Really appreciate the prompt, I wonder if any of these examples feel juicy and concrete enough to you
1. Events like Portal, cowork spaces and conferences for people who take subjectivity seriously. Helps move along a cluster of pre-paradigmatic intuitions into a more coherent scene of research and companies. See Jhourney and jhanas for the currently most legible example, they were incubated at the Alembic, one such space.
2. Recorded interviews with people in the scene whose ideas I admire and putting them into dialogue with each other, reflects the scene back to itself and increases coherence, while letting in the general public. (we have a Portal podcast coming)
3. Collective sensemaking tools, community tools, introspective tools, which require right-hemisphere intuitions. but left-hemisphere ability to build. Stuff like community notes, or data analysis or UI things on top of twitter like Threadhelper (which I built), or companies scaling therapy modalities with AI like refract.space. See my grant proposal https://manifund.org/projects/survey-for-llm-self-knowledge-and-coordination-practices-sdlerwahem9
4. "Coaching" to help systematic ppl like rationalists and effective altruists who are near burn-out break out of left-hemisphere dominance into right-hemisphere dominance with systematic explanations of "woo" practices
5. Twitter data infra (like a public db that everyone uploads their archives to, which I'm building) and analysis tools on top of people's twitter bodies of work that allows people to summarize their insights and better interface with each other. (e.g. "tailor this explanation to person X given their archive)
6. Tiktoks and other bespoke delivery of these kinds of "systematic woo" insights to different subcultures
7. Daycare + cowork (B's idea) to enable people doing good work in the scene to settle down and deepen their families while staying connected
8. Consulting for companies wanting to integrate more metamodern philosophy, better ability to take others' perspectives, etc (my friend Roland is preparing to do this)
9. Similar to 1 but solving problems for institutional clients by organizing conferences structured with framings we provide. We make sense of a complex problem, frame it, and bring people together to engage with our story.
10. Neuro tech companies inspired by e.g. Mike Johnson's writing. I'm thinking of his recent piece "Presence neurotechnology & technology-aided direct transmission"
one thing that consistently comes up in these concrete examples is that some of them lead to confusion, and some lead to excitement & strategy (concrete enough), and this feels entirely due to framing it in a way that feels concrete and commonly recognized (to me).
Exciting, Concrete Examples (for me. also, these are exciting because they feel like something I can really hold in my hand, I'm not saying these are the "best" ideas, if implemented):
- twitter data infra. Perfect, I've used this before
- Recorded interviews with people in the scene whose ideas I admire and putting them into dialogue with each other, reflects the scene back to itself and increases coherence, while letting in the general public. (we have a Portal podcast coming). Seems awesome.
- Daycare + cowork (B's idea) to enable people doing good work in the scene to settle down and deepen their families while staying connected. AMAZING.
Some examples where I felt both, depending on the sentence:
- 1. Events like Portal, cowork spaces and conferences (YES!!) for people who take subjectivity seriously. (NO!!! idk what subjectivity actually is or what YOU SPECIFICALLY mean when you say it.) ... See Jhourney and jhanas for the currently most legible example, they were incubated at the Alembic, one such space. (YES!! SUCH A GOOD EXAMPLE!!)
- 3. Collective sensemaking tools, community tools, introspective tools (YES!!) which require right-hemisphere intuitions. but left-hemisphere ability to build. (???) Stuff like community notes, or data analysis or UI things on top of twitter like Threadhelper (which I built), or companies scaling therapy modalities with AI like refract.space (YES!!!)
Generally the pattern is like: obviously I'm an emotionally attuned person who understands spirituality. *almost* everyone is, in one way or another. We're all born with the same parts.
HOWEVER, I find it hard to get excited about things that use "woo", or "left-hemisphere", or "right-hemisphere" or "metamodern philosophy" or "systematic woo". I can literally feel my imagery and understanding of the concrete example go from like HIGH, ALIGNED, immediately to LOW, VAGUE and then back to HIGH, ALIGNED when you bring it back in with a specific institution.
Obviously over-the-top example, but Steve Jobs was a woo dude. Imagine if he tried to bring that *explicitly* into the framing of what he's doing at apple. Now it is obvious by LOOKING at apple that he DID bring in what i think you mean when you say "right-hemisphere understanding" into his products, his explanations, his interviews, his scene, and his inspiration...
But he didn't mention this to us. Maybe to his close collaborators, idk. But when he was describing his work, it seemed very important for him to focus on strong, concrete foundations of "common understanding", so that the products could stand on their own, absolved from the need to also communicate the philosophy behind them.
Threadhelper (and the similar Roam) remind me deeply of this philosophy. It's obvious that threadhelper requires a certain philosophy to be created, but i don't know what it is! I'm more curious to find out AFTER I use it, since I now love it and want more things like it in the world.
This is really great perspective Andrew, thank you! Updating towards less woo in my public discourse.
However, I feel the need for a handle to distinguish between "business as usual, optimize capitalism without questioning assumptions" and moves that potentially reframe assumptions (trivial example: maximizing shareholder value as terminal utility) for the benefit of individuals.
> I'm an emotionally attuned person who understands spirituality. *almost* everyone is, in one way or another.
This feels true but not everyone has a theory of change (from left->right brain world) and that prevents them from acting directly / supporting projects that do.
Also my story specifically is one of overriding intuition and subjective experience with rationality, and freeing myself from that. My path to impact is like a macroscopic version of that early experience for people in similar positions and institutions which usually suffer from the same problem.
Low confidence take, articulating for the first time:
Avoiding "spiritual talk" makes your more legible and therefore effective, but the tradeoff is that to "say less" you need to conform with more of the ambient assumptions. (which are biased towards objective worldviews i.e. what you get when you normalize across personal points of view)
If you're trying to talk about the frame you live in and how to change it, you may need language that sounds strange unless you define it. I could define those vague terms you pointed at, only didn't in the interest of time.
(aside: i'm really enjoying substack-as-public-square. Feels substantially different than twitter.)
I actually think I'd like MORE spiritual talk, in some sense, but less spiritual "jargon", which tends to obscure my intuition and sense of your vision.
I mean, you basically specialize in this! I want to see your unique definitions for these obscure terms IN your manifesto, IN your visions. And i want to see those definitions get simpler and simpler over time until they are both crystal clear, and easily communicated.
I think the commonly used spiritual terms are, even among friends, weak pointers to phenomenon at best. There is a sense of directionlessness (for me) when they are used to get me "onboard" with a project (as a manifesto intends).
For instance, speaking for myself: "I would like to increase the right-brain strength and ability to integrate woo into the tech industry in NYC."
We're friends, so I'm sure you agree this is a good idea because you trust me, in some sense, but there is NO WAY you understand what I actually mean here. There's just way too large of a query surface; I could mean any of 1000 things. Maybe this is good in some sense, but I think I can do better for you (and thus achieve the goal more effectively).
Better would be: I could use help building a tech scene like the one at Xerox Parc -- where researchers lived in a beautiful environment, took long walks, and passed around insights from diverse topics like McLuhan, stageplay, cellular biology, Hannah Arendt, Piaget, Joseph Campbell, Montessori, Christopher Alexander, Feynman, Tufte the Federalist Papers (among many other sources) to build new metaphors for computing media. In our era, we would be passing around insights like the ones YOU uncover, as well as those from past eras.
I want to see Xiq's unadulterated thoughts, yes. If the way those thoughts come out is referring to overloaded terms, like "woo", I'd love to read them, because I do want your thoughts first and foremost.
But as to future iterations of your manifesto, I'd love to see my friends move away from terms like that and move toward visions that I can place myself in; stories that feel as real as sci-fi and as intense as history. I want to be able to hear, see, taste, touch your spirituality, rather than just think about it with you.
I agree the language might sound strange, but I don't care! Strange is good; i just want it to be real and evocative.
(as an aside: I think definitions are really helpful, yea, and often worth doing somewhere on the internet so pedants like me can quickly be dismissed with a "see my 'Xiq's Glossary of Terms' essay for definitions then re-comment")
this paints a delightful venn diagram! The combination of harmonisation between parts of the holon via communication, broadly, PLUS applying security mindset, in particular. Godspeed.
Love it. The piece is quite theoretical, and I'd love for it to be grounded in something as real as stone.
What are 5-10 concrete examples of your work, when it is in action? (as you imagine it)
Perhaps along the lines of:
A startup that profits, producing X, while every employee and customer is deeply happy (?)
A YouTube video animating the analogy of free energy minimization across scales
A weekly club that meets to practice X, ultimately leading to Y
A research paper that will be read by X and critiqued by Y, and will ultimately be useful to the work of Z.
Really appreciate the prompt, I wonder if any of these examples feel juicy and concrete enough to you
1. Events like Portal, cowork spaces and conferences for people who take subjectivity seriously. Helps move along a cluster of pre-paradigmatic intuitions into a more coherent scene of research and companies. See Jhourney and jhanas for the currently most legible example, they were incubated at the Alembic, one such space.
2. Recorded interviews with people in the scene whose ideas I admire and putting them into dialogue with each other, reflects the scene back to itself and increases coherence, while letting in the general public. (we have a Portal podcast coming)
3. Collective sensemaking tools, community tools, introspective tools, which require right-hemisphere intuitions. but left-hemisphere ability to build. Stuff like community notes, or data analysis or UI things on top of twitter like Threadhelper (which I built), or companies scaling therapy modalities with AI like refract.space. See my grant proposal https://manifund.org/projects/survey-for-llm-self-knowledge-and-coordination-practices-sdlerwahem9
4. "Coaching" to help systematic ppl like rationalists and effective altruists who are near burn-out break out of left-hemisphere dominance into right-hemisphere dominance with systematic explanations of "woo" practices
5. Twitter data infra (like a public db that everyone uploads their archives to, which I'm building) and analysis tools on top of people's twitter bodies of work that allows people to summarize their insights and better interface with each other. (e.g. "tailor this explanation to person X given their archive)
6. Tiktoks and other bespoke delivery of these kinds of "systematic woo" insights to different subcultures
7. Daycare + cowork (B's idea) to enable people doing good work in the scene to settle down and deepen their families while staying connected
8. Consulting for companies wanting to integrate more metamodern philosophy, better ability to take others' perspectives, etc (my friend Roland is preparing to do this)
9. Similar to 1 but solving problems for institutional clients by organizing conferences structured with framings we provide. We make sense of a complex problem, frame it, and bring people together to engage with our story.
10. Neuro tech companies inspired by e.g. Mike Johnson's writing. I'm thinking of his recent piece "Presence neurotechnology & technology-aided direct transmission"
this is amazing.
one thing that consistently comes up in these concrete examples is that some of them lead to confusion, and some lead to excitement & strategy (concrete enough), and this feels entirely due to framing it in a way that feels concrete and commonly recognized (to me).
Exciting, Concrete Examples (for me. also, these are exciting because they feel like something I can really hold in my hand, I'm not saying these are the "best" ideas, if implemented):
- twitter data infra. Perfect, I've used this before
- Recorded interviews with people in the scene whose ideas I admire and putting them into dialogue with each other, reflects the scene back to itself and increases coherence, while letting in the general public. (we have a Portal podcast coming). Seems awesome.
- Daycare + cowork (B's idea) to enable people doing good work in the scene to settle down and deepen their families while staying connected. AMAZING.
Some examples where I felt both, depending on the sentence:
- 1. Events like Portal, cowork spaces and conferences (YES!!) for people who take subjectivity seriously. (NO!!! idk what subjectivity actually is or what YOU SPECIFICALLY mean when you say it.) ... See Jhourney and jhanas for the currently most legible example, they were incubated at the Alembic, one such space. (YES!! SUCH A GOOD EXAMPLE!!)
- 3. Collective sensemaking tools, community tools, introspective tools (YES!!) which require right-hemisphere intuitions. but left-hemisphere ability to build. (???) Stuff like community notes, or data analysis or UI things on top of twitter like Threadhelper (which I built), or companies scaling therapy modalities with AI like refract.space (YES!!!)
Generally the pattern is like: obviously I'm an emotionally attuned person who understands spirituality. *almost* everyone is, in one way or another. We're all born with the same parts.
HOWEVER, I find it hard to get excited about things that use "woo", or "left-hemisphere", or "right-hemisphere" or "metamodern philosophy" or "systematic woo". I can literally feel my imagery and understanding of the concrete example go from like HIGH, ALIGNED, immediately to LOW, VAGUE and then back to HIGH, ALIGNED when you bring it back in with a specific institution.
Obviously over-the-top example, but Steve Jobs was a woo dude. Imagine if he tried to bring that *explicitly* into the framing of what he's doing at apple. Now it is obvious by LOOKING at apple that he DID bring in what i think you mean when you say "right-hemisphere understanding" into his products, his explanations, his interviews, his scene, and his inspiration...
But he didn't mention this to us. Maybe to his close collaborators, idk. But when he was describing his work, it seemed very important for him to focus on strong, concrete foundations of "common understanding", so that the products could stand on their own, absolved from the need to also communicate the philosophy behind them.
Threadhelper (and the similar Roam) remind me deeply of this philosophy. It's obvious that threadhelper requires a certain philosophy to be created, but i don't know what it is! I'm more curious to find out AFTER I use it, since I now love it and want more things like it in the world.
This is really great perspective Andrew, thank you! Updating towards less woo in my public discourse.
However, I feel the need for a handle to distinguish between "business as usual, optimize capitalism without questioning assumptions" and moves that potentially reframe assumptions (trivial example: maximizing shareholder value as terminal utility) for the benefit of individuals.
> I'm an emotionally attuned person who understands spirituality. *almost* everyone is, in one way or another.
This feels true but not everyone has a theory of change (from left->right brain world) and that prevents them from acting directly / supporting projects that do.
Also my story specifically is one of overriding intuition and subjective experience with rationality, and freeing myself from that. My path to impact is like a macroscopic version of that early experience for people in similar positions and institutions which usually suffer from the same problem.
Low confidence take, articulating for the first time:
Avoiding "spiritual talk" makes your more legible and therefore effective, but the tradeoff is that to "say less" you need to conform with more of the ambient assumptions. (which are biased towards objective worldviews i.e. what you get when you normalize across personal points of view)
If you're trying to talk about the frame you live in and how to change it, you may need language that sounds strange unless you define it. I could define those vague terms you pointed at, only didn't in the interest of time.
(aside: i'm really enjoying substack-as-public-square. Feels substantially different than twitter.)
I actually think I'd like MORE spiritual talk, in some sense, but less spiritual "jargon", which tends to obscure my intuition and sense of your vision.
I mean, you basically specialize in this! I want to see your unique definitions for these obscure terms IN your manifesto, IN your visions. And i want to see those definitions get simpler and simpler over time until they are both crystal clear, and easily communicated.
I think the commonly used spiritual terms are, even among friends, weak pointers to phenomenon at best. There is a sense of directionlessness (for me) when they are used to get me "onboard" with a project (as a manifesto intends).
For instance, speaking for myself: "I would like to increase the right-brain strength and ability to integrate woo into the tech industry in NYC."
We're friends, so I'm sure you agree this is a good idea because you trust me, in some sense, but there is NO WAY you understand what I actually mean here. There's just way too large of a query surface; I could mean any of 1000 things. Maybe this is good in some sense, but I think I can do better for you (and thus achieve the goal more effectively).
Better would be: I could use help building a tech scene like the one at Xerox Parc -- where researchers lived in a beautiful environment, took long walks, and passed around insights from diverse topics like McLuhan, stageplay, cellular biology, Hannah Arendt, Piaget, Joseph Campbell, Montessori, Christopher Alexander, Feynman, Tufte the Federalist Papers (among many other sources) to build new metaphors for computing media. In our era, we would be passing around insights like the ones YOU uncover, as well as those from past eras.
I want to see Xiq's unadulterated thoughts, yes. If the way those thoughts come out is referring to overloaded terms, like "woo", I'd love to read them, because I do want your thoughts first and foremost.
But as to future iterations of your manifesto, I'd love to see my friends move away from terms like that and move toward visions that I can place myself in; stories that feel as real as sci-fi and as intense as history. I want to be able to hear, see, taste, touch your spirituality, rather than just think about it with you.
I agree the language might sound strange, but I don't care! Strange is good; i just want it to be real and evocative.
(as an aside: I think definitions are really helpful, yea, and often worth doing somewhere on the internet so pedants like me can quickly be dismissed with a "see my 'Xiq's Glossary of Terms' essay for definitions then re-comment")
Xiq, we want much the same things.
this paints a delightful venn diagram! The combination of harmonisation between parts of the holon via communication, broadly, PLUS applying security mindset, in particular. Godspeed.
Thank you for sharing! This resonates :) Have you seen Ilia Delio's "The Not Yet God"? https://orbisbooks.com/products/9781608339921
have not, will have to check it out!
lovely to see more of your consolidated expression! 🔥❤️
Really appreciate you reading! ❤️🔥