[ExI] instilling ambition

[Anders Sandberg]

On 21/01/2013 04:57, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> ### It came as a surprise to me but recently I learned that the masses 
> are almost irrelevant to the direction that democratic societies take. 
> Murray's "Coming Apart", earlier Caplan's "Myth of the Rational 
> Voter", recently some articles quoted on Econlib, all these convinced 
> me that the roughly 90% of people who are not members of the broadly 
> defined elite are just tagging along for the ride.

I always mention Hayek's "The intellectuals and socialism" at this point.

In many ways this is not strange at all: influence is, like most social 
properties, skew-distributed (powerlaw-ish, I suppose). If you have a 
random social small-world network you should expect some nodes to be 
much more influential than the rest, even when there are no assortive or 
specialisation effects. If some people specialise in spouting off memes, 
the thing get even skewer. So make sure you convince them about your 
memes - if they are not incompatible with their normal memes they may 
now spread yours.

Case in point: today I listened to the presentation of a new government 
report. We at FHI had written a report on the same topic earlier, and 
the team making this report had read ours. They did their own thing 
(less "high tech" in their words)... but some of the memes we brought in 
now permeate the other report, which of course has far, far greater 
weight than a mere FHI report. (The report and evidence base can be 
found at 
http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/our-work/policy-futures/identity for 
those who are interested. Foresight.uk do a lot of cool stuff, and today 
I learned how they are indirectly responsible for making cognitive 
enhancement a topic for polite conversation in the UK. )


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University