9 WHYS conversations matter into Critical Uncertainties

Human culture, coordination and collaboration is built mostly out of communication. Whether that be body language, facial expressions and physical signaling, language, conversation and symbols, or more complex forms of software powered stigmergic social computation.

I’m going to focus on language and conversation, because that’s where I’ve been able to find purchase and I see an enormous amount of work to be done that might actually be faster, cheaper and easier to implement than the other two. If you can turn this conceptual exploration into software, good for you, and I’m sure all be interested, but it's not where I’m skillful so LFG

So why does that (shit language, conversation and symbols) matter?

As group creatures humans we are responding collectively to our environmental challenges and opportunities. This seems so obvious but it is extraordinarily complex and challenging. 

So why is it hard?

Blind men and elephants. There is way more information than it is possible to get a grasp on all at once. Even if you add time to the mix and could get a grasp on the whole elephant, you then have yet another impossible challenge, discerning which part of it is relevant for what is happening now amidst the combinatorial explosion of possibilities. 

**What makes these impossibilities significant? **

First is this is a route to epistemic humility. 

Second is that a problem well understood is half solved

**What makes epistemic humility important? **

It may just help us shut the fuck up long enough about what we believe is THE thing in order to listen to one another

Why should we listen to one another?

In order to min-spec sending in order to accelerate the rate of flow of information across the group social/superorganism

**What might that increased flow of information help us do? **

We may just be able to address those impossibilities if we can solve the wicked question of both getting information from each blind man and receiving one another’s information.

If we could answer that wicked question, what might we get?

Relevant information getting to where it is needed at the appropriate time

So what if we do that?

We might drastically decrease the difficulty around deciding what to do

And now what happens if we can decide what to do?

Then we may just be able to do the fucking thing that needs to be done

The Byzantine General’s Information Theory

What are the most critical and uncertain factors of getting the appropriate information where it needs to be at the appropriate time?

This question lights up the technical part of my brain that wants to think about things very analytically. It wants to evoke big smart person things like the Byzantine General’s Problem and then Parallax with Information Theory

The Byzantine General’s Information Theory:

Did my information get to where it was intended to go?

Was it understood how I intended it to be?

The present answer to both questions is:

probably not😭

What would have to be true in order for them to be a solid “fuck yes”? (Let’s bookmark this for later).

All this to qualify what I believe is that the most critical factor can probably be simplified to status, which is always social. This may not solve the “was it understood as I intended?”, but the chances are significantly greater the higher the status of the sender of information. 

This is of course extraordinarily problematic because everyone on the face of the earth knows it to be true. So we play mostly at hierarchies and measuring dicks which takes up a lot of space in the channel of information flow. Coming back to our blind men and the elephant, this is the approximate equivalent of them spamming the feed with clickbait not about what they are sensing but why they should be listened to. This downward spiral into degeneration is an essential ingredient in what Tristan Harris describes as the Social Dilemma and it fucking sucks that yet again it is true. 

So if (social) status of the sender is critical to getting the relevant information to the right place at the appropriate time, then what’s uncertain about it?

I think like so often in life, the answer is in the question: 

relevance of information. 

If this is not the most uncertain thing in the universe then I don’t know what’s relevant. 🥁🥁💥 

But in all seriousness it is damned near impossible to tell in advance what information is relevant to whom. Lucky hunches may be about the best we can do in advance of running the actual check. The crucial questions here have everything to do with context and the receiving end: 

Relevant to whom?

For what purpose?

In the context that every person on the entire planet is playing the status game this becomes not only impossible to sort out but a bona-fide pit of vipers.

But okay we’ve got critical=status and uncertain=relevance. Ordinarily we’d plot these on a 2x2 matrix and make sense of these four scenarios like so:

What happens when my status is high but the relevance of my information is shit? 

I mean we kind of did this one in the 9WHYS:

Social dilemma, clickbait, unfortunately I don’t follow the mainstream media so I have no idea who this is at the moment and don’t feel like embarrassing myself with some disgustingly out of date reference. 

Never mind, keeping up with the Kardashians, Reality TV, Sports TV, Politics TV, TV, you get the idea. Massive output of fucking useless information.

I love the thought experiment of what this landscape is going to look like in 5 years of GPT-infinity powered steroids. The skills of how to ignore and who to trust and how to validate who you trust is not some jackhole spoofing them is going to generate some serious alpha. 

Let’s just call this the “Social Dilemma” Visualize a slam dunk that bounces off yet still shatters the backboard backboard

Next up, an omega with irrelevant information. This one seems funny but it is certainly not. Conspiracy theocracy. Incel’s Unite. Vulnerable minds hijacked and repeating what their “research” has found. Even if you think you’re smart enough to play the game well, you should be more terrified of this category than all others combined. 

Let’s call it the “Zombie Apocalypse” half court airball that blasts you in the face

Next up. Alpha’s with relevant information. Dear God, let us pray for benevolence. There is something so folksy and charming and comforting about this scenario. FDR, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Mahatma Ghandi, MLK Jr, The Rock, Elon Musk 😂. Wouldn’t it be nice? If Dad would just come home in the nick of time to save the farm from alien robot monsters from the future of outerspace? Edris Elba all

Naruto/Goku/Ichigo/Gilgamesh returns from gaining new special powers just in time to save Uruk from the bull of heaven. Simba/Arjuna accepts his role to return as warrior/king. Somehow this one seems less probable than ever. 

Let’s call it “Hero Savior” game winning 3

Last but not least where I believe most of us find ourselves. Pieces of the puzzle fucking lost in a sea of bullshit. Pearls thrown to swine. Signals drowned in noise. Needles in the haystack. Whispered sutras. When relevant information is held by hands of those without the social status that garners being paid attention to, I believe we all suffer. How much possibility lies behind locked doors that folks everyday humans are holding the keys to?

Let’s call it “coordination failure” the blocked shot.

Alright that’s fine and dandy but so fucking what?

Ordinarily we’d brainstorm coping strategies for each of these scenarios, what do we do in order to survive in each one of them. This is wise and worthy so let’s do it even if I think its kinda stupid. 

Social Dilemma:

Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out. No joke. This is not a game worth playing and existing in places where this is the vibe only legitimizes it. Or of course, no holds barred win at any cost, and I mean ANY cost, beg, borrow, lie, cheat, steal, or kill for all anyone cares. Be warned, everyone else is also playing as rough as they can as well. Good luck.

Zombie Apocalypse:

Take your pick between build your own mountain fortress, desert oasis or nuclear bunker. At some point hords of unwashed will evolve to fascism and decide anyone who doesn’t think like them is the enemy. The other option is to assimilate completely.

Hero Savior:

Either become the hero of more than normal stature who’s destiny is directly linked to that of their people, or find them. Just like they do with the Dali Lama and shit. 

Coordination Failure:

Understand your puzzle piece and find the others

Now perhaps I am feeling a bit too cynical to cope with bullshit at this moment. Perhaps we’ll revisit, or perhaps we’ll skip to changing the game. First however let’s slow down.

9 WHYS conversations matter into Critical Uncertainties

Human culture, coordination and collaboration is built mostly out of communication. Whether that be body language, facial expressions and physical signaling, language, conversation and symbols, or more complex forms of software powered stigmergic social computation.

I’m going to focus on language and conversation, because that’s where I’ve been able to find purchase and I see an enormous amount of work to be done that might actually be faster, cheaper and easier to implement than the other two. If you can turn this conceptual exploration into software, good for you, and I’m sure all be interested, but it's not where I’m skillful so LFG

So why does that (shit language, conversation and symbols) matter?

As group creatures humans we are responding collectively to our environmental challenges and opportunities. This seems so obvious but it is extraordinarily complex and challenging. 

So why is it hard?

Blind men and elephants. There is way more information than it is possible to get a grasp on all at once. Even if you add time to the mix and could get a grasp on the whole elephant, you then have yet another impossible challenge, discerning which part of it is relevant for what is happening now amidst the combinatorial explosion of possibilities. 

**What makes these impossibilities significant? **

First is this is a route to epistemic humility. 

Second is that a problem well understood is half solved

**What makes epistemic humility important? **

It may just help us shut the fuck up long enough about what we believe is THE thing in order to listen to one another

Why should we listen to one another?

In order to min-spec sending in order to accelerate the rate of flow of information across the group social/superorganism

**What might that increased flow of information help us do? **

We may just be able to address those impossibilities if we can solve the wicked question of both getting information from each blind man and receiving one another’s information.

If we could answer that wicked question, what might we get?

Relevant information getting to where it is needed at the appropriate time

So what if we do that?

We might drastically decrease the difficulty around deciding what to do

And now what happens if we can decide what to do?

Then we may just be able to do the fucking thing that needs to be done

The Byzantine General’s Information Theory

What are the most critical and uncertain factors of getting the appropriate information where it needs to be at the appropriate time?

This question lights up the technical part of my brain that wants to think about things very analytically. It wants to evoke big smart person things like the Byzantine General’s Problem and then Parallax with Information Theory

The Byzantine General’s Information Theory:

Did my information get to where it was intended to go?

Was it understood how I intended it to be?

The present answer to both questions is:

probably not😭

What would have to be true in order for them to be a solid “fuck yes”? (Let’s bookmark this for later).

All this to qualify what I believe is that the most critical factor can probably be simplified to status, which is always social. This may not solve the “was it understood as I intended?”, but the chances are significantly greater the higher the status of the sender of information. 

This is of course extraordinarily problematic because everyone on the face of the earth knows it to be true. So we play mostly at hierarchies and measuring dicks which takes up a lot of space in the channel of information flow. Coming back to our blind men and the elephant, this is the approximate equivalent of them spamming the feed with clickbait not about what they are sensing but why they should be listened to. This downward spiral into degeneration is an essential ingredient in what Tristan Harris describes as the Social Dilemma and it fucking sucks that yet again it is true. 

So if (social) status of the sender is critical to getting the relevant information to the right place at the appropriate time, then what’s uncertain about it?

I think like so often in life, the answer is in the question: 

relevance of information. 

If this is not the most uncertain thing in the universe then I don’t know what’s relevant. 🥁🥁💥 

But in all seriousness it is damned near impossible to tell in advance what information is relevant to whom. Lucky hunches may be about the best we can do in advance of running the actual check. The crucial questions here have everything to do with context and the receiving end: 

Relevant to whom?

For what purpose?

In the context that every person on the entire planet is playing the status game this becomes not only impossible to sort out but a bona-fide pit of vipers.

But okay we’ve got critical=status and uncertain=relevance. Ordinarily we’d plot these on a 2x2 matrix and make sense of these four scenarios like so:

What happens when my status is high but the relevance of my information is shit? 

I mean we kind of did this one in the 9WHYS:

Social dilemma, clickbait, unfortunately I don’t follow the mainstream media so I have no idea who this is at the moment and don’t feel like embarrassing myself with some disgustingly out of date reference. 

Never mind, keeping up with the Kardashians, Reality TV, Sports TV, Politics TV, TV, you get the idea. Massive output of fucking useless information.

I love the thought experiment of what this landscape is going to look like in 5 years of GPT-infinity powered steroids. The skills of how to ignore and who to trust and how to validate who you trust is not some jackhole spoofing them is going to generate some serious alpha. 

Let’s just call this the “Social Dilemma” Visualize a slam dunk that bounces off yet still shatters the backboard backboard

Next up, an omega with irrelevant information. This one seems funny but it is certainly not. Conspiracy theocracy. Incel’s Unite. Vulnerable minds hijacked and repeating what their “research” has found. Even if you think you’re smart enough to play the game well, you should be more terrified of this category than all others combined. 

Let’s call it the “Zombie Apocalypse” half court airball that blasts you in the face

Next up. Alpha’s with relevant information. Dear God, let us pray for benevolence. There is something so folksy and charming and comforting about this scenario. FDR, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Mahatma Ghandi, MLK Jr, The Rock, Elon Musk 😂. Wouldn’t it be nice? If Dad would just come home in the nick of time to save the farm from alien robot monsters from the future of outerspace? Edris Elba all

Naruto/Goku/Ichigo/Gilgamesh returns from gaining new special powers just in time to save Uruk from the bull of heaven. Simba/Arjuna accepts his role to return as warrior/king. Somehow this one seems less probable than ever. 

Let’s call it “Hero Savior” game winning 3

Last but not least where I believe most of us find ourselves. Pieces of the puzzle fucking lost in a sea of bullshit. Pearls thrown to swine. Signals drowned in noise. Needles in the haystack. Whispered sutras. When relevant information is held by hands of those without the social status that garners being paid attention to, I believe we all suffer. How much possibility lies behind locked doors that folks everyday humans are holding the keys to?

Let’s call it “coordination failure” the blocked shot.

Alright that’s fine and dandy but so fucking what?

Ordinarily we’d brainstorm coping strategies for each of these scenarios, what do we do in order to survive in each one of them. This is wise and worthy so let’s do it even if I think its kinda stupid. 

Social Dilemma:

Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out. No joke. This is not a game worth playing and existing in places where this is the vibe only legitimizes it. Or of course, no holds barred win at any cost, and I mean ANY cost, beg, borrow, lie, cheat, steal, or kill for all anyone cares. Be warned, everyone else is also playing as rough as they can as well. Good luck.

Zombie Apocalypse:

Take your pick between build your own mountain fortress, desert oasis or nuclear bunker. At some point hords of unwashed will evolve to fascism and decide anyone who doesn’t think like them is the enemy. The other option is to assimilate completely.

Hero Savior:

Either become the hero of more than normal stature who’s destiny is directly linked to that of their people, or find them. Just like they do with the Dali Lama and shit. 

Coordination Failure:

Understand your puzzle piece and find the others

Now perhaps I am feeling a bit too cynical to cope with bullshit at this moment. Perhaps we’ll revisit, or perhaps we’ll skip to changing the game. First however let’s slow down.