this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Thanks for your effort! I like the cancer analogy. I wonder though, if our society might already be in metastasis. I try to keep my hope...
Can you recommend literature?
a lot of this is novel, and only now being properly understood from confidence of multiple expertise perspectives being compared, that allow more confidence in certain weightings on old ideas. some old ideas are hard to quickly correct for, because people don't like digging out parts of their current model for making sense of the world.
to be fair, that is mechanically connected to the same drives that run fear and everything else based on how we contextualize the 'surprise' we feel when the world doesn't match our model.
most of the stuff on surprisal is mostly in the karl friston direction, or predictive processing. active inference is a very good thing to study, because it teaches how we make sense of the world as a bunch of cells working together, in varied and often novel contexts.
for more technical reading
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5299/Active-InferenceThe-Free-Energy-Principle-in-Mind
free textbook on MIT, although it's a couple years old now.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38667857/
this is one of my favourite current takes, basically anything around mahault, friston, or michael levin right now is great for a technical framing of things.
levin is a good source if you like the cancer analogy
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33961843/
although this writeup was a few years back. he is constantly interacting with different experts of different fields on youtube, and there's a lot to be learned just hearing their conversations and sense making. some of the most amazing empirical results in recent experiments are coming out around michael levin's work. he keeps a summary up to date for his broader message if anyone wants to know tufts university for something other than the government bagging students.
more lighthearted and mainstream,
algospeak by adam aleksic,
Godel Escher Bach/i am a strange loop by douglas hofstadter,
for understanding language and complexity.
extra shortform,
https://www.youtube.com/@theforestjar/videos
the forest jar is often dismissed because of the art and dry delivery, but the topics are fantastic, comparing the represented perspectives of different 'thought tools' or representational perspectives, to convey a greater and more nuanced picture.
a lot of knowledge is just understanding how cults work to sustain their current model of the world in-front of critique.
some things are just general concepts that need to be better collected and talked about together, like the motte and bailey, and how cults, or people like jordon peterson will confabulate pockets of faux expertise complexity (kind of the same way AI will confabulate in a way that sounds like it makes sense) but he is actually just diverting and distracting so that he doesn't need to deal with the dissonance in question. someone actually framed it well in his jubilee thing and it's hard to call it out if the surrounding people aren't familiar.
that being said, any pocket can take all of your time if you let it, so we need to do better at creating cultures of cooperatively and intentionally interacting with this material. people with more social talent would be valuable here. etc.
also artists should already be working with scientists to help with communicating the truth of current understanding, better than clickbait dishonest journal headlines.
hopefully some good resources here, unless you're looking for something else more specific.