Rhys' Newsletter #70
Susan Blackmore on Memes and a surprising amount of stuff on AI, I guess
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 in the past week!
Hello from San Francisco! I just moved into a communal house on Haight Street called Template House. It’s half formerly incarcerated folks and half not. Great crew and excited to nestle long-term again.
1) Podcast This Week: #91 Susan Blackmore: How Memes Gave Rise To The Third Replicator.
Susan is a brilliant psychologist and researcher who wrote one of the seminal books on memes, The Meme Machine. We talk all things memes including the rise of a (scary!) digital third replicator:
Susan: I began to think about what happened when memes first appeared. You have biology producing loads of different species and then one of those species [humans] becomes a copying machine.
When early humans began to imitate each other and copy, vary, and select information—fire-making techniques, putting feathers in their hair, whatever—that set off a new evolutionary process and that's what we call memes.
Could that process happen again?
Yes. All of these human meme machines, they began to produce books and cars and cups of tea and many endless things. But then they accidentally produced computers that were capable of copying information with variation and selection.
So you've now got a new kind of copying machine, digital technology, but is that enough for a new evolutionary process? Yes. Once the machinery we created was doing the copying, varying, and selecting without us, then there would be a new evolutionary process taking off.
This leads to a terrifying thought, that there's a new evolutionary process going out there. In the same way that memes are dependent on biological genes, the new replicator is dependent on cultural memes. The whole process can take off for its own sake.
Rhys: It’s a new kind of replicator, with its own objective function. I think what you're doing is describing AI safety from a memetic perspective. Will this new replicator actually be aligned with human values?
Thinking from the perspective of selfish replicators has been a powerful grey pill for me. Hope this interview with Susan helps you go down the rabbit hole too!
2) My personal TikTok this week: History of the World from 200,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE.
3) Last chance to apply for RF5, which begins Oct 11!
LINKS
1) Reader response from Sam Jonas on last week’s newsletter re payday loans:
You can only ban payday loans if you provide consumers a viable alternative. I am no defender of these loans, but they do provide to these communities a source of short-term financing where no one else does. I don’t see BofA offering to loan someone $500 to pay their bills.
Silicon Valley players have tried to create alternatives, but they just turned out to be gloried tech payday lenders wrapped in marketing lies. The most notorious I’m familiar with was: CFPB Orders LendUp to Pay $3.63 Million for Failing to Deliver Promised Benefits.
So the move to ban these loans without providing a legit alternative is good intentions gone bad, or worse, tech folks who would like to clear out legacy local providers for their next fintech opportunity.
Definitely agree with Sam here that we don’t want to remove existing financing without something in its place. That’s why I think changing the laws to have payday maximum interest rates is a good option! (Socialize the costs of lending riskier loans to lower-income folks.)
2) Two excellent lectures:
First, Eugene Holland gives a summary of A Thousand Plateaus, which Holland describes thusly:
As Kant was the metaphysical philosophy of then-new Newtonian science, A Thousand Plateaus is the metaphysical philosophy of modern complex systems of the networked age.
Yes yes, very much yes.
h/t Jordan Greenhall with his piece on NFTs here, which he describes as “applied Holland”.
3) In the video below Tim Lewens gives an excellent pushback on Universal Darwinism. The most interesting part of the pushback for me was his idea that “evolution doesn’t need replication.” He gives the example of AI systems where the neural network “evolves” to solve a design problem (like identifying cats). But this doesn’t involve replication in the strict sense (the network weights aren’t being replicated per se).
4) AI movie posters.
Each of these images was generated by AI based on a brief text description of a movie. Can you guess the movie from the image?
5) Babylon Bee: New iPhone 13 Will Require Vaccination To Unlock Screen
6) The Onion: Unvaccinated Mom Wants To Know If You’re Coming Home For Covid This Year
7) Rhys: Local Man Knows One Of The Stans Is In Trouble, But Can't Quite Remember Which
8) TikTok of the Week: @ForrestFeels showing how HRT (testosterone) affects your voice!
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center is starting an Institute for Rebooting Social Media. They’re hiring an Institute Director.
The awesome School For Systems Change is accepting applicants for their six-month fellowship starting in Spring 2022. Apply here.
Roote is hiring a Founding Developer for Meem.Network, a wrapper on Hive.one to explore Twitter sub-graphs.
EVENTS
Annual Gray Area Festival with good folks like Benjamin Bratton, Audrey Tang, Kei Krutler et al. Online Oct 20-26.
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
Rise Up Singing is an excellent songbook of 1200 folk songs. Playlist here:
Singing together is a beautiful activity of “collective effervescence” that activates what Jonathan Haidt calls the “hive switch”—something that activates groupishness by making us feel part of something bigger.
Order the $25 book here and have a lifetime of delightful group singing.
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
If you like this newsletter, check out the online community of systems thinkers that I helped co-found, Roote.
❤️ Thanks to my generous patrons ❤️
Chris Densmore, Maciej Olpinski, 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.