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Love how you but Musk and Schmachtenberger on the edges of the upper right quadrant but who are the other four "think different" examples in the upper right quadrant image? I see Jim Henson and Miles Davis(?) but don't recognize the others.... I'd also like to question whether frameworks are truly necessary to "help us understand how wisdom might become evolutionarily competitive". Perhaps the evolution of a culture of better cooperation is what is needed

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Ha, that's actually a think different ad — not meant to represent any of them individually, but the kind of deeply human genius and potential they represent... The others are Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, Martha Graham (the dancer), and Pablo Picasso.

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Good read! Really appreciate the effort to make molochian forces more meme-legible, as you called it.

I have been working on an understanding on how to connect the consequences you arrive at here with memetic evolution, specifically thinking of ethics as cultural software evolutionarily designed to combat such forces.

I believe that developing a metaethical explanation which shows that cultural development and morality has been about fighting Moloch all along, could resonate with the moral intuitions of people from diverse cultural and religous backgrounds and helps in unifying the majorites needed to divert our path towards the top right instead of letting an accelerationist minority lul the public into blind techo optimism.

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Welf, let's have a conversation on this. Perhaps one we can publish?

I'd like to bring in a couple specific avenues (currency design, natural law, etc.) and question some of your assumptions.

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I’m already lining up first conversations for the (upcoming) podcast — let’s do it!

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It’s ironic how every link in your posts is a tracking endpoint, turning the anti-moloch-limbic-capitalism content into an exemplary case of surveillance capitalism.

Now, problems can’t be solved with the same thinking they were created by. To be actually solved problems must be addressed on a higher semantic level. Otherwise one would end up with creating more problem, like this surveillance capitalism example.

Capitalism is an economic system, a machine, it has no own intents per se. The machine is made of, and is driven by values humans have. It does indeed have some intelligence-like structure, if rather ChatGPT-like one: it does correlate things together, but it does not have any own preferences not intents.

That’s said, capitalism is the best machine of that kind the human civilization came up with. All others are way worse. In fact, capitalism it’s a positive sum game, it manages to create added value (including the Internet you are using right now) out of negative sum ingredients which those human (not even human, actually) values like greed and jealousy are.

To “fix capitalism” one need to re-train it on a different set of values, much like with ChatGPT. The very mechanics of the machine itself does its work well enough.

The different set of values comes not from capitalism, it comes from people. Also, it can’t be enforced on people because it leads to hell, it has been tried and proven way too many times.

So the higher semantic level the “problem of capitalism” needs to be addressed at is people’s values, to change the people’s OS, because the current one is not even human.

The core of the OS is the identity definition. It needs to be changed qualitatively. There are concrete parameters, criteria and metrics for this. None of those are about capitalism, politics, left, right, evolution (these are just 2-, 3-, 10-th order effects of the actual problem).

A good start would be to stop using the surveillance capitalism approach in your posts, not because surveillance capitalism is bad but because you do value privacy from your own identity, own Self, your choice, with no additional external reasons.

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1. On tracking links — that's Substack's default functionality, not something in my original links. They add analytics parameters during publication. If anyone knows how to disable this, I'd be interested to learn.

2. If capitalism is a machine as you suggest, the question becomes: what is its objective function? What does it optimize for? And can we really just 'retrain' it when its optimization pressures arise from game theoretic incentives rather than explicit programming?

The argument isn’t really about individual intentions but about emergent systemic behaviors - like how flocking emerges in birds without any individual bird 'intending' it.

Meditations on Moloch gives good context on how game theoretic incentives create outcomes no individual intends or wants.

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Emergent phenomena is exactly that - emergent. They emerge from a lower semantic level. In case of capitalism they emerged from human values, and they exist for and optimize for those values.

For example, if people valued privacy they wouldn’t use a service which does violate privacy, and would use the services which do no such thing. That would in effect apply all the emergent power of capitalism to incentivize and profit the latter, and render the former ones non-existent. If only people had such values.

This doesn’t even require all the people to change their values.

In fact it needs only a fraction of them to change values, a butterfly to flap its wings, to change the attractor of the emergent behaviors. Then, by consciously adjusting these values we could maintain the system in the desired state.

Also, game theory is not a value, not truth, by any means, and does not incentivize anything. It is just a very simplistic ad hoc model of the real world phenomena, and it is it which needs to be adjusted, or maybe just applied properly, with all the relevant parameters taken into account.

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