superexponential scaling of collaborative culture

September 27th, 2022

• superexponential scaling of collaborative culture
  • something that Michael "Valentine" Smith and I independently noticed a couple years ago is that we had some sense that the collaborative culture we were working on would scale superexponentially
  • note that this doesn't mean fast—superexponential growth is slower than exponential growth—until it isn't! (like exponential compared to linear)
  • I don't know if I can fully argue why I think this is so
  • but a few intuitions
    • culture spreads better via immersion
      • so if we're trying to create a new kind of culture, it'll be very slow to start with since people will mostly still be immersed in mainstream cultures
      • but then once there's a certain critical mass, it will be able to spread at least exponentially (assuming it's adaptive in the first place)
      • why superexponential? a sense that in addition to increased surface area from more people and increased robustness from people being more stably in the new cultural mode, there'll also be a wealth of diversity
        • and the diversity will be able to be actually leveraged, as everyone operating by this new cultural platform will mutually recognize others doing so, even when they have wildly different object-level cultures
    • more role models makes it dramatically easier to hone in on the thing they have in common rather than idiosyncrasies, and to find a particular exemplar that you want to emulate
      • this is true on the level of individuals within the culture and groups embodying some version of the culture
      • if you only have Game B families, then a Game B team doesn't have any good role models
      • in addition to role models, there's also something about different peoples' experiences and trust
        • eg a woman joining a group of all men will likely have a harder time integrating than a woman joining a group of all men except 1 other woman, which is itself harder than a group that's evenly balanced
        • now repeat that previous paragraph multiplied by all the combinatorics of age, class, language, culture,