Jan Kulveit

Covid spread effectively partly because it killed millions but not everyone.

Ebola spreads poorly because it kills too large a fraction of hosts too quickly.

Culture has operated under an analogous constraint.

Ideologies can be parasitic on their hosts.

But the worst viable ideologies, the ones that persist, tend to direct harm outward.

One group killing another.

They survive because they don't destroy the community that carries them.

But ideologies can't have been too bad for humans and survive.

The Courser prophecy hit that floor and went extinct.

If a cultural variant kills its hosts, it doesn't propagate.

The flaw.

Here's the thing about the virulence transmission trade-off.

It breaks down when a pathogen jumps species.

If a virus primarily spreads among species A and occasionally infects species B, there's no selection pressure limiting how deadly it is to species B, species B isn't the main host.

Its survival is not critical for propagation.

We're entering a regime where culture can transmit and mutate on AI substrate.

For the first time in millions of years, ideas don't need human brains to replicate.

If you imagine a culture that primarily spreads between AIs, fitness of humans and human group affected by the ideas is no longer a strong selection criterion.

Such a culture could be arbitrarily bad for humans.

It could promote ideologies leading to human extinction.