Five Slices #29: Ideas have a life of their own
We don't have ideas, ideas have us
Welcome to Five Slices! I share five stories every week from science, art, psychology, culture, history, and business. To get it in your inbox:
Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers - passageways - for genes. They ride us into the ground, like racehorses, from generation to generation.
– Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
From one angle, we are just vessels that pass on our genes. But there’s a parallel universe where we are carriers for thoughts, ideas, and culture that persist long after we are gone. Like genes that are carriers of life, these carriers of information are called “memes.” A meme could be as small as a song lyric or the habit of saying “God bless you” when somebody sneezes, or something as complex as the blueprint for democracy. Like viruses, bacteria, and our own genes, these memes have a life of their own – they live, they spread, and they conquer – lasting longer than we do. Or as Carl Jung said, “People do not have ideas, ideas have people.”
This week, I’ve been studying how these ideas are born, how they develop, and spread. In today’s issue:
Two ways of copying
People-shaped ideas
Genius and Scenius
Technology has no morality
Lizard vs killer snakes
Two ways of copying
This is an Origami model of a Chinese boat:
Imagine that 10 children are made to sit in line. The first child draws the boat by looking at the model. The second child copies the first, the third one copies the second, and so on. By the time we reach the tenth child, do you think the drawing would look anything like the model shown here? It’s very unlikely. Each child would add or miss out details that are missing in the original model, and the end result would have no resemblance to the original model.
But consider that the first child instead gets this instruction sheet on how to make a Chinese boat:
If the first child learns how to fold a sheet of paper into a boat, and every child teaches these instructions to the child next to him/her, the results will be very different from the first experiment. There might be a few variations in how the models look, but the imitation would be much more accurate than in the first case of copying a drawing. You might remember school crazes where someone figured out how to make a paper camera or a bird or a better design for a rocket plane, and within days, the entire school was savvy to the secret.
Why is this so? The first type of copying is learning by seeing, also called Lamarckian imitation. There are too many ways in which this copying can go wrong, and we tend to fill in the gaps with our imagination, with no real understanding of how things work.
The second type of copying is learning by instruction, called Weismannian imitation. When you compress a procedure into a bunch of simple steps, you can teach it across time, across geographies, to a large number of people (the picture above doesn’t even need you to know Chinese, the language of images is universal). It’s a high-fidelity way of transmitting ideas. Food recipes, computer algorithms, and even games are all Weismannian. Think about it – you can play tic-tac-toe on the back of an envelope and soccer in a classroom, because what matters are the rules by which people coordinate.
Weismannian learning is very efficient and maybe you think that it’s always superior. But while efficient and clear processes can always be automated, the magic in peak performance is hard to explain": What sets apart Warren Buffett from other investors? What makes Hans Zimmer’s music so good, or Tarantino’s movies so fun? These secret ingredients cannot be put into a set of instructions for Weismannian copying. In the age of AI where clear instructions can be automated away, learning by seeing might be the technique that gives humans an age.
Source for the experiment: Richard Dawkins in the intro to “The Meme Machine.”
People-shaped ideas
Ideas are like viruses. They attach to hosts, they live inside them, and they spread by jumping from one host to another. Not all viruses are contagious, and not all ideas spread among people. What helps some ideas spread but not others?
Ideas spread when they are “people-shaped” i.e when there’s an easy way for people to interact with the idea, hold on to it, and pass it along. Good designers design objects so that you can use them without any explanation. When you see a chair, you sit. When you see a handle, you grasp. When you see a button, you push. These designs that let you interact are called affordances.
What’s the mental equivalent of an affordance?
Stories.
People are attracted to stories about people, to see ideas embodied as characters. Remembering a list of dinosaurs and their dietary habits is hard, but after you see Jurassic Park, it’s hard to forget a T-Rex chomping a guy on a toilet or Velociraptors chasing children through a kitchen. Most people in my generation might not remember who signed the Declaration of Independence, but they probably know all the Avengers or the names of Harry Potter’s father’s friends. That’s the power of a good story, because emotional resonance registers things in a way facts can’t.
It’s possible to take this one step further, by using stories as a bridge to deliver complex information. Many good speakers (like Lincoln, Reagan, Warren Buffett) insert jokes and parables into their speeches. Even if people forget the message, they remember the joke. Or take a look at this designer, who created human characters for the periodic table – much more memorable than a bunch of squares, don’t you think?
Source:
on people-shaped ideas, on affordances.Genius and Scenius
Although great new ideas are articulated by individuals, they’re nearly always generated by communities. Genius sits in the middle of scenius. Just as genius is the creative intelligence of the individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of the community.
— Brian Eno, Musician
You’ve probably heard of Vincent Van Gogh. He’s the one who painted the vibrant picture of the Starry Night and the bright Sunflowers. He developed a unique style, with swirling shapes and coarse strokes and bold colors that wasn’t recognized enough in his lifetime. Surely, a rare intelligence handed by the Gods… Or was it?
This is what Van Gogh’s paintings looked like when he started painting. If I didn’t tell you, would you even know that the same painter favored these gloomy colors?
These pictures are just six years apart. What happened in that time?
When Van Gogh started out, his style was influenced by his cousin Anton Mauve who favored a realist style of painting. He had no other exposure or peer group. But when Van Gogh went to study painting in Belgium, he was dazzled by the expressive colors of Ruben. Later, when he moved to Paris, he hung out with Impressionist painters like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Monticelli, whose style he liked. Van Gogh was also influenced by the bold style of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) and he even tried imitating them.
There was no instruction set for the style Van Gogh developed. Drawing on today’s first story, Van Gogh was following a “learn by seeing” style that was a sum of all the people he admired, who nurtured his talent. But the end result was something truly original because nobody combined these elements quite like him.
The story of Vincent's evolution is the story of how profoundly we’re all shaped by what we consume and the people we spend time with – life-altering moments surround us. Something to ponder in the choices we make every day...
—
in this Twitter Thread which tells this story with way more details and pictures
Further reading: Kevin Kelly on Scenius,
on Scenius and myth of lone genius, “Kafka’s precursors”: An essay by Borges on how Kafka developed his style.Technology has no morality
Every time new technology enters the picture, there are signs on the street screaming that the end is nigh. That we are losing the “real art” of the greats.
Let me tell you a story about one of those greats. When Beethoven was born in 1770, the piano was a young instrument, barely 70 years old. As he grew up, the piano grew up with him – wooden frames turned to iron, the range of the piano expanded, and the hammers and strings grew stronger so that more versatile music could be played. But Beethoven always wanted louder and larger pianos. The innovative music he composed was like the death metal of his day. In fact, some of his compositions like the Hammerklavier sonata demanded a range that existing instruments could barely support. Piano makers had to evolve quickly to keep up.
Van Gogh in the earlier story was no exception. He lived at a time where synthetic chemicals birthed colors like chrome yellow and ultramarine. If he had just stuck to “natural pigments,” we would have neither the Sunflowers nor Starry Night. Both these artists didn’t protest against evolving technology. They actively embraced it and made it their own.
People worried that photography would destroy the art of painting. Socrates feared that if people put their trust in writing, it would induce forgetfulness of the soul. Yet here you are, reading this on a screen in the age of the internet. Can you imagine a life where you don’t write anything down?
No, AI is NOT destroying art. The Substack app on which I spend so much time is the church of anti-AI. Just this week, I came across three articles talking about why the trillions of dollars being spent on AI are a waste and that we are losing touch with the real mud and clay that artists massage into meaningful work. But technology has no morality of its own. I admit that some of this stuff scares me too, but the possibilities seem way more exciting than the fears.
Further reading: Photography and art on Noema, “Good artists copy, AI artists ___” by
Lizard vs killer snakes
This last one has nothing to do with ideas or innovation. It’s the best nature video I’ve watched and it’s two minutes long. Enjoy:
Forward this to a friend who might enjoy it. Last week, I wrote about the business of writing. You can find the complete list of posts here.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, say hi by replying to this email and tell me what you want to see more of. Don’t be a stranger!
What an interesting essay and especially format!
Another excellent post. You really have an eye for finding what’s interesting. Thank you.