meanwhile, on extremist right wing twitter @hankgreen.bsky.social

Inspired by @ventrella.bsky.social's Clusters demo, I'm exploring how to add an arbitrary number of dimensions to #particlelife and/or #particlelenia simulators... patcon.github.io/Clusters-n-d...

6/ Goodreads is another inspiration for how “micro-knowledge” can aggregate into meaningful impact. As @aj-boston.bsky.social writes, why *don’t* we have something like Science Goodreads yet? bsky.app/profile/rone...

The post below is a bit incoherent, but important. It's about how society (now amplified by algorithms) chooses not to remember certain things: to "memory hole" them. Understanding how memetics works is the single #1 most important task facing humanity. Nothing else matters for civilization.

glimpse of what I've been up to (this is from the open memetics discord) - discussing memory holes & how they are unstable, because awareness of them makes them disappear

about to send an update for "Summer of Pub" sharing initial participants in our lil @leaflet.pub blog club! meant to do last week; finally putting together…anyone else participating? if you're joining but haven't shared your blog yet, lmk & I'll update the list! the ~only rule = publish weekly :)

great question!! I recently wrote an analysis/introduction to hank green from a memetics perspective (his egregore is surprisingly not well known at all in the tpot/rationalist spaces)

new essay: "how memetics can go mainstream" defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/how-memeti...

"There is No Source"

epistemic shortcuts are necessary, but some increase your ability to handle complexity, and some increase the veil of complexity that allows power, abuse, corruption to fester

given a viral tweet thread, we can see "the shape" of all replies. Replies that similar together conceptually appear close together on the map (planning to apply this to bluesky next)

"how autistic supercharmers develop (1/2)"

the ideological turing test is how you find out if you think the other side is evil because you don't understand them, or because they actually are evil

(1) this is not a problem to be solved, this is necessary slack in the system that makes room for groundbreaking new paradigms (2) there cannot be "one" canonical scientific community. Scientists obviously disagree on a lot of things, this is normal & good

This is my protocol for good faith interaction on the internet cc @linas.org

if you make peer reviews public, it acts as a way to get feedback for the reviewer too (like as an undergrad I can review a paper, in my own words, and that conveys any lack of understanding I may have about the field)

two ways to communicate with an entire mind

On open source cultural engineering (the cool thing about this is that doing it in the open allows those who disagree to take action, and possibly move the needle in the opposite direction. Culture war turns into culture science)

on epistemic literacy tests

learning about someone's understanding of the thing, is a different pursuit of knowledge than learning about the thing, but it is still in itself teaches you something useful about the universe

i think the heart of ATproto is people who think technology can improve our lives, if we shape it with care and intention, as opposed to the idea that all technological progress leads to the same utopian end state as if effortlessly by its own volition

How do you define intelligence?

📢 This Week in Memetics 📢 (Week of May 5-12, 2025) A weekly roundup of emerging ideas, discussions, and patterns in the memetics landscape. 🚨 Top Memetic Concept/Pattern of the Week

Those us us who can't love our enemies can still do a lot with militant decency.

is kenning a real word?

have you been able to read the linked paper here yet? related thesis henryfarrell.net/large-ai-mod...

did you guys hear about this by the way? University of Zurich did essentially a live psyop as an experiment, with the justification being "literally all companies are doing live experiments on a mass scale, academia needs to catch up. At least *we* publish our results"

Here is my "memetics 101" article. This summarizes my understanding of this field, why it's important, and who is actively doing work that I am paying attention to open.substack.com/pub/defender...

this is a profound insight and I checked the profile and saw it's a sociologist and I think more sociologists should go viral more often. This will heal the discourse as reflexivity kicks in

is there a way you can make a bsky feed for things that the moderation team has labelled "intolerance" ?

hate is a huge cognitive bias. It makes you stupid. Hating your enemies makes it hard to learn from them. This is the tactical advantage that the good guys have (those with love in their hearts & who can see a better world)

I would design my bluesky feed to only see posts about Shiloh from people who can articulate the steelman of the enemy's tribe. This will change internet discourse

In this video, Hank tries to take something true that people deny due to ideology/culture war, and create a new narrative so it can be accepted. I think this has a high chance of working, so I made a prediction market for it: manifold.markets/Defender/wip...

This doesn't get enough attention! Handy toolkit for a well-lived life.

"i tend to model my tribes as the only people with agency; the opposing tribes are like a natural disaster"

step 1: emotional graph of blue sky. Step 2: watch it live and try to move the needle. See if we can "make waves"! (all it needs is like a popular person to see it & try the experiment. Want to do some small tests first to validate it works!)

any posts that mention anything about memetics appear in this feed!

yes, and, leaving people to be radicalized & controlled by those vultures is terrible for us, and for them. It's lose lose. It's extremely important that the good guys learn how to deploy & spread their ideas at LEAST as effectively as the other side

single-origin software

the longer that I'm on here and maybe looking at defender's tweets, I am seeing that yeah we are heading into a blog era and its gonna be fucking myspace

@schlage.town do you guys have any plans to have an API or data export? thinking about how I want to jerry rig/generate a custom UI on top of my notes

a browser plugin that rewrites all comments about political tribes to be about the other one and you have to guess which one is fake

if anyone does this successfully they will be the Art Bell of tech culture and it will be a critical vector for solving coordination problems across the industry

most convincing take I've seen in the airplane crash so far (like you take over from a past CEO who ignored a specific solvable problem people complained about, you solve it, it makes you look good for political reasons?)

this feels significant

a bit more of an explanation of what this means, let me know if this is legible (or if you'd explain it differently!)

if you peek inside the mind of language models, we can see that (1) fire is red (2) grass is green (3) apples are slightly more red than green (4) if grossness had a color, it would be way more green than red

I finally built my dream interface where I can inspect the vibes of any word in our collective consciousness (using semantic embeddings)