One thought I had about why it is important to have a relationship with someone behind is that the relationship acts like a coal mine canary. If you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with someone who seems “dumber” and behind and you cannot teach them properly despite them being nice and caring and trying etc etc (i.e ure an asshole) that means ure not gonna use that knowledge properly for the common good
ORI requisites added to my to-do,, I feel the haze that often feels settled on a (in)visible network of human effect and affect is finally lifting. I always knew it would and there was a way to feel grounded in the landscape. I always knew a community would attract itself. I have ideas to share and I’m excited to learn more on GitHub and how to navigate that. And the open source community. This is fucking cool.
yeaaaah but it’s not very sustainable. It can’t grow in there. I’ve been using it to keep track of people. I consider the open memetics discord the ORI “memetics department”. I think everyone in ORI either joins an existing space where ORI has a presence, or is someone managing their own space, and we come to them.
right now i’m still kind of a “central node” keeping the network alive but I am now trying to do things that will decentralize it. And I think describing it seems to be having this effect
Your instructions to put ORI in bios deffo helps too.
If I'm looking for folks to collab with on the data/back end of the wellbeing economy experiments, is there a way you would you suggest finding people in the network?
i was thinking today of "ORI(department, section)" as a bio marker possibly, to at a glance show what part of the cluster you're in/what are you currently working on
people are working on a lot of the same things but give it different names, so part of what I do is try to recognize that and pick a name (or at least maintain a kind of glossary/translation, so far in my head, but the more I can put it down the better)
yeah I think my process for that is basically (1) write up the project pitch / needs / goals etc somewhere, can be a google doc but ideally something like github or substack where others can comment and add to it (2) publicly @ the known nodes of ORI. Until we have a better software for this, the "ORI servers" are the individual human nodes.
I was thinking I could/should make a list of ones that have some community/reach and are OK being @'d in public with requests like this (and if it's too much noise we can take it down, or can find people "lower down the ladder" who can propagate up the ladder)
what about info that falls under "true & not [apparently] useful"?
with regard to the chain, what if the people who are "ahead" are misguided? (I'm thinking of everyone I critique in my "Apostles of the Absurd" post) Because of their own biases, they wouldn't be able to recognize that they're wrong, and they might even resist others' efforts to show them so, especially if it has dread-inducing implications. Meanwhile, because their message is seductively reassuring, they easily lure people who are gladly see themselves as "behind" on accumulating more (filtered/misleading) "knowledge".
Let's say there's a breakthrough in lab grown meat (an A to the scientists reading it), youtuber Sabine Hossenfelder, Hank Green, or Cleo Abram talk about how this will make everything better (and it's an A to the audience if they now believe this will alter the trajectory of the future they're living in).
Now you read that and give it a U, because even if it's true, it doesn't change any of your predictions of future trajectory.
On the flipside, if you read something about supply chains break (forgive me I, I don't know what's a good example of a recent A for you), to a lot of people that might be a U (it's true, but they don't extract any meaningful conclusions from it, it's just an outlier, etc), whereas it might be a B (validating a prediction you had), OR an A (if it's showing you that something is accelerating, so it changes your timeline)
> what if the people who are "ahead" are misguided?
this is EXACTLY what will surface as everyone constructs their chain. And why the ORI logo is a circle - if you ask the rationalists to make this chain, then Yudowsky or Scott Alexander will be at the top. If you construct this chain, I think you are the source of A's for a lot of people around you (and also a lot of U's), and I'd be really interested in who your sources of A's are (my prediction is that you had phases where it used to be individual people, but now your world model is such that most of what you see are B's, and you're tracking specific individuals across different spheres / or the different spheres themselves)
I appreciate that you've read my writing enough to know that the lab-food is a U for me <3
My A's nowadays: I understand the behavior of all Realms (I'll come back to this in a post soon!) in the mode they've been locked into for the past 12k years. The trouble is that we're headed into uncharted waters. Planetary conditions and human behavior are wild cards, and it's possible that every year going forward, those circumstances are rapidly shifting. BUT, what remains unchanged are laws of physics, chemistry, biology still apply. So "if you deprive a human of food for long enough, they die (still)" remains good inspiration for strategy.
If i'm understanding correctly, though, this worries me... From my POV, it isn't that lab-grown meat is *truly* A and supply chain disruption is *truly* "U"; it's that my neighbors don't have enough data to sort "properly". And in many cases, they don't want to consider the data because they *want to live in a world where* Sabine's videos are A (and that *would* be a nicer world than the full reality!). As you've noted, causes have real-life effects, whether someone's model predicts it or not.
Checking my understanding: Could(/does) A/B/U & ORI lead to incorrect world-models and to entrenchment in those models? If not, why not?
Also: I've watched Sabine's and Hank's videos and evaluated their claims. Based on your knowledge of their fan base, do *their* fans consider *my* preferred contributors' content? (my stereotype is that they don't even know it exists and would avoid it, but I'm open to being told otherwise!)
useless = "I don't know what to do with it, which doesn't actually mean it's inconsequential; it's possible more a reflection of my mind/models than the data" << destigmatize being dumb!
If you were an economist in 2019 and you don't know much about virology, you wouldn't know what to do with data about COVID, but that doesn't mean it's actually useless/inconsequential to economics. But it depends on who you are, how you know to think. Someone who IS a virologist WOULD be in (more of) a position to decide which data are stronger predictors of events.
Even then, one could continue to build in dumbness: "consequential / inconsequential, *as far as I have reason to believe*"
(I say this at the beginning of my Video #3) - The debate over whether civilization can continue to operate (when the ones arguing "can't" are conscientious ecologists, not just grumps!) comes down to a question of the *relative predictive weight* of various data sets. Annnd that might become its own post...
Love it. Plenty of momentum for getting this thing going. Small correction though, you're giving me too much credit. I'm in a masters, not a PhD. Although doing a PhD would likely be a useful endeavour to better be the bridge between this emergent knowledge production and establishment knowledge production. There are certainly some interdisciplinary programs that would be helpful for that, but I'm tapped out on debt and school for the moment. We'll see how I feel after a few years of being in the trenches (hopefully) helping bring the right amount of structure to ORI and other emergent projects. I have the tools to help with that PhD or no PhD. Hahaha
I have avoided asking people to use the "ORI" marker thus far because I don't want it to feel like a "closed network" - the whole point is that it's just a good social protocol, and bits of it get copied & discovered independently. But I think it does help now that we have a bit of an idea of what the protocol is - when someone has "ORI" it means they're thinking of themselves in this chain and willing to calibrate to find "the center".
It's important that we understand it not as a name but as a function. You know you're in ORI because it behaves like ORI. If you can do ORI better than the people who call themselves ORI, then you benefit & your network grows. It's not purely collaborative, it has to be competitive in this way, I think.
Officially branded myself an open memetics researcher in my profile
huge!!!!
immediately grokked!
prediction as the meta-epistemic grounding is not just where ORI stands but I think the solution to postmodern subjective observer malaise.
in short, all As, amazing, and I will add ORI to my profiles :)
One thought I had about why it is important to have a relationship with someone behind is that the relationship acts like a coal mine canary. If you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with someone who seems “dumber” and behind and you cannot teach them properly despite them being nice and caring and trying etc etc (i.e ure an asshole) that means ure not gonna use that knowledge properly for the common good
ORI requisites added to my to-do,, I feel the haze that often feels settled on a (in)visible network of human effect and affect is finally lifting. I always knew it would and there was a way to feel grounded in the landscape. I always knew a community would attract itself. I have ideas to share and I’m excited to learn more on GitHub and how to navigate that. And the open source community. This is fucking cool.
I've heard there was also an ORI Discord server? 👀
yeaaaah but it’s not very sustainable. It can’t grow in there. I’ve been using it to keep track of people. I consider the open memetics discord the ORI “memetics department”. I think everyone in ORI either joins an existing space where ORI has a presence, or is someone managing their own space, and we come to them.
It grows with a hierarchical attention scheme
right now i’m still kind of a “central node” keeping the network alive but I am now trying to do things that will decentralize it. And I think describing it seems to be having this effect
[1] https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1997368254893871601
[2] https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1997358059744584071
Your instructions to put ORI in bios deffo helps too.
If I'm looking for folks to collab with on the data/back end of the wellbeing economy experiments, is there a way you would you suggest finding people in the network?
i was thinking today of "ORI(department, section)" as a bio marker possibly, to at a glance show what part of the cluster you're in/what are you currently working on
https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1997338996981006496
people are working on a lot of the same things but give it different names, so part of what I do is try to recognize that and pick a name (or at least maintain a kind of glossary/translation, so far in my head, but the more I can put it down the better)
yeah I think my process for that is basically (1) write up the project pitch / needs / goals etc somewhere, can be a google doc but ideally something like github or substack where others can comment and add to it (2) publicly @ the known nodes of ORI. Until we have a better software for this, the "ORI servers" are the individual human nodes.
I was thinking I could/should make a list of ones that have some community/reach and are OK being @'d in public with requests like this (and if it's too much noise we can take it down, or can find people "lower down the ladder" who can propagate up the ladder)
what's the basis for determining usefulness?
what about info that falls under "true & not [apparently] useful"?
with regard to the chain, what if the people who are "ahead" are misguided? (I'm thinking of everyone I critique in my "Apostles of the Absurd" post) Because of their own biases, they wouldn't be able to recognize that they're wrong, and they might even resist others' efforts to show them so, especially if it has dread-inducing implications. Meanwhile, because their message is seductively reassuring, they easily lure people who are gladly see themselves as "behind" on accumulating more (filtered/misleading) "knowledge".
great question!!
> what's the basis for determining usefulness?
you are! This is very important.
Let's say there's a breakthrough in lab grown meat (an A to the scientists reading it), youtuber Sabine Hossenfelder, Hank Green, or Cleo Abram talk about how this will make everything better (and it's an A to the audience if they now believe this will alter the trajectory of the future they're living in).
Now you read that and give it a U, because even if it's true, it doesn't change any of your predictions of future trajectory.
On the flipside, if you read something about supply chains break (forgive me I, I don't know what's a good example of a recent A for you), to a lot of people that might be a U (it's true, but they don't extract any meaningful conclusions from it, it's just an outlier, etc), whereas it might be a B (validating a prediction you had), OR an A (if it's showing you that something is accelerating, so it changes your timeline)
> what if the people who are "ahead" are misguided?
this is EXACTLY what will surface as everyone constructs their chain. And why the ORI logo is a circle - if you ask the rationalists to make this chain, then Yudowsky or Scott Alexander will be at the top. If you construct this chain, I think you are the source of A's for a lot of people around you (and also a lot of U's), and I'd be really interested in who your sources of A's are (my prediction is that you had phases where it used to be individual people, but now your world model is such that most of what you see are B's, and you're tracking specific individuals across different spheres / or the different spheres themselves)
I appreciate that you've read my writing enough to know that the lab-food is a U for me <3
My A's nowadays: I understand the behavior of all Realms (I'll come back to this in a post soon!) in the mode they've been locked into for the past 12k years. The trouble is that we're headed into uncharted waters. Planetary conditions and human behavior are wild cards, and it's possible that every year going forward, those circumstances are rapidly shifting. BUT, what remains unchanged are laws of physics, chemistry, biology still apply. So "if you deprive a human of food for long enough, they die (still)" remains good inspiration for strategy.
If i'm understanding correctly, though, this worries me... From my POV, it isn't that lab-grown meat is *truly* A and supply chain disruption is *truly* "U"; it's that my neighbors don't have enough data to sort "properly". And in many cases, they don't want to consider the data because they *want to live in a world where* Sabine's videos are A (and that *would* be a nicer world than the full reality!). As you've noted, causes have real-life effects, whether someone's model predicts it or not.
Checking my understanding: Could(/does) A/B/U & ORI lead to incorrect world-models and to entrenchment in those models? If not, why not?
Also: I've watched Sabine's and Hank's videos and evaluated their claims. Based on your knowledge of their fan base, do *their* fans consider *my* preferred contributors' content? (my stereotype is that they don't even know it exists and would avoid it, but I'm open to being told otherwise!)
oh! okay, maybe -
(even if just in my head, i know that...)
useless = "I don't know what to do with it, which doesn't actually mean it's inconsequential; it's possible more a reflection of my mind/models than the data" << destigmatize being dumb!
If you were an economist in 2019 and you don't know much about virology, you wouldn't know what to do with data about COVID, but that doesn't mean it's actually useless/inconsequential to economics. But it depends on who you are, how you know to think. Someone who IS a virologist WOULD be in (more of) a position to decide which data are stronger predictors of events.
Even then, one could continue to build in dumbness: "consequential / inconsequential, *as far as I have reason to believe*"
(I say this at the beginning of my Video #3) - The debate over whether civilization can continue to operate (when the ones arguing "can't" are conscientious ecologists, not just grumps!) comes down to a question of the *relative predictive weight* of various data sets. Annnd that might become its own post...
Love it. Plenty of momentum for getting this thing going. Small correction though, you're giving me too much credit. I'm in a masters, not a PhD. Although doing a PhD would likely be a useful endeavour to better be the bridge between this emergent knowledge production and establishment knowledge production. There are certainly some interdisciplinary programs that would be helpful for that, but I'm tapped out on debt and school for the moment. We'll see how I feel after a few years of being in the trenches (hopefully) helping bring the right amount of structure to ORI and other emergent projects. I have the tools to help with that PhD or no PhD. Hahaha
ah good catch, fixed!
Fascinating. I love the ambition and the potential here. Creating an ORI profile just got added to my to-do list
I have avoided asking people to use the "ORI" marker thus far because I don't want it to feel like a "closed network" - the whole point is that it's just a good social protocol, and bits of it get copied & discovered independently. But I think it does help now that we have a bit of an idea of what the protocol is - when someone has "ORI" it means they're thinking of themselves in this chain and willing to calibrate to find "the center".
It's important that we understand it not as a name but as a function. You know you're in ORI because it behaves like ORI. If you can do ORI better than the people who call themselves ORI, then you benefit & your network grows. It's not purely collaborative, it has to be competitive in this way, I think.
Yeah, I don't think you should hesitate. It is kind of a not so secret secret society. Which is fun and useful both