I do science communication, for scientists.

• Question: When a scientist discovers something new, how do they know that someone else hasn't already discovered it?
• Answer: they don't. They only know that it is novel to their field

This was true in 1948, and is still true today.

This problem is itself a research question. "Metascience" is what Analogue calls it. I think of it as a subset of "open memetics" - the study & engineering of information networks.

"Open Memetics" is like sociology, except with large scale field experiments. It's "open" to contrast it against the field of "closed/dark" memetics (when social media companies run A/B tests on millions of humans but do not publish the results). Another difference is that "open memetics" attempts to unify psychology & sociology, as micro-memetics and macro-memetics, to find the universal laws that hold at all scales.

Marketing, propaganda, and art, can all be considered "applied memetics".

My preferred method of communication is in public (this way my answers help others, or others can correct me). You can @ me in any of the online communities I'm in, or open a GitHub issue in my personal repo here: https://github.com/OmarShehata/OmarShehata/issues.

• What is the frontier of "dark memetics"? How accurate are models of the behavior of human populations at places like Graphika, Palantir, and social media companies?
• What % of things that go mainstream are engineered vs organic?
• How do we write down & communicate the current state of the "memetic landscape"? Another word for this is "noosphere" or "space of all beliefs currently held & ideas currently alive within human minds"
• Can we evolve a culture of memetic tracing? Such that within that network, any undesired change can be traced back to its source (whether organic, or engineered)
  • If that works, in any network on earth, it may then get adopted by other networks who wish to "clean up" their memetic environment.
• Can we construct a "hotline" from every subculture on earth to every other one? Probably via some kind of middle layer

• Community Archive - what if instead of analyzing people's social media data in secret, we just asked them for it? The goal of this project was to demonstrate that people are willing to give their data freely to those they trust, and that this would enable more "invasive" kinds of analysis that wouldn't be possible by the passive surveillance done by academics or companies.
• Anatomy of an Internet Argument - a social protocol designed to normalize testing people's epistemology on the internet in a pro-social way. This is the most ambitious one because it's designed to scale up to all interactions on the internet.
• Good & Evil Words - web tool to demonstrate how LLM embeddings provide an empirical way to measure the "shape" of the memetic landscape/noosphere. A "live" version of this does not yet exist, but if it did, it would allow us to actually empirically measure cultural drift (like seeing the word "gay" become more normalized, OR more polarized). Such a measurement tool would unlock the entire field of open cultural engineering (you can actually see if your experiments work or not)