You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape fromreality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply thewish to be relieved of your so-called personality.

I thought, not of her, but of what Hermine had said.

You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds andsufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deedsand no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to playand so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking,coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him—theheroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints—is a fool and aDon Quixote.

You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a manfull of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with thetrivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, thegreater has your need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that haveovertaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved andrevered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, hasbeen of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air tobreathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate?

All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, asmuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.

That night, however, forthe first time since my downfall gave me back the unrelenting radiance of my own life and mademe recognize chance as destiny once more and see the ruins of my being as fragments of thedivine. My soul breathed once more. My eyes were opened. There were moments when I feltwith a glow that I had only to snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Hallerand as the Steppenwolf to the unity of one picture, in order to enter myself into the world ofimagination and be immortal. Was not this, then, the goal set for the progress of every humanlife?I

but she gave me, also, newunderstanding, new insight, new love.

One such moment waswhen a few days after my first public exhibition of dancing, I went into my bedroom at night andto my indescribable astonishment, dismay, horror and enchantment found the lovely Maria lyingin my bed.Of all the surprises that Hermine had prepared for me this was the most violent.

Granted," I said coolly, "all the same it won't do to put Mozart and the latest fox trot on thesame level. And it is not one and the same thing whether you play people divine and eternalmusic or cheap stuff of the day that is forgotten tomorrow."

and my estimate ofhim had to be revised if only because Hermine liked him so much and was so eager for hiscompany. Pablo had left on me the impression of a pretty nonentity, a little beau, and somewhatempty at that, as happy as a child for whom there are no problems, whose joy is to dribble intohis toy trumpet and who is kept quiet with praises and chocolate.

but truths like that—that we must all soon be deadand so it is all one and the same—make the whole of life flat and stupid. Are we then to throweverything up and renounce the spirit altogether and all effort and all that is human and letambition and money rule forever while we await the next mobilization over a glass of beer?"

You like me," she went on, "for the reason I said before, because I have broken through yourisolation. I have caught you from the very gates of hell and wakened you to a new life. But Iwant more from you—much more. I want to make you fall in love with me. No, don't interruptme. Let me speak. You like me very much. I can see that. And you're grateful to me. But you'renot in love with me. I mean to make you fall in love with me, and it is part of my calling. It is myliving to be able to make men fall in love with me. But mind this, I don't do it because I find youexactly captivating. I'm as little in love with you as you with me. But I need you as you do me.You need me now, for the moment, because you're desperate. You're dying just for the lack of apush to throw you into the water and bring you to life again. You need me to teach you to danceand to laugh and to live. But I need you, not today—later, for something very important andbeautiful too. When you are in love with me I will give you my last command and you will obeyit, and it will be the better for both of us."

Of all the things that pleased and charmed meabout her, the prettiest and most characteristic was her rapid changes from the deepestseriousness to the drollest merriment, and this without doing herself the least violence, with thefacility of a gifted child.

"That's sweet of you, Harry. You wanted to make me a present, didn't you, and weren't surewhat to choose. You weren't quite sure you would be right in making me a present. I might beinsulted, and so you chose orchids, and though they're only flowers, they're dear enough. So Ithank you ever so much. And by the way I'll tell you now that I won't take presents from you. Ilive on men, but I won't live on you. But how you have altered! No one would know you. Theother day you looked as if you had been cut down from a gallows, and now you're very nearly aman again. And now-have you carried out my orders?"

Whoever this intelligent and mysterious girl might be and however she gotinto this relation to myself was all one. She was there. The miracle had happened. I had found ahuman being once more and a new interest in life. All that mattered was that the miracle shouldgo on, that I should surrender myself to this magnetic power and follow this star.

I was not in the least in love with her. Yet I had only to imagine that she might fail tokeep the appointment, or forget it, to see where I stood. Then the world would be a desert oncemore, one day as dreary and worthless as the last, and the deathly stillness and wretchednesswould surround me once more on all sides with no way out from this hell of silence except thera

This music was at leastsincere, unashamedly primitive and childishly happy. There was something of the Negro in it,and something of the American, who with all his strength seems so boyishly fresh and childliketo us Europeans. Was Europe to become the same? Was it on the way already? Were we, the oldconnoisseurs, the reverers of Europe as it used to be, of genuine music and poetry as once theywere, nothing but a pig-headed minority suffering from a complex neurosis, whom tomorrowwould forget or deride? Was all that we called culture, spirit, soul, all that we called beautifuland sacred, nothing but a ghost long dead, which only a few fools like us took for true andliving? Had it perhaps indeed never been true and living? Had all that we poor fools bothered ourheads about never been anything but a phantom?

I passed by the strains of lively jazz music, hot and raw asthe steam of raw flesh. I stopped a moment. This kind of music, much as I detested it, had alwayshad a secret charm for me. It was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable to all theacademic music of the day. For me too, its raw and savage gaiety reached an underworld ofinstinct and breathed a simple honest sensuality.

Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room,dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped upto him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and thenwith talk and music we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night! Once, in yearsgone by, I had often known such happiness, but this too time had taken away. Withered years laybetween those days and now.

I sought out the little ancient tavern where nothing had altered since my first visit to this towna good twenty-five years before. Even the landlady was the same as then and many of thepatrons who sat there in those days sat there still at the same places before the same glasses.There I took refuge. True, it was only a refuge, something like the one on the stairs opposite thearaucaria. Here, too, I found neither home nor company, nothing but a seat from which to view astage where strange people played strange parts. Nonetheless, the quiet of the place was worthsomething; no crowds, no music; only a few peaceful townsfolk at bare wooden tables (nomarble, no enamel, no plush, no brass) and before each his evening glass of good old wine.

Meditation, concentration and other exercises bring it about that the soul withdraws for a timefrom its union with the sense organs

we should treat them the way we treat the idiot who turns up late and drunk to dinner, talks loudly over everyone while spitting food everywhere, and then leaves without paying.

Our relationships with each other are more fraught, less tolerant, and quicker-tempered. Our view of people also seems more fleeting and impressionistic — we experience people less as fully rounded humans, and more as personas, or streams of opinions. Our interactions with each other are also more physically distanced, which seems to have an effect akin to road rage. We react to other people on social media as drivers do to other drivers — we rant and scream in ways we wouldn’t dream of doing if we were talking face to face.

This is an especially big deal because it changes a coefficient in the formula for how information spreads, which is one of the deepest formulas that determine how society functions. And actually the change is bigger than this, because shareability compounds — if a person finds information shareable, then so will the people they share it with. This makes the new formula exponential. It is why some information now ‘goes viral’.

We now see information mainly because somebody — another consumer of information — decided to share it, not because it was selected for publication by a professional, like a news editor.

d. The fourth change to our information environment is the most consequential. This is that social media has changed the selection criteria for information — the criteria that decide which information spreads and which doesn’t.

b. Our information environment has fractured. Or maybe it’s better to say it’s been cut up like cloth and then tailored. We each now see different information to each other, and so there are fewer common stories. There is also a smaller and more fragile common ground of facts/evidence.

So everything — including politics — is now lower fidelity, more impressionistic.

For the purposes of monetisaztion, for example, TikTok counts a video as viewed after 1 second.

Probably the most powerful in history. Meta is better at optimising for behaviour-shaping than General Motors was at optimising for car production, and GM was very good at optimising for car production.

The business model that is most relevant to democracy — because it bites hardest on the preconditions for democracy — is, in essence, about shaping human behaviour. Firms that adopt this business model build software (and/or hardware to carry that software) in order to shape our behaviour, mostly so that they can sell that ability to others.Firms do this by making software that is very good at three things:Capturing our attentionLearning more about us by tracking our behaviour (both when we are and are not paying attention)Intermediating decisions, e.g. by being the source for information we use to make decisions, or the means by which we make decisions

It's always that way with old Porteous. All his talk is about things that happened centuries ago. Whatever you start off with it always comes back to statues and poetry and the Greeks and Romans. If you mention the Queen Mary he'd start telling you about Phoenician triremes. He never reads a modern book, refuses to know their names, never looks at any newspaper except The Times, and takes a pride in telling you that he's never been to the pictures. Except for a few poets like Keats and Wordsworth he thinks the modern world—and from his point of view the modern world is the last two thousand years—just oughtn't to have happened.

If you made a list of Hilda's remarks throughout the day, you'd find three bracketed together at the top—'We can't afford it', 'It's a great saving', and 'I don't know where the money's to come from'. She does everything for negative reasons. When she makes a cake she's not thinking about the cake, only about how to save butter and eggs. When I'm in bed with her all she thinks about is how not to have a baby.

' It's not that Hilda's mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, and still less that she's selfish. Even when there happens to be a bit of spare cash knocking about I can hardly persuade her to buy herself any decent clothes. But she's got this feeling that you ought to be perpetually working yourself up into a stew about lack of money. Just working up an atmosphere of misery from a sense of duty. I'm not like that. I've got more the prole's attitude towards money. Life's here to be lived, and if we're going to be in the soup next week—well, next week is a long way off. What really shocks her is the fact that I refuse to worry. She's always going for me about it. 'But, George! You don't seem to realize! We've simply got no money at all! It's very serious!' She loves getting into a panic because something or other is 'serious'.

The higher-ups had taken their eye off me, and here I was in a snug little bolt-hole, drawing pay for a job that didn't exist. At times I got into a panic and made sure they'd remember about me and dig me out, but it never happened. The official forms, on gritty grey paper, came in once a month, and I filled them up and sent them back, and more forms came in, and I filled them up and sent them back, and so it went on. The whole thing had about as much sense in it as a lunatic's dream. The effect of all this, plus the books I was reading, was to leave me with a feeling of disbelief in everything.

Even Lovegrove the saddler, with cars and motor-vans staring him in the face, didn't realize that he was as out of date as the rhinoceros. And Mother too—Mother never lived to know that the life she'd been brought up to, the life of a decent God-fearing shopkeeper's daughter and a decent God-fearing shopkeeper's wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever.

To the end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can't go wrong.

Because in a manner of speaking I am sentimental about my childhood—not my own particular childhood, but the civilization which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick. And fishing is somehow typical of that civilization. As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool—and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside—belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler. There's a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish. Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike, chub, carp, tench. They're solid kind of names. The people who made them up hadn't heard of machine-guns, they didn't live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating aspirins, going to the pictures, and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp.

I had a wonderful feeling inside me, a feeling you can't know about unless you've had it—but if you're a man you'll have had it some time. I knew that I wasn't a kid any longer, I was a boy at last. And it's a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can't catch you, and to chase rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It's a kind of strong, rank feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it's all bound up with breaking rules and killing things. The white dusty roads, the hot sweaty feeling of one's clothes, the smell of fennel and wild peppermint, the dirty words, the sour stink of the rubbish dump, the taste of fizzy lemonade and the gas that made one belch, the stamping on the young birds, the feel of the fish straining on the line—it was all part of it. Thank God I'm a man, because no woman ever has that feeling.

Kernel Level InstrumentationThis new method allows to trace the messages ex-changed between containers at the kernel level. Theexperiment has focused on the ZeroMQ library, butthe instrumentation process would be the same forall Message-Oriented Middleware and other messag-ing systems. It does not require any modification ofthe messaging library or application source code

What makes me feel unfree even in a liberal democracy is the fact that I lack the ability to express my conscience in a truly satisfying way. I do not have the ability to see my ideals significantly materially reflected in the world around me. I can express them in the most superficial ways. I can write about my views, I can share them with other people, and even publish my thoughts in journals… However, I am prevented from taking initiative on making my values a political reality.

The decline in democratic preconditions has not been matched with a major fall in democratic outcomes at the aggregate level. But improvements in aggregate score owed much more to progress towards equality by sexuality orientation – where progress was made.Footnote87 Gender equality power saw early changes, which were lost by 2021, according to the index. Power distribution by group remained even. But, there was a marked decline in socio-economic power equality. A longer-term analysis of the indexes also suggests that socio-economic, gender and social group power actually seem to have made little progress since the late 1960s and 1970s. Real democracy analysis therefore differs from traditional democracy analysis by bringing equality of socio-economic power to the fore in the USA – rather than treating it as a separate “independent variable”.

Democratic preconditions in the USA and Australia, for example, are especially high and are shaded in darker green. This reflects high-quality health, high education, low levels of corruption, and traditional high democracy index scores. However, outcomes are comparatively lower and in light green – falling behind Nordic countries and Canada. Socio-economic, gender, sexuality and group equality is therefore under-realized in the USA and Australia. Space does not permit the use of equality-adjusted data, but this can be used in future research to examine patterns and distributions further.

Descriptive and multivariate analysis of past data does not identify “iron laws” of human behavior, which can be used to forecast the future. It presents information about past patterns of human action and past distributions of resources.

Has real democracy been in decline in the way that other forms of democracy have been claimed to be?

we are interested here in the de facto distribution of power

Which democratic preconditions structure state-societal relations towards the wider dispersion of power as opposed to within a narrow elite?

consociationalist protections championed by constitutional theorists

discursive democracy

It is important to note that power can be positive sum as well as zero sum. Some members of a society may be granted legitimate structural powers via an institutional position in order to facilitate collective gain. For example, elected officials and civil servants will usually have the powers to allocate resources to projects and implement policies. Bureaucracies and the division of labor within society are necessary to make societies function, and the allocation of such powers are therefore necessary. The empirical analysis of real democracy-specific countries should examine, however, whether such elected officials and civil servants who are allocated structural power act for the mutual gain in society– or whether those institutional structures enable office-holders to exploit their position for a narrow sectional advantage, or privilege others.

He then used critical realism to ask what is needed to ensure that democracy survives. He argues that this is loser’s consent, individuals subordinating their identity to those of others and governing through a principle that transcends binary identities

contingent compatibilities

The temporal dimension of structure-agency relationships was important but often neglected, Archer argued. The analytical dualism was proposed as a “method for examining the interplay between these strata” over time.Footnote19 Structure and agency interact in a three-phased, temporal sequence that she called the morphogenetic cycle.Footnote20 Firstly, there is structural conditioning (T1) from an earlier structural context where actors’ interests and being are shaped through a process of emergence. Secondly, there is social interaction (T2 and T3) where agents are influenced by the conditions under T1, but can use their own abilities and agency to forward their interests or bring about societal change. Thirdly, at moment T4, structural conditions are either changed as a result of this agency (morphogenesis) or not (morphostasis). The cycle then repeats as structural elaboration restarts a new morphogenetic cycle. There is, thus, some ability for agents to bring about change, but actions from agents “initiated at T2 takes place in a context not of its own making.”Footnote21

It appears that today Slovenia is stuck in a vicious circle, in which the anomalies presented inthis publication feed, maintain and support each other, and prevent any change from takingplace. But we should not be too pessimistic. In today’s information society, it is getting harderand harder to filter information and keep it from reaching voters.

The government and the legislature should have enough political courage to notably raise thesalaries of deputies, ministers and state secretaries, and achieve a clear understanding in thesociety that this is a matter of implementing sovereignty and statehood. At the same time, stateinstitutions should stop allowing the media and the public to spread populist manipulations oneconomising (where and how often ministers and state secretaries can travel, which ministersmay have their own driver, etc.), and should spread awareness in the public that suchexpenditure is in the general interest and necessary for normal and optimal functioning of thestate.

Typical examples of this are thefrequent generalisations in the media that “no politician is an expert in anything”, that “allpoliticians only think of themselves”, that “all politicians do is quarrel, regardless of what isbest for the people”, etc. Such labels are a priori unjust, since they exclude the possibility ofany politician falling outside these stereotypes. Without overcoming these, we can hardlyexpect a shift in the quality of the composition of Slovenian political bodies.

This way, the distance fromthe centres of power would also increase the impression of impartiality.

Slovenia urgently needs decentralisation and a reform of local government.66 This of coursefalls in the domain of the legislative branch. Introducing an appropriate number of regions (onhistorical and economic grounds), where part of the competences from the national and locallevels should be transferred, would make it easier to adjust the number of municipalities moreappropriately—either reducing their number, or lowering (halving) the criteria for theirestablishment and giving them fewer competences, less staff and much more limited budgets.In terms of development, it would be optimal to set the centres of the regions in smaller townsinstead of the already established centres (e.g. the main centre of the Primorska Region insouthwestern Slovenia should not be Koper or Nova Gorica, but Štanjel, Vipava or a town ofsimilar size), which would provide them with an additional boost. To make this easiest andoffer the best possibilities for well-prepared proposals, draft changes to the relevant regulationsshould be prepared by the government and sent to parliament for debate and approval.

The problem solvers: They deal with very complex problems and have identified systems thinking as a potentially useful tool to help them navigate those problems. They want to learn from others but use their prior skills and knowledge to tailor their approaches to their specific needs. Their end goal is not the application of systems thinking per se, but to improve their ability to solve problems.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

Does that mean there is little hope of governments taking urgent action in response to a crisis like the ecological emergency or other existential threats?

So what wisdom does history offer for helping us to understand what it takes for governments to act boldly – and effectively – in response to a crisis?

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset: John F Kennedy was wrong when he said that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ (wēijī, 危机) is composed of two characters meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. The second character, jī (机), is actually closer to meaning ‘change point’ or ‘critical juncture’.

Robin Hanson and I have a long-running debate over when, exactly, aspiring rationalists should dare to disagree. I tend toward the widely held position that you have no real choice but to form your own opinions. Robin Hanson advocates a more iconoclastic position, that you—not just other people—should consider that others may be wiser. Regardless of our various disputes, we both agree that Aumann’s Agreement Theorem extends to imply that common knowledge of a factual disagreement shows someone must be irrational.1 Despite the funny looks we’ve gotten, we’re sticking to our guns about modesty: Forget what everyone tells you about individualism, you should pay attention to what other people think.

Some things are worth dying for.  Yes, really!  And if we can't get comfortable with admitting it and hearing others say it, then we're going to have trouble caring enough—as well as coordinating enough—to put some effort into group projects.  You've got to teach both sides of it, "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be," and "That which the truth nourishes should thrive."

How do be balance agreeableness with honesty and integrity so that we can be saying what we really feel and mean, and trust that it will be acceptable?

how do we address the kind of argument we saw in 7–8?

How can we design spaces where people can experience trust even more quickly?

How can we be sure of where we are and what we're doing, and that we are not just still continuing to replicate the problems?

How can we move beyond the perhaps tame/lame "solutions" offered by the trio?

Religion: barrier or enabler?

What practical arrangements and steps contribute to the development of wisdom, or "scaling" wisdom?

What is the role for the collective to counterbalance individual bias, as part of DDS?

we were trying to build a culture where we are adding to the development of each other's ideas

collective not-just-intellectuality

beyond individual intellectuality

eah, and I'm sympathetic to animism. And one interesting thing here is as if you experimentally suppress the left hemisphere for, say, ten to fifteen minutes, people describe things that they would normally consider inanimate as animate. So they see the sun as animate moving across the sky, giving energy and such. And if you do the opposite and suppress the right hemisphere, they see things that we would normally think of as living as not. So people are like bits of furniture, like zombies or simply machines. So there's clearly a difference there.

And I'd like to just add — sorry — we need to encourage and provide institutional support for people who are bright to oversee the whole picture to some extent.

But I was going to go on to say that really, I mean, what I was going to say is, we can't do it by the direct approach, but we can do it by a more implicit and less direct approach. And that approach is actually, sadly not original, but is actually to start reeducating — I mean, or educating is what I'm trying to say. I think we stopped educating children about forty, fifty years ago. We started indoctrinating them and giving them information and testing them on how much of that they retained. But we didn't do the really important things, which are relational. All the people who really inspired me and taught me did so by their being who they were, and by the way in which the spark jumped across the gap, in the way that Plato describes in the seventh Epistle, that this is how philosophy is done, not by writing it down. Mysteriously, Plato completely betrayed Socrates into doing this. ¶437 So we need to reimagine what an education is. That would mean freeing up teachers from a dead weight of bureaucracy. In fact, that's one of the very practical things that could be done tomorrow. We should go around universities, go around hospitals, go around some schools and look very critically at all the superstructure of management and so on. And I reckon about 80 percent of that could go tomorrow and nobody would suffer. In fact, there'd be a lot more money for doing the things that we really want to do. We've become sucked by parasites, if you like, which is the externalization of the left hemisphere's drive for control, which is administration. ¶438 And so, I mean, that's a practical answer to the question, but also we need — apart from freeing up teachers to teach in a way that is individual, responsive, and alive, rather than just the carrying out the procedures, we need actually to — I'm sorry — give people back their cultural tradition. They need to read literature that — it's not fashionable to say this, but they need to understand the last two thousand years. Otherwise they don't know what they're doing here. They have a very shallow rooting, so we actually do need to teach history, literature, philosophy, music, all our culture, not just IT, not just procedural learning, but actually creative, empathic understanding of other people, not sitting in judgment on our forebears or on other cultures, but in fact trying to see our way into how they sort of work, because they’re no stupider than we are, and they might actually have seen something we’ve lost.

But Polanyi's argument was that you can — and this is Plato's argument too. You can't make people wise. You can — properly, again — seduce them so that they can come to love wisdom.

But at the slightly higher level, but how we do that has got to be through an implicit process, because if we try to — as I’m constantly saying — if we try to instigate the things we think are valuable into people, we have not instigated those things. Instead, we've instigated a kind of chain of thought, which is actually contrary to the way in which we want.

¶372 Yes. And there's something about also at the small scale. Like, we're talking, we’re having a conversation, a lot of people are going to get to see. But we're not necessarily taking people through a practice that is inducing the kinds of states, the right-hemispheric state where the numinous is there, right? Where the sacred is there, where the intimacy is there, and I don't want to violate something I'm intimate with. ¶373 You know, there's something about the small-scale that has high intimacy, high touch in which I'm not relating to the abstract concept of, “They're Christians. They're on my side. They're not Hindus on the other side,” or whatever. I'm relating to this unique person and this one and this one here that is inherently, I think, hemispherically different. ¶374 I was also thinking about — so I'm curious how much you see hemispheric dominance having to do with scaling, is one question. I'm also very curious about — and I've had other friends want to ask you this — if matriarchal and matrifocal cultures had any difference in this particular way, given the — is there a evolutionary difference in tending the babies and tending life that orients in this way? And then we come back to the challenge of, we have global scale problems that have global drivers. If the Chinese are, the US has to, and because the US is, the Chinese have to. We have to deal with that. But scaling, if it involves standardization, abstraction, and a loss of instantiation, is inherently part of the problem. ¶375 So how do we get something that is profoundly instantiated and profoundly unique, profoundly local, and also cultivate that in a way that has the distribution that it needs?

most of human experience is in this other thing. And a big part of it was that it was always local.

We are currently (Q4, 2023) in the ideation phase of this project. We're actively seeking feedback and advice from experts and potential users to refine our plan and avoid falling into rabbit holes.

and many conflicting incentives to consider.

When dealing with polarizing topics, we expect sources to disagree on the incentives of different entities. In such situations, it may be particularly interesting to compare how opposing sources paint different pictures. This is something we could easily do by generating two different models from two different sets of sources. As long as the two models are relatively self-consistent and grounded in relatable human incentives, looking at them may help an observer develop empathy and respect for both sides. Likewise, a good incentive model could provide the proof that no conspiracy, no nefarious plan, no evil schemes are necessary to explain what people do most of the time, even if it seems inexplicable at first.

EducationThe next generation of students is likely to spend less reading history books and more time asking history questions to an intelligent chatbot. But there is also a danger that the chatbot will provide them with oversimplified, sometimes biased narratives. High-quality incentive models could be a building block for more sophisticated and reliable education tools. Consider for instance a student learning about the French Revolution. The tool could reveal the complex web of economic, social, and political drivers that influenced the actions of groups such as the monarchy, nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie, and peasantry by analyzing historical texts and records through the lens of incentive modeling.

We will then use clustering techniques to merge similar answers, focus on the questions that produced consistent sets of answers, and use these sets of answers to start building ontologies. The experiments that we have run so far suggest that different questions work better in different situations.

After modeling the list of entities mentioned in each document, we will ask LLMs a long series of questions which will all be loosely or tightly related to incentives. For instance: What are the stated goals of {entity}? What does {entity} seem to be optimizing for?What seem to be {entity}'s main motivations?Which actions may {entity} be able to take?Which scenarios would {entity} consider good and favorable to them?Which scenarios would {entity} consider bad and unfavorable to them?What may be {entity}'s main fears and concerns? What resources does {entity} have at their disposal?

Humans routinely model what the incentives of other humans may be. Historians look at the incentives of powerful individuals to explain why they made specific decisions. Journalists look at the incentives of large companies to uncover collusions and conflicts of interests. Economists use incentive models to  understand  markets. Lawmakers look into existing incentives before introducing new ones.

Build healthy relational cultures that are high in trust

The sameinterviewee argues that in order to see the new mental objects that are emerging,we need to both individually and collectively shift our relationship to mentalobjects, mental thingness. That brings us right back to uncertainty. If “chair” isn'tactually there for you to sit on, and the only way you can participate in the spaceis by dancing, meaning being able to be in creative action within the emptyspace of uncertainty, then new mental objects can emerge that themselves aredancing around, that themselves move around. So yes, new objects areemerging, but these objects are dynamic. They're more like a puppy that isplaying, than a chair just sitting ther

Freedom could be that what we desire cohere withwhat we need. And so in order to get there, we have to deconstruct the notionof personal desire with something which is not our personal desire, and that'swhy I believe community and collective frame are a good playground for that

People say] ‘Okay food is important, of course food is important’. Then – ‘Ah,okay, let's buy Nutella, let's buy sausages, let's go to [a major supermarketchain] and they don’t join up the dots. But if you talk about ecospirituality, youcan't go to [a major supermarket chain]; it doesn't work! You're making slavepeople on the other side of the planet and you're talking about connecting withnature, it doesn't work. Yeah, that's the biggest challenge: the coherence. [...] Inthe crowd that we are, you know, it's the minimum we have to expect fromourselves. You know, if you're like, ‘Okay, yeah, I go there because the nuts arecheaper’. Did you ask yourself why it was cheaper?

In this space [we’re] talking so much about emergence and letting go of control.

We sort of show up when we want, we start things and then it fades off,because we're just following the energy in this flow. Because it's so invisible andintangible, it's a little harder to stay focused and connected. The philosophy islike, just do that thing that your soul needs to do from source, and that's justright. [...] The self-organising ability and initiative is the challenge.

There's a diffuseness. [...] We don't necessarily have this kind of discipline anddrive [...] [to] get things done, have outputs, and create something. We doconnect, and create, and offer a lot. But people get confused, they can't follow. Ifyou don't step right in and commit, you fall away really quickly. There's a barrierof commitment.

We need to learn to trust that taking the time to connect to each other isimportant, and how that synchronistic emergence makes everything so mucheasier. [This emergent facilitation process] is something that's hard for everyone[to trust], especially if you haven't really experienced it. More people need tolearn what that is. Everyone's busy and they don't want to spend timecollaborating, because it feels like a lot of wasted energy – talking for hours, andnothing happens. And a lot of the time, [sitting] in the not-knowing and nothaving a plan – that's very uncomfortable.

Therefore, evolving a relational culture requires a consciousco-creative effort from the whole group.

My initial impulse is to say that [the friction within the team was] strongly in thedirection of trust and belonging. But I realise that there's also an element ofpractical expertise and personal competence, which impacts the trust andbelonging: [...] how to be aware of tensions, and to surface and process themcollaboratively with others, is a real competence question and acts in a certainarea of expertise.

A failure to address conflicts and tensions productively was cited by a number ofinterviewees as the primary reason for collaborations slowing down or failing entirely

what's the meaning you make aboutwhat I said?

f you have trust and trustworthiness, you have people that are far morelikely to be adaptive, to listen, to be open to new ideas and new thinking.

by“developing healthy relational cultures” we intend here to emphasise a deliberateawareness and development of the values, assumptions, and practices thatunderpin and shape how we relate with each other. A healthy relational culturesupports the development of trust, which is fundamental to resilience, creativity, andeffective collaboration

because religions have been able to do — they've shown that they are proper distributed cognition, collective intelligence machines that can fundamentally reorient at a civilizational level. They have a — they can do that, for good or for ill, right?

7 So it was a relationship to human mind, our mind’s ability to create vast economic, industrial communication, educational, governments, technological systems, the way those systems in turn reinforce patterns of mind, that lead us to a novel situation of self-induced, global catastrophic risk that is increasingly imminent, and then saying, what do all these different risks have in common in terms of the patterns of human experience and behavior individually and collectively — in particular collectively — that give rise to them? Because if we can identify those generative dynamics, then we can say, a future that is not described by these catastrophes has to deal with these generative dynamics. And so we talk about the third attractor of, like, neither a future defined by increasing catastrophe nor a control response to that that gives dystopias — what's left?

¶289 So the question comes — and so let's take AI for a moment, because splitting atoms takes G-8 nation state-level capacity to do. It actually doesn't. The G8 has made sure nobody else gets to use it through the IAEA and making sure that if anyone even tries to, we’ll bomb them preemptively, because we don't want the power to get distributed, and yet we're distributing the power of synthetic bio and AI rapidly that is every bit as destructive to not just other state actors, but anybody, in a way that is unmonitorable.

¶287 What I'm arguing is that that mixed bag that we have been, with exponential tech near planetary boundaries self-terminates, and that we don't get to keep being that mixed bag. And this now comes up to the vulnerability of, if the relationship to the sacred is forced or compulsory, it's not actually a relationship to the sacred. If you remove choice, it's not ethics anymore; it's mechanism.

But this is also something not at the individual level. Democracy has to — democracy requires this commitment, which is not game-theoretic, but it has evolutionary provenance. You are the best possible entity for me overcoming my self-deceptive bias, because you have alternative biases, and I am the best for you. And if we both commit to the Geist, the logos between us, we can get the best self-correcting system, which is what democracy’s supposed to be. But not just for individual cognition, it's supposed to be for distributed cognition.

I recognize you as a rational being, and therefore I should acknowledge that what you say

And that is where I think it's very interesting is, if those who are pursuing the true, the good, and the beautiful, those who are pursuing a deep relationship with the sacred and wisdom don't do anything and don't develop any levers of technological or economic or other types of power — “lotus-eating” so to speak — then they're leaving the direction of the world to those who maximally seek power-orientation for the illegitimate use.

educative authority versus propaganda

and this gets fuzzy

So you can never have the situation where the one that is wise has that power, because one of the terms on which wisdom exists is that it sees beyond power.

the master was missing a certain kind of wisdom in his assessment of the actual realistic capabilities of the emissary.

I might argue that the responsibility for the failure of that civilization or tribe, whatever you want to call it, was the master’s, not the emissary’s, because the master obviously misassessed.

And the idea of self-restraint used to be intrinsic to the rise of most civilizations. They were founded on a generation or several generations that were prepared to make sacrifices on a personal level in order to achieve something greater. ¶161 That has moved out of the picture because the value now is about our personal gain. But sometimes, if we can restrain ourselves from just pursuing personal gain, we could produce an outcome which would be far more beneficial for all

So the left hemisphere might be less intelligent in some very important ways, because wisdom — I've never actually heard anyone give a good definition of wisdom that doesn't involve restraint. It always ends up involving restraint and binding in some ways. And — but the utility emphasis of the left hemisphere is very good at game theory, and then it creates almost an obligate trajectory. And then nobody wants climate change, but nobody can stop it. Nobody wants species extinction, nobody wants desertification, but nobody can stop it.

we can use social Darwinism to describe where there's a selection process defined in war and defined in population growth and things like that

That is so much in contrast to my own frequent experience, of having a stimulating time with people during an event, but simply not following up, and losing touch afterwards. So, how do we facilitate this connecting for action?

Intentional coming together

How about other kinds of event?

What's the point of coming together? Here are the main reasons for coming together that occur to me, whatever kind of event it is: enjoying yourself in the presence of other people who enjoy similar things — sharing enjoyment expanding your horizons through interaction with people with new or different ideas, or who are from different backgrounds forging connections, links and bonds which you're going to take with you, follow up on, and do things together. Let's look for the questions beyond these first answers. For enjoyment, how do you know that the other people will enjoy similar things? Will it feel safe enough to interact with the other kinds of people? What will best enhance the chances of meaningful connection with others?

Number 2 seems to be the focus of the increasingly common codes of conduct, or respect, or something similar, that we see at many events these days. Many of these seem to me to have unintended side-effects, but at least the organisers have good intentions. A different kind of question emerges for me here: what is better stated clearly, and what is better left unsaid, in an attempt to ensure a feeling of safety and openness in all participants? Could it be that listing some undesirable but unlikely behaviours simply brings them to mind, actually reducing rather than enhancing the feelings of safety? These are interesting questions, but I'm not dealing with them further on this occasion.

to connect for action