Game A

Moloch

• In general, Game A dynamics within a given business will make it less competitive within its industry, so as Game B dynamics start to stabilize within some organizations, other organizations will either have to find a way to operate at a similar level of effectiveness, or will go bankrupt.
  • To illustrate these, read these this excerpt from the Intro to An Everyone Culture:
    • > In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.
      > We regard this as the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. Is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their energies? The total cost of this waste is simple to state and staggering to contemplate: It prevents organizations, and the people who work in them, from reaching their full potential.
  • Clearly, any organization that can find a different way to organize itself that puts an end to the hiding and taps peoples' deep appetite to do good work and to learn new things... will have a huge advantage.

everything makes sense

• Except for psychopaths, most people are in some sense being quite honest most of the time, although due to Game A power dynamics they're usually sufficiently compartmentalized that it's hard to tell what's going on.

April 7th, 2022

• watched Kate Raworth presenting "3 horizons framework" — decent concept for how disruptive innovation / technology can either be captured by Game A or harnessed towards Game B

Podcast summaries

• Keywords: Eric Chisholm Sarah McManus Conversation As Medium blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) ottergroup fishbowl frame dialogue frame blindspot Circling Liminal Space Agency NNTD upward spiral fuel the upward spiral nobody is to blame What is Blame? building trust out of distrust trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions Game A Game B Circling NVC NNTD has let me see how certain attempts towards trust-building will fail to build non-naive trust obvious

• 1:23:45 - 1:33:48 - Is NNTD and upgraded version of Upstart's ideals and methods? Liminal Space Agency trust-dancing Game A Game B CirclingNVC
  • 1:26:43 - M > Yeah, it it very much feels that way to me because, yeah, that's that's kind of how it emerged. And there's a profound amount of historical contingency to all of this. Like, the name 'Non Naive Trust Dance,' has a lot of rich elements to it, and it's not a coincidence that it's named that. But there's also a way in which like... and I may do things about this over the coming years, or months even, but like one of the things that's currently a little funny is that like, in some sense, Non Naive Trust Dance refers to a thing that people are always doing to greater and lesser degrees of skill and workability and effectiveness. Like, you know, any conversation that people have is them navigating, effectively or not, the trust landscape between them and building trust and building distrust, or having gaps in trust. Like, that's, that's always happening, right? And so in some sense, the Non Naive trust Dance is just a way of talking about a thing that's already happening. But it's already happening, and I didn't invent it in that sense of it, right? And that's part of why I talk about discovering the Non Naive Trust Dance, because it feels in some ways more like a discovery than like an invention. Having said that, it's a discovery that produces a set of kinda obvious implications for how one might go about trust dancing in ways that work in the same way that -and this is an analogy I use often- [in] learning thermodynamics and aerodynamics, it's like, you, you get an immediate sense of like, "Okay, yeah, you can build faster-than-light aircraft, but they need to have some way of lifting themselves," and there's sort of like, three or four-ish, I don't know, I mean, some expert in this could talk about it, but, you know, there's sort of a few ways to do that lifting thing, and, you know, pushing off against the ground can't do it, because you can't do that when you're in the air. Like, just some of these basic principles. And, you know, knowing thermodynamics, you'd also know that you can't build a perpetual motion machine. Like there's limits of entropy that prevent that from being possible. But you can build a superconductor, which is kind of cool. And so there's something where I feel like I've unlocked a very basic couple of fundamental truths about how trust building ever works, when it works. Like, it always follows these principles, but the principles themselves are really hard to put into words. They're like this sort of... I mean, in part because they sound almost tautological, like, they're just like, "you can't trust what you don't trust". But, if you really take that seriously, and you and you look for instances where you're trying to get someone to trust you when they don't, without actually changing what's available to them as information or just salient features that would allow them to trust you, instead of not trusting you, you notice that this is happening constantly with, with things that people say and do and so forth. So even though it's kind of obvious when stated that, like, "you can't trust what you don't trust," that's not actually how people operate most of the time. Anyway, I'm getting a little sidetracked from the the core thrust of your question, which was like, in what sense is the Non Naive Trust Dance an upgrade on what Upstart has been doing this whole time, right? So, in one sense, it just straightforwardly is, and, in some sense, even almost too much so, in that, as I was differentiating myself from that... from just being like, "the main way I have of understanding this collaborative culture thing is how we've been talking about it here, and, in particular, the way that Jean has been talking about it - Jean being the main founder of upstart and that whole project. As I was differentiating myself from her thinking, there was a way in which like, any difference that I had, between how she was seeing things and how I was seeing things that felt central, as opposed to just aesthetic or something got kind of put in the Non Naive Trust Dance. And in that sense, I'm not sure it's one thing. Like, it's in some ways a placeholder for Malcolm having his own thoughts about stuff, which I hadn't previously felt like I had space to do until I sort of started having this new framework. But in a different sense, it all feels really related. So I hope it's an upgrade. It is, at minimum, a critique, and I do have concerns that it's possible that I've missed one or two key pieces of the original, that Jean still understands that I don't. And that, in that sense, it might be a critique that's not actually viable in the sense that I might be missing some basic components. And it might be that I know I see things that ge doesn't see, because I've seen them and I've tested them and they do they do something. But it may be that I'm still missing some key pieces and that's part of why, over the coming years, part of what I want to do is find ways to bridge the thinking that I've developed back with Upstart's thinking which I was already starting to do while I was there - to some success. But I think it's gonna be really helpful for us to have had the space that we've already had, and the further space of me being out here. Which I'm just gonna mention for the recording, because if you're out in British Columbia, particularly on the coast or Vancouver Island area, I would be interested in talking with you, like nebulous podcast listener, people.
  • 1:32:35 - M > Right. And it's funny that you're using the metaphor too, because we've been using the operating system metaphor going all the way back. You know, from the very point that I joined, we were talking about the upward spiral as being humanity 3.0. Which is like the previous two operating systems being the kinda 'Hunter Gatherer pre Game A' one, and then the kind of various forms of much more serious hierarchy that humanity's had, that are also known as Game A. So the operating system metaphor goes deep, and we've even, you know, been reading some open source texts, like the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric S. Raymond. And we've been talking about the Non Naive Trust Dance as something of like a fork of the OS, I guess - a fork of the code of the cultural kernel that Jean has been stewarding for years. And, I mean, maybe one way to point at that a little bit there is, is NNTD the whole fork? Or is it just the changes that I've made on top of the fork, right? Like, is it just the patch? There is a way in which part of what's going on with the NNTD is very much designed to mediate between cultures and assumptions and protocols, kinda wherever they're at. And so, I think that similar patches might be able to be created from the same sort of font of inspiration that I've been drawing from, for other communities, other groups, other practices. You know, like various ways in which circling could benefit from a similar patch, or nonviolent communication or like other similar things. And that, that would make them all more able to talk with each other because of this basic assumption of like, "If something's not working for us, such that you don't trust me, then well, you can't trust me. Like that's how it is and that's the ground from which we need to start." And that needs to somehow be okay, in the sense that like, otherwise, you have to throw out the universe and get a new one.

September 4th, 2021

• Game A→Game B

psychopaths

• "what, if anything can/should we do about psychopaths within Game A cultures?"
  • To the extent that one operates in Game A subcultures, this is an inevitable question, but it's not one that I have a particularly novel opinion on. I say:
    • try to avoid them
    • threats don't really work [one core feature to psychopathy is not caring particularly much about punishment, only about reward source]

• People learn non-empathic coping mechanisms to deal with a Game A world, at a young age, and then Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings so they persist these dynamics even in contexts where they aren't needed.

• Much of this is on a small scale & self-limited by various internal mechanisms that include Game A mechanisms like guilt but also just like... that people do still have empathy and their empathy still doesn't want to hurt people.

• Existing Game A societies are places where psychopathic behavior is incentivized in everyone, not just psychopaths. This is true in any context that uses blame, essentially, because of either/or scarcity-based thinking that's inherent to blame.
  • For more on how blame is a confusion, read Reality is alive: don't carve it

September 28th, 2020

• there _is_ a non-shouldy way of holding something like this but anyone in the Game A→Game B transition process is not going to start by knowing what it is, and attempting to embody "this ought to be fun" will likely result in them blaming themselves or others for it not being fun, one way or another, or feeling entitled to things being fun (entitlement being part of Game A)

Werewolf variant ideas

• This is actually really shitty, and I bet some people even play Werewolf in this shitty way. By "shitty" here I'm not being judgmental, I'm pointing at how it seems like it would entail people being shitty to each other, because of creating a kind of scarcity among the villagers, which would naturally generate Game A dynamics of trying to sacrifice others to avoid being targeted.