Follow-up to: The Intelligent Social Web

Related to: Fake Frameworks

Yesterday I described a framework for viewing culture as a kind of distributed intelligence, and ourselves as nodes in this distributed network.

Today I’d like to share a way of using this framework intentionally that doesn’t require Looking. My main intent here is concreteness: I’d like to illustrate what an application of accounting for the Omega-web can look like. But I also hope this is something some of y’all can benefit from.

I’ll warn up front: this is playing with epistemic fire. I think the skill of clearly labeling when you’re entering and leaving a fake framework is especially important here for retaining epistemic integrity. If you aren’t sure how to do that, or if the prospect of needing to unnerves you too much, then it might be right for you not to try using this at least for now.

Scott Alexander created a fascinating impact through his essay Meditations on Moloch. A few excerpts:

What’s always impressed me about this poem is its conception of civilization as an individual entity. You can almost see him, with his fingers of armies and his skyscraper-window eyes.

[…]

The Universe is a dark and foreboding place, suspended between alien deities. Cthulhu, Gnon, Moloch, call them what you will.

Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names. In the Kushiel books, his name was Elua. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.

The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”

But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.

There are many gods, but this one is ours.

There was basically nothing in that essay that was conceptually new, at least in the social circles I’m in around CFAR. But this essay still had a huge cultural impact. Suddenly it became real how to literally see the demon-god so many of us are fighting, and now we know its name: Moloch. This mattered to the web. Now we can actually feel a sense in which we’re battling eldritch horrors in an epic war ...

Eldritch Analogies