Thread by @0x49fa98

We are living in a scientific theocracy that has rejected both God and science.

This is possible because ideas are alive and they reproduce by influencing humans to spread them, and there's a sense in which ideas are bigger organisms than people, higher up the food chain

An older version of this thought: the idée fixe—an idea becomes an object of fixation, and completely overtakes the person, til his mind is nothing but the idea. This is part of the theory of the idea as force: "people don't have ideas, ideas have people"

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1438939616577458176

But the understanding of "idea as force" is incomplete without an account of the Darwinian struggle between ideas. It's not only a metaphor, to say ideas have their own life, because although they exist in our minds, they exist independently from any individual

That said, we should not abandon the notion of personal agency, but we must contextualize it. There are things which are made purely of ideas, things that move among us, that also move us. Some people call this an "egregore" but lately I have taken to "metahuman"

A great man, who commands the multitudes and shapes the world to his will, becomes metahuman, and his command becomes an identity, an epistemic grounding, a verbal uniform—in short, an ideology

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1267813711424569344

Ideologies—metahumans—are much more immanent because of the internet. They move, spread, and evolve faster. Their food is attention, their ecosystem is our minds, and some are parasitic, some are symbiotic, and some are predatory

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1311067151726411776

Not that "scenes" or subcultures never existed before; we can think of various metahumans from history such as religions and nations, especially. You might expect the internet to create a Cambrian explosion of ideologies, but I think the opposite is true

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1055227790100856832

There are 3 avenues of transmission for a living cluster of ideas: vertically, from parent to child; horizontally, from peer to peer; and institutionally, from school to student. The internet disempowers institutional transmission the same way institutional disempowers vertical

The increase in speed and spread of these "metahumans" allows them to evolve faster and to maintain tighter coherence within themselves. When it takes days or weeks to send a letter, ideas drift and diverge within their carriers. When it takes seconds, they stay in sync

And when things spread via network effects, winners win yugely. For the same reason BTC has an order of magnitude greater market cap than ETH, the biggest thoughtforms in the game dominate the smaller ones, and "woke" is the biggest game in town

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1352661153109913600

You could pick up a lot of this from reading about memetics, the now pretty much dead branch of thought that sprung off of dawkins and blackmore and a few others, though that thoughtline was deficient in the ways Moldbug outlined unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-da…

The problem with treating these metahuman entities as hostile invaders is roughly the same as treating your gut bacteria as hostile invaders. You have a gut biome for digesting food and a mind biome for digesting perceptions

Like any metaphor, this one is limited, because gut biomes don't spread virally, but mind biomes can and do. And the truth is, when we hear the call of an idea that feels clear and beautiful, authentic and true, we have very little power to resist it

Early in its lifecycle, the loss of a key man can wipe out a thoughtform, but as it spreads, it takes on a life of its own. People who are successful at spreading ideas are rewarded by those ideas for doing so, in the form of prestige

This is, again, not to discount individual agency regarding the ideas we ingest, but it's likewise a mistake to pretend we have no reliance on them. The collectivist vs. individualist debate is idiotic, but it's also a durable self-replicator

From this you can see how truth is not essential to the fitness of a self-replicating idea cluster, and it may be even be a hindrance. Lies, simplifications and contradictions all have their uses to the organism, and every ideology has them

There are shapes ideas must take to stick in our minds, and there are doctrines that arise in different places and times in almost the same shape. This could be evidence of either perennialism or convergent evolution

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1421082788242104324

Example of convergent evolution: Pure Land Buddhism mirrors the Lutheran idea of Sola Fide, salvation through faith alone. Pure Land Buddhists believe enlightenment (salvation) is unattainable in a fallen world, and comes instead from faith in Amitābha

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1022156776836280320

An idea hits the Darwinian jackpot when it manages to colonize an influential school or a government department of education. A scientific paradigm is one type of idea that can do this, and it obeys all the same rules as any other kind of idea

Besides predictive power, a scientific paradigm might have properties which allow it to thrive and multiply in a govt dept of science. Eg. a hypothesis might engender a state of crisis that necessitates new departments, jobs, laws, consultants, lobbyists, and so on

Government money-receivers want to keep existing, so both institutionally and personally, participants in them aren't capable of apprehending the counterfactual to the hypothesis that justifies them. Anyone who can is filtered and selected out as part of the evolutionary process

This is an inextricable feature of the Vannevar Bush system: once it's captured by a dogma, it has no recovery mechanism. A scientific finding which expands bureaucratic power causes the system to replicate it, regardless of replicability

https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1384146274786545665

Every scientist in the regime must also be a bureaucrat; he must know the prejudices of grant-writers and appeal to them. Those prejudices are determined by scientific consensus, which is determined by those same prejudices

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1281387008376614913?s=20

Real scientists are interested in falsifiability, but scientific theocrats are interested only in dogma. They advertise their lies as "settled science" and "consensus among scientists" but they don't even see the narrow chokepoint of govt funding through which consensus must pass

Slowly at first, then all at once, Science that depends on state power becomes a factory that manufactures state power. Simultaneously the state evolves to launder power through Science. We can think of many examples

No moderate or centrist view is possible once a hypothesis is entrenched in scientific institutions. No study that seeks to negate it will be funded. 97% of scientists will agree, almost as if the negation of certain positions instantly ends your career

https://twitter.com/Howlingmutant0/status/1352218757880557570

We see this dynamic play out with climate change, covid, with questions of race, and most strangely, with the LGBT movement. Science should not make any moral claims, should not cross the is/ought barrier, yet it now informs me that transgenders are heckin' cute and valid

Science (big-S) now attempts to ground prescriptive claims such as "you should castrate your 13 year old son" with descriptive claims such as "clownfishes exhibit sequential hermaphroditism." Scientists refer to this as the Novum Organum zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2021/09/27/the…

That the regime has lost the ability to do science is a source of untapped strength for us. Dissident anons can out-predict the regime because we hew closer to reality. So we must not abandon science (small s) out of disdain for Science (big S)

Having abandoned faith and eschatology, Science has become faith, become eschatology. In these online spaces where new rival thoughtforms ferment and foment, we need to recover the sense of religious fear, so it may be overcome by religious hope

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1048660452861833216