Information Transfer
Becoming autistic about all the different way information transfer in society can happen
Over the last year or two I’ve become convinced there is something underlying many issues which I care about seperately. National politics, assimilation as an immigrant into a group, industrialisation, the creation of new scientific knowledge / process knowledge, community-building for effective altruism. This underlying thread sometimes appears to me in the shape of a spectre. “It’s just memetics” I’d say in my twitter group chat when discussing political issues. “If we could just figure out memetics we could LITERALLY fix all the problems”. Unfortunately I don’t think this saying itself has yet become memetically successful, I don’t hear policymakers using it as much as invoking other 21st-century concepts of justice, equality etc. Maybe the idea of intentionally thinking about doing propaganda is unpopular in a democratic society and culture. But maybe it’s just not yet a very fleshed out idea. After this long I wanted to do a sort of “resource review” where I try to list out potential books, sites, ideas, and people in and around memetics or information transfer and related more theoretical and more applied fields, to see the whole landscape. Part of me also wants this to become somewhat of a reading list, which you can pursue at your own leisure.
Goal: have the mechanism of information transfer “work better” than is it “working” “now”. Better as defined by aggregate cultural welfare (vs efficient prices market) Now as defined by in a set area in 10 years onwards, vs whenever I have the data for.
e.g. routing social skill theory to aspies no matter where in the world they are.
(Can I put a welfare function on the structure of different information networks?) (Can I put an individual welfare function on the structure of different information networks?)
Reading list:
economics (Hayek etc.) to moral philosophy to history of economics development to immigrant assimilation from first principles
Theoretical Economists
- HAYEK: The use of Information in Society
- Old Institutional Economists
- North; Path dependence
Psychologists
- Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory - Albert Bandura
- John W. Berry – Acculturation Theory
-
The Social Construction of Reality
- Xuanalogue’s alignment work
Anthropologists (academics who study Anthropic)
- The Secret of Our Success - Joseph Henrich
- Boyd & Richerson — Culture and the Evolution of Human Cooperation
Immigration Scholars
- Portes & Rumbaut — segmented assimilation theory
Development Scholars. Greif (institutions as belief systems) Akerlof & Kranton (identity economics) Nunn (culture as persistent expectations) North, Wallis, Weingast (institutions = belief equilibria) Putnam (civic norms → institutional performance)
Resources for autistics (which may not exist.)
- This gives you a unifying theory of institutional improvement
Your framework basically says:
Institutions improve when populations learn higher-quality behavioural scripts through cleaner, broader, faster information routes.
Therefore:
Fix information frictions
Improve clarity of expectations
Standardize norms
Increase transparency
Provide feedback loops
Reduce ambiguity
Expand apprenticeship channels
Strengthen role models and demonstration effects
…and institutions get stronger.
Institutions succeed or fail depending on how well they coordinate dispersed knowledge.
Good institutions:
distribute relevant information
create stable expectations
reduce ambiguity
provide feedback loops
allow individuals to learn local norms
give clear signals for action
work even when individuals don’t fully understand the whole system
Bad institutions:
block information
distort signals
hoard knowledge
create ambiguous expectations
punish initiative
break feedback loops
Industrialization depends on institutions that route knowledge effectively.
You can view:
major choice
career sorting
social assimilation
immigrant adaptation
children learning expectations
organizational culture
bureaucratic capacity
industrial policy
as distributed knowledge systems where individuals absorb local information and act on it.
Decision quality = quality of internal model = quality of input channels.
Can we build tools to massively improve those information channels for individuals and societies? Would that improve social choice, career paths, institutional performance?
Twitter people: You have to mention Defender of Basic but I hate him. He promised so much and under-delivered.