Information Storage & Communication

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Claim · condensed

   Connecting the dots between information, energy, and how information flows through a system explains why the fiat system operates the way it does now, and shows it can be no other way than what is currently happening, given how the system is built out and how information flows through it.

2. 00:36Claim · condensed

   The current state of the extended order can be understood more accurately by understanding its information flow: information is energy, energy is the ultimate goal, and information about the state of reality decreases entropy, which increases the hive mind's ability to extract energy from the environment.

3. 01:19Idea

   We can start at the very base of the tech stack that the entire hive mind operates, the entire being that is the extended order, this group of complex organisms that itself forms once it's reached an information threshold that it can no longer process; it creates a new level of life to take advantage of the energy reserves that it now has access to.

4. 01:54Claim

   To maximize efficiency, humans have developed a network that communicates and specializes so it can transform more energy than would otherwise be possible; the further specialization goes, the more nodes have to communicate with one another to take advantage of what that specialization can do for energy transformation.

5. 02:58Quote

   Why would we misallocate information or why would we sorry, misallocate energy to verify what has already been proven.

6. 03:36Claim · condensed

   Extracting more energy from the system depends on new information actually coming in; finding the same information again doesn't add anything to the total picture of the state of the environment.

7. 04:07Claim · condensed

   DNA is the lowest-velocity information storage system: it is information code for building systems that are efficient energy transformers given the constraints of the local environment, and the sequence expressed tells future iterations how to best survive so they don't have to waste energy guessing.

8. 04:07Quote

   DNA is just information code to build systems that are efficient energy transformers.

9. 04:47Claim · condensed

   Storing information in DNA itself costs energy, and the extended order cannot yet directly manipulate that information because doing so is difficult and energy intensive, so for now communication of information across space and time happens through DNA.

10. 05:23Claim · condensed

    DNA is the slowest of these information storage methods, which limits its usefulness as innovation speeds up: as efficiency picks up faster and faster, DNA's leverage for making an organism efficient in a given environment shrinks, and reliance shifts to other forms of communication.

11. 05:23Claim · condensed

    A step up from DNA, information is stored in the nervous system and the brain, and shared with others via language.

12. 05:57Claim · condensed

    Nervous-system storage is incredibly important for an individual's own energy transformations, but it is the form of information storage with the smallest time impact and the most limited reach: when the individual dies and the system shuts down, that personal storage is gone and worthless to the extended order.

13. 05:57Quote

    When you die and your system shuts down, your personal storage is gone. It is worthless to the extended order.

14. 06:27Claim · condensed

    Language lets the brain's information be communicated to others so ideas can improve the efficiency of the transformations around it; because a brain's processing bandwidth is limited to the size of the skull it's in, communication lets an individual outsource some of that information processing to get a better read on the true environment.

15. 06:27Quote

    They're only as big as the skull that you're going to put them in.

16. 07:40Claim · condensed

    The third method is storing energy at the network level, which requires language but also leverages technologies like the written word or math; here communication becomes one to many, because information can live on without depending on the biological body continuing to push back entropy to exist.

17. 07:40Quote

    You can write something down, you can die and it can live on. The energy is transformed once.

18. 08:12Claim · condensed

    Network-level storage is significantly more efficient at facilitating information exchange, which is energy exchange, because it removes friction from the equation; the faster this happens, the quicker efficiency picks up, which is visible now in online learning replacing the old model of in-person instruction.

19. 08:58Prediction · condensed

    The best and brightest ideas should be the ones that filter to the top and disseminate throughout society, while the other 999 professors, operating at a suboptimal level and giving students information with more noise and less signal, are pulling energy from the system that could be more efficiently allocated elsewhere.

20. 09:31Prediction · condensed

    Because technology has made the old, one-to-one way of sharing information redundant, the faster society recognizes an information role has become unnecessary, the quicker those energy resources can be reallocated to somewhere that transforms more energy than it consumes.

21. 10:03Claim · condensed

    The higher the signal-to-noise quality, the more beneficial it is, in terms of energy transformation, for scarce resources to be allocated efficiently; the system is operating at a suboptimal level not because alternatives don't exist, but because information needs to disperse far enough for the gains to become visible.

22. 10:03Quote

    We are operating at a, at a suboptimal level at the moment, but not because alternatives don't exist, right?

23. 10:38Idea · condensed

    Culture, in the extended order, is the storage of information at the network level rather than the individual level, the total pool of information inside the system; social behavior is information sharing, and there is a real benefit to that, because it lowers entropy by putting more information into the system as a whole.

24. 11:09Claim · condensed

    Information by itself does no good; it needs processing, and at the individual level that processing happens in the brain, which shows how much energy processing requires once the same idea is scaled up to the network level.

25. 11:40Claim · condensed

    According to the papers he worked from, the brain is roughly 2 percent of body weight but consumes 20 percent of energy; if it wasn't efficient to process and store information this way, the brain would not have evolved to the extent that it has.

26. 11:40Quote

    The brain is 2%, roughly 2% of body weight, but 20% of energy consumption.

27. 12:13Claim · condensed

    Every energy allocation to information processing takes energy away from other things the body would otherwise build, like giant legs or arms; a brain that consumes 20 percent of available energy would be a huge vulnerability unless it made the organism correspondingly more efficient at transforming energy in its environment.

28. 12:48Analogy · condensed

    The common trope of extraterrestrial beings with larger heads and smaller, slighter bodies with less need for muscle reflects, from an evolutionary standpoint, energy being funneled into information processing, which is very energy intensive, robbing it from areas that are no longer as necessary or efficient.

29. 13:51Claim

    The extended order has built up a tremendous amount of energy and information, and that information needs to be processed to tell us what the environment we are operating in actually looks like.

30. 13:51Claim · condensed

    Processing naturally takes place where information gathers, because it takes less energy to accumulate information that is already concentrated at a crossroads where it travels back and forth; technological limitations at the time meant certain entities ended up with access to more information than others.

31. 14:25Claim · condensed

    Centralized governments, the most representative example being the US government, have more information than everyone else today because centralization was the most efficient system available and out-competed systems that didn't have such an entity involved; as government extends into every part of the economy it supports, it gains access to more and more information.

32. 14:25Reference

    Who has the most information in the world today? Well, it's centralized governments, right? The most representative example being the US government.

33. 15:06Claim · condensed

    Processing a tremendous amount of information requires a tremendous amount of energy and, like the brain to a body, creates a single point of failure; an information-processing center is fantastic in times of abundant energy but becomes parasitical to the whole when resources are constrained.

34. 15:06Analogy · condensed

    Like the brain to a body, the information-processing center creates a single point of failure: fine when energy is abundant, parasitical to the whole when resources are constrained.

35. 15:54Prediction · condensed

    The worse the squeeze on energy gets, the harder the processing center that controls and processes information will clamp down on its own supply to stay functional, at the cost of everyone else in the system, and this is exactly the process now playing out with the legacy system.

36. 16:29Claim · condensed

    The centralized-government processing model won out simply because it was the most efficient system at the time and had no rival that could out-compete it, as information built up across DNA, the nervous system, language, writing and math faster than any single entity could process.

37. 17:15Claim · condensed

    Because specialization pays off, information processing gets outsourced, and the entities that fill that role gain power over others: getting first access to information is almost like insider trading, and the more information you have, the more you can extract from the system, because entropy is lower for you than for everyone else.

38. 17:15Quote

    It's almost like insider trading, they get the first access to that information.

39. 17:50Claim · condensed

    As information grows inside a system, there are only three paths available to it: the best is to find the new energy needed to store the new information while keeping everything you had before, which is the best building block for the future because you retain access to all the old information.

40. 18:27Claim · condensed

    The second path is to eliminate old information and use the freed-up energy to store the new, the way a full hard drive or a full brain can delete old information to make room; the third path is that the system simply dies and all its information is lost. Those are the only three options available to a system of any size.

41. 18:27Analogy

    You can think about it like your computer system: if your hard drive gets completely filled up, or your brain gets completely filled up, you can delete some of the old information to make way for the new, or you can simply die.

42. 18:58Claim

    Because so much information built up in the extended order that it became too much for any one person to process, the network had to take over the processing; nodes needed reliable information about the current state of the environment, and that job was filled by governments, but a centralized system can't process and communicate information more efficiently than a decentralized one can.

43. 19:31Claim · condensed

    It's a bandwidth problem: as complexity increases, a centralized system's processing shortcomings introduce more noise into the information spread through the economy, which leads to the misallocation of energy because not all information is known, raising entropy, and this means a technological step change is necessary to communicate with more signal and less noise than a centralized government can.

44. 19:31Idea

    If a centralized system cannot process all of the information, more noise is introduced into that information as it is spread throughout the network, which will eventually lead to the misallocation of energy, because not all of the information is known, which increases entropy.

45. 20:08Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin is the system for information processing and communicating that fixes the bandwidth problem: there was no prior system for accurate communication of real information that didn't involve people, since the network of minds was running on an architecture of biological switches that were less than optimal.

46. 20:08Quote

    Bitcoin is that system for information processing and communicating.

47. 20:38Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin increases efficiency and signal quality by removing the ability for information to be tampered with; information can now be processed and relayed without any human involvement, giving pure, unadulterated signal, and as communication speed and reach improve, entropy is lowered through better information.

48. 21:09Claim · condensed

    This sets off a positive feedback loop of efficiency: a language develops around the bits moving back and forth, a system of symbols built into a language of utility that tracks where energy is most valued in the system, which out-competes the current model by orders of magnitude because there's no slippage from faulty processing, and all information is revealed to every participant.

49. 21:40Claim · condensed

    While Bitcoin emerges from this new technological advancement, the extended order appears to be trending in the opposite direction: the effectiveness of energy transformation is slowing, if not reversing, because information processing is energy intensive and will prioritize itself over other activities whenever it can.

50. 21:40Quote

    The development of energy transformation effectiveness is slowing, if not completely reversing.

51. 22:13Prediction · condensed

    Those with power will use it to ensure their own survival at the expense of those who don't have it, so the people providing the energy needed to power the processing centers will themselves run short first: the energy transformers go first, then the processing centers, and everything breaks down while inequality increases as transformers and processors move in opposite directions.

52. 22:49Claim · condensed

    It's a well-documented phenomenon that as a society's well-being deteriorates, the level of inequality increases; information-processing centers are beneficial in times of abundance, since they let you take advantage of the low-hanging fruit available.

53. 23:20Analogy · condensed

    In times of scarcity, brains, and processing centers generally, become a liability, the way cockroaches are expected to outlast humans after a nuclear war because their baseline energy needs are lower, since they process far less information.

54. 23:53Claim · condensed

    Before Bitcoin it was very difficult to get accurate information about the state of the extended order that wasn't filtered by gatekeepers; you had no way to process all of that information yourself, and a lack of information creates classes inside the hive mind that can then be exploited.

55. 24:23Prediction · condensed

    This trend will continue in the legacy system, but those who adopt Bitcoin can bypass the technological limitation: they can send and receive straight from the source of the information itself, unfiltered, pure signal, because it can be no other way given the properties that emerge from the Bitcoin code.

56. 24:54Idea

    Bitcoin creates a system that is more powerful at information processing and storage: we are offloading it to the system, whereas before we were offloading it to other individuals who just happened to call themselves the government because they were the center of information processing; every individual can now connect to every other individual, and this creates the next level of intelligent systems, which is no surprise because it is what we've seen at every level of evolution: intelligent systems must aggregate into a system that is able to process more information.

57. 25:29Claim · condensed

    As information processing speeds up and network connections multiply, the individual becomes less important and the survival of the system becomes paramount; the notable thing about Bitcoin is that it still rewards the individual, creating a relationship that is likely to persist.

58. 26:00Claim

    No one can exploit the Bitcoin system because everyone has to play by the same rules, so a crystal-clear picture of reality emerges: Bitcoin, the map is the territory, what Bitcoin says happened has to have happened in the physical world, and there is no way to fake it because it is the most expensive system there is to manipulate.

59. 26:00Quote

    Bitcoin, the map is the territory. What Bitcoin says happened has to have happened in the physical world.

60. 26:33Claim · condensed

    That is exactly where you would want to store your energy reserves, in a system that cannot be manipulated; Bitcoin protects those reserves at the local level while also making the extended order more efficient by taking information processing out of the hands of people who history shows will get corrupted and take advantage of others who lack the same information.

61. 27:05Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin gives everyone in the system access to the same signal, the same purity, because the map is the territory and you cannot fake it; that means the price of every single item becomes pure information about where energy needs to flow next.

62. 27:38Claim · condensed

    If Bitcoin represents the global reserve asset, the global reserve currency, this isn't just about the individual or reserves at the individual level, it's about the network level as a whole, which is what he means by moving up levels of intelligence and complexity of systems: the extended order is going to gather so much energy that it cannot take advantage of it without offloading the processing to a system that can do it more efficiently.

63. 28:08Quote

    That frees us up to do things that were previously inaccessible because we simply didn't have the access because we had energy reserves that were required for the processing.