Shurik's Static

My Answer to the Hamming Question

5 min read

What’s the Hamming Question?

1. What are the most important problems in your field? 2. Why aren't you working on them? *

Context

My frame is that of meta-crisis. Some resources to understand it:

  1. Daniel Schmachtenberger says: our future hints strongly of either collapse, or dystopia. Can we steer towards a saner third scenario?

    1. As the First Attractor of ecological collapse intensifies— and democratic institutions continue to fail to avert it (or to deal with its social and economic impact on everything from death to hunger to health to migration to war)—
    2. the Second Attractor of authoritarianism will grow stronger; the notion of a global community will be called into question; borders will close or be contested; and some combination of techno-feudalist economics, a surveillance society governed by AI and social credit ratings, and ambient militarism with indefinite catastrophic risk will reign.
    3. What can we do to steer towards a third, more sane scenario?

  2. Samo Burja argues that our civilizations stand “on a large tower of intellectual dark matter” - crucial knowledge that keeps our systems running but is increasingly invisible and at risk.

    • Civilizations can lose vital capabilities not just through sudden catastrophe, but through the gradual erosion of “living traditions” of knowledge.
    • I think this is amplified when a) the majority of the population ages b) we have a breakneck rate of progress c) we keep switching medias d) the newer mediums have various forms of degradation/link rot d) we dilute our wells of information (copy of a copy of a copy, amplified by AI slop).

  3. We live in the age of Moloch. See Scott Alexander’s [[Article/Meditations on Moloch]] on game theory, malthusian traps, human nature: *

    What does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

    And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it

  4. The answer to all of the problems is all of the solutions

    • The key insight about civilizational challenges is that no single domain’s solution - whether economic restructuring, educational reform, media transformation, governance overhaul, parenting evolution, or environmental protection - can adequately address our meta-crisis alone.
    • While experts passionately argue for their domain’s primacy (“at the end of the day…”), their reductionist perspectives, though each valid, miss the fuller picture.
    • Daniel suggests that “what I learned was the answer to all of the problems is all of the solutions” - there isn’t a singular theory of change, but rather an “ecology of theories of change.”
      • Asking “what species is the forest?”, fundamentally misunderstands forest ecosystems; Asking for “the solution” misunderstands the nature of civilizational challenges.
    • We need people deeply committed to specific solutions while avoiding the fundamentalist trap of believing their solution alone is sufficient.
      • The goal is understanding how these various elements interweave and collectively address the challenges we face, without becoming overly attached to any single framework.

    Daniel Schmachtenberger On Why The Answer to All the Problems is All of the Solutions

    Link to original

Information

We live in a world that a) generates exponentially more information b) grows more interconnected every day.

  1. How do you design better representations and mediums?

  2. How do you consciously learn to see / augment perception?

    POV is worth 80 IQ points. - Alan Kay

  3. How do we build tools for thought to model complex systems?

    • Resources:
      • CadCad
      • In complex systems, Many of the “improvements” or “solutions” we’ve implemented ends up having disastrous 1st/2nd/nth-order effects. How can we help foresee them?
        • Examples:
          • Lead in paint/fuels;
          • asbestos (carcinogen);
          • plastics → microplastics, endocrine disruptors, pollution;
          • use fossil fuels → massive CO2 production → temp increase → coral die-off;
          • pesticides and fertilizer runoff decimating aquatic life

  4. How can you simultaneously see the small (microscopic) and the large (macroscopic)?

    By narrowing our vision, the microscope helps us see the small -the cells- and the telescope helps us see the large -the forest. But the system is not happening at just one of these scales. It is happening all-at-once. What seeing tool do we use to see the whole, all-at-once? And if we built these all-at-once seeing tools(simultanescopes?), and everyone saw through them, how would our behaviors change? Towards ourselves, each other, and our environment? My hunch is it would be change so transformative, we can’t predict it from here.

People

Any system at its core will have humans. “Security is only as strong as the weakest link, and people are the weakest link in the chain.” We have to understand who we are.

Physical World

  • Microplastics: how to…
    • a) generate less? My understanding is that they’re mostly from tires. Can we create safer alternative that lasts just as long? then from synthetic fabrics- how to use less synthetic fabrics? Can we create filters for washing machines to trap them?
    • b) consume less?
      • plasticslist.org
    • c) remove existing microplastics from the environment and human bodies?
  • Can we shift from destructive, centralized, relatively fragile monoculture agriculture, to permaculture and other systems-based techniques ?

Why am I not working on them? I am, but I could be spending more time if…

Graph View

Backlinks