May 18th, 2025
- re uptrust
- on an adjacent note, "trust" seems to me to be the wrong word for the thing that uptrust is trying to track. it's much more like "cred". trust is subjective (but non-arbitrary!) so you as the app can't just tell me how much I trust or should trust someone. you can just tell me how much computed cred they have, and then I trust that as much as I do, in the context of everything. which gets back to the embodied/embedded nature of trust
- I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend, where he said he wanted to commodify trust, and I was like... that's a total confusion. you can commodify lots of adjacent things like some key information that people use to trust, but trust itself is not commodifiable
- ———
- not sent
- (we could call this a semantic argument over what we use the word "trust" for, but if so I'd rather call it a semantic war, because I think we'll fuck ourselves up bad if we forget that trust's nature is to be the least commodifiable or externalizable thing.)
- but also it feels to me like there are a few very different kinds of trust that are relevant here. examples:
1. if someone is asserting facts about what has happened in the world that I can't verify for myself, I may or may not take their word for it.
2. that's quite different from if someone is asserting an interpretation of what Plato or Jesus was on about, which is somewhat subject to debate but it's also possible to be wrong about it and in order to know I might have to crosscheck it otherwise.
3. then there's like, someone has a philosophical take, which doesn't rest on any particular authority at all but is designed to help me notice things about their own experience, and there (a) what's relevant is not whether I can take their words at face value but whether I can understand and make use of them, and (b) the
- thoughts on the movie Groundhog Day
- it vibes hard with Psycho-Cybernetics
- it's not so much that you learn from your mistakes, but you learn from what works. it's just that in order to do so, you need to subject yourself to real tries, at your edge
- there's also some interesting stuff about self-image...
- Phil starts out with a self-image that's out of sync with others, where he thinks he's great and they think he's self-absorbed
- and then he kind of realizes, sort of, but not in a super devastating way exactly, that he's not actually living up to his own sort-of-self-image
- and then the ways that he does develop involve to some degree reconceiving of how he'd like to be and seeking out experiences that'll allow him to embody it
- the fact that at the end he says "let's live here [in pux]" slightly surprised me, but of course -- that's where he now has all this social capital, but also in the sense that like, it's there that people's image of him is of a nice guy. like it would be much harder to continue being that guy somewhere else
- alternate movie idea
- days keep moving forward in general, so there's no way to predict everything absolutely
- but, LIKE time-loop movies, the protagonist has a special way (via magic, narnia, or some handwavy technology they've invented) to step outside of time in some way to do costless-mistake learning
- this would be practically an ad for psycho-cybernetics / practicing in your imagination
- like it would give people an affordance for "I could take this type of situation I don't know how to handle, and spend some time rehearsing how I'd like to handle it, and then I could handle it well"
1 linked reference
omniwin training game
- May 18th, 2025 — cool "make your own lil interaction game" meta-game at Presence Games with Max Roth, which had a sort of low-stakes omniwin training game vibe
- (see google photos for rules of meta-game)