This newsletter goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people. Please share it with a friend who would like it. (And welcome to all the folks who joined this week!)
Well hi! I wish you were a kitten, but you’re not and I still love you.
1) Visual of the Week
This week I want to share a tool for thinking about evolutionary systems, the Popper Criterion. (Named after Karl Popper, coined by David Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity.)
The Popper Criterion states that the long-term health of any system is based on its ability to remove bad instances from the system. In politics, for example, people should be able to remove bad leaders through a democratic election. Without this ability, authoritarians like Putin stay in power even if the people want to remove him.
The Popper Criterion is important because it helps us diagnose and fix problems across many domains like politics, media, and business.
Examples of the Popper Criterion
The Popper Criterion applies to all systems where evolutionary thinking is applicable.
I. Biology
In biology we call the Popper Criterion the "survival of the fittest." We can see this at work in the image below. Birds only reproduce if they are fit (fast, clever). The weak ones die off and we’re only left with fast, clever birds.
Without the Popper Criterion, the world would be full of species that kinda suck. This has occasionally happened in times where there's enough energy to go around and organisms don't need to truly compete for their food. You'd get a bunch of "lazy" organisms. Like a sloth, but in all species. Slow cheetahs, slow gazelles, and short redwoods.
99% of all species on earth are extinct because of the Popper Criterion.
II. Science
In science we call the Popper Criterion "falsifiability." It's the ability to take a theory, run experiments, and change or disprove the theory based on the data. For example, you might hypothesize that objects fall at 20 m/s². After running a test, that theory gets "removed" and turns into 9.8 m/s².
Science is constantly disproving existing theories. Newton's gravitation was replaced by Einstein's theories of relativity. What we "know" about the world is actually just what hasn't been disproven yet. This is called fallibilism.
Again, we can see the Popper Criterion represented in the image below. Only the strong ideas survive.
III. Politics
In politics we call the Popper Criterion "democratic accountability." People should be able to remove bad leaders through a democratic election. Without this ability, authoritarians like Putin stay in power even if the people want to remove him. But with democratic accountability, governments can remove ineffective or corrupt actors.
We can see the Popper Criterion at play in the famous line: "democracy is the worst form of government, except the rest."
We could also use this for science: "relativity is the worst theory, except the rest."
Or for biology: "each species is the most inefficient way to survive in that environment, except the rest."
When you look at a system that you’re disappointed with, ask “can it remove bad actors?” (For example, police reform. Can police departments remove bad cops? No! They are protected by qualified immunity. Police departments don’t pass the Popper Criterion.)
2) Podcast of the Week
Tried out a solo podcast this week. #86 Solo: There Is A Level 5, Cultural Progress Studies, Predictive Processing, Internet annotations
Curious for your feedback on this format as I continue to experiment with it.
3) Last chance to apply to RF4 by this Friday!
LINKS
0) Rui Vale’s book review on Scout Mindset from our book club last week. Some good stuff on the scout mindset itself, but I especially liked Rui’s mindset towards books that portray binaries:
Text about having a proper mindset, especially if portrayed as a dichotomy, i.e., opposed to an improper one, puts me off instantly to the point of not giving it even a second look.
We should be wary of scout vs. soldier mindset, growth vs. fixed mindset, antiracism vs. racism, and other such good/bad binaries. Though Rui (and I) ended up liking Scout Mindset anyways.
1) Nice display of Hong Kong building colors.
Reminds me of this series from Michael Wolf, The Architecture of Density:
These are videos that created the “meme templates” for future videos.
For example, r/PerfectlyCutScreams was created after the 2014 template “Cut to Black.” Or the video below popularized reaction videos on Vine:
3) Help a Computer Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. Give the AI feedback on cartoons like the one below:
4) More on AI: Twitter examined their cropping algorithm. It was moderately biased in favor of women and white people (it would crop black folks and men). They decided to remove it:
One of our conclusions is that not everything on Twitter is a good candidate for an algorithm, and in this case, how to crop an image is a decision best made by people.
5) The Onion: Coronavirus Variant Excited To Compete With World’s Top Mutations In Tokyo This Summer
6) Babylon Bee: John Cena Apologizes To China By Body-Slamming A Uighur Muslim
7) Rhys: Billionaire Gives Away Some Money, Wow How Noble
8) TikTok of the Week: What’s something incredibly immature that you will never stop doing?
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Cool, free, week-long Science of Science Summer School. If you’re into metascience, check it out!
Anthropic is a great new crew working on AI Safety. Two cool research directions: a) Looking at scale-free network dynamics of AI. b) Creating tools to inspect individual neurons. They’re hiring for a bunch of positions here.
Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet.Nathan Schneider’s lab is holding a cool 3-month cohort exploring how governance was done pre-internet. $1,000 for the best projects. Apply here by June 15, 2021.
Andy Clark’s lab is hiring a Research Fellow for their XSCAPE project on mind-environment interaction. Learn more and apply here.
EVENTS
Skoll and Oxford are hosting a virtual #SystemsWeek2021 June 7-11.
Rostock Retreat on visualizing uncertainty from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. June 21-23
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
Joyner Lucas made a song praising one of his heroes, Will Smith. Will found it and decided to make a remix where he reps all of his heroes (Nelson Mandela, Julius Erving, etc.). It’s cute.
Also, if you haven’t seen Joyner’s “I’m Not Racist”, it’s one of the best videos for empathizing with The Other Side:
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
If you like this newsletter, check out my online community of systems thinkers, Roote.
❤️ Thanks to my generous patrons ❤️
Jonathan Washburn, Ben Wilcox, Audra Jacobi, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, Shira Frank, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Zoe Harris, David Ernst, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Collin Brown, Ref Lindmark, James Waugh, Mark Moore, Matt Daley, Peter Rogers, Darrell Duane, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, and Katie Powell.