November 6th, 2022
- I wrote in Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam
- > It seems to me that: sometimes it’s easy to welcome each other because we seem to already be on the same page about how we see the world and what we want from our lives and each other. It also seems to me that there are ways to learn to welcome everyone, even across vast cultural chasms.
- Michael "Valentine" Smith responded
- > This is the most questionable part, to me. I agree! And yet, it's the part I'd be least surprised to discover were wrong.
I'm reminded of the basic postmodern glitch. If you're welcoming everyone, do you welcome those who don't welcome everyone? Those who don't welcome you? How does that work?
Closely related to "How does a tolerant society deal with intolerance? Do we tolerate it, or not?"
This is the basic thing I see Wilbur's Tier II shift addressing. The Green to Teal transition.
(I know you know all this. This just seems like a part that isn't fully addressed yet, so I'm keeping an eye on it.)
- Some initial thoughts on the topic:
- a few key points:
- one main thing to differentiate is that there's a difference between
- coherence empathy, ie a stance of honoring that people's points of view are what they are and not expecting them to change those without evidence
- allowing people to DO anything in particular that you have the power to not allow them to do
- another is that people may not actually trust that you are in fact empathizing with them or welcoming them
- ie they may not feel any sense of welcome even if you're genuinely trying to welcome them
- and NNTD of course says "if they can't trust they're welcomed, they don't have to trust that"
- and ofc they may not trust that you respect that they can't trust it, but you'll still engage totally differently if you actually do respect it, and that "totally differently" will work a lot better"
- and of course optimizing for "everyone reports feeling welcomed" is extremely hackable by "bad actors" who simply extort demand from you until they feel welcomed
- so there needs to be some substantial ability to say "I don't know how to welcome you in the way you say you want, in a way that works for my integrity, and I'm not going to compromise that"
- this of course will get accused of being all sorts of things, among them perhaps illiberal, and insofar as liberalism has this paradox, perhaps it is illiberal! ideally it's truly post-liberal in a sense
- to some extent the best approach is to try to ignore the intolerant whenever possible and go build a more awesome scene that has tolerance as a prerequisite, and then welcome people into that scene to the extent that they're capable of also tolerating
- this isn't without issues, but as a basic stance to start from it's better than trying to welcome everyone all at once
- we dig into this somewhat in the middle of this long video but end up more argumentative than dialogical
- talking about scraping off skin cells and honoring the fractal parts down as well as up:
- also re parallax:
- MS > Notice that in the parallax analogy/example, neither eye ever sees through the other. What happens instead is, each eye learns how to coordinate with the other, and a separate process (the visual cortex) creates a "third eye" that does in fact see out of both eyes simultaneously. A larger "you" gets constructed out of two smaller "you"s, and it's only the larger "you" that needs to see from both vantage points.
- I don't know how much that actually generalizes. But I think it does some, and maybe a lot. Like, I don't ever need to see the world through your interface thing — but I need to have a way of coordinating with it enough that our process of jamming together allows an emergent "we" to arise that "sees" through both of us. (And you with mine, likewise, of course.)
- MO > Yeah, this is another open question for me of things that are similar and different at different scales, because it obviously analogizes quite well, but to name a simple contrast, I clearly can imagine the world through your perspective in a way that the eyes can't and don't need to. Like if we're facing each other, I can imagine your view, in which I'm seeing my face, but I'm not calling it "my face" I'm calling it "Malcolm's face", etc etc. So that's clearly unlike eyes in that way. And then there's a question of in what other ways is it similar/different.
- MO > Speaking of parallax, I'm enjoying how we seem to have a bit we're doing where you tend to find yourself as the "maybe it's basically the same at all fractal scales" eye and I find myself as the "maybe it's actually very different at all fractal scales" eye! Like that came up re scraping off skin cells. I continue to be very excited about having a conversation where we try to dovetail all of this!
- basically the thing where I said to Jean Robertson that Coherence Therapy has important stuff to say about our work in collaborative culture / meta-protocol
- and she said "I didn't sign up to be peoples' therapist"
- and I commented later to Michael "Valentine" Smith that this was entirely irrelevant to what I was trying to say
- BUT that it was entirely relevant to what Jean was needing in order to hear me
- AND this in itself is actually a brilliant illustration of what I'm talking about with respect to the relevance of coherence empathy to collaborative culture / meta-protocol
- first introduced by Jordan Hall in this 7min vide
- in Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam I wrote
- It seems to me that: these principles are on the meta level. That is, they’re not cultural norms but rather a way of relating to norms
- Michael "Valentine" Smith commented:
- > I suspect that cultural norms are an example of these principles enacted, the same way that biological evolution is the continuation of the same thing that created stars and planets (viewing that as something like "mechanical evolution"). My understanding of the truth of your point here isn't that these principles are meta instead of object. Rather, that the interesting thing for talking about these things explicitly is the way these principles apply to the meta level. Kind of like the most interesting thing about evolution now is at the memetic level.
- I replied:
- > I think what you're saying is that cultural norms aren't ummm separate from these laws of trust-physics any more than biological evolution has ever been separate from physics? although they may not yet have discovered ~sexual reproduction or something and therefore they don't yet have a need to maintain speciation in terms of compatibility. not a bad analogy!
- Michael "Valentine" Smith brought up the liberalism paradox, aka tolerating the intolerant or welcoming the unwelcoming again
- re
- > A vast diversity of cultures can exist on top of this cultural platform. What these cultures have in common is a certain kind of interoperability—a capacity to see and honor each other.
- and I commented:
- well there's also "they can see and honor each other" which is different from "they can see and honor cultures that aren't able to see and honor other cultures"
- like in some sense the answer to the latter also has to be yes, but also... it's in practice much harder/messier.
- oh! huh, using the speciation metaphor, here's another rather weird way of thinking about it:
- Gen3 cultures have wildly different phenotypes but are broadly all of the same species in the sense that they're interoperable...
- and then ALSO some Gen3 cultures will also be able to mate with some Gen2 cultures
- and the Gen3 genes/memes are dominant and therefore the offspring will be Gen3
- I say "some" here because I think that for a Gen3 culture to mate with a Gen2 culture, they need to be much closer in object-level-culture-space than two Gen3 cultures need to be
- (and for completion's sake, I guess Gen3 could also mate with Gen1?)
- also "mate" here is something like the deep perspectival intimacy of parallax/ophanim, which we already talked on tuesday about how it has an interpenetrative vulnerability quality that's somewhat like sex.
- a convo w Timothy Telleen-Lawton yielded a new concept of how to think about good faith
- which is basically that you are genuinely attempting to coordinate in accordance with your understanding of the shared understanding / protocol
- and ofc I might not trust that you are, but that's based on my understanding
- and ofc sometimes bad faith is exploiting exactly that ambiguity
- convo with Tim's friend Natasha
- Possibility Management as a thing that offers new maps and encourages people to experiment with them not to take their word
- heurisms basically