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