Treat your ideas like machines you are working in. If someone offers an improvement, you shouldn’t get defensive, you should thank them for helping you have a better machine.
Idea labs and echo-chambers have emergent properties. Single ants are dumb but colonies are intelligent. Single neurons are dumb but brains are intelligent. Echo chambers are dumb even though individuals are intelligent. Idea labs are extremely smart even though individuals are only moderately intelligent (e.g. no one person could have discovered the theory of relativity).
Golems are the unintelligent but powerful products of a bunch of individuals in an echo chamber. The Mongols were the most powerful golem in history. Golems are powered by conformity and ruined by individuality and dissent. For this reason, they forbid dissent at all costs (the Mongols used to kill the whole band of 10 members if a single one dissented).
Idea lab cultures value open mindedness and truth. Echo chambers value conformity and conviction.
Context for the book: technology is a magnifiers. It makes the good really good and the bad really bad. If the bad gets too bad, it’s all over. Society is acting like a poopy-pants four year old these days which makes the likelihood of a really bad bad more likely. We need to figure out what our problem is and get to the bottom of it so we don’t end humanity.
Societies are supposed to have immune systems that weed out harmful trends and subcultures (echo chambers, woke movement, etc.). Right now it’s failing in the US.
Liberal games implement just the right amount of rules for things not to devolve into power games without becoming power games. They protect personal liberty.
When there are no rules, power games prevail.
In the US you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone. Live and let live.
The immune system of a liberal democracy is the combination of the laws and norms. Laws are bricks and norms are mortar. Without the mortar it gets pretty easy to knock the wall over. The virus is power games.
What usually goes wrong is the norms not the laws. People get scared and don’t stand up for what they believe is right. And then the golem takes over.
The media landscape used to consist of three major media brands. The incentives were good. If you presented a bias or false view you’d lose credibility and viewers would go to the others. There also used to be a rule that you had to present both sides of an issue which later got repealed. Once that happened in the 90s, the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world came out and started catering to one side and broadcasting very low rung content. Not seeking the truth, just picking one side and the providing confirmation. This model was more lucrative and eventually most media devolved to this.
Corruption is when the true purpose of an institution becomes different than their advertised purpose.
Two types of social justice:
Four ways to handle a speaker coming to your campus: