The Portal, with Daniel Schmachtenberger
#refs #urbit #take-notes #nursery #favorite
Schmacthenberger on The Portal (the rest are on dropbox from two days ago.)
the new (anti-rivalrous, anti-disinfirmation) social system can export solutions and tech to the legacy world. since the new system is not able to be weaponized (it is anti-weaponization), when new poeole use ut, fewer people are using weaponinzed tech.
you don’t have to focus on the game of power to win at the game of power.
status is now a hypernormal stimulus, given that you can receive it from hundreds, thousands or millions of people and that it can be metricized with Likes, etc). (like processed sugar is - it wasn’t available at this scale to our ancestors). so we must have a very mature relationship to it.
when we’re in hypo-normal sitautions (lack), we get more attracted to hypernormal. when friends are camping togerher, they check their phones less often. you look in the fridge absentmindedly less often. hypernormal stimuli are good for markets - on the supply-side, addiction is great for customers.
Total mind blowing realization. If two people each create totally unique things they offer to the world they are not in competition with each other. This seems counterintuitive because we think of the example of Instagram, say. Where they’re in competition for a single resource: attention. If you disassociate their unique offer from that single resource, you remove the rivalry
You can’t reduce totally unique things to a fungible metric
In comparing things or people or status. The problem is fungibility and metric reduction. If you compare dollars to dollars someone is gonna look better. If you compare height to hate someone it’s gonna look better. That’s because these metrics aren’t fully reduced.
Dalten Collective needs to be anti-rivalrous. This means, you getting ahead necessarily means me getting ahead. We need to couple our interests together.
People want wealth because they want access to things. If they have the access then their wealth their personal wealth comes from what they offer rather than what they can access. The example Daniel gives is people with access to libraries in maker spaces etc. so they don’t need to take anything from anyone else in order to get the access they already have it and then they’re incentivized to make great things to offer to others. And that in turn increases the value of the commons that everyone else has access to as well
In early human development when tribes competed for resources it was easier to move than it was to war. Until we moved everywhere and then we had to war, and once one drive militarizes the rest must. On urbit there’s always somewhere else to go, you should never have to war. This is not the same on the default Internet where there are network effects that force you into certain platforms. More is needed on this last point
We as humans learn and teach each other, as one of our major adaptive strategies. Teaching each other urbit and learning how to use it falls into this category
conscious abstraction was a phase change for prediction capacity. lions and gazelles have a rough power symmetry in their abilities and the speed at which their abilities scale and change. the whole system is meta-stable - neither gains an advantage too fast so as to radically out-perform the other (eat all the gazelles or all the gazelles escape) and then eventually find their own collapse.
chimps might prefer to use a sharp rock over a dull one; but they don’t understand the abstract concept of sharpness. we did, and the environment couldn’t respond fast enough to our increased capacities.
plus we could then design better tools to exponentiate that capacity.
in small groups: can’t externalize harm, can’t lie, can sit around in a meeting and all give input. everyone has a say in large decisions. are we, as an early community, assuming this will continue and being too optimistic about “social urbit” as a result?
want: incentive to not disinformation, to share accurate information with each other. to maintain bonding. at scale. how do we do this on urbit?
dunbar limits were about communication protocols. social protocols. want to introduce anti-rivalrous. keep my well-being, yours, and the well-being of the commons more tightly coupled.
need uncorruptible accounting systems. but the game can always be gamed as long as we have separate interests. any in group can advantage itself by externalize harm to an outgroup or individual IFF their interests are decoupled.
You can optimize to a point but never perfectly in a complex system. That’s what wisdom is: wisdom is the difference between the optimization, and making the right choice