A Storms Are Dangerous
My last two posts, What’s happening on Jan 13th? & Why not dot com were written in plain English language, trying to explain what I do to as broad of an audience as possible. This post is NOT written in plain English, it is written in the technical language of ORI.
The title is written this way to sound like broken English. But it’s a correct sentence in ORI language. This is done intentionally so that readers realize they are confused, if they don’t have the pre-reqs.
The only two pre-reqs you need to understand the basic ORI dialect are (1) A/B/U1 (2) What “true” and “real” mean in the ORI language. Both of these are explained here: https://openresearchinstitute.org/onboarding/welcome.html
Language: ORI(floor)
An A storm is something that I used to think was always GOOD. Now it’s something that I think of as dangerous.
I define an “A storm” as receiving a lot of A’s in rapid succession. What does that look like? Maybe you’re having a lot of epiphanies, or going through some kind of major ideological shift. Perhaps at a conference where all the talks are of excellent quality and of major relevance to your life.
But I think I wouldn’t call it a “storm” if you are seeking the A’s. It’s a “storm” if the A’s are finding you. It means you are are probably in trouble somehow2.
You might be in the middle of an A storm (a rapid sequence of UNSOLICITED A’s) if:
you’ve had a faulty world model & reality is crashing in as your bubble collapses
you are going through psychosis. Your A’s aren’t true, or real, but you’ve lost your grounding & are being pulled down to madness
Language: ORI(floor)
An author that I get a lot of A’s from once wrote
“the universe WANTS you to learn about it”
That was kind of a big A for me. I tweeted it and it was a polarizing statement - half saw it as A/B, and half saw it as U (woo woo bullshit).
It was an A for me to ascribe agency to “reality as a teacher”. I think Andrea P and Tom S would give this a B, I expect it’s in their world models, that there are some things that reality will teach you, against your will. Your will can only put off learning some of these things for so long.
Ok, back to normal english in this section!
This is the 3rd week of the “Ithaca ORI retreat”, and the purpose of this post was part of me maintaining a weekly publishing rate of what I’m working on, where my frontier is, “posting my A’s” to speak. I consider this a requirement of being in ORI.
Coming up this week on the agenda is:
Sun is setting up his substack on “mettalignment”
In this way Sun is a “client” of ORI, I am investing in him because I think he might produce a novel piece of research that will give A’s to people with money/power/status, and that will bring resources to him, and ORI
Sun fits the typical “ORI clientele” in that he has been working on his “alignment theory” for literal years but has not published much, most people can’t tell if he is brilliant, or crazy. Should he be leading a team at a top AI alignment lab, or does he need t start from the bottom & do a PhD or something
You come to ORI because ORI will calibrate you. If you want to “skip the line” and go straight to the frontier, ORI will prepare your work to get it noticed by the frontier3
I have managed so far to get him one connection at Anthropic, and one connected to Google DeepMind. He got his own connection to OpenAI. If those labs give Sun an A, then that’s a success & can set him up for the next steps to launch his research career
The most ideal outcome is, in addition to that, for Sun to “apply” his alignment theory to my work. I want Sun to publicly look at all of ORI, its work, clients, financial history, its impact, and say “this stuff is aligned, this stuff is misaligned”, as a warm up for launching an “applied alignment” industry that can run around telling people, companies, and communities, what is “good” and what is “evil”. That’s the ultimate end game for me on this project
Lukas Hammarström and I have a few meetings this week with potential investors
Lukas is grounding the work, he’s my “adult in the room” for hire right now
There’s all these big crazy ideas floating around (see Sun’s work above) but if we’re running a business we need to iron out some concrete things, like what services are we offering, and who is paying, for what, and how much
Lukas is also managing me “as a client of ORI”. I have a role as manager (of ORI itself, and of specific clients, like Sun), but I also have my own writing/research, that has attracted money & attention, and I need a competent manager for this
This is one of the concrete things we can offer, a “competent research manager”, big philanthropy orgs give out $100k, $250k, etc to these moonshot research initiatives, but I don’t have the time (or skill) to manage or audit these projects
One of my upcoming opportunities as a “client” of ORI is potentially giving a few lectures at a university nearby about my memetics work (not Cornell). This would be a big milestone for me, that mirrors how we had someone else in the nascent memetics field teach a class on “Computational Semiotics” at Johns Hopkins, and this would be my version of that milestone
Alright, I think that’s it! We’re currently in the middle of a big snow storm here in Ithaca. But also apparently, all over the country? I keep feeling like “that’s weird”. I feel like in the 10 years I’ve been in the US, there’s never been a single storm that affected the entire country somewhat uniformly (like it’s just as intense in Texas as New York? what’s up with that?)
That’s what made me start thinking about “A storms” and about how, for me, it’s just as scary to think of a physical storm knocking out power over the whole country, as an “A storm”, everyone in the country waking up one day and learning something fundamental about how reality works….that’d be pretty scary, if it was an “externally imposed unsolicited A”4.
I may need to split A/B/U into multiple lessons. A lot of people understand the basic A/B/U but don’t immediately have an intuitive grasp of things “B floor”, “A ceiling”, and “when exactly does an A become a B”. They can usually get it after a conversation of two. These are things that I reference a lot & I think are necessary conceptual primitives to see some of the structures that I am studying & building.
I think this is what I meant by “there is no such thing as an unstoppable upward spiral” but I couldn’t convince people back then. If you are “being forced” to learn things & grow, then you’re NOT in an upward spiral, you’re in a downward spiral in some sense (even if literally everything about your life is improving, your direction has “at least one negative bit”). In Sun’s language, he would say “you aren’t moving towards the northant”. You’ll have to wait for him to explain that one, it’s one the tasks I assigned him this week.
I was thinking last night about what “services we offer” to put up on the ORI website, and I think one of them is like “we can expose your work to the frontier & get you feedback”. The first challenge in offering this service is even knowing WHERE the frontier is. Often times, the frontier doesn’t know itself!! So a lot of the community management and outreach work we do is necessary scaffolding for ORI to even exist as a company that can offer this service.
Once the frontier is legible enough you don’t need to pay someone to connect you to them. We would consider our job done there, the information infrastructure/road has been created, and as long as it continues to be maintained, we can move on to other things.
This is a good teaser for one of the pitches we have for a product/prototype we want to build, which is, can we design a social media thing where we can see “the propagation of A’s” across the networks/across the world? If such a thing ever happened, could we capture it and trace its origin (either because something big happened in the world and everyone is responding to it, or one community on earth figured out something and it propagated to all the other networks).
Another thing I forgot to say, that I'd put in the footnote for "ORI services we offer" is:
- ORI can produce A's for any information network
- If we CANNOT, then we put you in the lost of "confirmed ORI frontier", and we hold that up, broadcasted, until we find someone who can give you A's or who challenges that spot
not mentioned here but something I want to log for posterity, I've also been talking a lot to Rylan in Ithaca about kind of bringing open memetics locally to IRL. I have some ideas about how to make an "Ithaca map" of "what is happening" / what is on the mind of the town (of the various social circles in the town). And that kind of mirrors what we did for the "community archive".
One concrete way we can launch this is something very simple: I took some pictures yesterday of the event board on wide awake bakery. It would be really cute to have a "what's happening in Ithaca?" and it's a website with just pictures of community boards around town, updated whenever a community members takes a new picture (and maybe for fun an AI piece that lets you search through them). Boom, we can do that in like a few days, and for me the "memetically interesting" part would be, what does it FEEL like for everyone in town to have something they can put their attention on (because we can start to encourage people to annotate these...? or LEAVE COMMENTS because others will go and see them...idk, but you get the idea)