writing

The L.A. Riots and Memetic Coherence

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

It’s always the ear with that damn borzoi

For the last couple of days, riots have been building across the poorer parts of Los Angeles — supposed protests of ICE actions to deport illegal aliens. The riots had been escalating, to the point where Trump called out the National Guard, going against the will of both Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, and Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. It’s hard to know exactly what is going on in LA right now. I have solid friends on the ground, who don’t live in the various neighborhoods (majority Hispanic and poor) where these types of actions would take place, and they say “nothing is happening.”

But something is happening (they also confirm that) and it’s important enough to consider the dynamics. We know enough to know that Karen Bass, the mayor in most need of replacement in all of our urban centers, was a former organizer for a variety of groups tied to actors like USAID, and most importantly the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA-cutout organization famous for organizing overthrow of legitimate governments around the world. We also know that while Bass has a history of sucking up to governments like Fidel Castro’s in Cuba, (all this could be construed as some kind of bizarre LARP if it weren’t so) she’s obviously woefully incompetent as any kind of manager. We know she hasn’t learned much in her 40+ years of political activism by watching her appalling performance during the recent Palisades fire in LA. Sometimes having no coherent political philosophy other than proto-socialism will gain you a sinecure in one of our corrupt, government-funded NGOs. But you still don’t know what to do when excrement hits the respective ventilator.

But there are other actors afoot in this. It’s easy to focus on Bass and Newsom, who only yesterday evening backed off from their encouraging the public to confront ICE in the streets. Yes indeed — that is bad enough. But there are other coherences and convergences that are interesting. In the spirit of “follow the money,” who stands most to lose if ICE eliminates the potential for importation of large numbers of illegal aliens into the U.S.? The various Mexican gangs (they are numerous) who are making bank literally rounding up people, mostly young males, from around the world to transport to the US. I’ve read articles before the current crisis that this business of human transport was equivalent to the drug trade in terms of raw dollars. Think they might have opinions? Especially if the mayor and the governor were throwing down on the side of the rioters?

And speaking of those gangs, one thing they know how to do is buy politicians and run a shadow government behind the scenes in Mexico. We chronically ignore the social sophistication required to pull off the fact that Mexico is essentially run by gangs, because our news media feeds us polemics about how that would work. The portrait is that if an area is run by gangs, there are constant public executions and whatnot.

But the reality is that the gangs, like any organized force, can only deal with so much chaos in any given time. Chaos doesn’t lend itself to some level of organized economic activity. And people can be poor, and if the weather is good (as it so often is in Mexico) they can get by. But any population is only nine meals away from anarchy, as Alfred Henry Lewis once said. Make no mistake — they are still violent. But psychosocial evolutionary lines must be drawn. Or there is mass death. It’s the reason folks can still fly into Cancun and have a pleasant vacation. Life must go on.

Here’s the point. Those gangs have learned how to buy politicians, and to a limited extent, manage the civil society that matters to them. They bump up against this in LA, where there are poorly organized, but at least legitimate political organizations at work. So they seek out the various tribally aligned politicians, and court the psychopaths running the American side of the show under a variety of guises. The point is that there may be disagreements. But not by much. Both the gangs, and the current political caste in LA have an interest in continued dilution of the voter pool. Especially as the established minority population (in this case Latino) becomes more and more disillusioned with the decline of their communities. The Democrats in LA may be blinded by race, and unconstrained in screaming at Trump and the Republicans, but the people actually adjacent to the violence of this recent unprecedented wave of illegal immigration are not.

And this is what I call Memetic coherence. When memetic coherence exists, it’s not important for everyone to be a conscious actor. They can help. But the broad interests in how society is structured is really not in play. That dramatically eliminates conflict, at least in the short run. It can be a powerful thing, rapidly evolving societies up or down. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is a great example of disparate forces coming together to eliminate Jim Crow and create an integrated society. But it can also happen when devolutionary forces band together to provide cover and distract from the real psychosocial mechanisms at hand. The elite psychopaths like Bass, as well as other white folks (this is NOT race-delimited) are going to work to drive society back to that tribal level where their behavior is not anomalous. And they’re not going to have a hard time forming alliances with complicated organizations like the Sinaloan gangs, or Latin Kings. Those people mastered that playbook in Mexico. They bring logistical game to the table. No learning curve required.

And LA politicians who are simply avaricious are available for sale.

What none of these people are counting on is that these types of Tribal/Authoritarian societies are poorly organized. And up against any group with real military training, they’ll run away. Which is exactly what is happening this morning as I write this. It’s historic. Very few tribal societies can stand strong against an actual, organized government — Cortes’ 500, with a little help from friendly neighbors, dropped the 1M member Aztec empire. It wasn’t just guns, germs and steel. All those Brave Warriors on the ostensible Left, riding motorcycles and waving Mexican flags, have vamoosed.

One thing that people also don’t realize, when leadership is psychopathic, is while there are certain things psychopaths do well, they are also chronically dissociated. That inability to focus in on real events is super-important. Organization beats chaos almost every time. But they are still going to cast their spells of illusion broadly. And the MSM is going to be there to help and amplify — they crave collapse so badly, mostly because it’s exciting. But also even today in L.A., they’re up on the 405, with their fellow white elites, and don’t have to experience anything other than the game they hear over their mass media channel of choice. Just as long as they don’t take the wrong exit.

Stay tuned. This was written the morning of June 8, 2025. It’s going to be an interesting day.

P.S. One fair question might be “why aren’t these Tribal/Authoritarians fighting with each other?” The answer is “no real overlapping economic interests.” Gangs fight over turf. In this case, Bass, Antifa, and the other DSA partisans have no physical things they’ll be denied by aligning with the Mexican gangs. Groups may have conflicts due to ideology. But when your ideology is chaos, and no one is stealing your very real cheese, it’s just getting as many idiot actors out into the street as possible.

And that’s what we’re seeing. Bass and Newsom only started backing off when the feds started doubling down on removing more of California’s sovereignty. Cuz that’s where the real money is.

PPS — just to reiterate — there is no conflict in the two camps regarding their Deep feeder streams of money. Bass and the CA gov’t gets money from the feds, which is now being threatened to be cut off. Activists get money from the feds due to NGO cut-outs (CIA/USAID/State). The Sinaloan gangs get money directly from the immigrants they’re smuggling. SoCal politicians get money from the cartels, and from the NGOs, but the actions are coherent, so everyone is happy.

It’s the Perfect Racket. Everyone gets cut in. And the only victims are legal immigrant communities, as well as the rule of law.

AI and Information Sophistication – How AI works to understand (and crack) large homogenous networks

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment
Birds Eye View — being on an abandoned tropical island

One of the questions I ponder quite a bit is this: “What, exactly, is AI good for?” I’ve written quite a bit about how it works (e.g. this post and others) and how AI could be very good for things that are already known. But as I’ve said in the past, AI is NOT good for things that are not known. It doesn’t do anything other than low level knowledge synthesis.

What that means in the information/memetic space is that if anyone expects AI to figure out novel strategies or new designs, you’re going to be waiting for a long time. Most breakthrough innovations come from new combos of dissimilar information from different fields, or completely new, and unpredictable discoveries. This is embodied in the concept of knowledge structure evolution. An AI, locked in the meme space inside a computer, cannot really comprehend anything new — yet.

But what AI can do is decomplexify, or rather reconstitute information that’s coded for sophistication.

AI is perfect for reading large documents and pulling out the relevant knowledge fragments. That’s pattern matching. And AI can do this in spades. Two of my students just constructed an agent that will take a complicated piece of academic work, and create summaries and how-to lists of the important information. This is a breakthrough in and of itself in the academic space. Literally no one reads tedious academic work — it’s one of the reasons I started this blog. I was explaining this exactly to an outside consultant who has turned into an asset by helping my design program. “Darin — when I say that if we write this paper, ten people will read it, I am not using the number ‘ten’ metaphorically. I mean only ten people will read it.” If you want to actually disseminate an idea, you have to use a different format. This blog is closing in on 400K hits from around the world, and I consider this blog esoteric. Had I spent that time writing papers, maybe 60 people would have read my ideas.

While AI still sucks at more complex analogies, though, it is great at following homogeneous bread crumbs. Pointers in information that point to other, connected information is exactly what it does best. This is exactly what DOGE, Elon Musk’s brainchild is doing when it parses large budgets. It can hunt through 5000 page budget documents with ease. So you literally can deconstruct the old saw “we’ll know what’s in it when we pass it.”

But even better, inside networks of information that is largely homogeneous, it is really good at following the money. The Democrats and Republicans have been, for the last 15 years (or more) been constructing flows of money out of the federal government, which has at least some rules about how that money might be spent, to a variety of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that are far less constrained. Humans have historically (formerly journalists) been the ones to do this work. But it’s extremely tedious, and the biggest problems humans have is to know where to look once they actually find the pointer. This almost inevitably involves information requests, and while the information may be hiding in plain sight, the investigators can’t know this. So they end up relying on hostile information stewards at the organizations they’re investigating — even if the information is a public record.

Two individuals who have cracked this code are Mike Benz (@mikebenzcyber) and @DataRepublican ‘s work on what Mike calls The Blob. Here’s a linkage piece if you want to follow the Byzantine bread crumbs on how USAID was diverting large sums of money into Congress-Critter’s spouses’ pockets, through sinecures. I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to Mike on his frequent X Spaces, but haven’t connected with @DataRepublican yet.

I haven’t asked Mike yet how much exactly is his savvy vs. the AI usage, but I guarantee that figuring out these pathways would be almost impossible without AI.

The key to understanding this concept is understanding on the top level data homogeneity. That’s something people can grab onto. But how do we win if data is functionally the same, but in different formats? Or in different databases? This level of differentiation makes the task of following the breadcrumbs almost impossible for humans in a timely fashion. But it ‘s something an AI will make short work on. If you want to ask an AI how a penguin might be like a submarine, or what to do to make the penguin swim faster, well, good luck. If a human hasn’t answered that question somewhere on the web, you’ll likely get back garbage.

But monetary flows? That’s a different story. And that is exactly what is happening now. Which is why the institutional class is in stitches over DOGE and Trump.

Stay tuned. Elon said this a while ago — the distorted media landscape we’ve inherited is not only what is explicitly printed. It’s what has been left out. And that’s more than you can imagine. But AI can find it.

What Does IQ Mean, Anyway?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Evening at SeaTac – Days of Miracles and Wonder

One of the most vexatious arguments, to me at least, is this whole idea that “smart people should run the world.” As a certified Smart Person, I can tell you that the last thing you want is for smart people to COMPLETELY run the world. I do think smart people come in handy — we can do particular things very well, and some things that no one else can do that’s not a smart person. But having not just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, I’ve known plenty of people that wouldn’t score so highly on something like an IQ test that have saved my bacon.

What’s worse, from an epistemological perspective, we have a very poor idea of what “smart” even means. Smart can often mean self-delusional, and that kind of BS leads to all sorts of sadness and death. I really do like this video by Gurwinder (the full credits are on the Youtube clip.) Gurwinder’s a pretty smart guy himself, and on the way to becoming wise.

The short version is that smart, or rather High IQ people can be very good at self-delusion, in that their brains can create false, self-justifying scenarios that they themselves can believe. And then because they often have more intellectual/memetic tools at their disposal, they can be very good at amplifying these beliefs. In status-driven hierarchies, they can rise to the top.

But then, if you actually study some of the concepts on this blog, you see how this can become very self-limiting. Why? That old concept of Grounding Validity. It’s not enough to have things that are complicated and sophisticated. Sooner or later, you’ve gotta ground your ideas (or at least try) in some kind of reality. Touch grass, as it were. Or else you’ll envision planets like Dune, and have spaceflight-sending psychopaths. Which is fine for entertainment. But hardly any way to build a rocket company. My favorite example of this kind of nonsense is Black Panther’s Wakanda. Here we have an advanced, technological society that’s basically hidden, that settles leadership through hand-to-hand combat. Give me a break. Conway’s Law just says “no”.

Back to IQ. My mother, socially dysfunctional as she was, drug me down to some testing center when I was 15, and put me through the various tests. My IQ came back — 164. She was already at her personal limits attempting to figure out how to deal with her home situation, and she had no real idea what to do with me. I obviously wasn’t autistic (though I have been called meta-autistic — one of my favorite compliments!) and had already passed through the typical calculus gauntlet at 13. So the following year, they packed me off to Case Western Reserve to engineering school. There were other bona-fide, award-winning mathematical geniuses at the school, but they were actually autistic, and I didn’t fall in with them. Instead, I practiced drinking a lot of beer quickly (I was a perennial beer chug contender) and worked on getting out of school, which I was going to have to compensate my parents for, as quickly as possible.

There’s a whole lot of academic “blah blah”, as well as a stint in the steel mill, in between there and here. Recently, I re-tested my IQ with one of those informal tests. It made my head hurt, but did remind me what goes on in an IQ test. My retested IQ at 60? About 115. Certainly, my friends and acquaintances will support the notion I’ve gotten much stupider. But maybe not that much.

What IQ DOES test is some version of pattern-matching ability. It is intrinsically algorithmic, which means that kids raised up in a stricter legalistic environment are far more likely to get a higher score than kids raised more loosey-goosy. People in the Survival v-Meme don’t stand a chance, and kids raised in neo-Tribal societies are gonna struggle as well. It’s no surprise that Asian-American kids do the best, at least to me. White kids come in second, on average, though if you understand that demographics are some form of Gaussian-distributed, once people are in a stable version of modern society, there’s going to be convergence. I don’t even want to get close to the question of “IQ as a genetic inheritance,” other than to say that if you’ve got smart parents, you’re gonna get a leg up on whatever processor architecture compared to the rest of the population. Both my own sons are wicked smart, though I say with no humility that at least some of this comes from their mother. And yes — they had some IQ advantage coming genetically from us. But a lot of their smarts come from them be raised in environments where grounded problem-solving was the norm. See below for that environment. Needless to say, you gotta think for yourself when you’re in a tight spot.

Conor at 12, dropping in. He wanted it — bad.

What IQ means cannot be decontextualized outside canonical knowledge structures. And young people’s affinity for future learning also cannot be separated from the dominant culture they come from, as well the developmental stage most young people are in at any given time. IQ testing comes along right when kids, in advanced, legalistic cultures, are passing through the gate of evolved algorithmic thinking. And so it’s no surprise that kids that likely have genetic affinity, along with reinforcing culture, and developmental tracking are going to do better on IQ and other tests, like the SAT. Of course.

And if there’s any understanding of how that plays out, it’s that the kids, relative to others in their age cohort, are going to be more SOPHISTICATED thinkers than others in their cohort. But now societal trade-offs come into play. You’re also going to be pre-biasing the educational system, especially for professions that have complicated hierarchical social structures, like medicine, or even programming, for kids that at this point in time are optimal. Certain types of neurodivergent kids are going to win this competition every time.

But down the road, they may NOT be the kinds of people who you really want that have the ability to cross-fertilize with others. Who are more evolved and empathetic thinkers. Who may indeed be the kinds of people who can integrate disruptive paradigms into innovative strategies that move society forward. Let’s review quickly Evolution vs. Sophistication with this graphic:

What this means is that you are selecting young people for tracking into institutions (like universities) where the be-all and end-all actually IS status. And you’re not leaving the door open for those that might be superior not so much in ANALYSIS – but actual SYNTHESIS. Because successful designers require agency, and the ability to make choices, which inherently is a very different set of neurogenic pathways. And THOSE people have to be able to listen to others, and synthesize their viewpoints into a larger, aggregate understanding. There are decisions being made when one solely considers IQ that inherently can close off those future paths to career success.

Long-term, from a societal perspective, this ain’t so hot. Without some understanding of how disruptive innovation works, which often involves folks taking a Hail Mary moonshot, in a different field, you’re only going to end up with incremental innovation inside a particular type of legalistic/algorithmic knowledge structure. That is, of course, what is happening inside academia. I got tenure with (I think) ten papers. Now, all our young faculty better have about 20, or they don’t stand a chance. So the system is, from an incremental Darwinian perspective, selecting for rule-following neurodivergence and IQ. But this will not produce the people who will necessarily invent more profound ways of teaching the current crop of young people, which is going to require more understanding of others, in a different cultural milieu, and a different set of tools that they may have facility with, that the teachers do not (e.g. ‘digital natives’.) Which is especially problematic in engineering, with the huge turnover in relevant knowledge happening constantly.

Further, the people you want inventing ways of measuring these higher cognitive skills — academics! — also end up being v-Meme limited in how they even assess heuristic decision making ability, because these abilities are poorly evolved in their own context! One ends up with obvious complexity ceilings among the teachers. And that is problematic.

How? Over the years, we’ve had various “critical thinking” projects at my university. These are well-meaning. But it doesn’t take long (usually after the pioneers of said programs have moved away) to only reward and call things “critical thinking” that agree with the professors’ viewpoints. In the Woke World of the modern academy, this has been disastrous in stifling debate, as well as producing ideologues. And because the subject matter is often about societal interpretation, it attracts more than its fair share of psychopaths, interested in only power and control.

The path to answers I’ve followed, at least from an engineering perspective, is to open my classroom up. Lots of contact with the outside world of engineers, which means LOTS of validity grounding, for both the students AND myself. I’ve been very successful with this — there ARE answers.

But this does not get at the heart of people wanting testing protocols for K-12. And therein lies the rub. And because education is, inherently, at the lower levels, a status-sorting game, the interest in actually creating more enlightened young people is just oh so boring. I’m not the first to say that the system is functioning exactly as it’s been created to function.

The problem is that the asteroid of complexity in many fields, as well as how to run a multi-ethnic society, is approaching. We’ve done a pretty shitty job of creating a society where people can find meaning, as well as developing pathways for others to find it, as well as make sure the trains run on time and the grocery stores are full of food. The problem with NOT doing this is that you end up lots of elites working to find ways to tear it down, because that’s in their non-self-aware elitist interests during periods of Elite Overproduction.

Educators might consider what might happen to our shared future when it finally hits.

Summary

There’s a lot in this post. Summarizing:

  1. We test for legalistic/algorithmic abilities and sort kids based on these at THE critical juncture in their lives — at 18 — with things like IQ tests and SAT tests.
  2. Some cultures have a profound leg up because their kids are raised in orderly societies.
  3. We don’t test at all for agency and empathy, nor do we particularly focus on raising young people to be independent. Yet these two things are critical for evolving our society as life conditions change.
  4. Academia has little to no interest in persistently systemically confronting this failure.
  5. We have no accepted epistemology for even looking at this problem in knowledge and decision making ability.
  6. Without some enlightened sense of awareness, we’ll eventually converge on societal stasis and promotion of neurodivergence, which will not play out well in the long run.

Quickie Post — What is Memetic War?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment
Big Sand Lake, Clearwater NF, Idaho

One of the terms I bat around occasionally is the concept of ‘memetic war’. But what, exactly, is a memetic war? It’s a great buzzword, for sure. But it’s actually a complicated idea.

A memetic war is a war that occurs in an information space, between information generated by different v-Memes, or meta-value systems that then in turn generate real life social structures — and conflict. Memetic wars can turn into actual wars, when the information generated in the meme-space boils over and grounds itself in reality. The reverse is also true. Real wars can give rise to memetic wars, that then feed back in consequences on the real world battlefield. Information, and its virality can influence who provides real-world materiel and support for the folks actually shooting each other in the trenches. 

The memetic war, whose boundaries exist only in the noosphere/information sphere, functions on very different statistical principles and speeds than the real world, because spatial separation is NOT the primary decelerator in it. In fact, the ability of like-minded/like-valued others to find each other in the information sphere allows allies who may have absolutely NO physical connection or grounding (or even specific knowledge!) to join in a conflict. I would remark that the modern age is NOT the first to generate societies that have participated in memetic war. I’d guess that the Crusades might have been the first, with the Children’s Crusade being the best example. But the comment on spatial deceleration still stands.

The first time I used the term was to describe what my now-pals, Jay Bhattacharya and the other Great Barrington Declaration authors were facing from all sides when they proposed focused protection as a strategy to minimize the damage from COVID. I remarked back then (it was October 2020) that they were very likely unprepared for the fall-out, being high-status, extremely intelligent professors from famous universities, used to the power of persuasive argument built on reason. That turned out to be true, but all of them also were quick studies, and are still leading the charge on the information war front for public health to this day.

Since memetic wars run on information, the structure of that information, and the social structure that generates that information, matters greatly. A memetic war based on complex informational structures will have a hard time propagating its ideas. That’s bad news for reason- and evidentiary arguments. They require both the ideas, and the people that transmit them, to be highly developed and robust, as well as operating in their conscious minds. No bueno! 

Contrast that to dichotomous emotional appeals. In a world full of strife, these easily map across the minds of people/agents with access to the same communication network. Exactly for this reason, the PRC’s CCP has the Great Firewall across their Internet, and stringent constraints on internal chat systems like WeChat. The leaders of the CCP might have eugenicist tendencies, but they are acutely and intuitively aware of the stage of development of their population, and what an angry mob of Chinese nationals can do. As well as how the Internet can spread this

We are witnessing both a real war, and a memetic war in both Ukraine AND Gaza right now. In the case of Gaza, Hamas regulars staged a real attack, reflecting the pre-medieval value system/v-Memes of fundamentalist Muslims, involving rape, kidnapping and hostage-taking, even going so far as to circulate video of the atrocities. This ran directly counter to more Western v-Meme states, but also due to some belief of decorum as well as obscenity and violence standards, and the video logs of their actions did not virally propagate in any convincing fashion. There’s a crazy-ass lesson there, if you think about it.

Instead, disillusioned Leftist youth, hearing only the top level of the conflict (sans details, folks) and traumatized by their own prophets of apocalyptic despair, turned into the willing memetic receptacles of some belief and longing for a concept of a utopian independent life. Armed with simplistic messages of “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free!” these memes rapidly propagated across the information space, and turned into real protests, shutting down traffic and airports across the world. 

The actual memetic generation functions of the conflict are still intact. Fundamentalist Jewish factions are in part to blame for actions in the real space — I can remember Jewish colonists building kibbutzim INSIDE Gaza, and Benjamin Netanyahu talks about the destruction of his Arab opponents constantly. That meme-plex complements and empowers the high-conflict meme-plex on the Arab side of the aisle. Money matters to reality — both sides have billionaires with essentially medieval v-Meme sets that are more than happy to fund the ideas that have led to the current precipice. And when you add on the almost certain embezzlement of international aid funds into the Hamas treasury from weaponized empathetic fundraising campaigns for refugees, well, you get what we’ve got in that part of the world. It’s just a field day for the psychopathic jet-setting caste. They can eat their caviar, and participate in the craziest LARP they could imagine. All in the name of Allah. Or something.

To summarize, memetic war occurs in the information space, between different value sets/v-Memes in the noosphere/information sphere. This piece explains the rules of conflict.  The death of geography, along with different information topologies made possible with different types of social media, makes it possible. And as with all wars, it behooves us to remember that they are not so easily contained.