Guillaume Verdon: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I like the visual of the landscape of ideas evolving through forks. So on the other part of history, thinking of Marxism as the original repository, and then Soviet Communism is a fork of that, and then the Maoism is a fork of Marxism and Communism. And so those are all forks. They’re exploring different ideas. Thinking of culture almost like code. Nowadays, what you prompt in the LLM or what you put in the constitution of an LLM is basically its cultural framework, what it believes. And you can share it on GitHub nowadays. So trying to take inspiration from what has worked in this machine of software to adapt over the space of code, could we apply that to culture? And our goal is to not say, “You should live your life this way, X, Y, Z,” it’s to set up a process where people are always searching over subcultures and competing for mind share. I think creating this malleability of culture is super important for us to converge onto the cultures and the heuristics about how to live one’s life that are updated to modern times. Because there’s really been a sort of vacuum of spirituality and culture. People don’t feel like they belong to any one group, and there’s been parasitic ideologies that have taken up opportunity to populate this Petri dish of minds. Elon calls it the mind virus. We call it the decel mind virus complex, which is the decelerative that is kind of the overall pattern between all of them. There’s many variants as well. And so if there’s a sort of viral pessimism, decelerative movement, we needed to have not only one movement, but many, many variants, so it’s very hard to pinpoint and stop. But the overarching thing is nevertheless a kind of mimetic optimism pandemic. Okay, let me ask you, do you think e/acc to some degree is a cult?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.