So how is it that the John Vervaeke Video only got 257 views? But Ian McGilchrist over 9k?
Traditional Social media - heavily influences “the algorithm”.
Which is why I am also wondering…, I mentioned this already in this post/section:
There is the content you create and which you invite people in to participate.
If the second Renaissance is about making things better in new ways way then use the old social media platforms?
Like x (a platform that actively pushes for accelerationism and transhumanism?)
instagram (meta does the same, with people having seriously bad experiences with doomscrooling)
Whats app? Shouldn’t we try to avoid being careless? Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams | Goodreads
Youtube - it seems convienient and yet its heavily steered into profit margins directions
Github, LinkedIn - collaboration through git is mostly OK, but microsoft is heavily focused in similar directions as X or meta.
Many of these alterantives support bridges and federation.
The choice of technology (as an organisation) is also a political one.
Books like:
Talk about these. Access to information on the internet is heavily influenced.
The principles Chomsky is refereing to are still at work and more so applied in internet communications (as explained by the two book examples and countless others)
In his book - The age of Resilience - Jeremy Rifkin argues that society in capitalism developed a problematic relationship with effiency:
This maybe leaves us with questions like:
How convient or efficient do we want to be in our cultures? How does resilience look like?
Using major social media platforms is double-edged, for sure. On the one hand, helping these platforms monetize more than they already do is not the best way to avert the metacrisis or any number of more limited social harms. On the other hand, the social cost of using these platforms can be offset by sufficiently pronounced positive outcomes. There are always tradeoffs involved. …
For example, I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook. But anyone doing organizational marketing is almost forced to use it, because of the audience available there. So I swing back and forth. If I’m doing something promotional for a worthy cause, I’ll use it more. If I’m between projects (or if other channels are a better fit), I’ll reduce my usage. The LifeItself community makes extensive use of WhatsApp. That’s not my preferred channel, but to reach that audience, I just figured out how to work with the channel. There are lots of other examples … in general, if we can get a critical mass of users onto purely open-source platforms, I’d very much prefer that over the more commercialized systems.
To look at this as a more multi-turn, dynamic “game”, part of the strategy is to meet people through enshittifed social media, and then pivot off of that to better media and/or face-to-face relationships. My local face-to-face spiritual discussion group for example is very high value, but for outreach (and because of the demographics of the group), they still favor FB as a social and messaging channel. Net-net, I think the karmic gain outweighs the rather minor marginal monetization enjoyed by Meta, inc.from this process. By contrast, my younger-skewing action groups are mostly on Discord.
Part of this is generational. If your target market is Boomers, just suck it up and go FB or Insta. For youth outreach, there are lots of other options to consider!
Isn’t it a interesting Paradox? In theory digital tools should be able to connect us all worldwide. But then the murky humans devide into generations and then things get seperated by companies and such.
Another thing is the zeitgeist inhibited by a certain community and how that relates to its worldview.
In my spare time (while pulling weeds from hedgerows and pumpkin fields), I’ve been working out a pragmatic reinforcement theory of language and culture. Namely, people adopt specific language through both natural and social feedback. (I got onto this after stress testing the Hanzi Freinacht metamemes with a bunch of AI sessions. Generally, the first three stages were least problematic in comparative global perspective. The fourth, the “modern”, needs work. The “postmodern” and “metamodern” are barely there at all, beyond the most elite of global urban population centers).
Anyway, even if one buys the stage theory of metamemes to some extent, we need a mechanism to account for why one stage sprouts from another. The social reinforcement mechanism is a pretty simple hypothesis for that: people echo what they hear around them. It may be complete BS from your POV or my POV, but if they hear it all the time from friends and neighbors, it gets reinforced. The connection to the memetic tribe idea should be fairly apparent. Dig into any of these memetic tribes, and specific social, geographic, and class-based circumstances should become apparent.
It should also be clear why different generations cluster around different channels. If one reaches out to Boomers on FB, one gets responses. Setting up a Discord channel for Boomer outreach will not get the same feedback. Anyway, on my hypothesis, these tribes are “sticky”, because they self-reinforce even around pure fiction, bias, conspiracy, etc. But they are also changeable, because physical reality does also get a voice. (Just look how “great” MAGA has been making America look lately in the Persian Gulf. Too much real information is leaking out beyond the propaganda. The supposedly defeated and destroyed target is blowing up US bases and allies pretty much at will. That’s the sort of physical refutation that eventually changes or extinguishes memetic tribes too far beyond the pale of pragmatic feedback).
So … on your list of memetic tribes, I’m not finding a great fit for whatever mine is. Integral theorist and post-rational are the best approximations maybe. But also, I do a lot of deliberate tribe crossing and tribe-to-tribe networking, so maybe we need a new tribal label for that! Polyglot internationalist, maybe?
Yeah its a very rough snapshot of some internet perception things. The post is from September 2018! Many things did change since then. My point was that there is a connection between the zeitgeist and the tools. Which is why I find the world view negotiation ever more so important:
And I think we should NOT outsource that negotiation to LLMs..
Agreed. I use LLMs only as Internet search on steroids. Namely, suppose I have some hypothesis I wish to test. I would want to know if the Internet in general contradicts my hypothesis. In the good old days, that would have involved quite a few hours in a university library doing a review of the literature. Now, I delegate that to the LLM, at least for an initial test. I don’t necessarily just accept what the LLM gives back, either! If it looks like the LLM (based on the Internet in general) is missing some pattern I think is really there, there are other forms of testing that can also be deployed. The LLM stress test is just one tool in the kit.
Anyway, I completely agree that inter-worldview dialog is a good idea. What I’ve found, however, is that worldview hopping is its own skill set that requires a degree of training and preparation. One needs a worldview that allows navigating plural alternative worldviews without losing personal navigation capabilities! Any form of linguistic or conceptual literalism will defeat this process. To make it work, one needs a sense of self, ethics, spirituality, etc. that are centered in the trans-rational and the trans-verbal. Playing this game requires focusing on the music, not so much on the lyrics!
I watched the entire video a few weeks ago. (I’ve probably seen at least 100 hours of Vervaeke videos in total over the past 2 or 3 years.) So it’s not very remarkable that my thinking aligns quite a bit with Vervaeke’s!
Well, lately I took on the role of discussion scheduler and facilitator for LifeItself Reseach calls, so I suppose, “Yes”! At least Vervaeke and lots of other thinkers influence my approach to discussion facilitation.
At this point, my personal discussion facilitation practice is a synthesis of so many philosophical and psychology influences, it would take a really long, boring thread to list them all. To cite just a few, what I get from Vervaeke is a sense that what lies beneath the words is most important. My overall conversation process model is Habermasian (late Habermasian, to be precise - the Habermas who emerged after his debates with Cardinal Ratzinger). Paulo Freire is another huge influence in what discussion and language mean to me - it’s all about grounding language in experience.
Notice how LLMs utterly fail to ground language in human lived experience! That’s why they don’t matter all that much in my scheme of things. They are just a new and improved version of the library card catalog, as far as I’m concerned!
