An emergent phenomena: The Selfish Meme.
...fish Meme. The meme itself drives humans. Humans feel an interior want, but the overall system is just water flowing downhill.
Topic: overall system
21 chunks · 19 episodes
3.4x burst in 2024 Q3
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- overall system appears in 21 chunks across 19 episodes, from 2023-12-11 to 2026-09-07.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 8/5/24 (2024-08-05), with 2 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with left behind, value creation, and apis, while by chunk count it sits between early adopter and selection pressure; its yearly rank moved from #31 in 2023 to #65 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
An optimizing process will find the path of least resistance.
...l work, then as more things flow through, more useful work will be done for the overall system. For example, if the path of least resistance is to distill bits of safe-by-construction mechanistic software.
Systems should be designed for principled centralization, with a jewel bearing.
...ure it's governed in a way that is aligned with the long-term incentives of the overall system.
Individualism's grotesque form in the limit is "I am the only thing that matters."
...g that matters." The proper amount of individualism leads to innovation for the overall system. But too much tears it apart. The advice of "do what the hero of your movie would do right now" is hyper-individualist. It fundamentally ignores exte...
Pluralism is a defense mechanism against civilizational collapse.
...ainst civilizational collapse. You have the competitors internally, keeping the overall system strong, at the cost of efficiency. Resilience and efficiency are in tension.
In some contexts, it's better to have the algorithm be your boss.
...people who care about you. There are individuals who do care about you. But the overall system is a machine that is structurally incapable of caring about you. Organizations are more like an unfeeling algorithm than we care to think about.
A more iterative regulatory approach allows learning on the go.
... so the system will learn around it, often in ways that are maladaptive for the overall system. Japan has a much more iterative regulatory system than the US.
The faster the twitch of components, the faster the clock speed of the overall system.
The faster the twitch of components, the faster the clock speed of the overall system. But also fast twitch can't get more leverage. A swarm of shallow actions. In lots of tech companies today, they use Slack, never email (too slow). T...
What makes the enchanted vault magic?
...ir vaults around the world. Even though everyone's data is totally private; the overall system can still see the kinds of tasks that people are doing on their hidden data, and help automatically share those best practices, creating increasing l...
When there's a boundary there's an automatic "us vs them".
... vs one to put on the other and then blame them for if it doesn't work. But the overall system will succeed or fail based on whether the API is the right one; whether it's simplifying but also adaptable. A good pattern to counteract this is to ...
When you are an all powerful leader in an organization where members can be fired, it is extremely hard as the leader to get good disconfirming evidence.
...y. That disconfirming evidence is annoying, and can even hurt, but it makes the overall system antifragile. But in companies an employee who makes too much noise is liable to get sidelined or fired. Employees watch carefully and see what kinds ...
A pattern for data-aware artifacts, adopting the three-bucket pattern from my earlier Doorbell in the Jungle:
...ion of human judgment of quality that can be used to improve the quality of the overall system. An artifact that another user decided to pin, all else equal, is way more likely to be useful to another user too than a random hallucinated artifac...
I had a fascinating conversation this week with a friend who had read The Institutional Revolution.
...the same if I were him." Polis is about following the rules for the good of the overall system. Only people in the middle follow the rules. The very poor and the very rich tend to be more about Oikos.
When building a platform, deciding when to expose functionality in the platform is a hard decision.
...e stayed constant over multiple years, despite new use cases being added in the overall system and underlying changes. The hardest ones are new APIs that you've never gotten experience with at all.
If you don't constantly switch the underlying provider for a service in your system then you'll get stuck in it.
...then you'll get stuck in it. You'll build up more and more functionality in the overall system that subtly assumes that it works in the one way, which will be load bearing and get increasingly heavy and hard to swap. If you allow swapping out p...
Any single idea in an r-selected context is fragile and unlikely to succeed.
...ingle idea in an r-selected context is fragile and unlikely to succeed. But the overall system that includes r-selected items, the meta-idea, the swarm, is antifragile.
Almost everyone today is assuming all of the requisite variety will be within a particular AI model.
...come where no one entity dominates. This approach creates open-endedness in the overall system that eclipses what any single model can do. If this other approach turns out to be wrong, and there's one AI model that emerges as the AI god-emperor...
A useful lens for products: primary vs secondary use cases.
... As long as there's a viable primary use case to get the whole thing going, the overall system could become massive faster than you might think.
The language model is a component of an overall system.
The language model is a component of an overall system. When people imagine something like AGI, they imagine a specific high-powered computer, running a single, finely tuned model, blinking and beeping in...
A few more riffs on the kinds of people who are "illuminators" that I talked about last week.
...hat are seeds of greatness that are likely to have a net positive effect on the overall system. I threw together a little GPT to give everyone an illuminator in a box. (Obviously it's no replacement for the real thing!)