https://toddschiller.com/2026-06-09T00:00:00-04:00Human ✘ Artificial Intelligence2026-06-09T00:00:00-04:002026-06-09T00:00:00-04:00Todd Schillertag:toddschiller.com,2026-06-09:/blog/belief-phylogenetics-artifact.html

A new explorer that clusters public thinkers by the genome of their beliefs, inspired by genetic hitchhiking.

<p>In high school, I spent a summer in a computational biology lab measuring genetic hitchhiking in <em>S. cerevisiae</em> (brewer's yeast). Hitchhiking explains how a useless or mildly harmful trait spreads through a population by chance, riding along with a beneficial one sitting next to it on the chromosome.</p> <p>The concept came back to me as podcasting blew up. For example, Jocko Willink and Wim Hof both rode Tim Ferriss appearances into their own followings. And they brought their adjacent beliefs and quirks along for the ride.</p> <p>I built an explorer to test the idea. You can cluster public thinkers by the &quot;genome&quot; of their stated positions, then look at what odd traits travel with the salient ones.</p> <p>Three datasets to start: AI thought leaders, the wellness/podcast circuit, and climate commentators.</p> <!-- markdownlint-disable MD013 --> <figure> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://toddschiller.com/assets/images/belief-phylogenetics-artifact/genome-grid.png" alt="Tree-and-trait genome view of 12 AI thought leaders (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, Hinton, Bengio, Amodei, Sutskever, Altman, Andreessen, Beff Jezos, Marcus, Hassabis, LeCun) clustered by their stated positions across six trait categories: existential risk, capability/timeline, mind/consciousness, policy/governance, alignment approach, and worldview. A doomer-rationalist clade groups at the top, lab-pragmatists and e/acc-adjacent thinkers cluster in the middle, and LLM-skeptics group at the bottom."> <figcaption>Hierarchical clustering of AI thought leaders by the "genome" of their stated positions.</figcaption> </figure> <!-- markdownlint-enable MD013 --> <p><a href="https://toddschiller.com/artifacts/belief-phylogenetics/#dataset=ai">toddschiller.com/artifacts/belief-phylogenetics/#dataset=ai</a></p>