I just skimmed Chapter 18 of "Who Are We Now" - lots of B's! I was pleasantly surprised.
Then I skipped around Chapters 20 & 21 - less alignment. It seems like he took a lot of care to examine psychology/sociology... but then the claims about "consider these technological marvels of the futuuuure!" is unsubstantiated, leaves unaddressed most of the fairly easily-graspable reasons why the agro-industrial-digital system can’t possibly have a future
The reason readers might let his (not evil, just dumb) oversight slide is:
1. He gives a bit of lip service to some threats
2. He uses language of the natural scientists and hippies (superorganism, mycelium, Gaia - I assume that's where you pulled the terms from) and quotes some prominent experts from those fields
3. He just spent a whole book telling you all these true, well-explained, mind-blowing things about yourself, so you're prone to give him a pass on the ending (“the hamsters are so cool and well-understood = their cage will keep functioning; it must!”)
… And his stance on invasive species makes me think he's never seen a Japanese honeysuckle thicket with his own eyes
I'm pretty aligned with this review as stated! On my first read of the book, it was the first half, and I think I particular the first 3-4 chapters that made me think (1) wait, what IS the history & trajectory of the superorganism I live inside and rely on (2) I can see how this question is answerable! And you don't need permission to answer it, this guy is teaching me/inspiring me to find out for myself
> He just spent a whole book telling you all these true, well-explained, mind-blowing things about yourself, so you're prone to give him a pass on the ending
I think this is why I was saying the questions that you plant in people's minds are more important. You describe (1) the question (2) how you find out if an answer is correct.
------
I think shortly after reading this book I watched a couple of "non narrative" artsy movie (baraka, samsara) - both of them feel like watching a "webcam feed randomly placed across parts of humanity", and it amplified that question in my mind. "Is this really what we look like? If not, how DO we look like? How do I know?"
---
Just to emphasize this point even more - when I tweet to a large audience I primarily do it in a way that asks questions. What happens usually is (1) it triggers people to have an insight. Which is great, low effort, and the insight sticks, and they got it themselves, not from me. They own it (2) they find the question abrasive, their mind doesn't want to go there. When I notice this, I don't push, because I want to keep prodding their mind. I try to probe further and find the bottleneck
And I am still thinking about that insight I got in our last in person interaction, about the root bottleneck for a lot of people being "it's because they are asleep, and already feel like they are dying and there's nothing they can do about it"
Reading books from different authors for the same period of history is very fun because I get a sneak in how people lived, thought and how that lead to what we have here. This sounds so exciting, also I finally pieced together your open memetic project. It is very cool :))
hell yeah!!! the more people get it, the more likely it is to happen!!!
I'm curious what you think about today's one, about the Hank Green one (especially if you've already followed his work, if the frame I describe matches/fits).
YES THAT IS IT. You have given a firm concrete connection to a bunch of ideas that I had about left/right divide, political divide. And also things repeating in the same way at different scales. I have been using an IFS framework to observe all the emotions that make me that has helped me tremendously over the past few months. But that was born out of simmering ideas on emotions and how we feel
About them. This is the direction I knew It was headed and now it makes a lot of sense. Like why was I headed in this direction, why is twitter discourse so interesting even if the platform is addictive
Tldr: yes what Hank green is doing resonated with me (first time heard of him btw) and something I ve been thinking of for a long time.
U know now I see Musk in a different light because his whole political dance was struggling with the tribalism of culture, now he finally settled on the answer of it is neither this or that
Anyways enough rambling, I will be looking forward to your project while thinking how can I contribute to it on my side
Aren’t self reported surveys extremely flawed. Tim tok and instagram servers essentially are the human memone project because they store revealed preferences. And now the memone is corrupted with contextless slop that doesn’t evolve into a narrative. As if someone took a crisper buzzsaw to the memone. Of course that information isn’t publically available either. The real evolution is probably happening in private discord servers, anywhere where ongoing discussions , context can be continually iterated.
"Aren’t self reported surveys extremely flawed" -> think it the same way you do A/B testing. When Google wants to know if people like this or that, they don't ask them, they expose to something and measure their behavior.
If you give people an app that tests their knowledge of X, and they all do poorly, it's either because they don't know, or intentionally want to signal that they don't know. Either way, this is still useful information about those people.
Also, you're right about most of the important information is private. People change their behavior when they know they are being monitored/that information is being acted upon. A lot of companies/governments are already doing this, but they're very limited in how much they can act upon this information, compared to the open, opt-in approach.
Thanks for all your great work and heads-up that there's a typo in last sentence of footnote 4; really curious whether you meant to say "what" or "when"!
thanks for the heads up! I'm actually not seeing it:
> It’s when someone who is capable of understanding the idea can’t tell what you’re talking about it.
Feynman's example was him reading a news story about some big new physics discovery, but it was so dumbed down that he couldn't tell what they were talking about, even though he likely read the paper they were trying to describe.
This is like, if someone who is capable of understanding it 100% is unable to understand it, then we've given up on science communication, we're not even trying.
Oh OK, I get it - so you meant can't tell what you're *saying* about it. I thought maybe you meant to write "when" instead of "what" which would have slightly different implications. Anyway, great example - especially since the loss of info from being too dumbed down can in certain ways be even worse than loss of info from being a little too difficult or technical. Yet sci-comm tends to focus only on the latter.
Also, shape of America sounds like a fantastic tool to demonstrate what the work of an open memetics institute will do. Why not just let people construct their own maps of meaning? You'd need a pass a certain scale before it got interesting for most but it could be built to evolve on its own over time.
yes!! I think the key is to design it such that even if only you & your friends used it, it still provides *some* value. For "Shape of America" it was fun to put it up on the TV at a party and go through it, revealing our collective biases (most people predicted that all blue collar jobs are republican, and that all "smart" jobs / knowledge work are democrat, but that is not the case!)
And if it takes off, then it becomes even more valuable. Imagine how fun it would be looking at the results dashboard in real time, then suddenly seeing a huge increase in incorrect answers, and you realize it's because it's going viral on tiktok or bluesky or some other subculture.
Re-maps of meaning, I think this is the ultimate goal and what I was trying to point to with the "paint your picture of the world, find the others who share it". A beautiful side effect of this is if you discover that some people who are "your enemy" share some fundamental beliefs about the world
I just skimmed Chapter 18 of "Who Are We Now" - lots of B's! I was pleasantly surprised.
Then I skipped around Chapters 20 & 21 - less alignment. It seems like he took a lot of care to examine psychology/sociology... but then the claims about "consider these technological marvels of the futuuuure!" is unsubstantiated, leaves unaddressed most of the fairly easily-graspable reasons why the agro-industrial-digital system can’t possibly have a future
The reason readers might let his (not evil, just dumb) oversight slide is:
1. He gives a bit of lip service to some threats
2. He uses language of the natural scientists and hippies (superorganism, mycelium, Gaia - I assume that's where you pulled the terms from) and quotes some prominent experts from those fields
3. He just spent a whole book telling you all these true, well-explained, mind-blowing things about yourself, so you're prone to give him a pass on the ending (“the hamsters are so cool and well-understood = their cage will keep functioning; it must!”)
… And his stance on invasive species makes me think he's never seen a Japanese honeysuckle thicket with his own eyes
I'm pretty aligned with this review as stated! On my first read of the book, it was the first half, and I think I particular the first 3-4 chapters that made me think (1) wait, what IS the history & trajectory of the superorganism I live inside and rely on (2) I can see how this question is answerable! And you don't need permission to answer it, this guy is teaching me/inspiring me to find out for myself
> He just spent a whole book telling you all these true, well-explained, mind-blowing things about yourself, so you're prone to give him a pass on the ending
I think this is why I was saying the questions that you plant in people's minds are more important. You describe (1) the question (2) how you find out if an answer is correct.
------
I think shortly after reading this book I watched a couple of "non narrative" artsy movie (baraka, samsara) - both of them feel like watching a "webcam feed randomly placed across parts of humanity", and it amplified that question in my mind. "Is this really what we look like? If not, how DO we look like? How do I know?"
---
Just to emphasize this point even more - when I tweet to a large audience I primarily do it in a way that asks questions. What happens usually is (1) it triggers people to have an insight. Which is great, low effort, and the insight sticks, and they got it themselves, not from me. They own it (2) they find the question abrasive, their mind doesn't want to go there. When I notice this, I don't push, because I want to keep prodding their mind. I try to probe further and find the bottleneck
And I am still thinking about that insight I got in our last in person interaction, about the root bottleneck for a lot of people being "it's because they are asleep, and already feel like they are dying and there's nothing they can do about it"
Reading books from different authors for the same period of history is very fun because I get a sneak in how people lived, thought and how that lead to what we have here. This sounds so exciting, also I finally pieced together your open memetic project. It is very cool :))
hell yeah!!! the more people get it, the more likely it is to happen!!!
I'm curious what you think about today's one, about the Hank Green one (especially if you've already followed his work, if the frame I describe matches/fits).
YES THAT IS IT. You have given a firm concrete connection to a bunch of ideas that I had about left/right divide, political divide. And also things repeating in the same way at different scales. I have been using an IFS framework to observe all the emotions that make me that has helped me tremendously over the past few months. But that was born out of simmering ideas on emotions and how we feel
About them. This is the direction I knew It was headed and now it makes a lot of sense. Like why was I headed in this direction, why is twitter discourse so interesting even if the platform is addictive
Tldr: yes what Hank green is doing resonated with me (first time heard of him btw) and something I ve been thinking of for a long time.
U know now I see Musk in a different light because his whole political dance was struggling with the tribalism of culture, now he finally settled on the answer of it is neither this or that
Anyways enough rambling, I will be looking forward to your project while thinking how can I contribute to it on my side
L
Aren’t self reported surveys extremely flawed. Tim tok and instagram servers essentially are the human memone project because they store revealed preferences. And now the memone is corrupted with contextless slop that doesn’t evolve into a narrative. As if someone took a crisper buzzsaw to the memone. Of course that information isn’t publically available either. The real evolution is probably happening in private discord servers, anywhere where ongoing discussions , context can be continually iterated.
"Aren’t self reported surveys extremely flawed" -> think it the same way you do A/B testing. When Google wants to know if people like this or that, they don't ask them, they expose to something and measure their behavior.
If you give people an app that tests their knowledge of X, and they all do poorly, it's either because they don't know, or intentionally want to signal that they don't know. Either way, this is still useful information about those people.
Also, you're right about most of the important information is private. People change their behavior when they know they are being monitored/that information is being acted upon. A lot of companies/governments are already doing this, but they're very limited in how much they can act upon this information, compared to the open, opt-in approach.
See this video for an example of the types of tools private companies are using to monitor the evolution of the memome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wixy4aIY9Q
Thanks for all your great work and heads-up that there's a typo in last sentence of footnote 4; really curious whether you meant to say "what" or "when"!
thanks for the heads up! I'm actually not seeing it:
> It’s when someone who is capable of understanding the idea can’t tell what you’re talking about it.
Feynman's example was him reading a news story about some big new physics discovery, but it was so dumbed down that he couldn't tell what they were talking about, even though he likely read the paper they were trying to describe.
This is like, if someone who is capable of understanding it 100% is unable to understand it, then we've given up on science communication, we're not even trying.
Oh OK, I get it - so you meant can't tell what you're *saying* about it. I thought maybe you meant to write "when" instead of "what" which would have slightly different implications. Anyway, great example - especially since the loss of info from being too dumbed down can in certain ways be even worse than loss of info from being a little too difficult or technical. Yet sci-comm tends to focus only on the latter.
Great piece!
Also, shape of America sounds like a fantastic tool to demonstrate what the work of an open memetics institute will do. Why not just let people construct their own maps of meaning? You'd need a pass a certain scale before it got interesting for most but it could be built to evolve on its own over time.
Really appreciate the work you're doing.
yes!! I think the key is to design it such that even if only you & your friends used it, it still provides *some* value. For "Shape of America" it was fun to put it up on the TV at a party and go through it, revealing our collective biases (most people predicted that all blue collar jobs are republican, and that all "smart" jobs / knowledge work are democrat, but that is not the case!)
And if it takes off, then it becomes even more valuable. Imagine how fun it would be looking at the results dashboard in real time, then suddenly seeing a huge increase in incorrect answers, and you realize it's because it's going viral on tiktok or bluesky or some other subculture.
Re-maps of meaning, I think this is the ultimate goal and what I was trying to point to with the "paint your picture of the world, find the others who share it". A beautiful side effect of this is if you discover that some people who are "your enemy" share some fundamental beliefs about the world
(thank you for your comment & support 🙏)