iprayiam3
2d ago
This is something I’ve tried to talk to smart people at work about who actively employ AI and they never seem to think through the implications.
Here’s one example I’ve given before - AI agentic sales outreach. For a brief 6 months, in 2024 orgs who adopted the ability to research contact, write “personalized” emails, and send cadences at scale had a super power. And a few startups got amazing buzz over it. Then it was table stakes and once everyone gets more in their inbox it becomes junk again.
If AI was good enough that you could send the exact right message to me at the exact best time to consider your product, the first 10 people would get an easy sale. But as soon as this is available to everyone of the 10 million businesses who think I should buy their product, it will just ruin email altogether.
This has always been an arms race but AI will not in the long run improve email outreach, but break it. I think this is going to be the same in a lot of areas
iprayiam3
10d ago
All fair points. I'm not particularly proud of the structural product of op, so no point belaboring. Happy to engage further on the actual content
iprayiam3
10d ago
That's fair. This is a tough issue though, because AI is at this point impossibly looped into basic editing processes, and there's a spectrum. It is AI now, because I ask AI for a spell check, or to fix commas? 1.Write a something for me on this topic is one thing. 2. Draft these bullet points into a post is another. 3. Take this draft, and help me edit for grammer/wording, is another still. It's closer to blue underline suggestions in Word. For me personally, I don't really do option 1 ever. I will occassionally use option 2 in work emails. But option 3, which should be useful,I find the AI to be overly zealous in rewording, then have to tweak back. It's a general problem I have at work with AI generation. AI is a very zealous editor, and instead of tightening a clause or fixing a word, it tries to aggressively redraft things into AI voice. Perhaps somethign like Grammerly is better, but ChatGPT sucks in this regard.
However, in this case, I don't think AI was noticed here. I think stilted prose was noticed, and everything that doesn't feel organic, registers as AI now. The biggest difference between my OP and, say this comment, is that I tried to write it out in a word processor and create a structure, rather than stream-of-consciousness into the comment field.
iprayiam3
10d ago
right, I am not suggesting that the only true institution is one that resists change or evolution. And perhaps my OP misstated this. Genetic and memetic evolution will occur in most (every?) institution, and attempts to resist that are varying levels of tension in the system. I am trying to combine both an analytical frame and a point of view in the frame, which I think is muddying it.
I think there is a natural, healthy debate about what Church Five is, and this is the natural order of an institution or nation. The fact that the US has conservatives and liberals, and an internal debate about what do we progress and what do we conserve, and which parts are core to our identity is a reasonable debate. When a faith or organization says, which parts of our doctrine are non-negotiable, and which parts are developments, the same.
Whether memetic evolution, changes the nature of an institution or not, I think is an open question. What I am suggesting is that when memetic evolution occurs primarily through genetic replacement, something somewhat different is happening (this is akin to the concept of skinsuiting), and conflating the two or trivializing the difference is usually done by pointing to thenetic continuity.
My point of view is that thenetic continuity is less important than it is often made out to be when debating core identity.
iprayiam3
10d ago
Portions, I ran through an AI for editing (at this point, this is just unfortunately any writing at all that isn't pure stream of consciousness), was mostly frustrated with the output not being in my voice, and pasted back in my own words. It is certainly stilted, and a combination of lack of time spent editing, skill, and my rusty impoverished attempts to be more essayic.
As my time spent posting on the internet has decreased, my writing style has increasingly become sloppier stream of consciousness, and this was the first attempt in quite a while to draft something before posting.
It is not AI, but poorly written, and unfortunately apes AI writing styles, in an attempt to be structured.
iprayiam3
11d ago
The church example was only illustrative. The idea with both genetics and memetics is not that they are stagnant. Children aren’t clones, genetically or ideologically. But that the successive generations are descendants not displacements. To go back to the real example of my child’s school, which is attached to our Church, a tremendous amount has developed, from the technology in the classroom to the buildings to the curriculum. The idea is not stasis. But I also accept that the general positionality of the conservative is undesirable for a libertarian, but preference aside, my post is about taxonomy
(cross-posted from dsl)
I recently listened to the Tucker and Piers interview, and specifically want to talk about the part on population replacement. Pierced framed the idea of whites becoming a minority in the future with 'so what' and I felt tucker inadequatedly answered the question. (He is not a good debater). More broadly, much of the inadeqacy generally, is folks tripping over themselves to avoid claims of racialism. Everyone is trying so hard not to sound like a racial essentialist, while the other side, gotchas on anything not nailed down.
While thinking about it, I have come up with a propostional idea, I want to share here. I will call it thenetics, a portmaneu of genetics and Theseus (as in the ship). Thenetics is the empty bag that carries genetic and memetic transmission. Much of the disagreement with replacement population (aside from the conflict theory), is one side thinking thenes alone is enough (or better).
Genes tell the story of bodies. Memes tell the story of ideas. But thenes tell the story of arrangements. The social graph, the occupancy of roles, the alignment of persons in an institution across time. When people talk about “losing a country,” they often mean the fading of memes and gene. Thenes are the structural continuity during that transmission or loss.
My thesis is that thenetic continuity without memetic or genetic is empty, and hides actual noncontinuity. It simply preserves the shell of the institution while its substance may have changed entirely.
Consider four churches in one town.
- Church One is the easy case: a multi-generational congregation with healthy memetic transmission. The families remain, but newcomers are welcomed into the liturgy, the stories, the shared habits. There is continuity of body, of belief, and of arrangement.
- Church Two loses its founding families over time, but it holds fast to its doctrine, its rituals, its internal grammar. The pews are filled by new faces, but the culture is strong enough that the ideas replicate themselves. Here the genes depart, but the memes endure. Most people still say, yes, it is the same church.
- Church Three begins like the first, but its memetics fail. The congregation dwindles. The shared language collapses. In desperation, the church reinvents itself attempting to attract a new audience new doctrine, new sensibility, a total cultural rewrite. It never closes its doors, but by the end it is a different creature entirely. Only the thene remains.
- Church Four suffers the same decline, but its end is literal. The church dies. The building goes dark. Eventually another congregation purchases the property and plants something new with the memetics of church 3. A successor, not an heir.
In my pointof view, Church Four is clearly a successor organization in the same 'space'. But from a Ship of Thesian way, #3 is more like 4 than 1 or 2. In both 3 and 4, the memetic and genetic transmission are dead ended. But the difference is the thenetic continuity of 3, which is irrelevant and a distraction from the idea that it's the 'same' church.
Ship of Thesus To answer the question, it's the same ship at the end if the form and function are the same. Replacing a plank with a like plank is genetic (via the 'blueprints'), retaining purpose and aesthetics are memetic. But if the ship is a car at the other end, it's not the same ship, even if it had thenetic transition. Thenetic continuity alone cannot guarantee identity. Thenetic continuity does not determine identity. It can only disguise the loss of it.
The Family The platonic family is biological: parents raising their own children in a shared home. But adoption shows that concept is not confined to genes. A family can be created through transmission of life, but also through transmission of meaning in shared context (family). The bond is thenetic and memetic in place of genetic
But there are limits to this. If a child moves into the house after you have already moved out, that child is not your sibling. Even if you once slept in the same room, the relation is absent. And if two children overlap in the house for a brief season, the degree to which they become family is not measured by the length of the overlap but by the memetic exchange within it. Family is not the structure of occupancy alone. It is the lived transmission that occurs while the structure is shared.
Finally, consider my own experience as father sending his children to the same church and school of my youth. I have many feelings seeing brand new people and families who have in the intervening 30 years carried on, changed or added to the familiar traditions, ideas, identity, and physical space. There are also other families still there or returned (I have old classmates with kids here too) and/or people who are transitionary (a constant chain on relation). The latter is thenetic. But the thenetics only matter if they are transitioning the memes and social graph. If there was a wholesale rip and replace, it would be more obvious and jarring that it was a 'new' community. But so would it be if 'brick by brick' it had fundamentally changed.
TLDR; I appreciate the recent meme that a country is not just an economic zone, because it generally resonates with how I feel about both my side and the other. But I think it risks over-transactionalizing the people on the other side. My main beef is that a country is not a thenetic structure, to be filled with whatever people and ideas fit in.
Thenetics describes the continuity of an institution’s role-structure across time. An institution remains identifiable only when this structural continuity is joined by an appropriate degree of genetic or memetic transmission. Thenetic continuity alone is insufficient to preserve identity.
iprayiam3
11d ago
like I said it's the paganism + the volume. and again I'm using pagan for coming from a nonwestern Christian context. Everything about westernism, even aggressively secular westernism is a conversation with Christianity in very Christian language, which developed in conversation with Classical paganism.
iprayiam3
11d ago
It's a lot of things, but the paganism and the volume is what exacerbates the rest. By paganism, I mean it literally, as well as just the strong cultural distance. These are volumes of folks with a foreign cultural and religious foundation, flooding the middle class, and the effect is visible.
Contrast with Hispanic immigration, where, while still not highly appreciated by the same demographic, are working lower class jobs, and are still firmly shaped by hundreds of years of Western / Christian culture.
Watching housing prices go up and tech jobs disappear to very obviously culturally foreign population is different than sharing a pew with laborers. In fact, if we were better at vetting, more serious about stopping drugs and forcing English, I think most anti-immigration Americans would be fine with a pretty large stream of legal Hispanic immigration. It is more akin to previous waves of European immigrants.
iprayiam3
22d ago
I do have a family of 6+. I’m not literally unable to afford it, but it is a very unjustifiable expense against the other things that go into budget. And I’m talking specifically delivery, not takeout
iprayiam3
22d ago
When I was a kid in the 90s we got take out now and then; as an adult (making much more than 100k), I can’t afford such luxury. Who are all these people door dashing, and also finding it an indispensable example of modern convenience?
iprayiam3
26d ago
Yes, of course they exist. What I said is made up is the 'social relevance'.
iprayiam3
26d ago
I do think that a lot of the recent obsession (Dreher etc) with the “groypers” is somewhat overdone -
somewhat?! it’s social relevance is completely made up controlled opposition. It’s exactly like Qanon. I never met a single person on the right who subscribed to it, yet somehow from the left and media it was everywhere. The groyper scare is a completely astroturfed attempt to police and taboo/discredit certain opinions on the right
iprayiam3
28d ago
Like @FiveHourMarathon, my church is the one I grew up in and my children go to school in the same Catholic school attached to it. It’s very beautiful to really feel such a circle of life sense to the place
Yeah exactly, resumes are already an example where AI just broke the concept, not improved anything. You can argue that people could always get external resume help. But the friction was valuable information itself. That someone went out of their way to find and rely on another humans help and discern quality was in itself a signal so it was ok to not know whether this polished resume was self written or professionally assisted.
Now every resume is AI polished with the pus of a button. Instead of improving resuming anyway, it just broke the function
More options
Context Copy link