Game B

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.

Cointelligence R&D Lab Proposal

• Game B

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 - fractal fractal selves perspective-taking parallax Game B Jordan Hall Jim Rutt Show The Challenge of Partial Control Destructive Global Capitalism Grokking Systems and Society community much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly the point of friendliness is not to avoid conflict, but to actually create contexts that allow for deeper, more intense, prolonged conflict over the long term dialogue human superorganism Geoffrey West Books/Scale by Geoffrey West Books/Scale by Geoffrey West fractal selves internal conflict inner conflict internal conflict Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality

• 7:52 - 11:48 What is game B and what does it mean to be a "game B thinker"? Game B Jordan Hall Jim Rutt Show

• 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

• 47:07 - 1:08:42 - Interesting moments from my personal history. Earliest introduction to meditation. Getting started with LSA, rationality and Trust dancing. Mark Lippmann's meditation protocol Liminal Space Agency The Stoa Game B
  • 56:52 - M > And, I guess the other thing I could say was that I've long had a fascination with interfaces. And I mean that in very abstract sense, not just like computer interfaces, and not just the interface of designed objects in general, like this handle is an interface with this mug. So, of course, is the lip of the mug, don't forget, that's a necessary interface for drinking. But interfaces between people as well, and like what kinds of interactions between people yield mutually satisfying, 'upward spiral' type dynamics? And what kinds of interactions between people lead to disappointment and despair and frustration and challenges and so forth? Well challenges, you're always going to get challenges, but difficulty in like the psychological sense, strain? And, from the get-go, it was just really clear that these folks had a model of human relating, and thus human interfacing, and that was more sophisticated than anything I'd ever seen. And remained more sophisticated than anything else I would come to see over the following eight years. You know, there's been important key pieces that we've incorporated from other places, and things that I've found, you know, like missing or like necessary elements of various things. But it remains the case that the basic framework being pointed at there is one of the best things I've ever seen in the world for pointing at different human dynamics. And it was outlining kind of, you know, "Here are the basic things that lead to the upward spiral, and here are the basic things that lead to the downward spiral." And having seen that, as clearly as I had, in terms of like, 'what was I trying to accomplish there?' In the most general sense, it's like, "Get the upward spiral going more upwardly and spirally. And, you know, bigger and with more people in it, and more consistency," and whatever else, I mean. Which is pretty general, and I think the generality is something that I've been revisiting recently and sort of feeling into, "Do I want to have more specific targets? Or is that even possible or wise given that part of the nature of things is that you don't know what's possible until you make it possible? And like, you don't want to like constrain yourself too early? And there's this kind of dynamic tension between planning and improv or other dimensions like that. [pause]. Yeah, I think part of what's interesting -in terms of like, "What was I trying to accomplish there?", and I've been reflecting more about this recently- is that in some sense... so, as you know -and it has sorta implicitly been hinted at by how I've been talking about this group versus what I'm doing now as distinct- I left Waterloo and I left that scene in late 2020. And I was reflecting to Eric, recently. We were talking about home and I said, "This feels like it could be home." And he asked, "Was Waterloo home?" And I said, "Ah, hmm." And he and he said... or maybe he asked, like "Waterloo could be home," or something like that. And I said, "No, Waterloo was home. Waterloo never was 'could be home'". And there was something really valuable about getting in touch with how the whole time I've been living in Waterloo, I'd never intended to live there indefinitely. Like, I was there as a university student, who are notoriously transient, right? Although, I mean, a substantial fraction of university students end up living, indefinitely, wherever they do University, it's one of the main things that gets people moving, and so on. But, you know, for the years that I was visiting the Bay Area, I kind of always assumed that sooner or later, I would move there. And, you know, [there were] various factors, including social dynamics and also the fires, as well as other things that led me to sort of feel less inclined to try to move to the bay. But there was something meaningful in recognizing, "Yeah, I haven't been treating Waterloo, like the place I'm intending to live for the rest of my life. Like, I'm mostly just friends with the small group doing this culture incubator thing here." And most of my other friends just measured in terms of like, number of people I know, who know me and know each other kind of thing, are in the bay. And I wasn't bothering to try to make friends in Waterloo for the most part. So, there was a way in which I kind of was recognizing, oh, yeah, I was... I feel like I'm answering one of your questions right now, but I've forgotten which one.

• 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.

• 1:35:30 - 1:55:32 - Domino memes, barn-raising, new ways to non-coercively collaborate. self-energizing barn-raising Game B

November 13th, 2021

• Game B

Roam

• sensemaking-web (mapping Game B & people in that space)

September 4th, 2021

• Game A→Game B

psychopaths

• As far as I can tell, for various reasons, this question is not a leverage point for systems change. The relevant leverage point is nurturing Game B social dynamics, primarily with empathic humans, while ensuring that those cultures can work creatively and generatively with psychopaths as well.

• Game B societies will:
  • not actively incentivize psychopathic behavior among anyone
  • actively incentivize prosocial behavior among everyone, including psychopaths

• My current perspective seems to be that, given a workable solution to the initial challenge of getting Game B dynamics working with non-psychopaths, solving the psychopaths edgecase is actually a relatively easy problem. The reason for this page is to explore my thinking about why this appears so.
  • I'll caveat that the presence of psychopaths will surely furthermore make the transition process harder, so that's not irrelevant
  • Or, put another way, I'm not particularly worried about psychopaths undermining contexts with deep non-naive trust via infiltrating them—that's part of what it means for the trust to be non-naive! But they could still destroy those contexts materially from the outside.

• If you've thought deeply about this exact question ("how do psychopaths integrate with Game B?") and want to share your perspective on what I've written below, I am interested in that! I'm mostly not interested in discussing "what, if anything can/should we do about psychopaths within Game A cultures?" in general terms.

• Moreover, many of the aspects of culture that allow people (psychopaths or anyone) to effectively "win" win-lose games rely on certain underpinnings like feelings of scarcity, lack of self-trust, and people not speaking openly about what is happening due to shame or other threats. All of these factors can be adjusted, and will be in any Game B culture, which is an elaboration on how Game B will not actively incentivize psychopathic behavior among anyone
  • My understanding that psychopaths exploit this sort of thing came largely from reading Too Late for the Pebbles to Vote, a series of 3 articles, about a sociopath who was a leader in an open source community

cult

• (this is obviously missing something, and doesn't easily allow describing the difference between "a sports team" and "scientology", so more dimensions needed, but it captures something important about how cultness is actual entirely endemic to how cultures work currently, although it doesn't have to be! that it doesn't have to be is essentially the whole premise of Game B)

October 28th, 2020

• anti-rivalry comes up as a topic in Game B spaces a lot
  • and while I'm sure many people get what I'm about to say below, I've heard a few people talk as if they don't, so!
  • it seems important to me to note that some resources (primarily "energy/negentropy") are fundamentally rivalrous by nature
  • and that we need to figure out how to work with those within more broadly anti-rivalrous dynamics
  • part of that is going to involve generating an abundance of those resources, but there's got to be more to it than that, on the level of organizing resources
  • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1299428448159641601

It's not my fault

• and that working with that part is a huge leverage point towards creating H3/Gen3/Game B

September 28th, 2020

• 1. discomfort (of any magnitude) is not intrinsically a threat, although our belief that it is a threat makes it a genuine threat because it causes us to undermine ourselves to make it go away, which means that we naturally fear encountering such discomfort in the future because we know it will tend to result in us undermining ourselves - this is a huge part of how coercive memes are maintained, and unlearning this is vital to shifting into collaborative / Game B

• 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)

August 23rd, 2020

• found myself thinking about core books today, like what I'd consider textbooks for... something. ~ Game B. you don't need these ones in particular, but they play some important roles and you need something to play those roles. if you want to know what order to read them in, message me on twitter: @Malcolm_Ocean and I'll consider it for where you're starting
  • candidate textbook list
    • Already Free by Bruce Tift
    • The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
    • Meaningness by David Chapman
    • Unlocking the Emotional Brain by Bruce Ecker et al (summary)
    • something about systems thinking
      • Donella Meadows?
      • Fifth Discipline?
      • Mutual Causality
    • also a PCT book by William Powers
  • Probably I also want to comment on why each of these covers an important piece.

Werewolf variant ideas

• (this, btw, is why I think that real psychopaths will actually be able to play along fine in Game B—it's truly a game where the benefit from playing positive-sum, positively-correlated games is actually stronger than the benefit from playing zero/negative-sum, negatively-correlated games)

Game A

• Not my terms; search google or twitter for Game B to read others' perspectives

• Game A describes a cultural platform: the commonality among all cultures from the agricultural revolution until about now, when Game B cultures are beginning to emerge.

• Game A is based on "either/or" thinking on many scales. Game B is based on "both/and" thinking on many scales.

• Game A sees Game B as a threat.

• Game B sees Game A as a danger.

new map

• Game B: see Game B on the sensemaking-web public roam