🪞 White Mirror - Reading Guide - Part 1

Happy Friday! Last week I announced a “White Mirror” reading guide series, because I want people to read it along with me & see if we have the same shared understanding of these ideas around “the best possible future(s) for humanity”¹.

The other motivation I have here is that I feel like there’s a lot of people who have a lot of good & interesting things to say, but they are writing alone. They publish into the void & don’t get much feedback. But instead of doing that, you can “submit a public response” & at least I will read it and respond to it. I’m trying to design this such that, ANY writing about the umbrella theme “increasing humanity’s ability to choose the future we want” fits here & is worth discussing together.

For this post today I’m going to (1) discuss a bit more class logistics, (2) discuss the questions from last week, and then (3) end with the new reading guide questions.

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(1)

• I’ve put together a “White Mirror reading guide homepage”

• Includes a link for instructions on “How to claim your free White Mirror copy”

• I still have 6/10 open slots for this offer (to buy it for you in exchange for your attention on these ideas)

• I wrote up an answer to a commonly asked question of “Where do I submit my answers?”

• I am planning on doing this fully async so anyone can jump in at any time, but there is some interest in a “synchronous reading club”. Perhaps something like this may evolve in the White Mirror discord. If anyone wants to champion that I think others will join.

  • There is now a “reading guide discussion channel” in the White Mirror discord! Invite link

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(2)

Michael Garfield

was the first to submit an answer to question 3 of Story Zero, where I ask, “why can’t we just not live in fear anymore & break the self fulfilling loops of despair?”

I love Michael’s answer here because it is a “system wide” view. We can, individually, choose to trust more, but you might very quickly burn out. Ideally what you want is a critical mass of people who all choose to trust more, to change the balance enough so that on average, the good choice is rewarded:

Curiosity is the antidote to fear, but the carrot has to be more prominent than the stick

Until then, you’re stuck in a system that (almost) no one is happy with. This is the silver lining for me: if we ALL want a better system, and we all know that we want it, then we could just make it happen. All influencers feel crushed by the currents of the algorithm pushing them in directions they don’t want to go, but that current is made up of our attention. It IS within our control²:

So, this is the game. In order to remain trusted & influential, you have to align with the existing current. But doing so also reinforces the current. If the current is moving in the wrong direction, trying to pull it too hard just gets you ejected, and lots of content creators will hapilly fill the void to capture attention / money & make a living, reinforcing the current.

From: How Hank Green is Contributing to the Human Memome Project

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Question 4 was:

“an arms race of the imagination” -> do you see in what way this is a statement about our world? Can you point to an example of one person on each side of this arms race

I am really eager to hear people’s answers to this one, because it’s basically us collaboratively making a list of authors & pieces of work that help us imagine better futures. In my answer I picked “Yudowsky” for the “black mirror” side of this list. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I think that his work is bad or that people should avoid it.

I think there is a correct relationship between “White Mirror” stories and “Black Mirror” stories in our culture, and this is a major theme I want to explore.

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Question 1:

What does “Fact imitates fiction” mean?

This and the question about Jorge Luis Borges are meant to introduce the reader to the concept of “hyperstition” or “self fulfilling ideas”. The canonical example I use is how in the olden days, people used to put fake towns on paper maps as a kind of “copyright” or “watermark” (if your fake town appeared on someone else’s map, you know they copied your map). Sometimes, these fake towns would become real purely because they were on the map, people expected them there, so they showed up there & built it!

The most interesting thing to me about Borges is that in his stories, he’d write about non fiction books that didn’t exist. I think this is a great exercise to think, “if this book existed, what would some of the best ideas in it be?” → we can just skip right to that.

I think you can try to answer this about White Mirror itself. I’d be very interested in hearing what people THINK is in it before they read it. I’m framing it to you as a book about utopia, so what does that mean for you? What will you be surprised if it was NOT covered in it? I really want to hear this from you.

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Reading Guide for “Soaring Dreams” (page 172)

This is the last story in White Mirror, but it was the first one I had read because it was included in an earlier anthology book. I think it’s a great pairing with “Story Zero” as we think about self fulfilling prophecies.

1. “I was told I can do anything if I believe” - some things do not come true no matter how hard we believe in them. But anything that DOES happen requires us to believe in it FIRST. How do you balance this? When is too much belief dangerous? When is NOT enough belief dangerous?

page 173

2. Why does Lucilius say this to the boy “sometimes we make the mistake of thinking we are our dreams”³ ?

Reading Guide for “Descendants of the Paranoid ” (page 19)

page 19 - sounds relatable!!!

1. The story describes humanity’s negativity bias as a necessity for survival. It then asks:

Were our hardwiring reversed, what would humanity look like? What would we see?

Can you answer this question? What DOES the world look like if the majority of humans all suddenly decided to cooperate? What would the next few months look like?

2. Can those with the “White Mirror” bias, work together with the “Black Mirror” bias? They both have blindspots. Is it inevitable that those who look for & exploit flaws will overpower those who seek to build & collaborate? How do we avoid real danger with a positivity bias?

This is kind of building off of

Michael Garfield

‘s answer: how do you make the carrot more prominent than the stick? What does that even look like? Are there examples from our history where that was the case?

1. And if we all do…then we should get cracking! If not, then I want people to show me the gaps in my world model.

I see this project as a two-way teaching opportunity. I’m putting together these reading questions but I’m not confident I have all the answers. I expect some people’s write-ups will completely change my mind about certain things. I think we all essentially want the same thing (a better world), but as I wrote yesterday, discernment is the real bottleneck.

2. I’ve recently been obsessed with

Peter Limberger

‘s “The Pull” - it’s been a new part of my & my friends’ vocabulary. “Are you in the pull?” my partner asks me when I’m on my phone in the middle of a party, “oh no, I’m just checking a work email” I say, or “oh crap, you’re right, thanks for nudging me out of it”

3. This is potentially a good prompt for reflecting on free will & determinism. If I am not my dreams, who am I exactly? Do my dreams shape me, or do I shape my dreams?

This is a bit “advanced” but I found “How Things Become Alive” by

Guilherme Parcianello

to be a really good read here:

Life begins not with matter, but with pattern. Consider the world as networks—nodes connected by relationships. A cell, a forest, a city, a mind: all are webs of interacting parts that somehow, at certain thresholds, begin to act as unified wholes. This transformation—from collection to collective, from parts to purpose—marks the boundary where things become "alive."