Rhys' Newsletter #55
Fitness landscapes, Kevin Kelly's Vanishing Asia, raising money for a 150-mile walk in Kenya, and the first MetaMeet SF
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Hello! Hope you’re doing well on this beautiful first week in May.
1) I wrote a piece this week on why Fitness Landscapes Should Have These Three Dimensions.
Fitness landscapes are used by biologists to show how populations of organisms evolve high fitness traits. For example, cheetahs get faster over time. (They “hill climb” the fitness landscape.)
When looking at the full history of biological evolution, it is helpful to add a time axis to the graph. Humans weren’t high fitness 4B years ago when there was no oxygen. But we’ve become high fitness given an atmosphere with lots of oxygen. Over time the environment changed.
Here’s how to read the graph above: For a given environment (no oxygen, lots of oxygen, etc.), there is a certain arrangement of DNA that allows the organism to access lots of energy (to be high fitness).
This 3D cube is important because it will allow us to make similar claims about memetic replication. For example, given the end of the last ice age around 10,000 BCE, a new idea (farming) became high fitness (allowed humans to access lots of energy).
We can ask the 3D cube a question for our modern times: Given the world as it is in 2021 and the information layer of the internet, what memes will naturally arise?
(Also, here’s some good pushback on the article from folks on Twitter. Milan thinks we should represent amino acid sequences as discrete, not continuous. Jeffrey thinks the environment axis is much more necessary for memetic evolution where the environment changes more quickly.)
2) I had an excellent interview with Kevin Kelly (the founding editor of WIRED) last week. Full transcript and podcast here: #83 Kevin Kelly: Vanishing Asia and The Technium.
We talked spent a good amount of time talking about his awesome Kickstarter, Vanishing Asia. It’s a massive 9,000-picture photo book from his travels to Asia over forty years.
Just 12 hours left to support!
I asked:
Rhys: How did your journey through Asia connect your techno futurist work?
Kevin: There were two huge lessons that I took from it.
First, I spent a large portion of my young adult life living in areas that had very little technology. So I had the opportunity to go back in time. Some of it was like the 1800s and occasionally if you got into the tribal areas it’s even further back. I judged the remoteness by the iron factor—how much iron was present.
In Nepal, to go into the hills, everything has to be carried in. It gets very expensive. So the further away you were, the less iron there was, the more people did things with wood, fiber, earth, and the native materials.
These folks could be content and find happiness. And yet, it wasn't that they were unhappy, per see, it was that they didn't have choices. The son was going to do exactly what the father did. The daughter was going to do exactly what the mother did.
Hidden in among all those people were probably a Beethoven and a Marie Curie. Their genius is lost to us. Technology has negatives, but it gives us choices and opportunities.
The second thing that I saw was the future. I saw how Asia was rapidly bootstrapping itself out of ancient ways and creating a completely new urban cosmopolitan global culture. I kept returning to cities and so I got a sense of the speed at which it was moving into the future.
This future is our collective future just by sheer numbers. India and China have three billion people in just those two countries alone, compared to the 350 million in the US. It’s like 10x. So mathematically, what happens in the US is increasingly not going to be the most important thing happening. I saw and felt that.
This last point is almost impossible to underemphasize. In 2019, the world had 8 billion people: 1B in North and South America combined, 1B in Europe, 1B in Africa, and 5B in Asia. 1-1-1-5. Almost all of the world is in Asia, as Kevin notes.
By 2100, the world will be 1-1-4-5. We’ll gain 3 billion people, all in Africa.
Much more in the interview link on his book What Technology Wants, why all evolutionary systems tend towards specialization and mutualism, how aliens would know life was on earth just based on our atmosphere, and why “its” come from “bits.” Thanks Kevin!
3) I’m going on a 150-mile walk in Kenya this August with my dad and brother and I’m trying to raise $10,000 to improve a children’s center out there.
The center has already done great work. As a specific example, one child, Kocheche (below), grew up in the Chiri Children’s Center. She is going to medical school and wants to come back to Chiri to be a doctor there. Hooray for education leading to opportunity!
If we raise $10,000, I’ve committed to do a rap on global health. Also, I really want us Millennial types to beat my Boomer dad :).
To learn more and donate, check out the link here: Raising $10,000 for a 150-Mile Walk in Kenya. No pressure of course! I appreciate you either way. ❤️
LINKS
1) Good repository of all the remixes of the xkcd scientific papers meme. (Why did it spread so much? Because it was lenticular.)
2) Great to see the Consilience Project launch. I especially liked their article Were Pallets of Bricks Planted at Black Lives Matter Protests?
It hits on all of the crucial issues with narrative formation around a news story: motivated reasoning, ingroup dynamics, and fast news cycles. I especially liked how they focused on unfalsifiable claims as a crucial part of the information landscape.
In this scenario, an unfalsifiable claim might be “the bricks were actually part of a larger plot involving the elites that owned those construction companies, who were seeking to manipulate public and political sentiments by enabling riots.” This is extremely hard to debunk! Unfalsifiable medium-sized lies (#33) are lenticular (they look different to different people) and spread quickly.
Other groups have emphasized the importance of falsifiability in information ecosystems. The (excellent) Election Integrity Partnership evaluated platforms based on how they dealt with different kinds of falsifiable or unfalsifiable information during the 2020 election:
Platforms and media consumers should treat unfalsifiable information differently.
3) A reader shared this amazing artist with me that she thought y’all would like. Meet Britchida:
So good.
4) Babylon Bee: CDC Now Recommends Wearing A Seat Belt Even When You’re Outside The Car
5) The Onion: Only Tree In Class Sick Of Always Having To Explain Arbor Day
6) Rhys: Wikipedia Tests New TikTok-Style Livefeed Of Jimmy Wales Trapped In A Room Dancing Sensuously And Begging For Donations
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
The Virality Project is a great Stanford Internet Observatory-associated crew that is working on countering anti-vax disinformation. They’re hiring a Research Associate.
Erik Torenberg (of OnDeck) is hiring a Chief of Staff.
EVENTS
Starting to organize events in SF again. Starting up a crew called MetaMeet. Our first hangout is this Sunday, May 9 at 1pm. Stop by if you can or just join MetaMeet for future events!
#NotAnotherBookClub on Scout Mindset. May 27th at 9am PST. Register here.
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
This is an impressive video. Smash Mouth’s All-Star But It’s 24 Cartoon Impressions.
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
If you like this newsletter, check out my online community of systems thinkers, Roote.
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