In this blog post, I argue that aspects of modern life such as social media and nudging - covert attempts by others to influence our behaviour - reduce the diversity of our thoughts. To illustrate why this is concerning, I cast the problem in terms of Richard Dawkins Memes and explain why animal species are generally healthier as a whole when they are diverse. (Note that a "Meme" is defined as an idea that inhabits one's mind. This is distinct from common internet usage of the word). I conclude by sharing one of the ways that I diversify my memes.
I’m interested in pursuing a PhD, not the least because it's an excuse to think rather than do, and that I've been hesitant on commiting on something to do is an understatement. But of course, when asked in person, I'll generally pluck a more suitable response from the garden of causation. Recently, it's been a nightshade. Something like:
I want to do a PhD because I need scientific leverage to tackle a very serious problem which everyone talks about and is aware of, yet lacks proper treatment. There are some dark and evil forces at play with TikTok, the "Little Red Book" (like TikTok, but popular among middle-aged Chinese) and social media in general. People spend so much time on these that it becomes their entire world, and thus comes the lack of independent thought, the formation of arbitrary beliefs, and of course, (lowers voice to a whisper) facism!
They say that changing up the environment freshens up your ideas, and I was lucky enough to have discussed this topic of a PhD recently with a biologist. I reformulated my usual response, using Richard Dawkins as our common thread. I’d heard about Dawkins memes long ago, but this conversation showed me the connection between the memes and the source of my anxiety!
A profound idea that Dawkins popularised is that ideas are organisms. While e. coli churn in our guts and help us digest food, ideas live in our minds and help us adapt to the world and collaborate. He calls these ideas memes. For example, humanity's collective memes increased greatly with ancient Greek philosophy, hibernated through the dark ages, and continued to grow with the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason.
However, while the hierarchy is clear for us and e.coli, it's philosophically unclear whether ideas exist to serve humans, or whether we humans are just the e.coli that serve ideas! Like for many things, the concepts from evolution apply to ideas, in that they mutate and are selected for based on aspects such as simplicity and effectiveness.
If ideas are organisms with human minds as their vesicles, their diversity may be in great peril.
Diversity matters. If this doesn't resound to you sufficiently as an ethical statement, let's go functional. Isn't it bizarre how there are hardly any cloning species? Sexual reproduction is expensive and risky, since the random 50/50 split of genes between the parents doesn't explicitly select for the best ones. It would make sense for there to be more species that can selectively choose between cloning and sexual reproduction, and once an offspring wins the genetic lottery, to clone itself.
It turns out that this is great for the individual while the environmental circumstances last, but eventually things change, and the entire population of cloned individuals gets bombshelled. Non-diversity is fragility (See chapter 5 of Life Ascending for more justice on why clones aren't viable). For similar reasons, I argue that it’s important that we think diversely as well.
And once a thought goes extinct from the mind of any living human, I suspect that it is a very round-about process for it to return. The example I'll give of this is for tradition, which makes us take particular roles and thus influences how we think: the American and English armies recognize this and consequently maintain out-dated army regiments at diminished operational capacity, to preserve their traditions in the case that they would ever prove beneficial from full resuscitation. While there are clearly some differences between traditions and ideas, the fact that Darwin supposedly never read Mendel should be telling.
Nudging and algorithms are two forces that endanger the collective diversity of our memes.
When you nudge someone, you influence their behaviour without forcing it. The cafeteria can nudge healthier eating habits by placing the chocolate bars on the bottom shelf. Students often nudge themselves by placing their phones out of sight. A less subtle nudge is the nasty pictures on cigarette boxes.
Nudging is probably terrible for diversity of thought and of personalities. If at time zero, there’s diversity of behaviour, or a weak dominance by a few behaviours, the goal of nudging is to replace these by a single dominant behaviour. There are real nudging campaigns being run by powerful entities, and to their credit, many were founded to nudge people into healthier and more responsible behaviour. However, even well-intentioned nudges can be a menace.
As a constructed example, take one's career. In Switzerland, the number of individuals going into the trades far outnumbers those going to university. So Joe is going to trade-school. Out of welding, plumbing, accounting and carpentry, what does he choose? Say for instance that there is a governmental nudging towards coding. Joe, like thousands of others, is nudged into coding. Flash forward 10 years: coding is as automated as wheat-farming and the market's demand for coders goes down 10-fold. It's a double-whammy: Joe's jobless, and three of his neighbours are paying buckets to get their leaky pipes inspected.
But this example is about one’s career decision; how does this apply to memes? Simply, that
For example, applying the above in reverse-order, I recently thought that trouble-shooting in airports is a good metaphor for certain broken systems in life. When something goes wrong, you can wait in the official trouble-shooting line for hours (like working hard and following the system), or you can talk to a bunch of employees here and there, until one takes you to their friend behind the First Class-Only desk and they sort out your issue promptly (nepotism in broken systems). And I only had these experiences because I decided to study an aeroplane-flight away from home. I hope you’ll trust that I only made this discovery because I had an urgent flight to catch!
I'm sure you've heard all about the algorithms that Tik Tok, Youtube and Twitter use to keep you hooked. They recommend stuff that you're interested in, and usually that's just stuff that agrees with your views. It took me a while to translate that to myself.
Around three years ago, the algorithm recommended to me the Lex Fridman podcast. Lex is an artificial intelligence researcher and coder who originally held very technically detailed conversations, and has expanded to interviewing influencers, musicians and athletes. I’ve only recently realised the impact that Lex Fridman has had on me - his podcast probably comprises more than 50% of my Youtube-hours. It's gotten to the point where I've tried his carnivore diet (over a kilogram of meat a day!), tried to live as monkishly as him, and mostly read books recommended by him or his guests!
Upon looking closely, there’s something wrong with today’s platform. For any resource, there's two steps: wanting it, then acquiring it. If you think about it, why isn't Youtube just a video warehouse, where when you want to see a video of X, you search up X? Similarly for Twitter and knowing the thoughts of person Y. These platforms not only give you what you want, but nudge what you want!
A solution to this that I've recently stumbled into is used bookstores. These contain a wide range of books, many of which are out of print. They generally, through their layout and how you walk through them, curate tasteful collections and thus will meet your demands better than, say, randomly looking through a library. My first trips to the used book-store lasted hours, as alien worlds of thought and experience found their way into my thinking. Worlds such as mathematically modelled psychology, and books made entirely of correspondences between individuals. The latter typically consist of dozens of letters of witty written exchanges and, looking deeper, the evolution of profound human relationships over a lifetime.
My general principle I've extracted is that while it's okay (in terms of meme-diversity) for there to be a monopoly on where I acquire what I want, I try to diversify where my wants come from.
Jan 15, 2023