I realized the other day that this one question can generate the entire field of open memetics, if you hold it in your mind and look at your world through it.
An “axiom” you might deduce from thinking through this is:
(1) if an open problem exists,
(2) and a solution for that problem is found,
→ then the solution will propagate to the relevant receivers
An open problem that remains unsolved therefore means one of two things:
(1) the problem is unsolved
(2) you are inside a noisy / hostile information environment
Most people have some experience of (2), especially if they’ve worked for a big corporation. They know the “information market” is not efficient, because known solutions are slow to propagate, or sometimes never make it1.
Do you see how this points towards empirical measurements of memetics?
If you are memetically observing a company, you find an unimplemented solution, you connect it to the relevant stakeholders, and the company executes it and makes a ton of money, then you have (1) solved a valuable problem (2) you have evidence of the health of this environment.
If you found a perfectly good solution just sitting there - there might be more. If you can understand the bottleneck for it reaching the right person, you can:
find more ideas like it and help them propagate
make a permanent fix to the memetic landscape so that any ideas like it in the future have an unblocked path
For example: it could be that the engineering team has no contact with the sales team. So if you setup a weekly meeting with the two managers that’d fix it2.
How do you get compensated for solving “information asymmetry bugs”?
This is one of the current open problems of the field. Someone who is selling you “solutions to information symmetry” (aka showing you valuable information that isn’t currently in your awareness) is a middleman that you need to trust. He has a perverse incentive to allow the environment to get worse, so that his work is more valuable. If he does his work very well, he makes himself obsolete.
We are working on fixing this in open memetics by (1) looking at ways that information asymmetry can be visible to the receiver, so you can compensate whoever is genuinely making it better (2) finding ways to monetize/compensate this work, so that more people are incentivized to do it (since it improves almost everything else - everything is downstream from the health of the information environment).
A frustrating bottleneck I’ve run into in advocating for open memetics is the “we live in a perfect information environment” fallacy
I tell people that this work matters because “there may be solutions to a lot of our open problems, but they’re just sitting there, and we’re pouring resources into trying to solve them, but they’ve already been solved & you aren’t aware of the solution”.
This sounds like a crazy claim - they say “if a solution existed to this obviously important problem, we’d know about it”. But from my POV, theirs is the crazy claim. What is this magical mechanism that you are assuming that will surface the information you need, when you need it?
They ask me, “if what you say is true, then prove it”. Now, if I do successfully surface a problem that is solved by connecting two unconnected networks, they see it as an outlier. “Ah, this is the information market working as expected!” - but that’s dumb, that solution was sitting there for months (or years!!!) before I unblocked it. The market is not efficient. We ARE the market. That it took years for someone ahead of their time to be recognized is NOT NORMAL nor inevitable. It’s a bug. It doesn’t have to be this way.
I believe this memetic learned helplessness exists only because these problems have been way too complicated to solve before. Paying too much attention to the flows of information propagation can lead to paranoia and spinning your wheels for nothing. But it doesn’t have to be this way either.
Open memetics is about working on these methods in public, and testing each other. We will create as a byproduct a lot of value, that will benefit a lot of people. Those people will make a lot of money, and we will capture a tiny fraction of it.
But that’s OK. Projects like Wikipedia, Open Street Map, and most open source infrastructure work exactly this way - they produce enormous value and they capture very little of it. But the alternative is worse for everyone. It’s a point of pride to be a contributor to Wikipedia, Open Street Map, or any kind of public infrastructure. And I think it can and will be a point of pride to contribute to open memetics.
As a reminder, if you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve started an Open Memetics github repo where we’re currently writing down “basic concepts” to coalesce into a shared language for the field. Don’t worry if you’re not on GitHub, you can contribute from wherever you are. Like Shadow Rebbe recently noticed a typo, DMed me, which I have fixed on his behalf and credited him3.