Mini-metaverse theory, Democracy, and why Science is dogma

An off-the-cuff recording where I talk about my note-taking process, Sam Harris, Peter Thiel, the power of conversations, my theory of Mini-metaverses, simulated experiences and meditation, why luck is fractal, and Science as dogma.

Chapters

0:04 Introduction to the Update
1:46 Mini Metaverse Theory
6:08 Conversation vs. Violence
7:11 Meditation mediates Reality
13:56 Knowledge vs. Dogma
18:04 Science as Dogma
19:08 Balancing Skepticism and Trust

Here are some of the ideas I mentioned in the video. Keep scrolling for summaries and the full transcript.

Here's the notebook page I showed in the video, as a few people asked for it:

Someone asked, so here are the notes I showed at the start. Hopefully useful pic.twitter.com/cOmeO3dQEi
— David Elikwu FRSA ⚔️ (@Delikwu) November 19, 2024

Sources/inspiration mentioned:

The Sam Harris video i took notes on

The interview between Bari Weiss and Peter Thiel

My interview with Garett Jones

My interview with David Robson

Short summary 🤖

This short lecture explores knowledge assimilation and the influence of media on societal dynamics. It begins with a reflection on a Sam Harris video, emphasising the role of note-taking in personal growth. David discusses crises of meaning in developed societies and the impact of technology and social media on perception and political discourse.

Highlighting the necessity of conversation for societal stability, the lecture introduces meditation as a tool for regulating emotional responses. A critique of dogma versus scepticism examines trust in experts versus personal understanding, alongside the complexities of democracy and informed decision-making.

The discussion weaves together themes of technological fragmentation, collective understanding, and belief systems, advocating for conversation to foster empathy and connection in society. David encourages further exploration of these interconnected ideas.

Long Summary 🤖

In this lecture, we explore the intricacies of knowledge assimilation and how various forms of media influence our understanding of societal dynamics. The discussion begins with an examination of a short video by Sam Harris, which serves as a catalyst for David's reflections on note-taking and the synthesis of ideas. The speaker shares their method of distilling key points from the video, emphasising that the act of note-taking itself facilitates deeper thought and personal development, especially in the context of their ongoing book project.

A core theme of Harris's video is the crises of meaning prevalent in the developed world—an observation that resonates with David's view on cultural fragmentation and the consequential choices society faces. Harris outlines a dichotomy between open and closed societies, emphasising the importance of conversation as a foundational element of peaceful cohabitation. The speaker connects this to modern technology, particularly social media, which has fragmentarily tailored realities that potentially isolate individuals within their "mini metaverses." They delve into how these individualised algorithms can distort one’s perception of normalcy, thereby narrowing one’s worldview and impacting political discourse.

As the lecture progresses, David elaborates on how technology and social media create a bifurcated landscape in which people become entrenched in specific viewpoints, further exacerbating misunderstandings and conflict. By examining Harris's broader arguments on the relationship between conversation, shared understanding, and societal stability, the speaker suggests that the diverging paths we face—whether choosing conversation over violence or persuasion over coercion—are significantly shaped by our digital environments.

Importantly, the concept of meditation is introduced as a transformative tool for mediating one’s responses to external stimuli. David details how our sensory experiences are filtered and constructed by the brain, which, when combined with meditation practices, can lead to more measured responses to emotional triggers. This reflects a deeper philosophical inquiry into the nature of conscious experience, suggesting that individuals have the power to regulate their emotional reactions through mindfulness rather than succumbing to instinctual impulses.

The discussion further transitions into a critique of dogma versus scepticism in the pursuit of knowledge. Drawing parallels between scientific advancement and dogmatic beliefs, David questions the accessibility of scientific truths among the general populace, positing that much of what people accept as knowledge is based on trust in experts rather than personal understanding. They juxtapose this notion with insights from contemporary figures like Peter Thiel, who posit that true understanding requires navigating the balance between scepticism and blind trust in established narratives.

Through this lens, David navigates the complexities of democracy, elite governance, and public knowledge, remarking on the potential pitfalls of crowd judgement versus informed decision-making by elites. They highlight the nuanced realities of modern democracies, where the outcomes of collective decision-making can sometimes lead to detrimental results, raising questions about the efficacy of pure populism compared to more guided forms of leadership.

In conclusion, the lecture presents a tapestry of interconnected ideas spanning the societal implications of technological fragmentation, the evolution of personal and collective understanding, and the delicate balance of belief systems. David's reflections illuminate the ongoing discourse around how we can move towards a more constructive and empathetic society, one that values conversation as a tool for connection rather than division. They encourage continued exploration of these themes, emphasising that the fusion of diverse thoughts and experiences can yield original insights that contribute meaningfully to the broader conversation.

Transcript 📜

[0:04]

Introduction to the Update

[0:01] Hey man, how's it going? I hope you've been well since our last little conversation. I thought I would give you a bit of an update because I was just making some notes on a short video that I was watching, um, from Sam Harris. It's literally only 10 minutes long or so, which is why it's just like the one page, but the point being, I thought it might be a useful example to show. Okay. Here's how I think about making notes. Here's the kind of notes that I make. and also how I might think about combining some different ideas. Right now, I'm working on a book project, so I won't have time to turn this into an essay, but this is like a partly baked essay in my mind, and it's kind of forming. I still don't know exactly where I'll take it or where I'll go, but I write the notes in a way that helps me to have the right thoughts. So that's kind of the idea. So the point being, so it was like a really short video. I think it just came out. It was Sam Harris on the big thing. It's like 10 minutes long. And so line by line, I'm kind of, as he's making a point, I will just write down the core thesis of that point. And then like here, he's making some bifurcations. He's saying, oh, you know, we have a choice between this and this, this and this, this and this. And so I'm making notes on all that. So the video overall, the kind of point he was making is that he started off with, you know, there's a crisis of meaning in the developed world. Culture has...

[1:22] Become fractured. And this idea, and he paints it repetitively through some of these different clauses, is that we have this choice. And he frames three choices later on. So there's a zero sum contest between open society, closed society.

[1:40] We have the perpetual choice between conversation and violence,

[1:46]

The Mini Metaverses Concept

[1:44] between persuasion and coercion. And so, you know, he starts off with that, he leads on to making this point about how i think the the early point is essentially that technology and the way that we use it has changed a lot about the way society interacts and and i'm embellishing slightly here but i'm connecting it to other ideas that i've had right so society has grown a tremendous amount in a relatively short space of time you can think about the way in which you can almost carbon date some types of media by how many people they think there are in the world so there are often books where they might say oh there was six six billion people in the world you automatically know this book is from the early 2000s right because because things have changed since then right so if they think there's six billion people in the world i know what period of time that book comes from if they think there's seven billion people in the world this is like early 2000s period if there they think there are you know eight billion people in the world i know that we're getting towards the 2010s or whatever so you can think about things in that way but the point being that the advent of social media has created, and I wrote an essay about this, which is about mini metaverses, this idea that, and Sam Harris makes this point, we don't really know what other people are seeing.

[2:59] And my idea of the mini metaverse thing is that, you know, there was a period of time where everyone was thinking about, oh, what the metaverse is going to be like, and there's going to be one metaverse, and we're all going to be there. And I was like, actually, I mean, we already exist in millions of mini metaverses, where, you know, We already have individuated experiences of the world.

[3:18] All the algorithms that surround you, social media, even your search history, what you get on your browser when you're looking for information, all of these things are little algorithms that are tailored to the way that you interact with them. And so the way that you search influences the way that you're going to search later on. The things that you watch influences the things that you will watch later on. More and more you get pulled in a particular direction based on your past behavior so even if you change and evolve as a person it is hard to reconstruct all the algorithms that your life centers around right your instagram algorithm your youtube algorithm your tiktok algorithm your twitter algorithm all these algorithms that you interface with on a day-to-day life even your search algorithm um they become tailored to your particular preferences at one point in time they don't always very easily change with you or afford you the opportunity to change by showing you a wider variety of other examples. And what happens, and this was my mini metaverse idea, and I'm going into this, but I'll come out of it in a second. But the idea was this point that within that mini metaverse, your baselines shift.

[4:30] Your idea of what normal is shifts because everyone else that you see and interact with are other people that also interface with that same mini metaverse so if you are in the manosphere or you are like a red pill person or whatever that is or you are a woman and a lot of the content that you see is also of people that might get let's say like permanent cosmetic procedures that becomes normal to you it becomes normal to you because everywhere you look you will see other people that have had that thing who have accepted that as normal and you don't get to see all the other possible multiverses of people where that is completely foreign.

[5:07] And so the more time you spend in a particular space online, the more that influences your sense of normal. So how I would tie this into what Sam Harris is talking about is this idea that similarly, we have a political bifurcation where people enabled by the technology that we use have kind of tunneled in or borrowed in and not always intentionally. It's simply the way that we interface with technology that can shift us in certain directions where mainstream media, celebrities, all of the Democrats had a very certain idea that this is going to be a slam dunk election. This person at Donald Trump's rally made this joke. That's it. It's over. Of course, Kamala Harris is going to win. You know, it's very easy to get stuck in a mini metaverse where everything you believe makes sense. Everything...

[5:52] All the people around you say also makes sense. And you construct a certain belief of the world on that basis, which ends up being drastically different from the actual reality because you don't really get to see all those other people.

[6:08]

Conversation as a Bulwark

[6:05] So anyway, uh, that's kind of where he starts. Then he comes down into this idea, like I said, of this bifurcation, open society, closed society, um, persuasion, coercion, conversation, violence. There's a point that he makes that Conversation is the only bulwark against violence, because if you don't have conversation, if you don't have, and there was a, in the subtext of what he was saying, there's this idea that the connective tissue of conversation, the thing that enables conversation is a shared understanding. If you don't have a way to share understanding, then you can't have good conversations. And if you can't have good conversations, then naturally society will trend towards closed societies, towards violence, towards conflict, towards war, because you don't have any shared basis on which you're able to communicate. And that connects to the first point, because the point is the more that we end up in these mini metaverses, the more we end up in these individuated experiences of our online digital.

[7:11]

The Role of Meditation

[7:07] Lives, the less we understand other people and the more conflicts that we get as a natural result. So those two things piece together quite well. then there's a third piece where he's then talking about meditation and my notes here again are paraphrased because i'm not always writing word for word what he's saying i'm writing what he says makes me think so what i was writing was this idea that meditation mediates our experience of the world and the way that we think mediates our experience of the world and so actually you know if you were to think of this as a filter funnel you might have at the very primary layer there's this idea, and I think I've written about it somewhere, but I don't remember the name of the essay, but there's this idea that, actually, I mean, you could go to neuroscience for this. Your experience of the world, the things that you see, all of your senses are not the world itself, right? Life is a mediated experience, right? Your brain is locked in a dark box. It has no idea what's going on in the outside world. It's getting everything it understands based on data, your sensory data. So the sensation from your hands, from your eyes, from your nose, from your mouth, everything, all of these things work together to give your brain some kind of simulation of what is happening in the outside world. But that simulation can be distorted in a variety of ways.

[8:35] At the very primary level, you know, for example, this is how waterboarding works, right? You don't have wet sensors. You can't, you can't, sense wetness. What you sense is pressure and temperature, and your brain combines those things to create the sensation and imagine what wetness feels like. So when you feel water and it feels wet, what you're feeling is the pressure, the pressure along the different points in your skin and the temperature of the water. And that's how you can simulate an experience and get someone to believe something is happening to them, like being waterboarded, feeling like you're drowning when it's not actually happening, because your brain actually doesn't really have an idea. It's just figuring things out based on this data. So that's one point. If you take a step before that, you actually also realize, and I'm slightly drifting here, but we'll get back to the point, you'll also realize that your brain does not wait until the sensory data arrives before taking action. It predicts what sensory data is going to come and uses the incoming data to update its predictions and that's then when you act so let's say you're walking uh in a path and a rock.

[9:50] Dislodges and falls on you and you jump out of the way what did not happen or what most people would assume happens is oh you were walking and you saw the rock falling and you had super fast instincts to jump out of the way if that was the case you'd be dead everyone would be dead life the brain doesn't work like that the brain is pattern matching everything that you've ever learned since your birth as you are walking it is already predicting the likelihood that a rock might be dislodged and fall on you and so in predicting that it is uh preparing the neurons in advance to fire in the event that it gets sensory data that confirms that prediction So you start walking, then you get the very first sensations of sensory data, that something might be happening there. Your brain has already predicted it. It's already prepared the neurons to fire. As soon as that sensory data arrives, that confirms that prediction, your neurons are already primed. Boom, you can react very quickly and you survive.

[10:55] And all of this is geared towards survival. So why do I mention all of this? The point is that our sensation of the world mediates our perception of the world, but then in your perception of the world itself, that also mediates your experience of the world. There's this idea, and Sam Paris has talked about this before. I think I've written about this a little bit before. There's this idea that your experience of the world doesn't have to be, or, you know, the, the way that you, the things that happen don't have to correlate with your experience of them happening. I think there's a very common example of this where people say something like, you know, events are neutral and things happen in the world. And that doesn't mean that, oh, for you, it might be good for someone else. It might be bad. I think I've actually talked about this in an essay that I wrote about luck and this idea that luck is kind of a fractal in a way where, um, and I think I talked about like, oh, chess is luck. Everything is luck. And, and what defines whether something's lucky or not is really your proximity to the event. And when you have a very far proximity to, to the event, you're more likely to say something is lucky because you don't kind of count all the, the intermediary events that happen between you and the event. So if you're walking down the street and you find some money on the floor, you say, wow, I was lucky. Obviously, someone else was unlucky, but that seems like luck. It doesn't seem like skill. But let's say you're in a sporting event or you're in a chess game.

[12:25] You have much more closer proximity to someone making a mistake that you can capitalize on. Technically, still luck, that the same mechanisms are involved. Someone else takes an action that's fortuitous for you and negative for them, and you can capitalize on it. That seems more like skill because you have more proximity to it and you can act on it more directly, even though it's luck in the same sense. It's all just fractal, you know, depending on your closeness to it. Anyway, all of that to say, it's just this idea that, okay, if you meditate, if you see something that makes you angry, you don't just have to react in anger, right? That might be the natural reaction or response, but you can mediate that. You can put something, which is your own thought and the qualia of you moving through the world, you can use that to mediate the external activities in the world and your internal experience of what those things mean and how those things should affect you. And so there's this idea that anger can have a half-life. You don't have to live out the full experience of anger. something could happen that would normally trigger the experience of anger in you. And you can mediate it very quickly and decide, actually, I don't want to live that experience. This thing has happened, but it's already happened. It's done. I don't want to keep responding to this external stimuli in the same way. So anyway, that's a point.

[13:56]

Knowledge vs. Dogma

[13:51] Then another point, and I kind of went off on a tangent here, but it connects. So he mentions this idea, yes, that all progress, All human progress and future states kind of come from knowledge. And he kind of presented, and I'm paraphrasing, but this dichotomy between dogma and knowledge. What that connected to in my mind is I recently watched, I think it was an interview with Barry Weiss and Peter Thiel very recently. I think it also came out this week. And in that Peter Thiel mentioned this idea that science really comes from this balance between skepticism and dogma. And historically, there are a lot of things that might have been driven by dogma, and there are a lot of things that are driven by skepticism. And science is kind of a barrier in the middle where we find some kind of golden meme between the two. You don't want to be too dogmatic, you don't want to be too skeptical and veer off into conspiracy. But then it just made me think, I mean, is dogma useful? And actually, of course, we've had so much progress scientifically from science, right? From this period of time that might be in some people's minds unique to the West.

[15:08] But I think even now, there's an interesting balance where we see, is democracy working? Particularly liberal democracy. Francis Fukuyama had the end of history. That's clearly not worked. It didn't turn out that way. And I think Peter Thiel also talks about this idea that when democracy goes right, we say it's democracy. When it goes wrong, we say it's populism. If I don't like it, it's populism. If it goes right, then it's democracy. And it's this idea that, and Garrett Jones also talks about this. He has a great book about the elites and the masses and this idea that, do the masses really know what they're doing? And the extent to which sometimes we actually want elites to make decisions on our behalf, so we don't have to think through things for ourselves. And we can clearly see plenty of occasions where people are trying to think through things from themselves, make the wrong decision, They come to the wrong conclusion. We get bad presidents, we get bad democracies.

[16:07] And so it's this idea that just following the wisdom of the crowds doesn't lead you to the right place. Um, so this is now where I'm slightly debatting from, you know, my original, like what Sam Harris is saying, I'm thinking for myself here and I'm like, huh, you know, I want to explore this a bit more. Where.

[16:27] There's a balance here between autocracy and democracy. And funnily enough, there are some circumstances where autocracy ends up getting things right, that democracy gets wrong. And by giving everyone an equal say, you can go down the wrong path. But by putting a small number of people in the right place, you can end up going further to the right path. And actually, when I was thinking about the Peter Thiel thing, I didn't make detailed notes on that. But even at the time, I was just thinking about this idea that, I mean, is it really true? When you think about the emergence of science in a much more coherent way, a much more structured way in society, there was a sense in which it's almost like, what's the difference between that and.

[17:12] Muhammad or, you know, the preacher comes down from the mountaintop with a fresh revelation that he gives to the rest of the people, right? The people, the common man is not doing the science. The scientists are doing the science and they come every few years to give us their revelations how many people in in the regular world know if or why pluto is a planet we don't know people don't have any idea they don't even know why they just accept that okay the new science has come the new revelations have come from the sky they've been given to us and this is now our belief system it's not any less dogmatic just because we call it science the experience again this is a level of proximity here your proximity to science and what it is and how it works determines the

[18:04]

Science as Dogma

[17:56] extent to which this is something worth being skeptical about, or if this is dogma. For the vast majority of people, science is dogma.

[18:07] And it's dogma because it's something that you're taught. It's something that you accept. You are told, here are some facts. Here are some studies. You don't read the studies. They just tell you, studies have been done. This is the result. You don't even read the study. You don't read the paper, you read a newspaper headline. The newspaper headline ends up being wrong. And suddenly you're all off in this completely different universe where you believe facts that are no longer true. This happens all the time with books where a book comes out in the nineties or in the eighties, it becomes incredibly popular. There's some things in thinking fast and slow, which is widely praised that we now know are wrong. Some of the science, right? In loads of other books, there's science that we realize, oh, that was good science at the time is bad science now because we know better. And so actually, if you've run off with those ideas, you're now wrong. You may not have been wrong in 1988, but you're wrong now because we know it better. And so, yeah, like how do you mesh all these ideas?

[19:08]

Balancing Skepticism and Trust

[19:04] The extent to which your belief system should be individuated versus collective. The extent to which finding a balance where people can get along and have mutual understanding comes from, each person having their own balance of being skeptical versus dogmatic, and the extent to which actually what you need are elites that you can trust, that mediate your experience of reality, right?

[19:30] I haven't fully thought all of this through, but it's an interesting idea to start with and to start thinking deeper about, the areas in which this is true versus not true, the area in which we already accept this, uh even if we think that we don't even if it doesn't seem appealing to believe that this is true um and the extent to which this already exists i'm just trying to think if i have anything else here but i think that that's essentially it so yeah i mean those are my notes and kind of you can see where my thought processes have led me and it's something i'm still thinking about but it was like a short 10 minute video i combined that with some thoughts from a two-hour podcast that I listened to yesterday. I combined that with an essay that I wrote last year or two years ago. And so now I have this completely different idea, this completely different train of thought, which is original to me, uh, in the sense that it's not a hundred percent original. It's coming from these various sources, but each one of them is a reflection of the way that I have interacted with that source to kind of come to a new conclusion. And the more I think about these things, the more I ruminate on them, the more maybe I can write something that people find useful. And yeah, so hopefully that's useful. Forgive me for rambling, but yeah.

Mini-metaverse theory, Democracy, and why Science is dogma