Narrative Spears
How to effect change through self fulfilling predictions
A “narrative spear” is a social technology for effecting change in a human community.
It’s not a prophecy, it’s a “self fulfilling prediction”. You have a problem in society, you describe how you are going to fix it, and you toss it. It either happens, because you make it happen, OR because someone else sees it and carries the baton farther than you can take it.
It’s win-win because you get your original problem fixed either way.
I’m interested in empirically studying the dynamics of narrative spears. What I’m describing is a theoretical construct, like the Higgs Boson, and we can go out looking for evidence for it in the world.
How do you prove the existence of narrative spears?
Same way you prove the existence of anything: take the predictions of this model, test it against reality. If it fails to predict reality, you do not toss the theory. Like a good scientist, you evolve the theory & try again. When to abandon a theory as “not true” is not a scientific question, it is a matter of taste (no scientist has a rational answer to this question).
A lot of narrative spears fail because they’re not very good. Like, imagine discovering fire, you go around telling people, they try it with wet wood, they fail to create fire, and they conclude, “your theory is wrong. Humans cannot create fire”. That’d be crazy. The true answer is obviously to search for what conditions make fire possible. Refine the theory.
What are the qualities of a successful narrative spear?
It’s flexible
it doesn’t rely on specific people, and can be tweaked by those who pick it up
It rewards its execution
whoever successfully delivers it earns money or status, and people who helped along the way get clout of having made a successful prediction
It’s realistic
The more likely it is to happen, the greater odds it *will* happen.
It’s beautiful
The more people understand it, and want it, the greater its odds of success
I believe there is a LOT of low hanging fruit because no one’s even trying to launch these spears. There’s a misunderstanding that it hurts you, like you’re “doing work for nothing”. This is false. It’s more like writing a design doc for your team in a tech company. You’ll either lead this project, or someone else will. But if you suggest something whose existence will help *your* daily work, or help your career, then it doesn’t matter who does it. It would be NICE if you got the power/status/promotion of delivering it, but even if you don’t, you still benefit.
It’s win-win, but only if you do it right. This is the important part. It requires competence. It requires you to think through the consequences and choose something that will benefit *you* in all cases. Don’t shy away from personal benefit. Crafting & throwing these narrative spears is extremely valuable work for society, you should be compensated for it, so that you can get better at it & craft more of them.
The next narrative spear I wanna try is:
- Post the question on manifold markets: "Does Defender have a uniquely diverse group of followers?"
- where I claim that I have intentionally crafted one of the most diverse communities on twitter, in terms of having people who follow me who are right wing, left wing, arab, jewish, scientists, anti-science people, pro gov, anti gov, etc.
- how do we test this theory? I want support/collaboration on this. Can't do it alone. Making it a market is a fun meta-move, where someone can say "that's bullshit" and prove me wrong (by finding someone with a more diverse following than me, and that is a success! That's what I'm looking for! A cultural study with empirical proof!)
- Would be cool to extract the bio's and a few tweets from my followers & semantically categorize. OR can just...send out a google form??? And cross-check the results?
My first successful narrative spear was on Dec 13, 2023. I tweeted about "what if we exported our own twitter archives, shared it with each other, built an open API". It didn't take off. So I made a little prototype myself. And *then* someone saw it, bought a domain, launched it, collected twitter archives from 70 people so far, 2 million tweets in a public dataset. And they're still actively developing it.
I wanted an open twitter API because I wanted to study culture. And now I have it. I didn't have to do it myself, or even market it myself. And now I can use it and build on it.