David Deutsch
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23 linked references
May 23rd, 2025
- not sure if Lulie Tanett or David Deutsch would agree with this quote, but it feels fairly representative to me
Pointing at the shift / mindset pairs / ways of being
- (/ societies; from David Deutsch)
November 15th, 2024
- David Deutsch uses "Understanding" to refer to something like everything makes sense, in Book/The Fabric of Reality - according to Michael "Valentine" Smith
- and ofc "seeking PCK"
May 24th, 2024
- huh, just noticed that chimps have both parasitic and symbiotic memes:
- the famous story of the chimps that keep each other from going up the ladder to get the bananas at the top, even though none of them were around back when doing so actually got them collectively punished, but they lived with others who were
- they sometimes copy each other because they can tell that what the other chimp is doing works
- I'm not 100% certain that the first is parasitic, but it's very clear that chimps DO have symbiotic/ICTFM/"rational" memes, which really underscores the extent to which "rational" is a stupid word for this kind of meme.
May 16th, 2024
- read The Myth of the Framework by Karl Popper
- (Lulie said it was an article, but I've only found it as a book or a chapter of a compilation book)
- > One of the more disturbing features of intellectual life at the present time is the way in which irrationalism is so widely advocated, and irrationalist doctrines taken for granted. In my view, one of the main components of modern irrationalism is relativism (the doctrine that truth is relative to our intellectual background or framework: that it may change from one framework to another), and, in particular, the doctrine of the impossibility of mutual understanding between different cultures, generations, or historical periods. In this paper I discuss the problem of relativism. It is my claim that behind it lies what I call ‘The Myth of the Framework’. I explain and criticize this myth, and comment also on arguments due to Quine, Kuhn, and Whorf which have been used in its defence.
January 14th, 2024
- cultural evolution — individual invention not needed. relevant to my "no H1" critiques of David Deutsch
- > That’s a common misconception. Culture can evolve and adapt to an unconscious process of errors, variation,retention and recombination. The secret of our success is full of examples, and this can be shown in the laboratory. t.co/pVdh3U9mnP
[🐦]() by Joe Henrich on October 2nd, 2023
Books or essays that answer each others' questions
- DD: The Evolution of Culture by David Deutsch says a bunch of stuff about cultural evolution, which also connect potently with The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
- DD: The Evolution of Culture talks more about the implications on a meaning level
- The Secret of Our Success talks more about the implications on a biological level
- both talk about the role of rationality and how it relates to memes, in different ways
- and both talk about ways in which the culture itself can "know" things the individuals don't, and the implications that has for things like rationality, creativity, etc
December 6th, 2023
- David Deutsch critiques
- Jess's thoughts on essay
- Jess >
- he's using the world "brain" where he means "mind"
- and literally he could just find/replace
- so he sounds unnecessarily reductionistic
- (M: which maybe he is, but yeah)
- Jess > various memes he's saying have been extinguished, but even if they're delegitimized they're still happening in certain forms
- subjugation of women, torture of children (very autistic ones sometimes face torturous conditions)
- Jess > I like the bit about science and religious conflict in a person
- Jess > surviving memes that make you more successful given a ruleset, and the memes for implementing the ruleset
- what are the incentives on the game designers?
- (vibes with David Sloan Wilson's new invisible hand article)
- my thoughts
- you can have a meme that is locally rational for an individual for winning the game they're in but leads to the perpetuation of dynamics that suck for everyone, for instance
- so in that sense...
- J > "critical faculties suppressed by religion"
- but all major religions also have critical schools
- in relation to the masses though yeah. the majority were not allowed
evolution includes WAY more than biological evolution
- David Deutsch has a detailed model of two main memeplexes
- anti-rational memes, that spread independent of whether they serve the organism spreading them, because they convince the organism they're vital to spread
- rational memes, that spread because they serve the organism spreading them, who thus wants their friends etc to also have the meme
October 10th, 2022
- then, we could use David Deutsch's hard-to-vary explanation criterion
December 20th, 2021
- meanwhile, some stuff that Book/Controlling People talks about dovetails interestingly with David Deutsch and The Secret of Our Success...
- if one asks the question, from PCT, why don't people reorganize better already? why do we get worse at reorganizing as we age, given that that seems non-adaptive?
- DD: The Evolution of Culture by David Deutsch says a bunch of stuff about cultural evolution, which also connect potently with The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
- which explains why this is
- and if one asks the Deutsch-inspired question of how this happens neurologically, or even something like what is necessary to achieve this, neurologically?, Unlocking the Emotional Brain and PCT both have some answers
- Controlling People in particular talks a lot more about the reorganization system, and so if you want people to not try to outsmart culture then it would naturally be necessary to keep people from consciously inspecting certain things!!!
November 13th, 2021
- the human may be able to understand every phenomenon, and in that sense be a universal explainer
- but it can't have every experience, or see the world from every perspective
November 5th, 2021
Romeo Stevens call re thinking that rejects other thinkin… › things we need better language for › the phenomenon Beeminder talks about, of if your error sy… › R > buddhism - suffering is such an error system
- M > maps onto David Deutsch's irrational memeplex
September 4th, 2021
16:00 - starting a kind of writing block › I feel like some of what I'm trying to say would benefit … › If I were to do this though, what would some approaches be? › A different approach would be to compare & contrast like … › eg › 4. cultural models
thinking that rejects other thinking
- obviously relates to David Deutsch's model of static & dynamic societies, irrational & rational memes
June 26th, 2021
- this bit helps convey something about David Deutsch's
February 11th, 2021
- thinking about David Deutsch's anti-rational vs rational memes
- Malcolm > seems also "arational" as a type of meme
- which is what typical internet memes are
- they are intentionally optimized for being ideal replicators
- whereas anti-rational unintentionally evolve towards being ideal replicators
- and rational intentionally evolve towards being meaningfully worth spreading
- re DD's "anti-rational vs rational memes" concept…
I think internet memes are a 3rd type
anti-rational = unintentionally evolve to spread
arational = intentionally optimized for being ideal replicators
rational = intentionally evolve towards being meaningfully worth spreading- re DD's "anti-rational vs rational memes"…
internet memes are *nonrational*…?
🦠👿🤬anti-rational: hacks host to spread despite harm to host
😂📈🙃nonrational: host optimizes for viral spread
💡🤯🛠️rational: host shares because beneficial (& maybe improves before sharing) - Thinking out loud about this, to check my initial insight:
1. how are nonrational memes different from anti-rational?
contrast
🧿 old unquestioned dogmas ("Bible tells me so" to "because I said so, that's why!")
💩 creativity & irreverence of internet meme culture - 1b. The important thing is that with anti-rational—aka STATIC—memes, the host is functionally *attempting* to propagate the exact same meme they received, without any changes
And any evolution happens *in spite of* that attempt, because more sticky or spready memes win. - 1c. By contrast, internet memes are *intentionally* changed, & creators hope they'll be picked up and changed *MORE*🚀
The infinite-game-ness of meme-remixing certainly has a fun-theory quality to it, but underlying substrate favors just *change*, not improvement in rationality. - 2. how are nonrational memes different from rational?
contrast
🧪 science needs rationality & vv, democracy needs liberalism & vv
😮 people falling deep into youtube conspiracy holes- is youtube conspiracy the best comparison?
- 2b.
- 2c.
September 28th, 2020
- Wrote something in relation to coercion & David Deutsch's fun criterion (originally in a chat to a friend)
- I've gone through many layers & loops around type stuff, disagreeing with my past self, agreeing again, and coming to a loosely held larger picture at this point I think.
- a few perspectives:
- 1. discomfort (of any magnitude) is not intrinsically a threat, although our belief that it is a threat makes it a genuine threat because it causes us to undermine ourselves to make it go away, which means that we naturally fear encountering such discomfort in the future because we know it will tend to result in us undermining ourselves - this is a huge part of how coercive memes are maintained, and unlearning this is vital to shifting into collaborative / Game B
- 2. forcing someone else to face their discomfort doesn't generally work - even when well-intentioned, it's usually a common mode of the coercive dynamic
- 2b. same with forcing yourself to face your own discomfort
- 3. however: attempting to avoid discomfort also doesn't generally work
- 3b. for instance: the only method I'm aware of to unlearn anxiety or panic attacks, is to welcome them. anything that tries to make them go away reinforces the basic root cause - even if it works in the moment! because they're caused by being afraid of ones' own fear, which causes a runaway feedback loop. welcoming the fear breaks that cycle.
- 4. sadness, anger, fear, etc, are natural feelings, both in the course of sensible everyday life and especially in working with internalized coercive schemas, trauma etc. rejecting them when they arise (in oneself or others) is not the answer
- 5. no feeling is incompatible with the thing that I think is the generator of what David Deutsch is calling fun:
- I can be feeling sad and also welcoming & enjoying that sadness.
- I could be feeling terrified on a rollercoaster and also having a peak experience of ecstasy.
- 6. processing trauma can be a ton of fun (I tasted this a bit at the Bio-Emotive retreat last summer, then a bit more this summer and I am extremely fuckyeah about it, and have done some unlearning about the idea that it is (or should be) necessarily sucky/scary/isolating/etc)
- 6b. however, one doesn't have to avoid processing trauma if one wants to, just because one doesn't know how to "make it fun" yet.
- "this ought to be fun" has an ought in it, which is basically a should.
- there _is_ a non-shouldy way of holding something like this but anyone in the Game A→Game B transition process is not going to start by knowing what it is, and attempting to embody "this ought to be fun" will likely result in them blaming themselves or others for it not being fun, one way or another, or feeling entitled to things being fun (entitlement being part of Game A)
- If I were to try to come up with a better phrase to use for the learning process, here's a first attempt:
- "can I make this fun? [without trying to make it go away]"
- it doesn't assume you already know how ("can I make this fun?")
- it assumes agency ("can I make this fun?")
- it assumes a transformation, not that it should already be fun ("make")
- it attends to what is so ("this")
- it doesn't try to reject reality ("[without trying to make it go away]")
meta-norms
- what David Deutsch talks about in relation to rational memeplexes
David Deutsch ↔ McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model
- who has also written a David Deutsch ↔ Meaningness bit
- Other stuff about David Deutsch
- Lack of criticism & creativity from Deutsch-followers
- Deutsch critiques the noble savage image, but doesn't seem to have any explanation for what is of interest/use/value/meaning of older ways of meaning-making
- (ie what de Quincey would call "pre-conquest" cultures)
- Continuum Concept says a bunch of things that I think Deutsch doesn't have good explanations for
- re machetes
- resonance around not coercing kids, but different frame
- "oh no, preventing danger"
- but you never get to understand what happens if you don't prevent the danger
- threats as working through counterfactuals
- which connects with the cassava thing too! (in a sort of different thing)
- the culture is not-even-coercive-in-the-first-place
- you could frame it as Pepe criticizing Cesar by saying "look how we do it and how happy we are" but that would be missing the point!
- "unconscious conjectures" about how he wants to live?
- totally different meaningmaking frame
- so in terms of anti-rational memes, what are the memes here?
- Cesar behaving differently on the action-level (not gardening)
- and yet he was encouraged, on a meaning-level meme, to active from a place of enjoyment
- (and which there clearly are things of value!)
- (otherwise you wouldn't have the observation in early colonial America that European settlers would run away from their families to join the indigenous people (and would run again if rescued!) but not the reverse in the same way)
- what I find myself concluding in relating David Deutsch & Continuum Concept says a bunch of things that I think Deutsch doesn't have good explanations for
- is that there must be a stable possibility of an anti-rational memeplex that isn't based on traumatizing people, and that this is how things functioned in many (most? all?) prehistoric cultures and many tribes etc like the Tauripan in the Cesar story
- so it's still a static society
- but... yeah. this is what is pointed at by H1 vs H2, tribal vs empire, etc
- my previous model was just that this had something to do with pure punishment vs double-binds, but reading the Pepe/Cesar story I feel clear that it must be something where there isn't punishment on the meta-level