Maybe Everything is Hit & Trial
You're wrong, and that's perfect
Pardon me as I work through how to best present my ideas, as this is one of my first attempts at expressing them.
In the fall of 2025 I tweeted, “as I’m learning more about life, I’m becoming increasingly unsure about my every action, how do you not do that?” I had slowly realized that I live my life under a lot of implicit assumptions. I take decisions, and a lot of them work out, but a lot of my worldview also hinders my growth, and makes me pass judgements I could have avoided. So I’ve embarked on a journey to find my method (sup decartes), and I’ll be writing essays as I go on it, hoping to attract distinct perspectives as well.
My decisions come from my worldview, from my biases, and those are formed by ideas, ideas I’ve had on my own, and ideas that have spread to me through the society I’m a part of. So how do I gain control over those ideas? Maybe ideas are nothing but organisms, part of a greater system, the same way I am.
Genes…?
Darwinism is a fascinating thing, and I’ve come to believe that a kind of universal Darwinism can be used to make sense of a lot of how observable systems work, including the universe itself. Let me dive into a few systems as examples of how Darwinism shows up in each of them, and how all of them seem to correlate back to the same underlying mechanism.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Darwinism, it’s the most accepted explanation for the evolution of life on earth. Variation occurs, some selection mechanism creates pressure, and some of the variations survive while others don’t, and this repeats, over and over, which explains the life we see today. As the system itself changes, the selection pressure changes with it, and so the kind of variation that survives changes too.
Let’s take horses. Around fifty-six million years ago, during a burst of intense global warming we now call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, an early horse called Sifrhippus actually shrank, by about thirty percent, down to the size of a housecat, over roughly a hundred and thirty thousand years, and then grew back as the planet cooled. Smaller bodies shed heat more efficiently, so during that warm stretch the smaller variants out-survived the larger ones, the lineage’s size drifted down, and about a third of mammal species shrank in that same window. Nothing about being small is “better” in any absolute sense, it was only better for that pressure, in that era, and when it cooled the larger ones were favoured again and the size drifted back up.
I’m guessing global warming is going to help short kings out.
Which is why I feel “survival of the fittest” is a bit of a misconception. “Fittest” makes it sound like there’s some variation that is simply the best, but there isn’t. No variation is better or worse on its own, outside of a context, it’s the selection pressure that decides which one survives, and that pressure is itself always shifting.
The system applying that pressure is itself just a node inside a larger system. Earth sits inside a solar system, which sits inside a galaxy, which sits inside the universe, and each larger system generates its own variations, solar systems, galaxies, and applies its own selection pressure, where some nodes persist and others don’t. I want to be careful here, I’m not saying our solar system, or a planet with intelligent life on it, is somehow “better.” It might even be worse, intelligent life might make a system less likely to survive whatever the greater universe is selecting for. The point is only that the same shape, variation and selection, seems to repeat at every level I look.
There is the selection pressure of the larger system I’m a node inside of, the one pressing down on me from above, where I, the variation, either perish or prosper. But I’m also a system with my own selection pressure, the one I apply from the inside to my own ideas, ideas that I choose to keep and create variations of, and ideas that die off. The selection process, together with how much variation I generate in the first place, is what I’d call my method. So the pressure from above is the environment I’m trying to survive, and my method is the variation I throw out plus the pressure I put on it myself, and those two are the only knobs I hold.
Memes are organisms?
Ideas themselves, the ones I generate and the ones handed down to me, behave like organisms too. This is roughly what memetic theory suggests, that ideas behave like the variations in Darwinism, they get spawned, they spread, they mutate, and the selection pressure is us, our societies and their philosophy and beliefs. Good ideas spread further, they get reshaped over time, keeping the traits we respond to and shedding the ones we don’t, and the versions we don’t like simply don’t get passed on. And just like before, the ideas themselves aren’t good or bad in any absolute way, it’s us calling them good or bad that does the selecting.
You can watch this happen across the history of science, where ideas evolved to be the ideas that we currently accept. Take the model of the “heavens”. Ptolemy, around the second century, placed the earth at the centre and had the planets ride on little circles upon circles, and remarkably it worked, it predicted the sky well enough to survive for around fourteen hundred years. Copernicus moved the sun to the centre, but he kept the circles, and his model wasn’t really any more accurate, it was just a different conjecture. Then Kepler, working with Tycho Brahe’s painfully precise measurements (Tycho Brahe’s tables were a statistician’s dream), found that the orbit of Mars disagreed with a perfect circle by about eight arcminutes, as he trusted the data over the better sounding idea of circles, it gave us ellipses. Newton then explained why the ellipses were there at all, with gravity, until a small leftover wobble in Mercury’s orbit, forty-three arcseconds a century that nobody could account for, was then explained by Einstein. Each model was good and was the reason why the better model eventually came, all ideas that were children of their predecessors.
The same story played out with the atom, Dalton’s solid little ball became Thomson’s pudding model, became Rutherford’s tiny dense nucleus, became the fuzzy cloud of probability we draw today (i still have trauma from the wave function…). The same can be observed in society, Marx’s socialism transformed into social democracy, the liberal faith in free individuals and free markets became capitalism, and today you find social democracies running both at once, generous welfare states funded by thoroughly capitalist markets. None of them arrived finished, they were all conjectures that got reshaped, split, and recombined as the pressures around them shifted.
But not every system has a method that makes this phenomenon recur. Some societies, some methods, effectively kill the idea engine off. Sparta was built around a single rigid design, the whole society pointed at one thing, producing soldiers, and didn’t entertain conjectures, new ideas, art or any sort of debate. Spartans believed that their way of life was perfect, thus there was no need to improve upon it. The Spartan idea system generated almost no new variation, it had little philosophy, little art, little trade, little room for a strange new idea to survive, so when the pressures around it shifted it had nothing new to reach for, and it ossified, while a messier, noisier, far more generative Athens produced the philosophy and art and ideas we still carry today, the ideas that lived on.
Something similar happened with what’s called the Dark Ages in Europe (I would prefer if we call it the Western Dark Ages, cause during that time the Middle East was having a golden age and gave the world al-jabr, which you know and love as algebra). After Rome fell, for a long stretch of time inquiry was suppressed and the dominant ideas were ones that spread by demanding obedience rather than by surviving scrutiny. David Deutsch talks about this in his book, he calls them rational and anti-rational memes, a rational meme is an idea that replicates because it holds up when you examine it, like our theory of gravity, and an anti-rational meme is one that replicates precisely by disabling your ability to question it. A society running on anti-rational memes can look stable for a very long time, but it has quietly switched off its own error-correction, and the knowledge of that era didn’t so much advance as wait, much of it kept alive and pushed forward elsewhere, in the Islamic world especially, until it eventually flowed back and they had to change their selection pressure.
Maybe the whole Universe?
The same might be happening at the scale of universes. The physicist Lee Smolin proposed that universes might reproduce, that every black hole could give birth to a baby universe, with slightly different physical constants each time, a small mutation. The universes that happen to produce more black holes end up with more offspring, so over time the whole population of universes drifts towards the ones that are good at making black holes. So whichever universe has the favourable trait of spawning more baby universes would win.
From here I’m going to take Smolin’s idea and run somewhere with it (this is a lot of speculation). I keep wondering whether a universe with intelligent life in it, life that grows into cosmologists and astrophysicists, might eventually learn to make black holes of its own, and tune the physics of the universes inside them towards conditions even friendlier to life and intelligence. If that were true, then intelligence stops being a side-effect and becomes the universe’s way of reproducing, and a universe that reproduces through its intelligent life would spread its physics further than one that just waits for stars to collapse. It would follow the same logic as an idea that spreads further than its rivals, and so survives.
A Method
So if all of this holds, then the thing that actually matters is the method, how a system generates its variation and how it selects, and whether that selection can itself keep evolving. A healthy system throws off plenty of variation and applies its own selection pressure, good enough to keep what helps it survive, but I think the generating, the throwing of more variation into the world, is the part we overlook.
A system that only ever produces the same safe variations, or whose selection pressure stays frozen and never adjusts to the larger system it lives in, can be successful for a while, and then perish the moment the world shifts even slightly. And the world always shifts, nothing holds still, the environment never stops changing, and a method that can’t change with it will eventually find itself mismatched and die, entropy always brings change, so change is the only constant.
Which is why I’ve started to understand the importance of diversity in people, ideas and cultures, and a tolerance for the weird, the whacky, the absurd, because a closed system snuffs out those strange variations far earlier than it should, and they’re exactly the ones that would have flourished once the selection pressure changed.
So here is part of my method I think I’ve found, at least its first rough version, knowing it will change. My mistakes, my bad ideas, are important, I shouldn’t be trying to filter them at the source. What needs to be fine-tuned is the selection. If I stop sharing, and throwing out the ideas I have, if I confine myself to only what I already believe to be true, my system stops evolving, and it falls behind. I need to keep generating, be receptive to new and strange ideas, and at the same time apply a ruthless, honest selection pressure of my own over them, so that what survives in me keeps moving in a direction that actually helps me prosper in the larger system I live in, and the same can be applied to a society that wants to prosper.
And maybe that’s the beginning of an answer to the tweet I started with. The reason I felt unsure of my every action is that I was trying to never be wrong. But I don’t need to be right about each action, I need a good method, and I need to keep taking the shots, because a good method with enough attempts will find its way there, while a perfect aim that never fires will not.
All of this was inspired by things I’ve been recently reading, mostly David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity and Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, with Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins. So take all of it as conjecture, and please apply your selection pressure to it.