Beginner's Guide to Culture Science

Also known as "memetics", it's the study of the narratives that shape human behavior, and how they propagate & evolve

I’ve stumbled onto a scientific field that, as far as I can tell, is still very nascent. There are many working in it, but they all use different terms & language. It’s historically been very difficult to study this rigorously and openly, but I think this is changing now. I think the missing piece is active participation from the people being studied.

We need to study ourselves at minimum to protect against propaganda & manipulation. In the best case, I think it will be critical for large scale coordination, and for solving the existential crises that humanity faces today.

What is Culture Science?

I call it “culture science”, most people call it “memetics”. The core idea is that narratives & beliefs have observable, functional effects on our behavior, at the individual & societal levels. We can study the effects of these narratives, their interactions, rates of propagation, and mutations.

Both memetics and biology study patterns that survive. The key difference is that biology studies patterns OF MATTER that survive, whereas memetics studies patterns OF BEHAVIOR that survive.

Source: “memetics 101” twitter thread by Michael Smith
https://x.com/Morphenius/status/1874965030158102973

“Memetics” comes from the word “meme” as in “cultural gene”. I like the term “Culture Science” because it feels both more familiar & expansive, like it’s about the complete system that is formed from the collection of these memes, narratives, and shared beliefs.

I think of shared beliefs as “sociocultural technology”. The simplest example of this is “what is considered polite?”

Just as HTTP is the operating protocol for the web, politeness is the operating protocol for our social interactions. Following the protocol will lead to predictable and desirable outcomes. Breaking the protocol will lead to inaccessible websites, or, perhaps, unwanted social awkwardness. Politeness, just like HTTP, can be documented and taught.

Source: https://samoburja.com/social-technology/

If shared beliefs are technology, where did they come from? Who is maintaining them?

Sometimes the answer is: they evolved organically. The social norm “don’t talk to strangers” evolved many times independently because it kept us safe. Whereas having a “designated driver” was pro-social propaganda (“led by Jay Winsten, with heavy involvement by television networks and Hollywood studios”) that successfully grafted a new social norm in our culture.

We can ask these questions of every single cultural norm or belief: “what does it do for us?” and “where did it come from?” It is not easy to get rid of a belief even if you want to. Nor can you necessarily hold onto the beliefs you want to keep.¹ Our beliefs choose us more than we choose them.

Some beliefs are good for us, some are not. We should study them so we can tell them apart. Tim Tyler explains this at the beginning of his memetics book:

https://on-memetics.blogspot.com/2011/08/memetics-introductory-chapter.html

Religion Was Discovered, Not Invented

The more I researched culture science, the more convinced I became that it is not a new science. I think it’s the oldest science.

I think the ancient prophets were very smart people who noticed that humans were stuck in lose-lose games (killing each other). They realized they could tell self fulfilling stories as a means towards human cooperation & thriving.

Here’s my understanding of how that works:

Say you live in ancient Egypt, in a period after collapse. You want things to go back to a united kingdom, because right now every piece of land is controlled by the most brutal, they are constantly fighting, food is scarce, and traveling across the land is dangerous because no one trusts outsiders. You notice that others yearn for this too. You believe it’s possible, so you go and make a proposal:

“What if a new king comes! And he unites the kingdom! It’ll bring us to a new golden age!”

This resonates with people. It’s a good story to hold onto in these dark times. They ask you, “What does this new king look like? Tell us so that we can support him when we see him! Everyone currently in charge sucks”

You, of course, don’t know what this hypothetical king looks like, but you can describe properties you would want in a king: “he’s going to be strong, charismatic, he will be fair and just!”

It’s a good story, so people tell it to each other. The story changes as it’s retold, and the versions that are most beautiful AND realistic are the ones that spread. Someone adds a clause for “in his reign, there will be plentiful food and good work for the peasants”.

Do you see where this is going? The prophecy is a decentralized job ad. People vying for power see an opening, but they also see that they’re more likely to succeed if they try to match the prophecy², otherwise the stories spread, “this is not the true king! We await the true king!”

The modern term for this effect is “hyperstition”. It’s not magic, it’s a technical thing. It can be learned and studied. Prophets who told self fulfilling stories that came true were celebrated. The most successful ones were the ones who knew what resonated in the hearts & minds of people, AND knew a lot about what was feasible.

There’s a few things I want to make explicitly clear:

1. The original prophet does NOT control the story (especially absent a central kingdom). It can grow & change beyond them. Anyone can contribute. It’s “open source” in this way

2. The story is “found” more than “invented” because there is an empirical, objective answer to “what resonates” and “what functional effect does this narrative have on people’s behavior”

I don’t think the ancient prophets were lying when they said they found God. I think kings kept pushing prophets to tell propaganda that served the nobles. A few of them were inspired to tell the stories that resonated most deeply in their hearts, the best possible visions they could find for the benefit & wellbeing of all. They noticed these beautiful visions had the same effect on others as it did for them. They felt like they had found something objectively true, beautiful, divine, and they hurried to spread the good word.

Culture is Open Source, We Must Contribute

Human minds have not fundamentally changed in the last 10 thousand years. Religion has never left us. All human beings today are “religious” in the sense that all of our minds are hosts to narratives that have observable effects on our behavior. We cannot get rid of this any more than we can get rid of our gut microbiome, but we CAN study it, document it, and change it.

I first realized I could contribute to culture doing my “Anatomy of an Internet Argument” series. I saw that the root cause of a lot of disagreement is a narrative conflict. Alice has truth, she tells it to Bob, who rejects it. Alice thinks Bob must be stupid, or evil, and thus despairs at this impasse. The reality is that Bob is NOT against truth, he just cannot fit it into his narratives³. If you understand (1) the truth (2) Bob’s narrative, you can absolutely convince Bob. It’s easy, it’s teachable. It works VERY consistently. This is my rock solid evidence that memetics is real, that it has predictive power, that it should be studied as a science.

The simplest contribution you can make to culture is to reframe truth to fit inside of existing narratives. A much bigger contribution is creating new narratives to explain existing truths. Which narratives take root in human minds & outcompete other narratives is a scientific question. What effects a particular narrative has on an individual and on their community is also a scientific question⁴.

The contribution that everyone is making all the time is just being a node in the network, accepting ideas & beliefs that resonate (think of culture as a giant codebase and believing something as accepting a change).

From “Who Are We Now”

One narrative that I’ve been trying to work on in the US is this idea that “the next 4 years are going to be awful because the evil guy won”. This is a self fulfilling narrative of despair that hurts both sides. Eroding this narrative might cause more harm than good if you are not careful, because “who are my enemies?” is a belief that serves the function of unity & group cohesion.

Here’s the proposal I made: “what if good things happen not because of but in SPITE of Trump?”

bluesky link

This resonated with everyone I tried it with, online and in real life. It changes your relationship to truth. Without this narrative, any good thing that happens in Trump’s administration hurts your psyche, because it means “maybe you were wrong about everything you belief is good & just”. With this narrative, you have the flexibility to see the good things as they are, without eroding group cohesion & your sense of morality.

bluesky link

So this is it, this is the full picture: I want to inspect the narratives in my own mind, like how we can do genetic sequencing but “memetic sequencing”, for my own safety & thriving. If I have this map for myself, it helps me understand my own behavior and how to pursue the change I want. If I share this with others I trust, it makes it easier for them to change my mind, or understand why I’m holding onto specific beliefs. I want to create these maps at the community & society level too, collaboratively. I want to use this to coordinate ourselves around the best possible visions & work on them.

What I am describing is monitoring & engineering cultural change, and it is dangerous for the same reasons geo-engineering is dangerous: it’s not a good idea to mess with a system that you rely on and have a poor understanding of. And yet, I feel a sense of urgency to do this work, and involve as many people as possible, because many organizations are already doing it in the shadows. The most benign cases are corporations that want to maximize profit. The scarier ones are political.

The scariest outcome of all is one where we don’t make it because we fail to coordinate. If, as a species, our reach exceeds our grasp, and we never get a handle on it before it’s too late.

https://whoarewenow.net/preface/

Who Else is Working on this?

Here is a list of people who I believe are actively working on this. If you have your own “memetics 101” article, or a statement about your work & what support you need etc, I’d love to link to it here! I don’t think we’ve all found each other yet, and I’d love to contribute to accelerating this & making our work legible to each other.

• Tim Tyler (https://memetics.timtyler.org/)

  • has been writing about memetics for over a decade. His writing is accessible, and he has a large body of work & curated resources, like this timeline of memetics

• ​Patrick Ryan calls it “Psychosecurity”, focuses on defense & warfare

  • This lecture on “Human Weather: Applied Psychosecurity” is a good introduction

  • The computational aspects of his work are unique, he pioneered this idea of a “grammar field” (a kind of fingerprint of culture) and how to use it to analyze the propagation of ideas, like a weather system

• Blaise Aguera, VP of engineering at Google, wrote “Who Are We Now” (2024)

  • His book never mentions the word “memetics” but it was my introduction to this field. It convinced to me that cultural change can be studied rigorously. He does a very good job showing how something that seems fuzzy & constantly changing can be studied empirically

• Ray Doraisamy has a newsletter “in search of a culture fit to seed stellar empires”

  • Each entry is very short snippet about one concept. For example, “faster than light coordination” is about using culture to coordinate across time & space.

  • His focus is more on cultural technology that has persisted for many years (religions) and understanding function & purpose

  • His project Agitproper is about teaching how propaganda spreads, and also trying to create their own pro-social propaganda

• speakerjohnash is very well versed in the theory of memetics & applying it to contemporary society

  • In “The Geometry of Culture: Mapping Memetic Space” he proposes a framework to see the evolving nature of our culture. This is something I have independently converged on as very critical, for the same reasons that we wish to monitor the weather of our planet.

• guy
  has a lot of very good writing documenting beliefs in contemporary society & what functional effects they have

  • In “You’re not powerless, you’re just under attack” he investigates how a narrative around a lack of agency keeps people from exercising their power

  • In Competent adversariality hides he deduces that malicious actors succeed only by hiding

    • (which is a principle I have come to independently, this is why I’m obsessed with transparency & each community studying itself)

• Robin Hanson

  • In “What Culture Can you Trust?” he writes about the selective pressures that cause us to lose cultural norms we care about, and whether we can get better at detecting this

• visakan veerasamy

  • Visa does both the theory & practice of culture change. He has successfully spread pro-social memes like “focus on what you want to see more of”, “do 100 things”, and coined the word “psychofauna” to describe the narratives that live in our minds as creatures to be studied

• Ronen is a “memetic engineer / culture hacker”

  • Here is a post where he describes why self sacrifice is a damaging narrative for society

• Tyler Alterman (psychofauna.com) is actively crafting narratives for a healthier society.

  • His bibliography is a great source for who else is writing about this

1. Derek Sivers’ “Useful Not True” is essentially a book about memetic self-engineering. You cannot eject harmful beliefs by sheer will power, but you can tell yourself new stories that replace the old beliefs if they fit.

2. A few months ago on NPR, they were criticizing Trump for basically having figured this out. They said “in his first term, he didn’t know how to get around these checks and balances on power, so he’d go on twitter and say what he wanted, and someone would figure out if it was possible & do it to for him”. This is prophecy-as-coordination-mechanism. The ancient techniques still work.

3. I have to emphasize that the solution isn’t to “just get over it & accept the truth”. First of all, because you cannot change your beliefs through sheer willpower. Second, even if you could, the narratives you hold onto have important functional effects. Letting go of it without the necessary scaffolding may harm you, and your community.

4. The closest thing I’ve found to people actively studying the functional effects of beliefs in academia is “The Deepest Beliefs Lab” led by Kurt Gray at UNC Chapel Hill