Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
If you find your natural brain has a comfort zone, then build a second brain that equilibrates it there, and use it more or less as you need to wander from that set-point.
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
One reason I haven’t invested in building as strong a BASB as many is simply that my comfort set-point is mostly near the gonzo edge. I need the full 2+ year foresight potential of the GSCITC for the thinking I’m most effective at. If it means continuous partial PTSD so be it.
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
One sign of the cost of this tradeoff. Though I can see this thread would be nice to put into a blog post, I don’t feel like I can conjure up the energy to do it. It will likely remain in this context, only accessible and grokkable to people who are also in a roughly gonzo place
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
And also, I need a better term than GSCITC… but something without baggage. Hive mind, borg, AGI, efficient narrative marketplace… all the terms I’ve been able to think of have inappropriate or misleading connotations.
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
For those who came in late… this train of thought began with my Against Waldenponding newsletter last year https://mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/against-waldenponding…
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
Which I recently added a Part 2 to… https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=098f100576…
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
The Waldenponding newsletters were Oct 2018 and April 2019. I think I first broached this topic even earlier in this newsletter. Your Passport to the Metabrain (Jan 2017). Shit, this has been on my 2nd brain for a long time. https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=0f299f9100…
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
The cost of being in gonzo mode online is admittedly quite high. The effect on more retreated modes of production (essays, books, products) is very noticeable. My best thinking in the last few years has been on twitter, but the reach is far lower than my blog or newsletter
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
Final point: you are almost certainly overvaluing information from history and undervaluing information being processed live in the GSCITC for *any* project you take on. Why do I think that? At some point AlphaGoZero discarded all human history of Go playing and went full gonzo
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
This is a form of temporal egotism. We have identities anchored in personal/collective history, and we like to think distribution we are attached to is the distribution of input value. Chances are, an AI approaching any given problem you take on will throw away most of history.
Venkatesh Rao @vgr 2019-05-05
Final final point. I flagged conversational media eating authorial media. This has been my personal ego challenge. It is hard to admit, having spent 10y building up an identity/vanity around my longform, that my conversational thinking embedded in the GSCITC is better quality.
𒀭𒂗𒆠 つん(でれ/どく) @enkiv2 2019-09-30
Gonzo mode plugs you into the scenius, but if you plug in completely, you can’t outperform the scenius (& few communities are actually very good! Some end up strictly worse than the individuals in them!)
𒀭𒂗𒆠 つん(でれ/どく) @enkiv2 2019-09-30
One alternative: plug into several communities (with no overlap aside from you) quite deeply, becoming the only information / entropy conduit between them. You become valued by each of them as a countermeasure to whatever groupthink loops, & have an outside view.
𒀭𒂗𒆠 つん(でれ/どく) @enkiv2 2019-09-30
The value of (ex) old info from time-binding is not that it’s old or that it was manufactured under circumstances of deep contemplation, but that it was manufactured under a different set of assumptions. It’s simulated annealing for memeplexes: important in groups.
𒀭𒂗𒆠 つん(でれ/どく) @enkiv2 2019-09-30
All groups amplify *something* based on biases in initial conditions. That *something* can be useful or harmful based on circumstances that the group can’t recognize from inside itself. The ability to amplify it conflicts with the ability to recognize if it ought to be amplified.
𒀭𒂗𒆠 つん(でれ/どく) @enkiv2 2019-09-30
So, percussive maintenance (like the periodic invasion of ideas so alien that they could not previously be conceived of by the group), while is lowers the highest highs, drastically increases expected yield. It slightly mediocritzes the future graveyards of great & terrible.
𒀭𒂗𒆠 つん(でれ/どく) @enkiv2 2019-09-30
(Other forms of percussive maintenance of memeplexes, less effective than alien transmissions from Big Other: tarot & other forms of RNG-based bibliomancy; mind-{warping,expanding} drugs, especially psychedelics; psychological trauma; ecstatic spiritual experiences)
𒀭𒂗𒆠 つん(でれ/どく) @enkiv2 2019-09-30
One’s ability to add to the scenius is half integration with the scenius, but is half the ability to act as conduit for the alien. Integrate too deeply & you become a drone, incapable of challenging the models or doing higher-level integration of new information. An ideologue.