Write 100 summaries/proposals

One of the classic big conundrums is "the coordination problem", ie getting people to realize win-wins together when those exist (and, I would say, noticing and creating more situations where they exist). The two main kinds of approaches to that are (1) finding ways to get existing agents to be able to coordinate better (eg matchmaking or dealflow systems) and (2) creating a new kind of agent (collective or individual) that can coordinate well with other such agents, and scale laterally to show others how to coordinate in the same way. I have new social tech for the second strategy.

The aim is to create scalable cultures where basically every interaction between people is therapeutic. This isn't about therapist-client roles and relations. By therapeutic, I refer to something like Bessel van der Kolk's "Healing from trauma amounts to learning that it is okay to know what you know, and feel what you feel." For interactions to be therapeutic, that means they support people knowing what they know, feeling what they feel, wanting what they want, etc. A lot of common assumptions of most cultures today negate that possibility. One example would be the assumption that if we see things differently, one of us must be wrong, which means that I can't know what I know while you know what you know. I've been part of several groups prototyping such a thing, and I have a rough plan for how to create an even better prototype, based on focusing on trust-building and perspective-taking.

Can we create friendly collective human superintelligence before AI superintelligence? One advantage is that insofar as "friendly" refers to "aligned with human values", well, we already know our own values! In fact, we're the authority on them (although we can be confused). And yet current coordination mechanisms such as corporations, capitalism, & government bureaucracies have system attractors that are so sociopathic that they get compared to the proverbial paperclip maximizer we're trying to avoid! However, there's a limit to how strategically unaligned they can be, because they are still made of humans with human values who are only coercible to a limited degree in service of unaligned goals. My project is to help humans become not-at-all-coercible, which simultaneously renders them capable of building deep trust with others and coordinating way MORE effectively.

I want to convene a series of conversations and collaborations among people who are near the forefront of cultural evolution. Culture is evolving in several ways:
 - from unconscious to aware of itself (eg memetics)
 - from blind reproduction to serving us
 - from win-lose dynamics to win-wins
Based on a decade of embodiedly investigating this, I've got some new hypotheses to test about how trust-building works in service of allowing people to perceive & act together. I'm going to explore those in small groups of people who are bringing their own sense of it. If my hypotheses are correct, we'll be able to make new headway on many kinds of coordination problems.

David Chapman wrote a piece called "A fully meta-rational workplace" which outlines his view on a new kind of organization that could emerge. I'm aiming to assemble a team of people to prototype a fully meta-rational workplace that can function as a model for others. I have a detailed model for how to get there, and I need to test it and see where it works and doesn't. I'll start by hosting a series of conversations and collaborations among people with meta-rational capacities, both to see who might be a good fit for the org, and because those conversations will help clarify how to make it work. One of the challenges will be navigating the interplay between the meta-level purpose of the org (to model meta-rationality) and the object-level purposes which may include things like building software.

Attempts at coordination or behavior change that rely on constructing "incentives" are naturally prone to goodharting, because the rewards and punishments are always meted based on appearing to satisfy some criterion. Behavior driven by intrinsic motivation does not have this problem. So the question is, how can we coordinate our intrinsic motivations to find creative win-win solutions to what we collectively want? It's possible, but sometimes counterintuitive, and we have lots of fears and habits that get in the way. I'm embarking on an embodied research program to understand how individuals and organizations can learn to do that effectively.

Most conceptions of resolving disagreement are profoundly limited, because they frame disagreement in terms of opinion rather than perspective. Consider that your eyes, in a sense, constantly disagree. Your brain, however, doesn't waste any time asking which one is right. Instead, it asks a much more interesting question: what deeper truth can be seen only by combining these different perspectives? Thus you see a 3D world. Resolution of conflicts, internally or interpersonally, can also be like this, if we can learn to honor the truth and partialness of all perspectives—our own and others. This has implications for intimate relationships as well as strategic decisions in business and governance. I'm developing training programs to show people how to see the world this way and what's possible when they do.

There are lots of dynamics that get in the way of people being able to think together effectively or collaborate — status dynamics, blame, defensiveness, politicking — and we all kind of agree it would be nice if we could not do those costly things, but nobody wants to go first—not just intellectually but on an embodied level. I'm developing social tech for becoming capable of credibly & consistently not engaging in those dynamics, without becoming vulnerable to them. The same tech also facilitates being able to appropriately recognize who else is capable of this and thereby mutually disarming and entering into appropriately-high states of trust. I've been exploring this for a decade and have some new hypotheses that I want to test with small groups and teams in SF.

Groups get pockets of stupidity around topics they've failed to achieve common ground on before, and end up routing around those topics in order to talk, which makes them worse at sensemaking. (This also happens implicitly, where individuals won't even bring up topics that were untalkaboutable in previous groups they were in, or will bring them up in ways that make them harder to talk about.) I've got some social technology for bridging viewpoints in these situations and building common ground for dialogue, that I intend to develop in small-group sessions. This amounts to training in how to take others' perspectives effectively without losing touch with your own, so you can see the depth perspective implied by the two eyeballs.

When we enter into an intentional social container (eg a therapy session, a karate lesson, etc) we agree on a set of expectations. When the container ends, then what? What is our shared basis? It's... culture, and it's a complex thing to redesign or change. Moreover, increasingly people don't agree on what the cultural expectations are in the first place. People feel unsafe if others don't follow certain norms—norms that those others don't understand and certainly never agreed to. The resulting communication breakdowns & blame are at the root of everything from political polarization to failed marriages. When we lack a shared basis for renegotiating expectations, can we learn to make one together? Can that process be a fun, satisfying, co-creative dance rather than a frustrating, wasteful power struggle? Yes, with different meta-norms, ie norms about how we relate to culture. I have a rough sense of what those are and I'm creating a petri dish for iterating on them and for learning how to embody them. The aim is to create a scalable culture of dialogue that enables humanity to fractally coordinate in relation to existential challenges.

It's widely agreed that flow states are great. Flow states usually involve focusing on a narrow range of experience, like a piece of writing, or a sport. It's possible, however, to enter into states of flow with broad awareness, where we naturally rapidly synthesize many perspectives and values to find win-wins.

Consciousness directs attention.

[see what is cc and why does it matter post]

the recognition that we're all, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not, participating in the [vast/grand] evolutionary process of the universe

& the choice to consciously participate in that

evolution becoming conscious of itself

the puzzle is to create a form of liminal/nondual consciousness which doesn't disintegrate on contact with dualistic consciousness but instead helps the dualistic consciousness to become mature/robust nondual as well