Today I had the privilege of directing the attention of 3 brilliant NYC friends over lunch.
I told them I’m now motivated to read the classics. There’s a sense in which Homer created Western civilization.
I am fundraising and so I ask myself “What do I want to do? What do I think the world needs?” And I can’t help but try to answer from first-principles.
data sovereignty
I am sensitive to injustice and so I care a lot about data sovereignty. I can’t count how many times I’ve wanted to hack a twitter feature or do some data analysis to understand my online community that gets blocked by siloed data.
There’s a sense in which attention and the data it produces is the valuable product of our metabolism as humans, so it’s only fair that we would be sovereign over that data. We could have 100x more serendipity and decentralized science. This is a practical problem I run into again and again.
The Community Archive is a shot at this. Gather data from my community, build a bunch of prototypes and research to show what would be possible if were sovereign over our data. It’s almost a rhetorical device.
At the same time, fixing data sovereignty is an act of unblocking. Removing an inefficiency. If you unblock, you get more of the overarching game you are playing.
Well you can argue capitalism is good for some things but ignores certain externalities we really care about like nature and community and beauty. So to the extent that we’d like to be playing a different top-level game, what can we say about it?
can we get a new myth from the myth store?
Do we want to design one? What do we base it on? What design principles do we follow? I say there are two things to pay attention to.
1. How does the current game work? Military empire, finance, economy, culture.
2. Top-level stories and myths, teleologies, eschatologies.
Prof. Jiang 1 has me thinking about how top level myths and prophecies and stories influence people at the highest levels of power. America is a big machine, a Gundam robot to be piloted on behalf of 300M people.
Imagine you’re a big government or military guy and. you find yourself with a lot of power, at the helm of an empire. You could do anything, you could further any vision of the world. What are you gonna do? Well you haven’t really thought about it. Not at a historical, civillizational level. But some rabbi or some bishop come along and they really have thought about it a lot.
There are stories at the scale of millennia that involve big groups of people and sacred sites and the end of the world and the second coming of Christ and these are powerful in large part because of their resonance with history and with the soul of the people listening.2
By soul, I mean something like their ontology and values. In our case it would be the worldview broadly derived from the “Western canon” like Homer, Plato, the Bible, Dante, Goethe, Catholic and Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers etc.
There’s a sense in which poets create the world. They notice patterns and tell stories that explain the world and guide action.
I’m interested in how the world was made in this sense. What stories does our worldview rest on? What is the architecture of our soul? Is it equipped to handle our modern predicaments and if not, what modules are needed and how can they best be added to what came before? Can we understand its architecture and intervene elegantly? That’s why I’m reading the classics.
one piece
I consider One Piece a modern classic. It’s an epic with thousands of characters, dozens of settings, touching on dozens of important human themes. It has been going for 30 years, is the best selling comic book of all time, touching hundreds of millions of people. Notably, One Piece extensively incorporates characters and plot points from Western and Japanese mythology and fairy tales, which works as evidence for the hypothesis that soul resonance is important for a guiding myth.
what if you just wrote it down?
Andrew asked what if I just acted like a prophet and wrote down whatever I think the story is?
I think I’ve done my best so far but want to go further. I have my theory of tpot with its core loop of post rationality and its social and technical scaffolding. Also shoutout Visa for being a total prophet.
It starts from
good online posting norms, which enable
the refinement spiritual and therapeutic traditions with good epistemics, which results in
the production of more regulated nervous systems, which lead to
more executive capacity,
all the way to flourishing communities and projects.
All supported by collective intelligence tools that support decisions, knowledge generation, and science.
I’m hoping to expand this into its own post soon. I also expressed the idea here.
I’m aware that there’s a big ??? between flourishing digital communities, and a global Golden Age + aligned AGI.
You may want to complete the picture by saying that the next step is to prototype new cyborg cultures in physical locations, supported by AI tools. And you may even argue for networking between them so they can coordinate and learn from each others’ experiments!.
My sense is that’s still not enough. I think that for a lasting golden age, we need some top-level stories to asynchronously orient around, and they need to be highly resonant with the stack of stories we’ve organized around so far, hence my focus on the classics.
I think what I want something may look like really good, historically grounded sci-fi story that paints a picture of how we go to the stars and why. Some EAs often talk about the need for positive AI visions and I just remembered I want to read Foresight Institute’s AI Pathways because they’re trying to do basically this. I’m also curious about Terra Ignota, a sci-fi utopia where humans associate in essentially values-base networks rather than land-based states.
Thanks for reading
Disclaimer: I’ve been watching a lot of Predictive History videos. Not in a naive way. In a, like, based self-aware way. I’ve caught him slipping epistemically a few times now, but he’s out here giving the most compelling, encompassing explanatory models of world history and current affairs and I respect a big picture thinker.
There’s a game-theoretic way to look at this because the most resonant story can work as a Schelling point for coordination without communication. Given a menu of possible stories the most resonant ones will be picked more often, and you can expect other people will pick them and so on.
have you played around with bluesky's data stuff at all? it does feel like old twitter, with all the stuff you can build on it