Systematic Eumemics
If we tried to boil down what it takes to make progress in every area, including in the moral realm, you could hardly do better than David Deutsch did in “The Beginning of Infinity”:
“Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative? That all other moral truths follow from it?” -David Deutsch
If we were to take Deutsch’s conjecture seriously, it would follow that anything destroying the means of correcting errors is detrimental to moral progress. What are these destroyers? Bad memes!
While a virus is piece of knowledge, a program, that highjacks our cellular apparatus to replicate (given the right environmental conditions), a meme is a piece of knowledge, a program, that highjack our brain to replicate (given the right environmental conditions). Just as people can design viruses to achieve some goal, they are also able to design memes for different purposes. Unfortunately, people can weaponize both.1
I don’t know how many of our current problems are caused by people afflicted with weaponized meme. What is clear, though, is that memes causing the destruction of the means of correcting errors, for example by spreading contempt, cowardice, censorship or coercion, are the greatest existential threat to humanity.
Not only did these memes cause the deaths of 10s of millions of people during the 20th century, in the name of gods, races, classes and rulers, but they expose us to existential threats. That’s because they keep us from building, leaving us …
without carbon-free, abundant power (fission, geothermal, fusion, space-based solar), mired in the geopolitics of oil and global climate summits.
without anti-asteroid weapons, praying they will miss us.
without solar radiation management, tying our hands behind our backs with regards to proposed runaway global warming.
without mRNA vaccines against cancer, malaria or many other deadly diseases,
without space settlements, leaving our species more vulnerable to cosmic events,
without means of supervolcano control, leaving us at whim of geology.
without AI, probably the greatest chance of humanity to improve our lot and lessen our toil.
without growth, pitted against each other in a zero-sum game for a dwindling stock of resources. We know from experience, that people will do horrible things to make sure that they will get “their fair share”.
Unfortunately, almost all of our history has been dominated by the bad memes of shielding people and ideas from criticism.
The only prolonged phase where those memes’ dominance has been reduced, is the period started by the culture of critique and quest for ever better explanations, that we now call the Enlightenment.
What does it look like, if we don’t criticize and search for better explanations? As Andreessen puts it: “stagnation, anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness”, “statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism", “bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition”, “corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels”.
Once “vital and energetic and truth-seeking”, institutions become stale, corrupt, “corroded and collapsing”. Instead of furthering discourse and moving forward, they are now “blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.”
This often happens, because “know-it-all credentialed experts”, lacking sufficient humility to be conscious of their own fallibility - and errors! -, engage “in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected”. Exalted positions in (formally) prestigious institutions are often unaccountable and shielded from the consequences of the ideas they force onto other people.
Thomas Sowell calls people that are actively seek such positions the “anointed”:
[The anointed’s preferences] are to supersede the preferences of everyone else that the particular dangers they fear are to be avoided at all costs and the particular benefits they seek are to be obtained at all costs. Their attempts to remove these decisions from both the democratic process and the market process, and to vest them in obscure commissions, unelected judges, and insulated bureaucracies, are in keeping with the logic of what they attempting.
They are not seeking trade-offs based on the varying preferences of millions of other people, but solutions based on their own presumably superior knowledge and virtue."
Before anything can get done, whether it is a new power station, or railway, or airport, there an endless maze of make-work committees, NGOs, departments, consultancies, public meetings packed full of “the anointed”, has to be navigated. It does not add anything else than a transfer mechanism from other people’s money to those occupying the relevant positions bleeding entrepreneurs and builders dry.
As David Deutsch states there are two prominent strains of bad memes arresting progress:
[Taking some] real or imaginary problem that would sabotage progress if it were insoluble, and instead requires radical entrenchment of new taboos. Examples of such supposed problems are population (Malthus), pollution (environmentalism), genetic drift (eugenics), racial determinism (racism), class antagonism (Marxism), and even the very fact of human fallibility (postmodernism). […] The other is to deny that progress has happened, is happening, or would be a Good Thing if it did happen.
Probably not purely coincidentally, people that block progress often apprear to be profiting from doing so. Issac Asimov observed
“that all through history there had been resistance ... and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance ... to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts..”
We are not lacking talent or courage or innovative ideas. We are afflicted with a system that causes debilitating amounts of friction in terms of money, time and motivation; building the future has become unnecessarily and unreasonably hard.
It’s easy to observe the effects of technological stagnation in economic data. Stagnation has been made effectively mandatory in many areas of the economy, because “safety standards”, “professional codes”, “occupational licenses” and artificial scarcity add enough friction to grind these industries to a halt.
The expected - and observed outcome: While less constrained areas are improving in terms of quality and affordability, the constrained areas become increasingly less affordable.
The recent “baptist and bootlegger”-alliance of leading AI entrepreneurs and politicians against AI is merely the latest instantiation of the memes of isolating against criticism and improvement to protect a comfortable space from “intruders”. In the name of safety, Biden’s EO regulates how much compute power you are allowed to spend on linear algebra. You can’t make up stuff like that.
Eumemics - correcting bad memes
What can we do to follow Deutsch’s conjectured moral imperative, if we were to take it seriously? We would need to gear ourselves, our societies, and our technology towards correcting errors and getting rid of bad memes by changing their environment in a way that makes them unviable.
We must criticize them out of existence, and inoculate our systems and ourselves with better memes.
Be optimistic in the Deutschian sense
All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. While problems are inevitable, problems are soluble. That means we will be able to move to better sets of problems without any inherent bound - if we dare to work on them.
Optimism in this sense is not a prophecy of success. It is an explanation for failure, based on the universality of the laws of nature: if we are failing at something, it is either because succeeding would violate universal laws, or because we have not yet created the requisite knowledge. There is no third possibility. - David Deutsch
Be humble about your knowledge
Just think about how unreasonable and backwards all those people were like 1000 years ago. Do you think your descendants 1000 years hence will think about you? Your ideas will seem childish, incomplete, and backwards not too far into the future. (If progress continues)
Humility is the acceptance of one’s own fallibility and wrongness on almost all topics. Even about things we really feel passionate about. Maybe it’s especially easy to be wrong about those, because confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance make it really hard to change your mind about things you care deeply about. Humility is the opposite of the anointeds’ vision.
Stay true to the method of acquiring knowledge - creative conjecture followed by criticism - not to the content of it.
F.A Hayek put it nicely:
“All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.”
Promote Free Speech
"Free speech is not a right among other rights, it's the predicate of other rights. It's also the predicate of a functioning psyche. And it's the predicate of a society that can maintain its integrity and its adaptive flexibility simultaneously." - Jordan B. Peterson
The decentralization of the media and reporting is sweeping away many of the traditional ways that states used for gatekeeping and “meme control” on their population. It has become incredibly cheap to reach a global audience with text, audio and even video content, opening the way for any kind of message - true and false.
Alternatives to the traditional science journals have enabled investigations and research into many topics, for example the origins of COVID19 and its effects, the effects of outdated and arbitrarily chosen emission scenarios or social cost of carbon guesstimates, the role of money, influence, and corporate research on pharmaceutical products and much, much more, that would traditionally not have had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting published.
This does not come without its own costs, because we are now back and the root questions of epistemology. How do we know, what we know? What information can you trust to be true? What source will tell you the truth?
We now know intimately, that “a prestigious history” is no guarantee for truth.
We have always been facing these problems, but now they have become so obvious that we have to meet their challenges head on.
As Karl Popper stated in 1960, there is not final authority of knowledge:
The question about the sources of our knowledge . . . has always been asked in the spirit of: ‘What are the best sources of our knowledge – the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?’ I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist – no more than ideal rulers – and that all ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ - Karl Popper
Our best hope, therefore, is to let people criticize the theories, policies and explanations put forward in the public square, to let them speak. Without free speech, we cannot improve upon our ideas, we cannot correct our errors, we cannot cause change. Not without violence that is. Free speech is the only way to let our bad ideas die instead of us. That’s why it so necessary to promote it, even if people put forward ideas you don’t like, our are criticizing ideas you do like.
Foster Free Markets
Free markets are a system that does not pretend to be based on an inherent goodness of market participants, but on their “selfish” desires. It does not require people to be well intentioned to work, which is certainly a plus, given how some people behave some of the time.
Markets have proved to be superior to all other known - and likely to all possible- economic systems in terms of growth. The reduction of absolute poverty in the world has been nothing but astonishing. There is no other system that follows the changing valuations, made by the choices of the largest possible number of people, as flexible. There is no other system that can make continuous adaptations to the unpredictable future possible, and even more important, profitable.
The market economy has been described as an almost magical machine that can turn soybeans into computers via trade. People can contribute what they are good at and can participate in what other people are better at. And they are free to explore what it is that they are good at.
But a market is nothing mystical, it is just the most effective way of organizing the economy. Willing buyers can choose from the offerings of sellers, and when a suitable price can be found, both profit from the exchange. Profits are what incentivize the fulfillment of demands.
Market prices contain information. The often astonishingly large number of inputs into products, their relative scarcity, emerging technologies that compete for the same inputs, interest rates, inflation, all of that and so much more influences prices. High prices signal entrepreneurs an opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.
Markets are also able to utilize the widely distributed, often only implicitly existing knowledge representing local conditions, which overwhelms any centralized economic system. Hayek’s knowledge problem is real.
Markets enforce discipline: you cannot be a seller without a buyer. If you produce stuff that nobody wants, you must exit the market one way or the other. Not so in centrally controlled economies. When buyers cannot choose for themselves what works best for them, there is no limit on how far away from real demand the production system can be aiming. As Andreessen says: “The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline [is]: ‘We don’t care, because we don’t have to.’ “
In short, markets allow us to adopt innovations, they allow us to access better technologies - and to get rid of outdated and overcome technologies and products that were made with less knowledge. Centrally planned economies on the other hand, don’t allow for corrections of the great planners’ plans. While markets use the intelligence of all, planned economies are constrained to the intelligence of a few.
Cherish democracy
Is it possible that democratically elected rulers make mistakes, become corrupted or captured? Sure, it happens all the time.
But could it also happen that a centralized government without elections makes mistakes and becomes corrupt? Of course.
What’s the difference when the system of government is fallible in both cases? It is that “Who should rule?” is the wrong question! The right question is: “How can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence?”
Democracy paired with free speech2 seem to be the only system tried so far that has a good answer to that question. It makes it harder for a small group of the anointed to impose their ideas on the population and to shield themselves from feedback.
Accelerate Effectively
There are whole areas of technology that can improve our world.
We will look in an upcoming post at what we can do to effectively accelerate the dissemination of new technology.
What is at stake?
Why is it so important to get rid of the memes destroying the the means of correcting errors?
Let’s look at a popular problem of our time: climate change. Supposedly, too many people are using too many resources to lead a too prosperous life. (I would argue that we are too far from abundance for all to be satisfied)
The set of solutions that are available with existing technology, which so many people want to chain us to, can have catastrophic costs. There are devastating, tyrannical, or even genocidal solutions to this problem.
But there is also the techno-optimist route, unchaining innovators and working towards better technology! We cannot let us get boxed into a problem and be denied the means to Kobayashi-Maru our way out of it.
If we allow memes, people, politicians, companies, institutions, products, or systems to be free from criticism and not be subject to error correction, they will become erroneous and corrupt. This will stop and even reverse the progress we have made so far.
Scott Adams explains in CWSA2287:00.58.40-01:05:40 how TikTok has been designed as a vector for weaponized memes.
If the information content is controlled, i.e. only memes lionizing the regime and denigrating the opposition are amplified, and any criticism being suppressed, democracy cannot work properly. Also, the integrity of the vote as to be secured.