Vitalik Buterin on Farcaster

Vitalik Buterin pfp

Vitalik Buterin

I am noticing that the most successful new ideologies of the past decade are very object-level (prescriptions on specific issues) and quite little meta-level (social processes for making decisions on object-level issues). Examples: * Abstract libertarianism feels much weaker than 10 years ago. But issue-specific versions of it are quite successful: YIMBY (housing), the crypto space * e/acc (it's about all technology in theory, but ends up being about AI in practice) * The largest cluster in effective altruism morphed from being meta-level ("think harder to making sure your donations are going where they can do the most good!") to object level (AI safety, with a little bit of animal welfare and global public health) * Longevity movement Maybe network states and Glen and Audrey's Plurality movement are two exceptions - but in general the above feels like a strong pattern. Any ideas why this meta level -> object level shift seems to be taking place?

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Jason Crawford pfp

@jasoncrawford.eth

Is it a shift, or has this always been the case?

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Aaron Blaisdell / ittybit 533 pfp

Aaron Blaisdell / ittybit 533

@aaronblaisdell

My best guess is that the greater ease of global access to networks via the internet, especially web2, led to greater tribalism and echo chamber behavior. The result being a narrowing of opinions to fewer but major issues.

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Darryl Yeo 🛠️ pfp

Darryl Yeo 🛠️

Where does d/acc fall on the scale of object-level to meta-level? https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html#dacc

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Daniel Fernandes pfp

Daniel Fernandes

Maybe Andrew Yang's Forward Party, and/or Braver Angels, and/or Lessig's Equal Citizen's (Another Way podcast). All these are political though. Maybe one non-political one would be Science-Based Medicine (the website & the movement).

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yangwao ↑ pfp

e/acc has sparked leaderless mutations */acc which can be per se clearly meta.. And later depends on mutations and alignment expires if results are not delivered in *

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Brenner pfp

Object-level you can put into practice (vs just theory) better than you can put a meta-level ideology into practice What meta-level ideologies of the recent past were put into practice successfully?

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Touching grass, “based” turn etc are cultural precursors of this ideological tendency One counter example is metamodernism. Very not-object-level. The object level bias also has a slight illiberal/reactionary bias. The spectrum has shifted right. Not surprising because liberal and progressive ideologies are necessarily more abstract by virtue of being forward looking. If your ideological anxieties make you grasp at the tangible, you’ll necessarily anchor on existing things and therefore the past/tradition/conservatism. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias” as Colbert joked, but tangibility has a conservative/reactionary bias.

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Mac Budkowski pfp

I think people - in general - like to have specific issues and goals. It's easier to explain YIMBY than libertarianism. It's easier to track the speed of AI development than the whole tech. It's easier to convince people that longevity research is important than convince them we should focus more on biotech.

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John Camkiran pfp

Follows readily from the accelerating deintellectualisation of the upper class

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lucky pfp

weakening attention spans

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Nounish Prof ⌐◧-◧🎩 pfp

Nounish Prof ⌐◧-◧🎩

For some, it might be that the loudest voices in those movements influence the direction. For example, some of the loudest libertarians may scare me away from the overall ideology but when I dial it down to specific issues, I see alignment.

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Iggy pfp

People are disconnected and want to feel part of some sort of tribe. Coalescing around a highly specific thing (object level) gives you that

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Timber ☀️ pfp

This is like “one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic” Object-level is an experiment, meta-level is analysis paralysis

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maks pfp

We're too polarized to coalesce around meta-level concepts, and they are often defined by their most ardent and extreme figures and ideas. And we don't want to be associated with those extreme figures and ideas.

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Biji pfp

Language is a reef of dead metaphors (Guy Deutscher).

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Frank pfp

Adjacent observation: STEM was intended to move labor into new economy jobs; which didn’t have the longitudinal view of a humanities driven economy

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Matt Huang pfp

One theory is that memes + social media as a dominant transmission mechanism for new ideologies can carry much fewer bits of information, so that selects for object-level, easy to transmit ideas

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Greg Lang pfp

Personally, I suspect that ideological abstractness is becoming more and more drowned out in the marketplace of ideas This is (probably mostly) not by design, but as a cobra effect of training and deploying neural networks to promote what continually gets and mostly keeps most people’s attention

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Sophia Indrajaal pfp

Sophia Indrajaal

@sophia-indrajaal

Perhaps we don't need new ideologies, but to look to implementing some of the best that have been handed down to us. For instance, Buckminster Fuller's "Advantage All and Disadvantage None" is a heckuva meta solution.

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