How Hank Green is contributing to the Human Memome Project

A few days ago I wrote about Human Memome Project. Today I’d like to show you a concrete example of what it looks like to contribute successfully to it.

Hank Green has never used the word “memetics” (as far as I know), and does not endorse this review, but I consider him a very significant contributor to the project, because he’s:

1. actively trying to shape culture,

2. & is explaining what he’s doing as he’s doing it.

This makes him an “open memetics engineer” in my book.

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(1) “Side note: isn’t everyone shaping culture, all the time?”

Technically, yes, but I limit my definition here to those who are operating on their audience’s epistemology¹. For example, both Hank Green and Taylor Lorenz have big audiences that are “liberal”/left-leaning, but Taylor is operating at the object level (she reports on what is happening, as it fits into the narrative you already have about the world). Whereas Hank’s content changes how you see ALL other content in the world. It changes the story/frame in your head².

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(2) “How does Hank change people’s epistemology?”

In “I Believed These Four Lies” he breaks down liberal propaganda. He basically says

“they’re on our side, the *story* they’re pushing for is true, but the facts are wrong. It’s NOT true for these fake reasons. It’s true for real reasons, like these …. ”

In “I have Biden / Weed Questions” he “live streams” his thought process. Given a claim on twitter, how do you know if it’s true or not? He thinks out loud, shows you what he googles, what information changes his mind³.

What he’s doing here is good not just for him & his audience, it’s ALSO good for everyone else. If you had a truth from the right-wing egregore, and you wanted to surface it to a liberal audience, you’ll have a much easier time doing this with Hank’s audience, than with Taylor Lorenz’s audience.

This is why raising people’s epistemology is “dangerous”. It’s hard to control. What if in calling out liberal misinformation, you push people to the other side?

But of course, if you believe you’re on the side of the truth, then you should pro anything that helps the truth surface, because it should help you.

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(3) One goal of the human memome project is to find a node like Hank Green in every culture / egregore

Hank Green has a lot of influence. A lot of people go to him to interpret the news, to understand whether something is good or bad⁴. When I want to see “how the liberals are responding to something” his channel/social media is where I go check. I don’t check Taylor Lorenz or her audience because they’re stuck in a downward spiral, so I don’t consider them representative of what direction the liberal egregore could go in.

In addition I also “cross check” with real life humans in my social circle.

We’ll have a complete picture of culture if you can have “one of each”. This is how we can bootstrap the whole thing with minimal effort. You don’t need to keep track of ALL of culture, you just need to keep track of a node or two in each space.

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(4) Failed attempts reveal the direction they’re steering in

When Hank violates the narrative that he’s embedded in (the dominant frames of the liberal egregore), it’s a rare chance to get a glimpse at:

1. What direction he wants to pull culture in

2. An empirical test of his influence, relative to the “bigger” egregore they’re inside

It’s an unfakeable/costly signal that he is indeed attempting to exert influence. An example of this is when he went on Blue Sky to tell everyone that maybe the right wing people were right about ivermectin being useful medicine:

This is essentially a blasphemy to say in the liberal egregore. Accepting this is VERY difficult because it implies, in the liberal language, that “the anti science cranks are right”.

But the anti science cranks are NOT right⁵. So, why would Hank, someone that we love & trust, say this?

As a result of the backlash, he deleted it and apologized:

He tries to still salvage some truth while apologizing:

Another recent example of this is his video “How we form opinions” in which he tries to say:

“You know how right wing people deny climate change? I think the fertility crisis is the same thing, but for us left wing people. We deny it not because we think it’s true or false, but because the OTHER guys believe it, and if THEY believe it, then it must be bad, so we must reject it”

“….but we should learn to see through this tribal dynamic, and see this as a real problem”

The video has a lot of negative comments, especially from women. I made a prediction market on

Manifold Markets

on whether Hank will be successful in shifting the narrative around the fertility crises, but it failed.

So, this is the game. In order to remain trusted & influential, you have to align with the existing current. But doing so also reinforces the current. If the current is moving in the wrong direction, trying to pull it too hard just gets you ejected, and lots of content creators will hapilly fill the void to capture attention / money & make a living, reinforcing the current.

The dream of the human memome project is to wake up & see where the currents are taking us, and make a choice.

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(5) What is Hank’s end game?

He has spelled it out in his novel, “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing”. Humanity one day wakes up to a great puzzle, that no one on earth knows how to solve, including the best scientists, the smartest politicians and leaders etc. They realize that every night, they all enter “the same dream”. Inside this dream are answers to the puzzle, that can only be unlocked when certain people or cultures interpret it. For example, some answers to the puzzle are in different languages. Some answers only make sense given a specific memory or local context.

Humanity chooses to cooperate, they all contribute their piece of the puzzle, they use the internet to come together, and boom, an absolutely beautiful thing unfolds.

What parts of this story are “real” ?

The part where people coordinate together through the internet to affect meaningful change in the world. The Hank Green egregore regularly does this. A memorable one for me is leveraging their audience to push Johnson & Johnson to release its copyright/IP for a tuberculosis vaccine.

The part where all humans on earth contribute towards the same puzzle is essentially what the memome project should look like if successful. We should be able to surface information from those who have it, to those who are looking for it.

Art is a crucial part of the memome project

The stories that are in people’s heads frame what they see, and how they make sense of the world. When people read Hank’s stories, they don’t just feel good, they now have a vision of what the future could look like. And Hank (or anyone) can use that.

In Hank’s novel, the character finds a book called “The Book of Good Times”. This book contains instructions on what to do, and when the character does it, good things unfold. That’s kind of meta right? Hank is giving you a story and telling you that, all of us following the story, if we understand it & agree with it, will unlock beautiful things.

Did you know that he is also selling THAT book, as a real separate book? Here’s the Kickstarter for The Book of Good Times.

What’s in that book? Well, he’s playing the same cute fiction/non fiction game I’ve been trying to play⁶, where he describes something in fiction, and then goes ahead and does it in real life. Essentially a self fulfilling prophecy that comes true if everyone makes it come true.

1. “epistemology” is a big word, if you’re talking to your mom or a small child about this, I’ve found it helpful to just say “how we know what we know”. See my note on “children can be better at epistemology than adults”

2. Note that it’s a mistake to think that one is “better” than the other. Reinforcing narratives & finding evidence is necessary, as is updating the narratives themselves. It’s like theorists & experimentalists, engineers & scientists, business people & technical people, they serve different functions of one system. The system falters if any of these pieces fails.

3. There’s a broader point to be made here about how, if you want to test people’s epistemology, you can’t just ask them what they know. You need to watch them absorb new information, and see how they filter it. I wrote a short note on this in “epistemic literacy tests”.

4. This is another “clue” that Hank is memetically aware: he knows that people go to him for that role, and he reinforces that by mentioning that people do that. In addition to bringing it up explicitly in his videos, in one of his newsletters he brought up how some external survey lists him as “a trusted news source”. Showing that people trust you is a great way to get more people to trust you.

5. This is a much bigger point that deserves its own post, but you’ll see this as a very common pattern.

Corsaren

had a viral tweet the other day about how trying to convince people that “woke ideology is bad” may do more harm than good. It’s the same here: when you tell people that “sometimes the anti science cranks are right”, they flip into believing that ALL anti science people are right, and the institutions are not to be trusted. It completely breaks your model of reality, because, if ivermectin really is good for humans, then what did it mean that all the “experts” that you trusted & believed made fun of it for so long?

Truths need to be reconciled together into a cohesive model. Throwing a true thing into an egregore may damage it, at least in the short term. The concept of “blasphemy”, and understanding what counts as blasphemy for each egregore, is going to be a significant part of the human memome project. It’s an empirical question, not a matter of opinion.

6. I first tried it in this essay in August 2024.