Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 11/07/2026I've been looking for examples of this (claim of direct link of information propagated to actual physical harm), ie "infohazard", thanks 210
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 30/06/2026day 1 on the job of the open source intelligence agency 110
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 29/06/2026Does this description make sense to you guys? luma.com/psyop-hackat... 020
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 28/06/2026Does this make sense? (for an event I'm hosting September 4th in Austin TX) 000
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 15/03/2026README dot md defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/delusions-... 041
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 26/02/2026I asked students in a small college in upstate NY to pay attention to what words are spreading in their corners of the internet & try to identify its origin & what the word does 290
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 07/02/2026I am surprised these don't yet have a "an LLM told me about you" 1142
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 05/01/2026You wake up one day & realize you are a source of evil. This is good news! 260
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 11/12/2025when a scientist discovers something new, how do they check that no one else has already discovered it and wrote it down with different language? 170
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 11/11/2025"can we predict, in principle, the “emotional resonance vector” of a new idea before it spreads" yes, absolutely! All you have to do is preregister with the open memetics institute. If your thing goes viral in the way you predict, then that's proof 130
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 08/11/2025yeah this is solvable if you take reflexivity as a fundamental part of your axioms, not something you try to eliminate. From michael smith's "subjective science" (morphenius.substack.com/p/subjective...) 020
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 03/11/2025screenshot to get around word text limit (also - if there's a beta testing thing for Semble or a discord or w/e I'd love to test it out! I've been getting all my ORI people to write on github to get used to the workflow of micropublishing & reviewing each other) 120
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 04/10/2025meanwhile, on extremist right wing twitter @hankgreen.bsky.social 170
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 05/08/2025we are discussing a strange phenomenon where if you google "Memory Holes are signs of Epistemically Hostile Enviroments" this substack essay does NOT appear (which is kind of poetic, the concept of a memory hole is being memory holed!) deathisbad.substack.com/p/memory-hol... 010
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 05/08/2025glimpse of what I've been up to (this is from the open memetics discord) - discussing memory holes & how they are unstable, because awareness of them makes them disappear 150
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 22/07/2025great question!! I recently wrote an analysis/introduction to hank green from a memetics perspective (his egregore is surprisingly not well known at all in the tpot/rationalist spaces) 130
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 25/06/2025(stats for the "There is no source" art piece on twitter: ) 240
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 18/06/2025update: k-means on projected data maybe isn't that great? (I haven't tried any of that yet) 010
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 18/06/2025epistemic shortcuts are necessary, but some increase your ability to handle complexity, and some increase the veil of complexity that allows power, abuse, corruption to fester 020
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 17/06/2025given a viral tweet thread, we can see "the shape" of all replies. Replies that similar together conceptually appear close together on the map (planning to apply this to bluesky next) 2141
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 10/06/2025Prep-planned scripts for social interactions are training wheels, and they prevent you from actually learning the underlying rules. You have to prompt real humans over & over to learn this. Good news: a lot of them crave earnest interaction on the internet. Go practice there. 040
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 04/06/2025the ideological turing test is how you find out if you think the other side is evil because you don't understand them, or because they actually are evil 020
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 02/06/2025This is my protocol for good faith interaction on the internet cc @linas.org 250
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 02/06/2025if you make peer reviews public, it acts as a way to get feedback for the reviewer too (like as an undergrad I can review a paper, in my own words, and that conveys any lack of understanding I may have about the field) 020
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 31/05/2025(no larger blog post yet, I'm struggling to write something that's legible to everyone, getting feedback on individual pieces seems to be unblocking me) here's my attempt at an answer: 120
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 31/05/2025The fundamental principle of open memetics is we spread ideas via "pull, not push". Because either it succeeds, or if there is resistance, that is ITSELF novel information. You either spread or gain insight. It's either marketing, or research. It's win win either way cc @tedunderwood.me 120
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 31/05/2025On open source cultural engineering (the cool thing about this is that doing it in the open allows those who disagree to take action, and possibly move the needle in the opposite direction. Culture war turns into culture science) 250
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 31/05/2025I didn't think about that!! the other big idea I'm really excited to see is "drift over time". Like take something that seems like it has shifted (like say, the ethics of AI) and see the concepts moving. If we had this decades ago we might have seen: 100
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 30/05/2025this is the footnote: learning about how gravity works is one thing, learning about how cohorts of humans THINK it works is another thing, AND both of these things increase your ability to predict the universe 000
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 30/05/2025learning about someone's understanding of the thing, is a different pursuit of knowledge than learning about the thing, but it is still in itself teaches you something useful about the universe 100
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 26/05/2025many such cases 😄 a rulebook for healthy internet arguments does not yet exist (the real trick is in rules that help you win even if the other side doesn't do them, but that if the other side does them/if everyone does them, you win even MORE) 030
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 04/05/2025Here is my "memetics 101" article. This summarizes my understanding of this field, why it's important, and who is actively doing work that I am paying attention to open.substack.com/pub/defender... 281
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 04/05/2025I think this is the correct visual for it. The hive mind needs boundaries for coherence and trust. It then needs to interact with the other hive minds (to convert, find ways to cooperate, or learn about what's working on the other side) 130
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 02/05/2025In this video, Hank tries to take something true that people deny due to ideology/culture war, and create a new narrative so it can be accepted. I think this has a high chance of working, so I made a prediction market for it: manifold.markets/Defender/wip... 031
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 19/04/2025"i tend to model my tribes as the only people with agency; the opposing tribes are like a natural disaster" 180
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 16/04/2025any posts that mention anything about memetics appear in this feed! 061
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 06/02/2025a browser plugin that rewrites all comments about political tribes to be about the other one and you have to guess which one is fake 040
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 31/01/2025most convincing take I've seen in the airplane crash so far (like you take over from a past CEO who ignored a specific solvable problem people complained about, you solve it, it makes you look good for political reasons?) 030
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 30/01/2025a bit more of an explanation of what this means, let me know if this is legible (or if you'd explain it differently!) 230
Defender @defenderofbasic.bsky.social · 30/01/2025yes basically!! It's deeper in the sense that, *just* from these words associations you get something as intelligent as ChatGPT. This is effectively "peeking inside the mind" of the LLM 000
 Hank Green shows examples of liberal misinformation to his liberal audience. "The conclusion is right, but not for this reason"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:sydtqdji6dxfqfn35gd7esdw/bafkreifculx2kfgwtpnsbsjuogtkobhovadw3ci26gg36ucplwb5w6jjsm)
