Social Evolution

Imagine picking up your smartphone one morning to find only two apps: one red one blue. Your smartphone’s operating system now only runs these two apps. You’d probably think it sucks. 

In the USA, we run on DOS (the democratic operating system) with only two apps. Many fetishize voting and elections, but these have become circuses to go with all the bread. We labor under the illusion that we are “free,” but we have outsourced our primary responsibilities to a corrupt cartel in Washington. 

In this episode, Porch and Max discuss the evolution of the Republic, the problems of political power, and the woeful shortcomings of democracy. The fundamental question: can we do better than monopolies on violence?

Two-Party System

Constitutional Government

Separation of Powers - Check & Balances

Founding Father of the United States

Democratic republic

Scapegoating & René Girard

Tristan Harris

Daniel Schmactenberger

The Social Dilemma

The Social Singularity by Max Borders

First past the post voting

American civil religion

Campaign finance reform in the United States

Tammany Hall

Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig

United States presidential primary

Lobbying and special interests

Parliamentary system

Westphalian sovereignty

City-states

Settled agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution

James C. Scott

Theories on the origins of the state

James Madison

Thomas Hobbes: Moral and Political Philosophy

Philosopher King

Majoritarian democracy and majority rule

Liberal democracy

John Rawls and reasonable pluralism

Freedom of religion

Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution

Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution

George Mason and Anti-Federalism

Consent of the governed

Social contract theory

Ward republic

Territorial expansion of the US

Jane Jacobs and the Monstrous Hybrid

Bootleggers and Baptists

G.K. Chesterton and Chesterton’s Fence

Traditionalist conservatism

Progressivism

Political spectrum models - Nolan chart

The consistency of libertarianism

Glenn Greenwald

Joe Rogan

Mohair

Rational ignorance & rational irrationality

Path dependency

Political polarization and radicalization

Tribalism and groupthink

States rights

Horeshoe theory

Emergency powers

9/11 attacks

Mass surveillance

2021 US Capitol Attack

Domestic terrorism

Cognitive bias

Approval voting

Ranked-choice voting

Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts

On-chain Governance

Holacracy

Liquid democracy

Quadratic voting

Glen Weyl

Vatalik Buterin

Janeček method

Collective action problem

Decentralized autonomous organization

Alex Tabarrok’s Dominant Assurance Contract

Vote trading

Sociality

Mutual organization

Non-zero sum games

Organizational mission

Corporatist economics and Fascism

Minarchism

Code forking

Open-source software and Linux

Network effect

Antifragility from Taleb

Federalism and Subsidiarity

Availability cascade

Localism

Polyarchy, polycentricity, and panarchy

Circle of concern and circle of influence

Are we living through a moral panic about Social Media? Many folks are concerned about misinformation while for others censorship is the main concern. Social media companies seem stuck in a dilemma where they’re damned whatever they do. Does the magnitude of the problems measure up to the handwringing on either side? Is our ability to make sense of things lost in this hall of mirrors? 

Some argue that algorithms create asymmetries between enfeebled humans and awesome AIs. Others say these concerns are overblown and that partisans are scapegoating social media companies for the failures of legacy governance. 

Join us for what turned out to be, in moments, a heated exchange. You will not be bored. Strap in and hang on. (And of course: like, share, and hit subscribe.)

The Facebook Files - Wall Street Journal

The Social Dilemma

Limbic Hijacking

Operant conditioning chamber aka “skinner box”

Filter Bubble

Propaganda by Edward Bernays 

“We shape our tools and our tools shape us”

Marshall Macluhan

Critical Theory

A Propoganda Model by Noam Chomsky

B.F.  Skinner

Blank Slate

Evolutionary Psychology

IQ and susceptibility to misinformation

Propaganda

A/B split testing 

Click-through rate

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Conversion rate optimization (SRO)

Online Advertising networks and Ad exchanges

Unexplainability and Incomprehensibility of AI

GPT-3

RSS Newsreader

Moral panic

Steel Man Argument

Viral phenomenon

Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life also by Nir Eyal

Nudge theory

Clickbait

NPR Bias

Instagram in the News: Mental Health Risks for Teen Girls

Conspiracy theory

Internet meme

Political polarization

Understanding the Blue Church by Jordan Hall

A brief explanation of the cathedral by Curtis Yarvin

The Prussion Welfare State

High modernism

Technocracy

FDR’s Fireside Chats

Psychographic segmentation

Facebook needs, wants, must have regulation, Zuckerberg says

Regulatory capture

Deregulation of the Radio Broadcast Industry

Big 3 TV Networks

Walter Cronkite

Citizen journalism

Cyperphunk manifesto

Socrates on writing

Print and the persecution of witches

Spiral Dynamics

Plato’s Authoritarianism

Public choice theory

Platonism

Relativism

Rawls’ Reasonable Pluralism

Daniel Schmactenberger

Occam’s Razor

Lab-leak vs zoonotic origins of SARS-Cov-2

Crony Capitalism

Chinese Communist Party - The Great Firewall

Elizabeth Warren Call on Facebook to Stop the Deliberate Spread of Disinformation

Frances Haugen

The Hypocrisy of The Social Dilemma

Tristan Harris

Cambridge Analytica Controversy

Sensemaking in the Era of Authoritarian Media by Max Borders

Hot to make your iphone black & white

Less Wrong

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

Sequences by Eliezar Yudkowsky

Critical thinking

The dubious rise of ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment, explained by Kelsey Piper

Bayesian inference

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

CGP Grey

Kurzgezagt

Prediction Market

Distributed ledger & blockchain

Falsifiability

Open Science

From Skynet to Singularitarian fantasy, AI is back in vogue with much hype and hand-wringing. Mainstream media don’t really know how to talk about it in a way that brings as much light as heat. In fact, even AI researchers have difficulty unpacking concepts like, well, intelligence. Philosophers stand by with critical eyes.

Michael and Max talk about the stickier issues as they try to find footing in a fog of mystery and misinformation. What is cognition? What are morals? Are we recreating conscious minds or just spinning out more sophisticated algorithms? Such questions linger as the industry speeds along, whether or not we have ready answers. Conversations like this help us burn the proverbial candle at both ends.

Artificial Intelligence

Intelligence

Boston Dynamics dog Spot

A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence by Marcus Hutter and Shane Legg

Metalhead episode of Black Mirror with killer robot dogs

Instrumental Rationality

Intelligence Quotient and g factor the psychometric of general human intelligence

Multiple Intelligences and developmental psychologist, Howard Gardner

Technological Singularity

The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

Exponential growth

Symposium: 'Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity?' on April 1st, 2000

Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us by Bill Joy

GPT-3 an AI text generator

Moore’s law

Moore’s Law is not dead and AI is ready to explode

IJ “Jack” Good and the Intelligence Explosion FAQ

AlphaGo project from DeepMind at Google

Lee Sedol

AlphaZero project from Deepmind 

Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster - from scratch

I, Pencil by Leonard Read

2001 A Space Odyssey

Terminator

Dystopia

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” — Stewart Brand

Stuart J. Russell

The myth of King Midas and the curse of his Golden Touch

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Paperclip Maximizer

Superintelligence

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

Descartes Errror and The Feeling of What Happens and the somatic marker hypothesis from Antonio Damasio

The Elephant and the Rider from Jonathan Haidt

Dual process theory — System 1 & System 2

The prefrontal cortex

Reinforcement learning

Skinner box

Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Neocortex

Cortical column

How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil

On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines by Jeff Hawkins

Predictive model of the brain

B. F. Skinner and behaviorism

Noam Chomsky and the cognitive revolution

Neural networks

Machine learning

Writing Successful Reward Functions

Search engine

Image classifier

Homeostasis

Instrumental Convergence, the orthogonality thesis, and the superintelligent will

Externalities

The Chinese Room Argument from John Searle

Oracle AI

Deep Learning

Artificial general intelligence

AI safety conference in Puerto Rico

Tristan Harris

Iason Gabriel on Foundational Philosophical Questions in AI Alignment with Future of Life Institute

Morality, ethics, and meta-ethics

Moral anti-realism

Justice as Fairness by John Rawls

AI Alignment Problem, aka, the Control Problem

Ethics of technology

“We shape our tools and our thereafter our tools shape us”

Daniel Schmactenberger

Laws of Robotics

Friendly AI

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart J. Russell

Asliomar AI Principles

Complexity

Darwin Machine

Universal Darwinism

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Moral Constructivism

Blockchain

Decentralization

Code is Law by Lawrence Lessig

Nudge theory from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Spiral Dynamics

John Nash and game theor

David Gauthier and social contract theory of morality

Ahimsa

The Golden Rule

John Stuart Mill

No-harm principle

Categorical imperative from Immanuel Kant

Negative Utilitarianism

Communicative rationality from Jürgen Habermas

Hippocratic oath

Mutually assured destruction

Warrior monk

Non-attach

Higher states of consciousness, whether through psychedelics or meditative practice, straddle the cognitive and the sacred. As we enter a “psychedelic renaissance,” we must do so not in a bacchanalian frenzy, but with respect and discernment. Michael and Max explore their personal experiences as well as the value of higher states in both personal transformation and contemporary life. Removing taboos around psychedelic substances, which are still illegal in most jurisdictions, starts with frank discussions around risks, benefits, and the need for wisdom.

Psychedelics

Entheogen

Ego death

Set and Setting

Psychological Shadow

Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

Vedanta

Ahimsa

The Immortality Key by Brian C. Muraresku

Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

The Psychedelic Renaissance

Appolonian and Dionysian

Eleusinian Mysteries

Phenomenology

The Omega Point and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Terrence McKenna Omega Point

Where do ideas come from? with Alan Moore

Imagination and Hypothesis generation

Adult Development

Second Tier

Mystical Experiences

Nondualism

Model of hierarchical complexity

Is stage theory BS? - Nora Bateson

Consciousness is a central feature of our humanity, yet consciousness is a mystery. Conscious experience comprises every aspect of our waking lives, yet we have a hard time explaining its nature. We know that our brains and bodies are made up of energy and matter. We also know that if we get a big bonk on the head, we can disturb the energy and matter in such a way as to LOSE consciousness. So what is the nature of the relationship between mental properties (such as itchy feeling) and physical properties (such as firing neurons)? For millennia, humans have been trying to bridge this ‘explanatory gap.’ And as we enter the age of AI, questions about the nature of consciousness will become more relevant as we create artificial beings who will think and feel like us. 

Artificial Intelligence

Sentience

Bishop Berkeley (Idealism)

The Technological Singularity

Phenomenal Consciousness

Qualia

Animal Consciousness

Reductionism

Physicalism

Subjective/Objective Distinction

Epistemology

Mental Properties

Grits

Causal completeness/closure

The Explanatory Gap

“What it is Like to be a Bat?"” 

Cartesian Theater

Nanotechnology

Penrose Microtubules

Cartesian Dualism 

Eliminativism 

Paul and Patricia Churchland

Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet

Conscious by Annaka Harris

The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers

Folk Psychology

Causal Overdetermination

Emergentism

Panpsychism

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

What is it like to be a Thermostat?

Multiple Drafts Theory

Recursion

Fractals

fMRIs

Complexity and Consciousness

Substrate Independence

Emulation

Ems (Emulation) - The Age of Em by Robin Hanson

Agnosticism

Conscious Universe

Panpsychism Redux (Porcelli’s Page!)

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Wilber’s Quantum Questions

Dancing Wu Li Masters

Interdependent Co-arising (Pratītyasamutpāda)

Indra’s Net

Vedanta

Mythopoetic Thought

Phenomenology

Meditation

Edmund Husserl

Naturalism

Psychonautics

Physicalism

Paradigm Shift and Thomas Kuhn

Ineffability

Epistemic Status of Unobservable Entities

The greatest innovation since the printing press is here. The trouble is, it’s a threat to the old Westphalian order: digital ledger technologies (DLTs), like bitcoin: aka “crypto.” The supplicants of the old order have a lot at stake in the status quo, so a war is coming. Michael and Max spend this episode talking about the idea of crypto as money, going back through a little bit of history, then rocketing back to the future to discuss the implications for humanity. To what extent can we disintermediate using crypto? To what extent will humanity be able to create cloud governance that challenges the old order? Nobody knows, but it’s important to speculate. Indeed, we must set out a vision of possibilities for crypto, because there is so much promise in this evolving ecosystem. 

Cryptocurrency

Distributed Ledger Technology

Bitcoin

Ethereum

Blockchain

Distributed Application (DApp)

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig

The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto (1988)by Timothy May

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993) by Eric Hughes

David Chaum

Nick Szabo

Wei Dai

Hal Finney

Cypherpunk

Freedom of Association

Common Law

Code of Justinian

DigiCash, ECash, BitGold 

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto

Fiat Money

Reserve Currency

Central Bank

Neolithic Revolution

Moneychangers

James C. Scott

Temple / Palace Economy

Usury 

Medieval Antisemitism 

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Middleman or Intermediary

Interest

Investment Banking

Financial Crisis of 2007-2008

Occupy Wall Street

Money

Subjective Theory of Value

Price Mechanism

Goldbuggery

Bitcoin Maximalism

Cryptography

Miracle of Wörgl

Velocity of Money

John Maynard Keynes

Time Banking, Local Exchange Trading System, Mutual Credit

Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein

Bancor

Ludwig von Mises

Friederich Hayek

Bretton Woods Conference and System

Peter Zeihan

Virtual currencies

Deficit spending

Standing army

Inflation

Inflation hedge

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Cooperative

Network effect

Metcalfe’s Law

Hyperinflation

FOMO

VisiCalc

Technology adoption lifecycle

Institutional investor

Coinbase

Regulatory capture

Cartelization

Securities and Exchange Commission

How we Become the Social Safety Net by Max Borders

Mutual societies

Welfare state

Trustless system

Art Brock and Holochain 

Open access network

Consensus mechanism

Tezos

On-chain governance

Butterfly effect

Real estate

Rivalry in Economics

Plutocracy

Oligopoly

Hobbesian trap

Bureaucracy

Democracy

Feedback loop

Crypto anarchism

The Vanguard Group

Credit Union

Polyarchy

Panarchy

Polycentric law

Billions of people worldwide are trying to track the truth. And yet we are living in a hall of mirrors. Whether it’s admonitions to “trust the experts” or headlines that read “Science says…” it’s too easy to forget that human beings have epistemic limits. We are all trapped in our subjective selves. We come with biases. And in our search for truth we sometimes have to appeal to authorities who are just as human as we are. In this brave new world of narrative warfare, we must reckon with the fact that tracking the truth (nevermind arriving at collective intelligence) is a tough, dirty business. In this episode, we seek the wisdom to know our limitations and the courage to track the truth despite them.

We are evolved beings. In fact, we’re more or less the same species we were 100,000 years ago. Yet, as individuals, we continue to develop until we die—as individuals and as cultural groups. Theories of adult development such as those proposed by Abraham Maslow, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Clare Graves are making a comeback. In this episode of Social Evolution, Michael and Max talk about the delicate interplay of nature and nurture. Then they discuss Spiral Dynamics, a popular “theory of everything,” which weaves together a number of threads in “bio-psycho-social” development. 

Biological Evolution

Darwinism

Fitness landscape

Limits to cognition

Long tail of excellence 

Evolved Cuteness: Dan Dennett

Neuroplasticity

Outliers

Egalitarianism

10,000 hours

Adult Developmental Psychology

Nabokov’s Lolita

Language Acquisition and Age

Spiral Dynamics

Claire Graves

Beck and Cowen

Dunbar’s Number

Animism

Magical Thinking

“They worshipped strength, because it is strength that makes all other values possible.”

Daimyo

Hobbes’s Leviathan

James C. Scott: The state as protection racket

Against the Grain

Duty

Hierarchy

Great Chain of Being

Magna Carta

Galileo

Baconian Methodology

From Mercantilism to Markets

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Counter Enlightenment & Romanticism

“Everybody get together try to love one another right now”

Hippies

The Sixties

Consensus

Cultural relativism

Postmodernism

Critical theory

Ken Wilber

Jürgen Habermas

Charles Dickens

Das Kapital - Karl Marx

Trust Busting & Progressive Era

Childhood labor laws

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States

Frankfurt School - Max Horkheimer, Max Weber

Speak truth to power

Culture war

Noble Savage

Traditionalism

Islamism

Sharia

Catholic Integrism

Ted Kaczynski

Tree Structure

Evolution before Darwin

Tree of Life

Stephen Jay Gould

Lawrence Kohlberg 

Robert Kegan

Cognitive complexity

Either/or fallacy and All-or-nothing thinking

Cognitive bias

Complex Systems

Multifactorial causation of behavior

Bayesian epistemology

Black swan theory and Nassim Taleb

Unknown Unknowns

Integral Theory

Emergence

Epistemic humility

Second Tier Thinking

Holonic

Apotheosize

Cultural Evolution & Sociocultural Evolution

Comparative religion

Animal domestication & selective breeding & coevolution

Bird and crocodile & cleaning symbiosis 

Self-domestication

Transhumanism, genetic engineering, & CRISPR

James Mark Baldwin

Baldwin effect

Cognitive Stratification

The Flynn Effect

Daniel Kish, “bat boy” & human echolocation

Biofeedback

Accelerated learning

Elysium

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Metamodernism

Gautama Buddha

Thomas Aquinas

Gottfried Leibniz

Emily Dickenson

Enneagram of Personality

Since humans roamed in paleolithic clan groups, humans have arranged themselves in different ways in order to coordinate. New forms of organization continue to emerge to this day. Max Borders and Michael Porcelli have a deeper look at these organizational forms, where they come from, and where they could be going. The hosts peer through the lenses of institutional rules, culture, as well as the technologies that enable different forms. The upshot? Insights about these rapidly evolving forms could be the most important lessons humanity has to learn so as to reckon with the onrush of complexity.

Notes:

Organization

Eight metaphors of organization

Hunter-gatherers

Prosocial behavior and Eusociality

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas Christakis

Paleolithic - the era of hunter-gatherer society

Neolithic Revolution - the transition to settled agrarian society

Hierarchical organization

Institution

Constitutional Documents - the legalistic definition of an organization

Corporate governance 

Capitalization Table

Business Entity Types and 501(c)(3) Organization

Exogenous and Endogenous

Dutch East India Company and British East India Company

Juridical Person and Corporate Personhood

Carrot and stick

Protection racket

Profit motive

Biological Thermodynamics

Entropy

Social Organization: The Thermodynamic Basis by Adrian Bejan, et al.

How physics explains the evolution of social organization

Blood vessels and the Aorta

Tree structure

Dunbar number

Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com

The Nature of the Firm by Ronald Coase and Transaction Costs,  

Holacracy

Property rights

Org chart

Workplace politics

Buck passing

Political decay

Executive function

Decision fatigue

Biological bases of conformity

Biological cases of hierarchy

Employment

Organizational structure

Visionary entrepreneurship

Intrapreneurship

Corporate values

Processing tensions in holacracy

Corporate culture

The HP Way

Emergent culture

Ouja board

Peter Drucker

Globalization

Cultural relativism / pluralism 

Metarelating practice

Clearing the air

Weaving shared reality

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

“Dismantling” racism at work

“Dismantling” patriarchy at work

Technical debt and organizational debt

Cosmopolitanism

Information Technology, Telecommunication, Databases

Cryptocurrency and distributed ledger

Smart contract

Disintermediation

Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO)

Forking the code

Bitcoin and Ethereum

BTC, BCH, BSV

Reduced transaction costs

Economies of scale

Client server model

Amazon Web Services

Decentralized web

Cosmos and Taxis by Friedrich Hayek

After Collapse: The End of America and the Rebirth of Her Ideals

Economic planning

Emergent order

Taylorism and Fordism

Teal organization

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness by Frédéric Laloux

Our imaginations are fonts of apocalyptic thinking--from the ancients seers to contemporary doomsday preppers, end-times cultists, and think tanks dedicated to studying existential risk. It seems there’s an end-times prophecy to suit any proclivity. Worries about human-caused cataclysms are gaining steam, including climate change, CRISPR, and superintelligent AI gone bad. Does the proliferation of dangerous exponential technologies require interventions such as “turnkey totalitarianism”? Or does trust in such great power bring catastrophic risks of its own? Join Max Borders and Michael Porcelli as they dive into these questions and even get a bit personal about why they each care about such matters.

After Collapse by Max Borders

Eschatology

Commitment device

Delayed Gratification

Survivalism

Collapsitarians

The Technological Singularity

Posthumanism

Transhumanism

Matrioshka Brain

Thomas Malthus

Malthusian Catastrophe

The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich

The Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Stewart Brand

Kevin Kelly

The Long Now Foundation

Julian Simon

The Simon-Ehrlich Wager

Climate Change

Bright Green vs. Dark Green Environmentalism

Jim Bendall

Dematerialization and Ephemeralization

More From Less by Andrew McAfee

Global Catastrophic Risk

Nick Bostrom

Turnkey Totalitarianism

Future of Humanity Institute (see also Future of Life Institute and Centre for the Study of Existential Risk)

Vulnerable World Thesis

COVID-19

Biohacking

CRISPR

Incel

Drake Equation

Fermi Paradox

Great Filter

Existential risk from artificial general intelligence

The Precipice by Toby Ord

Jordan Hall

Prometheus

Democide

Daniel Schmachtenberger

Jim Rutt

Nonviolence and Ahimsa

Black Mirror episode San Junipero

Decentralization

Cryptocurrency

Multicellular Life

Ludwig von Mises

Holon

Mussolini and Fascism

Central Nervous System

Cancer

Holacracy

Flash Crash

Systemic Risk

Hobbesian Trap

Race to the Bottom

Red Queen Effect

Immune System

Cybersecurity

Cyberwarfare

Mutually Assured Destruction

Black Swan Theory

SolarWinds Hack

Coordination Problems

The Blue Church by Jordan Hall

Walter Cronkite

FUBAR

Anthony Fauci

Daniel Dennett

Future generations (posterity)

Transcendental Argument

Sentience

Moral Agency

Ethical Constructivism

Pascal’s Wager

Postmodern Condition

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Ted Kaczinski

Spiral Dynamics

Catastrophizing

Cognitive Distortions

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Extinction Rebellion

Effective Altruism

Will MacAskill

Flagellant

Modern Stoicism

Virtues

Polyphasic Sleep

Ken Wilber

Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

Post-Truth

OODA Loop and John Boyd