![]() Or MetaMed, the company staked on the idea that we can improve significantly on mainstream medicine if we apply rationalist research tools to the medical literature. Or the Seasteaders, who believe the free market can produce better societies than the ones historical forces left us with. Or look at Quantified Self, the community of people figuring out how to improve their health by tracking and analyzing their own biometrics. “In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt,” Steven Levy wrote in Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution. That’s one reason I credit hacker culture for another Bay Area meme that I see in many entrepreneurs, rationalists, and others: building creative alternatives to establishment institutions like government, education, and health.įor examples, look at all the approaches to alternative education that have sprung up in the Bay – UnCollege, Coursera, Udacity, and General Assembly. The hacker ethic also included an itch to fix broken or inefficient systems, and an impatience with the bureaucracy that prevented them from doing so. (One of the most admired among the original hackers was twelve-year-old Peter Deutsch.) It was, in other words, the perfect cultural soil for the seeds of a paradigm-busting startup culture. In addition to being passionate about coding, hackers were unimpressed by “bogus” status signals, like age and higher education, and judged people only by the cleverness and usefulness of the things they could create. ![]() Hacker cultureĪ lot of the credit for the culture of Silicon Valley’s startup scene goes to the first generation of computer programmers, whose “ hacker” culture originated at MIT in the late 1950s, but shortly thereafter sprung up in a few other early-adopter schools like Stanford and UC Berkeley. (For a look at this meme turned up to 11, you can check out the only-partially-tongue-in-cheek Yudkowsky ambition scale.) 3. And startup culture in particular promotes a “try things fast” attitude that can be a perfect antidote to the “sit around planning and theorizing forever” failure mode we’re sometimes prone to. Startup culture’s “think big, be ambitious” meme is also something I could see impacting rationalist culture in the coming years. Business in general is good real-world rationality training: you test your theories, you update your models, or you fail. There’s a distinctive culture behind the successes of the Bay Area’s startups, and it’s one that I see benefiting rationalists as well. Bayes nets) also contributed to its resurgent popularity. Widespread use of Bayesianism in the field of artificial intelligence (e.g. The idea of thinking in terms of optimization problems – optimizing for these outcomes, under those constraints - has roots in computer science and math, and it’s so fundamental to the rationalist approach to problem-solving that it’s easy to forget how different it is from people’s normal way of thinking.Īnother rationalist building block, Bayesian inference, is several centuries old, but had fallen out of favor until the computing methods and power of the 1970s made it actually usable. Some of the basic building blocks of rationality come from computer science, and the Bay Area is rich with the world’s top computer scientists, employed by companies like Intel, IBM, Google, and Microsoft, and universities like Stanford and UC Berkeley. Instead of trying to cover everything in detail, I’ve focused on nine aspects of that memespace that help put the rationalist community in context: 1. (For example, yoga may be popular among many entrepreneurs, but that meme -> subculture relationship isn’t strong enough to make my map.).īelow, I expand on the map with a quick tour through the landscape of Bay Area memes and subcultures. ![]() Note that although many of these memes are widely influential, I only drew an arrow connecting a meme to a group if the meme was one of the defining features of the group. I’ve also depicted some of the major memes that have influenced, and been influenced by, those subcultures: ![]() I’ve limited myself to the last 50 years or so, and to subcultures defined by ideology (as opposed to, say, ethnicity). This map is my attempt at illustrating that landscape of subcultures, and at situating the rationalist community within it. The Bay Area is unusually dense with idea-driven subcultures that mix and cross-pollinate in fascinating ways, many of which are already enriching rationalist culture.
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