Book Excerpts

How social media is a huge vat of brains | Excerpt

How do you thrive in an unknown future?

When you can’t see past the world we have now, look to visionaries like Balaji Srinivasan. His ideas show us how to build a healthier, brighter, and more technologically-advanced humanity.

In The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future, Eric Jorgenson curates a collection of Balaji’s wisdom from his entire career. In Technology” you will see how technology shapes our world today and the ways it could shape our future. In “Truth” you learn how to think for yourself through the constant clamor of information and media. Finally, in “Building the Future,” you will learn how to wield Technology and Truth to change your life, change your community, and-maybe-change the future of our species.

This guide will help you pick the next great investment, start a billion-dollar company, or even a new country. The Anthology of Balaji helps you visualize and build your brightest future.

Read an excerpt on leveraging technology to create value below:

TECHNOLOGY

FASTER, BETTER, AND CHEAPER

Science is theory. Technology is practice. It’s applied science.

Referring to “the tech industry” is dumb. That’s a label we kind of accept, but it’s not a clear thought. You would not call something “the physics industry.” Every industry uses technology, like every industry uses physics.

Business is simply a vehicle to push the future forward and drive human progress.

Whether that is accomplished through an open source project, an academic paper, or a research lab, the tool doesn’t matter. The goal is to advance technology.

Build a better steam engine. It may turn out the best way of doing that is with a capitalist vehicle, but nowadays it could be done with an on-chain community or a crowdfund. The tool is less important than the goal.

If the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, then the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.

At first that sounds crazy. But let’s start here: the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity. Think about how a breakthrough is described: faster, smaller, cheaper, better. All these words mean that with a new technology, we can do more with less.

Mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had more time (or infinite time), we would be less concerned with whether something was faster. The reason speed has value is because time has value; the reason time has value is because human life spans are finite.

If you make life spans longer, you reduce the effective cost of everything. If reducing scarcity is the purpose of technology, eliminating the main source of scarcity—mortality—is the ultimate purpose of technology. Life extension is the most important thing we can invent.

We need to evangelize technological progress with every word and action. To recognize that the purpose of technology is to transcend our limits and to motivate everything we do with this sense of purpose. To take the winnings from our web apps and put them toward Mars. To feel no hesitation to start small and no shame in dreaming big. To tell the world it is possible to cure the deaf, restore sight, and end death itself.

VALUE CREATION COMES FROM TECHNOLOGY

Some people believe value comes directly from labor. They price something based on the number of labor hours that went into it. If it takes five hours of a surgeon’s time to do some procedure, it will be really expensive. If it takes one hour, then it is cheaper.

At first that seems reasonable, except people pay for the value provided to them. They pay for the impact on them, not the cost to provide it

It might take a lot of time for you to handcraft one chair, but a chair manufactured on an assembly line may be cheaper and better. Even though the first chair might have more labor going into it, the second chair may cost less and have higher quality.

Rather than the “labor theory of value,” I think about the “technology theory of value.” The actual value injection is from technology. Think about using a light   rather than having humans running around with you holding candles. It’s the same for refrigerators and automobiles.

Technology theory of value is better than labor theory of value.

This is the technology theory of value: technology is actually where the value creation is happening. We can see this most clearly on the computer.

TRUTH

SOCIAL MEDIA IS A HUGE VAT OF BRAINS

People are running on scripts. They don’t even realize they’re running on scripts. Media scripts humans, just as computer code scripts machines.

When kids come out of a movie theater, they immediately start quoting lines and re-enacting what they just saw on the screen.

Sometimes you can get people to do something by telling them to do it, but often just showing it being done is better.

Humans are mimetic. We mimic each other to acquire language and align on objectives. You could call it “contagious mental states.” I think this is an understudied concept. We know there are contagious physical illnesses, like viruses. Now consider contagious mental illnesses.

We all stuck our brains into Twitter. Being on Twitter is like putting your brain into a vat with 300 million other peoples’ brains who are all sending their brain-states to you electromagnetically. It feels a little unhygienic if you think about it that way. We create social distance offline, but we pack closely together online. Bad memes and crazy ideas spread faster than ever, because all our brains are connected.

If you go to Google Trends and type in a recent headline, you’ll see the topic often goes totally vertical. Everybody cares about the topic suddenly. Then interest in the topic drops off just as quickly. People go manic over something they didn’t even know about two weeks ago. It’s life and death to them; they’re willing to fight, kill, and burn things down. Then, three weeks later, they don’t care at all and will never care again.

The offline world doesn’t reward rudeness to random strangers.

Twitter, unfortunately, does. From an incentives standpoint, I think that is the problem. Starting fights on Twitter attracts followers. Followers are valuable. Starting fights in the physical world attracts police attention. That is not valuable. Ethics restrains many people—but not everyone, and not always.

My overall intuition is we need a totally new incentive-based approach to social networking now that we see failure modes at scale. Building Google was hard until seeing several years of Yahoo.

Popularity can be measured by likes. Truth can’t be.

Status is a zero-sum game. Wealth creation isn’t.

Lots of popular ideas on social media are a result of consistent repetition rather than independent replication. In cryptocurrency, we use the concept of independent confirmations. You don’t approve a transaction right away. You wait for six independent confirmations.

Our mechanisms for information dissemination have advanced past our mechanisms for information verification. Fortunately, the information is electronic, on a screen, in a database. Maybe soon some of the truth can catch up to the lies.

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