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Hello!
1) Two bits of reader feedback from last week’s article, Three Alphabets, Three Trees. First, from Diana:
I recently finished Snow Crash as part of a project where I had to ponder the metaverse. It’s amazing that the book was published three decades ago, way back in 1992.
Within the technocratic (and fashionably dystopic) storyline, the crux of the conflict is a form of physical virus that spreads through code. It nicely blends computer science with linguistics, memetics, epidemiology, and philosophy. Highly recommend if you haven’t yet read it. It really opened my eyes to the ways that technology has re-wired some of our neural pathways and how that opens up our body/mind to be hacked like a piece of software.
There’s a very interesting theory to be developed about how humans shape tech, tech shapes humans, so on and so forth, and how that leads toward the next frontier of human/machine hybrid evolution. I would be very curious to discuss and hear your thoughts on that.
First off, it’s awesome that Diana gets to read Snow Crash as part of her work pondering the metaverse :).
Here are a couple of thoughts on how I see the ideas in Snow Crash relating to our future. (Moderate spoilers below.)
Snow Crash was written in 1992. Amazing! What are the sci-fi books written today that will still be applicable thirty years from now? (Honestly, idk the answer to this. Suggestions?)
Snow Crash presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem. Although this is clearly fiction, I do think that we will continue to upgrade our languages as a species. Economic incentives will continue to aggregate speakers around English and Chinese. But natural languages aren’t the endpoint. Long-term, I expect us to add more intentionality to language evolution so our language gets increasingly constructed (contra from Gwern).
Snow Crash collapses biological, mental, and computer viruses into one virus. We’ll continue to see this. We’ll see more APIs between biological information (DNA, etc.), human information (language, brains), and machine information (bits). Here’s a recent video of a Monkey playing MindPong on Neuralink.
One interesting part of the book is that Snow Crash (the mind control drug) doesn’t naturally self-replicate. The villain needs to hand it out one-by-one. This makes it much weaker. In reality, everything that has a sizeable impact on the world has self-replication naturally built in. DNA, memes like religion, memes like Bitcoin, etc. (Side note: the COVID vaccine has mRNA code that doesn’t self-replicate. Instead it just builds X spike proteins. But we’re exploring self-replicating RNA, which is a bit scary.)
In Snow Crash, they protect themselves from the evil Sumerian Snow Crash virus drug by speaking different languages, which grants them immunity from it. This is an important question: how can we grant ourselves memetic immunity from negative memes? For example, in the sci-fi story Too Like The Lightning, citizens go to jail if they share religious memes about the afterlife. I think the most important thing to do is help lift people out of poverty to get to Level 5. Then there are less homes for negative memes to live in.
Finally, one unique part of Snow Crash is that the meme virus doesn’t need to be comprehended to be instantiated. It can just be injected as a binary (Neo-style) and then shut down its host, the human. This is different from how we normally think about memetic and cultural evolution. In general, we “comprehend” ideas and so can intentionally shape them to design things like factories. This is different than organisms which don’t comprehend their own biological evolution, but still design complex things like giraffes. With machine evolution, we’re going back to non-comprehension. We don’t understand the nueral networks in black box AI’s, but they still design things like winning chess programs.
See the three dimensions of evolution below from Daniel Dennett. Biological evolution (what he labels “termite castle culture”) is bottom-up, random search, and not comprehended. Technological evolution (labeled “intelligent design”) is top-down, directed search, and comprehended.
In the end, remember that DNA codes organisms, media codes humans, and bits code machines. Which (Snow Crash-like) drugs will you take to code yourself? I recommend the grey pill.
Second, one anonymous reader responded to my Three Trees post with “so what?”
“Ok, so three small alphabets underlie all forms of complexity in the world. Elements create the tree of molecules, genes create the tree of life, memes create the tree of ideas. So what?”
This is an excellent question and one that I’m trying to get better at constantly asking myself. (Your reader feedback from last year pushed me on a similar vein—to connect newsletter ideas to real-world events.)
Tree alphabets, three trees. So what? Why should I care?
It’s really about about flows of information, newly mediated by the internet.
These trees are important because they show how information is created and flows in the world. These flows determine real-world outcomes and progress in predictable ways.
Biological evolution is a predictable process. If we “rewound the tape”, DNA replicators would still hill-climb their fitness landscape to find sources of energy (like photosynthesis).
Similarly, memetic replicators search for homes (in brains) and sources of energy. Humans using farming and fossil fuels for energy is inevitable. Myths like religions, nation-states, and companies inevitably developed “desires for self-replication” like how religion proselytize. All of those myths also found access to money or energy, like churches getting bequests of land or nations leveraging taxes.
Today, digital technology is moving past the Deployment Phase (where we get everyone a smartphone) and into the Embedded Phase (where we experience the impacts of everyone having a smartphone). To understand current events, we need to more deeply understand how memetic replicators will leverage the internet to embed themselves in information infrastructure. For example, Bitcoin has found a way to “infiltrate” financial infrastructure to couple financial returns with memetic success.
Understanding how information flows on the internet will help us shape it for good. We can create an information ecosystem of less disinformation and more information.
Hope this helps (more soon). And keep me accountable with “so what?” questions!
2) I wrote a piece this week on Better Book Reviews. Instead of creating Yet Another Book Review, I want to experiment with co-creating a book review ecosystem.
I'll start with an experiment: I'm going to run a Monthly #NotAnotherBookClub that will produce a book review as an output each month. As a start, we’ll begin with with Julia Galef's new book Scout Mindset. #NotAnotherBookClub will meet from 9am-10am PST on Thursday, May 27th. Register here if you’re interested in joining! We’d love to have you.
LINKS
2) One RF2 fellow, Eugene Leventhal, just released a new podcast series, On Meaning. It covers existential psychology, which is a cool brand of psychology focused on how we think about death. Ep. 0 is especially quick and fun. He’s starting a community around it here.
This is connected to a big piece of news recently: 47% of US adults said they were members of a church, mosque or synagogue. Its the first time that a majority of Americans said they were not members of an organized religion since Gallup first started asking Americans about their religious membership in the 1930s.
What is the future of meaning as religion decreases in the West?
3) These are cool “evolving icons”. They show the containment zone around Chernobyl from 1986 to 2062. Each year the icon will change. From Banda Agency.
4) The Onion: Person Criticizing Police Has No Idea What It’s Like To Wake Up Every Day And Put Lives In Danger
5) Babylon Bee: Police Convert Antifa Into Productive Members Of Society By Playing Jordan Peterson Clips On Giant Video Screen
6) Rhys: Countermemes #StartAsianHate and #StopAsianLove Fail To Gain The Traction Of #AllLivesMatter
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Erik Torenberg (of OnDeck) is hiring a Chief of Staff.
VaccinateCA is a great nonprofit that helps gets shots in arms in CA. They are hiring engineers.
There’s a new Zcash-style privacy coin, IronFish. It will allow folks to run nodes directly from the browser. Their CEO Elena is an excellent and fun person. They’re hiring a bunch of engineers.
EVENTS
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
#NotAnotherBookClub on Scout Mindset. May 27th at 9am PST. Register here.
MUSIC
We looked at some of the music from Pixar’s Soul in #47. It won Best Soundtrack at the Oscar’s this weekend.
Part of this win comes from Trent Reznor’s electronic interludes. The other part comes from Jon Batiste’s jazz. Batiste also just released a new album, We Are. Here’s my favorite song from it. Good groove, good gospel choir.
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
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