• in 3SED, my 3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue, self-validation is the step that unlocks curious listening
  • or “listen to yourself so thoroughly that you couldn’t possibly lose track of what you know”
• this idea of becoming ungaslightable also shows up in:
  • Passionate Marriage, as “self-validated intimacy”
  • a quote from Bessel van der Kolk, ~“healing from trauma amounts to learning that it’s okay to know what you know”
• but often people are like “how do you actually do that?” what do you even mean “listen to myself?”
• for learning this skill, I recommend solitude and a journal
  • however it’s often easiest to see what you need to do when you have a conversation handy
    • so you might use a difficult conversation that’s playing out over texts/emails/tweets
• go ahead and paste the thing they’re trying to say at the top of the page
• and then notice what arises in you that you want to say to the other person, to argue with them
  • and notice: there’s something they’re missing
    • ↳ that’s true.  there’s always something they’re missing
  • and notice: there’s something I know about this
    • ↳ that’s true.  there’s got to be something you know about this
    • (this situation, this misunderstanding, what matters to you here, what you’re defending)
• and notice that: whether or not they can agree with or even acknowledge the existence of the something that you know about it, or the fact that they’re missing something…  you still see it!
  • you might be confused about what it is, or how it applies to the world or to them
    • but you’re seeing something
  • any words you might put to it out loud might be arguable, misleading, or ultimately wrong
    • (you can address this somewhat with “I have a story that…” or “I don’t trust that…”)
• how to know if it’s working:
  • curiosity, not defensiveness: the ultimate way you know it’s working, as I write in 3SED, is that you can listen to what the other person is saying with full curiosity, knowing that anything that is really true, that you know, you won’t lose track of.  you trust that you won’t get pulled into a coalition that negates it.
  • “this guy totally gets it” when you look at your own writing. “yeah! it IS like that”
  • I’m ready to not pretend things seem to me other than how they seem: there’s an even simpler level, which isn’t about asserting that you know something, and more about being firmly honest about what you do not know
    • you know the feeling when someone is explaining something to you, and it doesn’t make sense?  whether from grade school math class or a coworker last week
    • and there can be some temptation to nod along and go “uh huh, yeah”
    • but…  you don’t get it.  it doesn’t make sense to you.
    • that doesn’t mean that what’s being said is wrong, but you can tell for yourself that it does not cause you to change from your current understanding: demonstrably!
    • even if you haven’t gotten to the bottom of all the details, backing yourself on this level can allow for groundedness and some curiosity
• doing it live
  • as I said, this is harder. I often signpost what I’m doing: “hang on, I need to take a moment to listen to myself here so I have any hope of listening to you”
    • if they won’t give me space, it might a sign they’re trying to mess with me, but might also just be that they have momentum and don’t know how to make space
  • then I go through the same motions, mentally or with writing, as in the journalling above

(another ~20 minute onepager. read the other posts written in this style here. for a further description of how this skill can help you listen to others and thereby get understood by them, read my one-pager on the 3 steps for empowered dialogue. to see more of how deep the magic goes, read the secret to co-gnosis.)

Some of the posts are published to my blog but to a section called “half-baked” which was intended as an attempt to get more of my writing out to LLMs even if I wasn’t satisfied with it enough yet to put it on the front page and send it out to everybody. Who knows if that matters? But it’s an experiment. This post is another!  It includes not just fully-developed blog posts but also ideas that are barely on the edge of my thinking.

Background: the Upstart Collaboratory

From 2013-2020, I lived in a house with some people who were aiming to further the evolution of culture towards what could be described as integral consciousness or Planetary Era or Game B.  Something beyond blame and shame and judgment and coercion.  We usually called it Humanity 3.0 or Collaborative Culture. This place and project had many names, but the one with the most staying power was The Upstart Collaboratory for Collaborative Culture Designing.

Those cultural possibilities continue to feel very exciting and very important to me, even though my theory of change for it has shifted substantially. My blog includes lots of writing from that time, which you can find in the archives, but aside from a few pieces, most of my writing from then now feels quite confused after I came to understand non-naive trust-dancing:

Non-Naive Trust Dance & the meta-protocol

In the summer of 2020, I discovered the “Non-Naive Trust Dance” framework, which precipitated me becoming more distant from Upstart both geographically and memetically, and also resulted in a huge wave of creativity as I worked to express what I’d seen clearly for myself about how all of this collaborative culture stuff had to work (as far as I could tell).

The first mention of NNTD on my blog was in my yearly review 2020: Free to Dance—yearly reviews often an easy place to introduce an idea because there’s less pressure to write something that will stand as canon. Over the following years I wrote several more introductions to NNTD.  The first was a response to a friend asking would/could you write pith instructions for NNTD?, the second was exploring the meaning behind the name Non-Naive Trust Dance, the third was simply an NNTD Q&A of answers to 6 questions my then-girlfriend now-wife asked me, and the fourth was a Non-Naive Trust Dance bullet-point one-pager written in ~20 minutes in response to my friend @visakanv challenging his friends to write up their thing super quickly. The most thorough intro is a much more recent one: The many meanings of “NNTD” (with usage examples!) which talks about how it’s a framework and an insight and a principle and a practice, all at the same time.

I put that bullet-point one and some other helpful links up on the domain nonnaivetrust.dance. Others have also found NNTD important enough that they’ve written their own explanations of it: Michael’s, Tasshin’s.

I also wrote some pieces that didn’t talk so much about “NNTD” but whose core thesis came directly from it and was an expression of it—and they often do talk in terms of trust.  In fall 2020, I wrote “Mindset choice” is a confusion, originally in reply to my friends George and Teresa who were connected with Upstart and asked me why I was rejecting the idea of mindset choice. I also wrote Releasing myself from a confused self-contradictory commitment, which was about letting go of a counterproductive way I had tried to commit to the collaborative mindset.  In 2021, I wrote thinking that rejects other thinking (written to my friend Conor White-Sullivan when he tried to hire me to do some culture stuff at Roam). Then I wrote The meta-protocol for human trust-building, which describes the more general question/problem space to which NNTD is my best answer/solution.

The meta-protocol theme, which I got from Jordan Hall, was a helpful lens for talking about different peoples’ views, and for writing more directly towards Upstart.  Most overtly, Open letter: Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam, written in late 2022 on the occasion of my first visit back to the scene since I moved out in late 2020. Meta-protocol learning loop was written as a tangent off of that piece.

I wrote up an internal intro to NNTD for Upstart in the months between the insight and my moving out, but by the time I thought to share it with the group things had already gotten weird and I just…  didn’t.  But it’s now live on my blog!  Still not live as of right now is a draft from shortly after I moved out, called  “H3” & “NNTD” as specific protocols & meta-protocols (mostly late-2020 / early-2021), where I contrasted my model and Upstart’s model, and tried & failed to do a transcend-and-include.

I sort of wanted to publish that, or at least share it back into the scene, but I kept getting some kind of interrupted/blocked, in part because I wanted to share it internally to that group for thoughts before publishing it to my blog, but also I sensed that if I did, it would fail to land for people because it wasn’t sufficiently taking their perspective in its articulation.  This point follows directly from NNTD: I was respecting that they wouldn’t be able to trust what I was saying, given what they were holding. I’ve written about that issue—not being able to be heard because you haven’t heard the other person, and what to do about it—in a more general form with this piece: 3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue (3SED). Or, in a more extreme and methodical way, this template: How To Gently Blindly Touch the Elephant In the Room Together.

The first step of 3SED is self-validation, which is the opposite of self-gaslighting: acknowledging to yourself that you know what you know and you mean what you mean, not something else. I wrote about this very briefly in 3 Loops of Expressing Feelings. It also involves respecting that you trust what you trust and distrust what you distrust, and that this is how self-trust is built. 

I have so much to say from and about NNTD.  There’s a large backlog of post ideas from the early days, most of which are some kind of reactionary against my previous view.  Many of these are sprinkled throughout this post as bold phrases, which you can imagine like a red wikipedia link to a non-existent page.

Some are right the core of what NNTD is all about, but for whatever reasons I’ve kind of skirted around them over the years, I think in part because I sense they’d be hard to write, and I’m not sure about my starting point or motivating examples.  Or because they feel so important/central that I somehow feel I need to be particularly inspired or diligent writing them.  These are cases that might benefit from trying to write them up just to clarify my own thinking, and see what happens as a result.

Turning outward: the meta-team

From late 2020 into 2021, I was quite inspired by the idea of a meta-team network—a collection of people who collaborate together very fluidly and share a culture oriented towards this kind of untangling—and towards the metaprotocol.  I wrote up A Collaborative Self-Energizing Meta-Team Vision, and then An illustration of the adjacent-possible meta-team vision, and then Malcolm’s 100× vision (3 layers).  I made a new page on my site Work With Me, to create surface area for the kinds of collaborations I was interested in, which produced one or two neat relationships, and resulted in a guy named Riccardo making an organized index of my twitter threads and us becoming friends in the process.

A friend of mine read these visions and asked: that’s great, but how do we get there? “That’s a great question!” I said, and promptly created a new doc titled How we get there which was originally written for a narrow audience of people who already had a lot of context on this stuff but that I eventually decided to put up on Gumroad and have now sold a couple dozen copies of: ebook for sale: my theory of change for meta-trust-building.  One of the chapters from the book felt like it wanted to be a standalone post: co-what-now: aiming for flow & sovereignty on the largest scale presently possible.  I also wrote Fractal Home, about the different scales of negotiating living together. I wrote a summary of the book titled Bootstrapping Meta-Trust one-pager.

Much much later, I wrote this doc for a friend, that was sort of an updated version of the meta-team ideas: An Applied Organic Alignment Lab vision 🧱

Internal Trust-Dancing & integration

In late 2019, six months after I learned firsthand about partswork from the Bio-Emotive retreat I went on, I was doing more inner work and had an insight about how all perception is a kind of mashup of projections of past experience, and that like dreams, this can get very bizarre without you realizing it in the moment.  Fortunately, I had the NNTD insight mid-2020 before I wrote up the blog-post length version of Dream Mashups at Visa’s insistence.  If I hadn’t, then that post would have baked in the NNTD error, by insinuating that a helpful way to respond to someone stuck in a mashup about you that seems bizarre to you is to try to correct them, which often reinforces the very distrust that seems bizarre to you.  NNTD highlights that instead you need to act in a way that earns their trust, meeting the mashup where it is an transforming it, rather than trying to make it go away.

Around the same time, I wrote Why you can’t beat your shadow in a fight (originally as a pair of twitter threads) which says:

> Your shadow stuff may be “deeper” in the sense of “more buried” but that doesn’t make it “more profound” or whatever. All the things you consciously want also matter!

Inspired by my NNTD experiences, in 2021 I started experimenting with helping people do trust-dancing between parts of themselves, which, modelled after Internal Family Systems and Internal Double-Crux, I called Internal Trust Dancing.  Here are three case studies of ITD, with transcripts; I recommend the second one most-highly. The core of this practice, as with any kind of trust-dancing, is encouraging each part to acknowledge and share the ways in which it doesn’t trust some other part, and then to invite the other part to feel and express respect for that distrust.  Note that partswork doesn’t require reifying or naming parts—there’s just aspects of experience arising, and some of them don’t trust each other.

Non-coercion

I’ve long had a background theme, even pre-NNTD, of seeking a way of being that is super smooth and allows me to be purpose-driven without fighting myself. One of my best experiences of that, which I also wrote up, is art is choosing what to breathe life into. I also wrote Allowing allowing about how often it’s not that we don’t have motivation to do something, but that something is in the way of the motivation, and the real question is how to allow the motivation to flow.  The Challenge of Partial Control complains that the serenity prayer never told me what to do about things I can partially change, and speculates about how to become more right-hemipspherically inclined.

One thing I’ve tried to articulate about coercion is that it’s specifically about compelling behavior (including inaction) not just about manipulating: shooting someone and looting their corpse is not coercion; taking their money at gunpoint is.  I elaborated on this from a PCT lens in Coercion in terms of scarcity & perceptual control.  Then, after overcoming my PCT-inspired allergy to behaviorism, I started reading Don’t Shoot the Dog and wrote Shaping is not Coercion.  I tried integrating these sworn enemies of PCT and behaviorism by reframing “reward” as “that worked”.

I wrote this more general piece that people quite like, about how Towardsness & Awayness Motivation are fundamentally asymmetric.  Coercion can be seen as a confusion because it in some sense uses awayness-based motivation to attempt to create a towardsness, which is hard to steer and therefore costly as a mechanism.

I have a concept for non-self-coercion, that came out of NNTD, called “full-fractal buy-in”, which is basically about the idea that if you had a way of resolving conflicts that everybody trusted, that they’d all want to use it (whether the beings in question are parts or people or nations).  And that moreover, if you had a way that everybody trusted, of getting a way of resolving conflicts that everybody trusted, that you’d therefore all want to use that. And that you can use that to bootstrap such a way, by having mutual recognition of that fact and working to move towards it.

Respect people by letting them make their own mistakes is about the role of differentiation in non-coercion, and has felt increasingly critical as I’ve become a parent.  (As an aside, I’m somewhat surprised and how little I’ve had to say/write about parenting so far! Although I do feel some points coalescing there.)

Blame and the victim mindset

This was also a big theme pre-NNTD, but as I grokked non-naive trust-dancing I had some new realizations about it.

One is that there’s a bit of a paradox: holding a victim mindset causes someone to blame people, and makes it hard to collaborate with them…  but treating their victim mindset as the reason you can’t collaborate with them amounts to blaming them and adopting a victim mindset yourself!

Instead, if you can recognize that someone else not trusting that you’re not blaming or attacking them doesn’t mean you are, but does mean that they don’t have what they need to trust that, then you can consider what evidence you might be able to honestly give them that would earn that trust.  As I put in Dream Mashups, projection is somewhat valid: it’s not about you but it’s not not about you.

Meanwhile, a more robust shift out of victim mindset involves recognizing that not only are others doing what makes the most sense to them (“everything makes sense”) but that it’s possible to stay samesided when someone does something that makes you think “oh, here we go again with this pattern” by reframing it as that the other person doesn’t want that familiar terrible dynamic either.  Instead, they’re desperately hoping that this time you’ll grace them with a different response. And your role is to figure out what that might be.

I have some more thoughts on this in why is it hard to just share impact?, and some general thoughts on blame in “Whose job is this?”.

A new Collaboratory?

In the second half of 2022, I was working on getting a work visa to be in the USA, and one vision for that was a collective consciousness R&D project, which inspired me to write up What is collective consciousness and why does it matter? and then Wtf is the Synergic Mode? which is a lot more boggly thinking-out-loud rather than explaining/pitching.

I also wrote a handful of private docs outlining my plan for the organization/project I was seeking funding for. I was thinking of calling it The Boundary Collaboratory or The Interface Collaboratory, a hat-tip to my lineage with the Upstart Collaboratory in Waterloo. Those docs are The Interface Collaboratory ∞ Strategic Plan, Interface Collaboratory research questions, Interface Collaboratory Aims (1-3 years), Emergent Ventures Proposal [Malcolm Ocean • Interface Collaboratory] and First-person research in trust and synergetics. Maybe some parts of them will be worth publishing at some point, where they talk about more general vision or theory of change.

I ended up not pursuing that project in that form because that visa plan turned out to be unworkable plus by that point I was engaged to an American and so if it turned out I wanted residency that was already doable via our marriage.

Gnosis – “I can tell for myself” …and collective descriptive epistemology

In late 2023, my friend and close collaborator Michael Smith got me very interested in the idea of gnosis.  Descriptive epistemology: insofar as we know things, how do we know them?  What happens when we override our own innate knowing process with supposed ideas?  I wrote about this in terms of our sense of “I can tell for myself”, then talked about blocks historical (How did you forget to tell for yourself?) and societal (Oppressive cultures: you don’t get to know what you know).  Then I started to explore what happens when one person is more in touch with their gnosis than another (Reality distortion: “I can tell, but you can’t”) and when someone tries to teach someone else how to do it (Guru dynamics: “I can show you how to trust yourself”) and then when the student realizes the paradox involved in that (The eyes-open student: “I can see things my teacher can’t acknowledge”).  But as far as I can tell, merely getting everybody in touch with their own knowing isn’t enough.  So how do we get co-gnosis? Well, I know the secret to co-gnosis.  So do you.  Everybody does.  And nobody does.

I have a lot more to say about that.  There are two published asides from that sequence, one of which I framed as part of it because it was a response to a real objection from my wife, making the case that knowing-for-oneself is primary and taking-someone’s-word-for-it is derived).  I also had an urge to ramble a bunch of thoughts about Knowing and what it isn’t, which talks about Gettier cases and how knowing is not knowledge or truth.

A different angle on gnosis is a piece called 100% confidence + 100% humility (phrase cribbed from Michael) in which I claim it’s possible to max out both of these dimensions at once, and that that’s what gnosis is. That piece makes the case for the power of the core trust-dance moves (“I can’t trust that”+“I respect that you can’t trust that”) which is an example of unforeclosing statements: “I don’t know it is” (vs “I know it isn’t”). Foregrounding trust solves the intersubjective verification paradox.  When our intersubjectivity drops from commongrounded into chasmed, we need to switch from assertional to unforeclosing.  It’s Interfaces All The Way Fractal is my take on precisely how the “is my red the same as your red?” freshman philosophy question is confused. 

Relatedly, I’ve been meaning to write about co-epistemic status tags—phrases that indicate the expected degree of common knowledge that something has in the group, like “obviously” or “as most of you know” or “as far as I can tell”. Skillfully using these indicates to us that we’re tracking the sense that other people are making of what we’re saying: making sense of “that makes sense”.

I gave a keynote at LWCW 2023 about some of this co-gnosis and co-epistemics stuff, called Seeing Deeper Truths Together.

The evolution of consciousness and ego

In spring 2023, inspired by reading Andrew Cutler’s The Snake Cult of Consciousness and related essays, I started thinking a lot about the evolutionary factors affecting different forms of consciousness, self-consciousness, and cognition.  The superegos have gone crazy is my elaboration on Andrew’s model (remixing it also with David Deutsch’s). The Snake Cult stuff gave a new explanation for something I’d been thinking about a lot already, which was the question of what happened for humanity at the transition from what eg Robert Gilman calls the Tribal Era to the Empire Era.  The Preconquest Consciousness anthropological-epistemological essay formed another piece of this puzzle, along with this response essay from a friend, linking it with nondual consciousness.

That exploration, combined with asking the question “if, in some deep nondual sense, you can’t be separate from God, then what is the pain that people keep calling ‘separate from God’?” led me and Michael Smith to an insight about a dysfunctional mind-pattern we called “Original Spin”, which could be summarized as basically when your superego tricks your ego into attacking your id, making you think that you are a problem, rather than allowing you to spaciously orient to the fact that you have a problem. This is especially an issue with social problems or identity problems; the “separate from God” feeling is likely attachment trauma.

I wrote an Evolution of Consciousness one-pager to sketch out the field I was seeing, and started a document titled Questions I have about the evolution of consciousness which actually has only a dozen questions in it but has a list of over 50 sources (that I might have questions about).  In a way, it’s an inverse of this “what I’m on about” piece: a bibliography for my ideas, enumerating of various people, books, essays, etc, that have influenced it.

On a more phenomenological level, Michael and I also played around with a practice/game we called “my mind calls me the body” or “taking mind as object”, which feels to me like one of the most direct pointing out instructions I’ve ever experienced; a way to just tell my mind not to point the identity function as some left hemispheric self icon, but instead to point it at my present moment animal experience. We’ve shared it with a few other people, with interesting results though none as potent.

We-ship, we-spaces, the emergent “we”: organic alignment

This has been a theme for a long time for me, as is clearly implied by a bunch of the above pieces.

While We dynamics can get super profound, my best articulation of what’s going on here involves a simple everyday story: The Parable of the Canoe Sandwich 🛶🥪

I’ve also been experimenting with a practice I call “the we-ship”, where participants temporarily set aside the use of “I/me/my/mine” and each others’ names, and identify only with a 3-6 person “we”. It can be just a fun little language game, or very psychoactive—even for two people in the same We!

A much older piece attempting to reframe everything in terms of We is Relationship Panarchy.  I think this piece is a neat idea but likely has some confused assumptions about where one’s notions of “whole” come from, and the need to be more thoughtful about that.

I think about We’s in terms of systems orienting internally towards win-wins, and I’ve written up an exercise for getting Samesided that’s based on that, as well as an idea for a game to train that as a skill & stance: The Omniwin Game.

I tried ideating towards Fractal Altruism or some other Post-EA thing, which is my attempt to point at what a movement might look like that has the good parts of Effective Altruism without the parts that seem to me to be confused.  I think it needs to take a more organic stance, considering parts and wholes and how they all fit together, rather than just individuals helping other individuals.

I have a long song I wrote called Whole (The Superorganism Song), which captures a lot of my thoughts about this. I haven’t made a good recording of it yet, but I’m happy to sing it for you if we’re in person together.

Trust in terms of life

I think it’s helpful to understand trust in terms of life.  I’m pretty sure I’m trying to say something about the free energy principle or active inference here, but I haven’t yet grokked enough of those to make the mapping. But I’m sure I will, especially now that I work at the Michael-Levin-&-Karl-Friston-inspired Organic Alignment startup Softmax.

For now: I sense there’s at least one deep law of how trust works that is akin to the laws of thermodynamics.  I keep seeing people trying to do the equivalent of building perpetual motion machines out of trust, and I know with the same conviction as someone who understands the thermo laws that either the machine (the trust-building) will fail or that it involves a hidden energy source (place where trust is honestly and freely built, not just assumed).

One of the core dimensions is that trust involves skin in the game.  Cosmic unity neither trusts nor distrusts, it just is.  From this perspective, it becomes more obvious that hostility is a sign of too-closeness. And that distrust is new information. Relatedly, Beware Trust-Laundering: just because you trust one aspect of something, doesn’t mean you should trust some other aspect.  Even if a person or phenomenon seems spiritually or cosmically or ontologically significant, doesn’t mean that it’s right to devote your actual material life to it. There are many such people and phenomena; if you pretend you don’t have a choice, you’re fooling yourself.

Life and mind are not separate, and it seems to me that a lot of how trust works involves mutual simulation: here’s a very excited twitter thread where I’m having this insight.  Newcomb’s Problem is a trust problem

Courtship – “The Mating Dance”

In 2022, I ended a major relationship, and wrote this song about my process of realizing that all of my motivation for staying was fearful or shame-based, not about wanting to be in the relationship: The Courage To Leave.

I then applied all of my NNTD wisdom to the process of falling in love, which allowed me to navigate a new courtship in a way where I could tell I was actually listening to my doubts rather than repressing them.  Over the following years friends started asking me for advice on questions like “how can I tell if I’ve found the right person” and I started writing up my thoughts on that to share with them, which became first 7 takes on falling sanely in love and then in 2024 The Mating Dance: an online course on falling sanely in love.

This was a great context for sharing NNTD with the world, because most people want a really deep and powerful sense of we-ness and wholeness in their marriage, whereas desiring that in other relationships is fairly unusual.  Put another way, people can see how families are a form of collective life, in a way that’s less obvious (but still true!) for a random group of people living or working together.

Religion, God, Christianity, game theory, prayer

I’m on about religion.  Fall 2023 and onward has seen me increasingly praying, and running a series of experimental church services: Experimental Church retro. I’ve realized that while I’m not sure what I am, religiously, I’m clear I need to be a devout whatever-I-am.

Part of what led into that was listening to John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and then listening to my friend Romeo’s exposition Attractors in the Space of Mind Architectures and the Super Cooperation Cluster, which rederived a benevolent God from game theory in a way I found really exciting. (And where you can see that godshape as reflected in eg Christianity, but not implying anything in particular about Christianity being true or whatever.)

It’s seemed obvious to me for some time that there is no one single answer to what the shape of God is that one can (wholesomely or unwholesomely) pray to; even if two people agree on many many phrases about God, if they both call God “Father”, they’re probably projecting different fathers onto that image—even if they’re literally siblings!  Nonetheless, it seems like there are better and worse shapes for sure, and it’s nice in many ways to have a shared image among people who are close, although not as critical as some may have imagined a long time ago.

I care about different godshapes and I started writing out a Vision for a Viable Church and a more I-thou invitational piece called Come be a feral church with me  I’ve been praying increasingly over the last two years and have been working to articulate what prayer is.  I gesture at it loosely in this piece I wrote recently, You can pray to different things on many scales but I’ve been meaning to write a piece called something like “A practical intro to prayer” which would have a bit more of a guide in it.

I have a modified version of the Lord’s Prayer, translated from early modern english (KJV) into metamodern english.

Charles Taylor points out in A Secular Age that part of what religions offer is a shared sense of what gives life its most rich fullness… for me, that connects with the experience I’ve had of an upward spiral learning-oriented mindset based on the facet of evolution called exaptation… and I yearn to access that space with others in an ongoing way. I’m newly excited about a means for how:

Grappling with mindset choice

Going back to “Mindset choice” is a confusion… it is in general my view that if you call something a confusion without being able to see how the confusion makes sense in its own terms, then you are also confused—this is, amusingly, essentially the thesis of that post.  So I knew I was missing something here.  I followed a trailhead a year later in late 2021 to figure out what that might be and came up with Mindset choice 2: expanding awareness, but it was unsatisfying.  Yet another year later I published it and a new attempt: The choice to open, the choice to allow.  Also unsatisfying.  I have some new inklings about what those attempts were trying to get at, that I haven’t blogged about but some of them are explored on my roamblog in [[game: my mind calls me the body -aka- taking mind as object]].

Those failed attempts were both about some shift in momentary mental stance, which is interesting but not relevant: the mindset choice I had been calling a confusion involved shifting assumptions as well—changing one’s worldview into a new stable attractor.  For example, growth mindset and fixed mindset are both self-reinforcing views: if you think you can get better, you’ll behave in ways that will result in you getting better; if you don’t, you won’t.

In early 2024 I found a new trailhead altogether for grokking mindset choice, and explored it extensively including interviewing a new friend who clearly seemed to be making a mindset choice move in exactly the way I found difficult to relate to (“that’s an NNTD error!”) and reading Mickey Singer’s The Surrender Experiment (which resulted in me A Letter Of Letting Go: leaving the BGI Team).

My keyword for this investigation was “faith”.  It’s sometimes considered a synonym of “trust”, and there’s some etymological backing for this (Latin “fides” is essentially both) but when you actually look at how people use the words, they’ve clearly diverged, and I figured that there might be a similar insight possible around faith as I’d had around trust, that would put it all in perspective.

In the midst of this, with the help of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce as a foil, I found my way to a different kind of articulation of the problem I had with most existing approaches to faith: they leave one in a state that seems to me to be bullshitting—not just about facts, eg young-earth creationism, but about faith & choice itself. I wrote Hell is Praying and Heaven is Bullshitting. Interestingly, the same day I published that to UpTrust, one of the founders published a piece that seemed to me to be semi enacting Heaven’s Bullshit, which I wrote some responses to.

This recognition of Heaven’s Bullshit probably helped me with the self-validation needed to stay open to finding a version of faith without that issue…

Coalitions within and between people

I had no idea at the time that this would be related to the faith stuff, but in late 2024 I started exploring a new angle on NNTD that was framed in terms of psyche coalitions, within and between people.  It felt like simply a new view. of an old thing: “NNTD but realpolitik tho”, because of how it emphasized the ways that our sense of things is affected by the power landscape around us, not simply bottom-up.

How people end up with crazy (to you) worldviews was an earlier recognition of some of these ideas.

After I’d been working for months a long draft that would later turn into four pieces (Conversations are Alive, Coalitions Between are made by Coalitions Within (the central one), How my liberating insight became a new ruling coalition, & Born-Again Christians as a Case Study in Coalition Formation (& Memetic Lifecycles)) I accidentally pushed the serendipity button, getting distracted while checking my email and finding this piece about Steven Byrnes’ model of Trance by Scott Alexander.

The four steps he describes, for switching between multistable views (whether optical illusions or entire worldviews) clicked with the coalitions stuff and gave me the keystone for answering the faith question.  I have a writeup on that coming, called How to safely choose a mindset. The basic model has been ready for months, but given that translating theory into practice here is a huge part of the problem, I wanted to have a few more successful experiments under my belt before I published it, to make sure I’m not missing something critical.

Reflexivity and meta-reflexivity

In parallel to this, Michael had been developing some ideas he was calling Subjective Science.  This was inspired by realizing from reading David Deutsch’s popperian ideas, that if science is fundamentally the process of domesticating memes by developing explanations that are hard-to-vary and then subjecting them to selection pressures that will kill ones that are tricking you…  then there’s no reason to require science to be objective.  It should be objective you’re studying objects, and subjective if you’re studying subjective phenomena, such as consciousness, trust, love, or spirituality.  But it can still be science!

Then we came across a piece on reflexivity—places where how you orient to something affects what is there to perceive—and realized that that was critical to what we were trying to make sense of there. Since reflexive questions inherently don’t have a single ground truth, you can always reason your way into staying put, and it will seem just as true, even though the other attractor might be categorically better than the one you’re in.  What does rigorous investigation look like in this context?

Reflexivity was a theme for us in a few other ways as well:

1. we’d been getting more into psychocybernetics, which is sort of a process of self-hypnosis that uses the self-fulfilling prophecy properties of perception to get better results in life, not by trying to do anything differently but just by vividly imagining it going differently until that imagining inspires better action.
2. the ways in which LLMs take on characters based on what they’ve read, which then affects what comes out…  caused me to become way more interested in hyperstitioning.  it’s in fact the case that things you think will become true will tend to become more true! not always, but often!

Those all helped with the faith insight as well. At some point I intend to write up the full story of how I had this insight, because I think that much of it is reproducible as a general approach for life insight and for intellectual insight (of which this was both).

Trust and Faith

Colloquially, people use “trust” and “faith” somewhat synonymously, and they’ll tell you this.  However, they also use them very differently, and I think this tracks something really important.

Colloquially, people use “energy” and “power” somewhat similarly…  but if you want to do physics, you need to track that they’re different and have a very precise relationship: P = E/t.  Power is the rate of energy per unit time.  If your external battery has more power, it’ll charge your phone faster; if it has more energy, it’ll give your phone more total charge.

Having gotten a handle on faith as a top-down semi-volitional function, and trust as a bottom-up emergent function, I’m very excited to articulate more precisely exactly how they relate.  Maybe this will even literally involve some equations once I figure out how to formalize these in free energy / active inference terminology! 

In the meantime, I have articulations like “trust” can’t be conjugated in the imperative case (which is a bit like saying “you can’t make energy from nothing”). To be clear, I don’t think energy/power are analogous to trust/faith, even if there is some deep telic physics to trust & faith.

I still also have a lot to say about trust and faith in general, and the recognition of the power of deliberately adopting a view (and the delusionality of pretending that you’re somehow avoiding adopting a view) has been affecting my spiritual/religious life, as well as how I orient to my work and relationships.  And I have a lot of desire to experiment with friends and others in making these shifts together in a mutually-supportive and sane way, both religiously and not.

Being on about stuff is one of the most joyous parts of life.

• I began the year thinking that my mission was to build an actually-good AI Secretary as a new business
• I worked on that for a bit but in spring I started realizing I was BSing myself about my priorities
  • and in particular I started getting the sense that continuing on my current path with the secretary idea was likely to lead down the same old paths I’d gone with my previous business, intend.do, where it became a sort of half-assed lifestyle business but didn’t take me to the next level
• the other thing that happened was I backed up and started seriously reflecting on the fact that I wasn’t really pursuing a theory of change I believed in, or living a life that made sense given everything I’ve experienced—particularly the collective consciousness magic described in Wtf is the Synergic Mode?
  • I reflected: huh, it’s as if I were a chemist who in undergrad found a molecule that might plausibly cure cancer, and I sometimes talked about that discovery but when somebody asked I would say ‘idk, I’m working on other stuff.  but it would probably be good to follow up on that’
  • it’s one thing to have a specific reason for not working on it, whether it’s “it’s too daunting” or “it seemed also maybe dangerous” or whatever
  • but I didn’t have a clear reason (although I do think those two were part of it)
• thus I entered into life-crisis mode
  • Jess (my wife) and I share a philosophy that life crises are good and if all is going well you should have one every few years.  kind of like controlled burns
  • I had major ones in 2020 and 2022, which are well-documented in those respective yearly reviews
  • my main approach to having a crisis is, to the extent possible within my commitments, to stop letting my life go forward as usual and do almost nothing but journalling, going for walks, and talking to friends about my situation and confusion
  • at some point I might write up a bit of a guide for this haha
• I did a lot of journalling about what might feel even plausibly viable in light of my experiences of we-spaces etc
  • one main idea I had for unifying things was to build an LLM-powered app for helping people do 3SED (3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue), on all scales from personal conflicts to political conflicts to scientific paradigm tensions
    • I still think this is a great idea, and I might hack on it on the side, but I still didn’t really trust myself to start another software business.  maybe with the right cofounder?
  • I also considered trying to start some sort of institute or foundation or other organization, and get some funding for researching this kind of thing, but I wasn’t really sure how to approach it
• in parallel to this, though not unrelatedly, I’d been writing up some ideas on the interplay between internal and interpersonal coalitions (aka “NNTD but realpolitik tho” – NNTD is my “non-naive trust dance” framework-etc)
  • and that coalitions writing, combined with…
    • Anna Salamon’s essay on Believing In
    • some thinking by my friend Michael Smith about reflexivity and subjective science
    • getting more curious about hyperstitioning and psycho-cybernetics
    • a comment by my friend Jarred contrasting NNTD’s “respect distrust” with the upward-spiral power of a practice of “noticing what’s working”… that practice being central to the approach of the scene I was part of up until 2020 in which NNTD emerged
    • an essay by Scott Alexander on bistable illusions and trance states
    • some work I’d done the previous year to grok a friend’s maxim of “life is trustable”, which seemed to conflict with my NNTD insight on multiple levels
  • to produce a massive insight about faith
    • …which pairs very nicely with my 2020 insight about trust!
    • (hope & love & peace & joy, watch out 👀)
  • the effect is that while I don’t disagree with my “Mindset choice” is a confusion piece, I now feel like I understand what mindset choice is and how to do it on purpose, and how you’re sort of inevitably doing it so you might as well do it well.  I’m still not that good at it, but I now see how to become good at it (and how to set up guardrails to approach it safely)
    • and, excitingly, I now feel like I can approach leading in this kind of domain
    • whereas before (particularly since NNTD) I’d been so fixated on the importance of bottom-up processing that I could kind of only take a critic role
  • but also conceptually, this seems to have untangled a major blindspot I’d had since the NNTD insight, and I feel more space to be less dogmatic about all of this stuff
• in August, I was texting my friend Emmett Shear about various ideas and mentioned that I was back to the drawing board but probably wasn’t going to start a new software company, and I said “ok so i have another weird proposal” and pitched me on joining his organic alignment AI startup to do the human organic alignment of the company itself
  • …basically my dream job?!  I get to hack on software tools, but internally, not having to build and sell production apps…  I get to tinker with applying cybernetics and active inference in an organizational context…  I get to work with and learn from people with way more experience running real successful businesses…  and I get to apply what I know about trust and how I’s become a We to a team that’s working on important technical and philosophical problems—a team with good feedback loops, not a navel-gazing community or research institute..?!? 
  • anyway, long story short, after a few smaller explorations, we decided to go for it, and thus began my first experience of full-time indefinite employment, as Softmax’s Organizational Development Manager
  • (we’re hiring, btw! looking for a small number of very skilled Orchestrator-Engineers)
• definitely part of what drew me to finally exploring having a job was finding it hard to cohere my focus at home with a baby-okay-now-a-toddler-wow-they-grow-up-fast
  • I was surprised about the extent to which I just liked having a job, and I think this contrast was part of it but far from all.  teams are great.  I’ve been lonely.
• in November I published one post a day for 30 days! some were quick ones I whipped up day of, and some were long pieces I’d spent many hours and months iterating on. I’d recommend:
  • 100% confidence + 100% humility (maybe my best yet articulation of why trust is such a key concept)
  • Come be a feral church with me (an invitation into the kind of religious practice community I’d like to have)
  • 3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue (3SED) (a pragmatic technique for how to listen so you can get heard)
  • bonus: my friend Tasshin’s NNTD writeup, that I didn’t write but gave tons of input into: Trust Dancing and Distrust Wrestling: Exploring Malcolm Ocean’s NNTD
• on the toddler/family front, I feel satisfied to have spent the first year of my firstborn’s life so actively involved in her care (Jess and I were basically 50/50) not so busy that I ended up not quite getting some of the core skills and ending up with a learned helplessness attitude about it
  • but overall I have been loving my daughter and loving being a dad, even as I got clarity that I don’t want to spend quite so much time being just in baby mode
  • relatedly, Jess is now taking much more than half, but she also wants time to get more work done, but we’re also not super stoked about most daycare or school premises
  • instead, she’s working on creating a post-secular family coworking space, based on some ideas that both of us have been nurturing for awhile

There sometimes seems to be a tradeoff between confidence and humility. That apparent tradeoff comes from a subtle assumption, which is common yet false: that your experience and mine are supposed to be the same. Rudyard Kipling knew this:

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, yet make allowance for their doubting too.

If, indeed. If we could do that, that’d be great.  But how?

Consider these five expressions:

1. “You are trying to screw me over”
2. “I have a story that you’re trying to screw me over”
3. “I think you’re trying to screw me over”
4. “I can’t trust that you aren’t trying to screw me over”
5. “I should trust that you’re not trying to screw me over”

They’re all expressing a concern that the person is trying to screw you over. That part of the sentence doesn’t even change! What I’m going to say also applies to other second-halves of the sentence: “going to hurt me” or “lying” or “asking me to doubt myself” or “hiding something” or “overoptimistic” or “not on my side” or basically anything. I deliberately picked a contentious situation—one where it’s hard to talk without encountering issues. It’s contentious not just because of the tension in screwing-over, but because they refer not just to the other person’s behavior but their intent.

These phrases all express the same concern, but they express it in vastly different ways. They’re radically different speech acts—nearly as different as “what do you think about getting married?” is from “will you marry me?”. This isn’t just about the words, although words can help us understand how confidence and humility are not opposites but how you can have both or neither.

No transcending of a duality is complete without a 2×2:

• Confidence means living in contact with your own sense of things — the opposite is dissociating from your sense of things or repressing it.
• Humility means holding and sharing your sense of things in a way that’s open to learning — the opposite is having a fixed view.

Let’s talk about each of these different kinds of speech acts in turn.

“You are trying to screw me over”

This one is all confidence and no humility.  In general this speech act is a claim, but in this context of talking about someone’s intent, this speech act is an accusation, which invites defending—or, if the accuser has sufficient social power, capitulating. Where the others are “I statements”, this one just tells it how it is. Except of course I don’t actually know how it is, I only know how it seems to me. This is especially true with statements like this one, which imply something about the other person’s intent. 

Suppose that you’re indeed doing something that is likely to screw me over, but without intent—you don’t have any idea that I have a particular vulnerability, eg a peanut allergy or some information I don’t want public, or whatever. You’re going to have a hard time syncing up with “You’re trying to screw me over”. You’ll probably just say—rightly—“no I’m not!” But I’ll still be left with the sense that you’re gunning for a future where I get screwed over.

If you’re on your game you might be able to reflect back “I’m not trying to screw you over, but what are you worried about happening? Maybe I’m missing some way in which what I’m doing is about to screw you over.” And then we might be able to resolve things. But it really demands a lot from you to dodge the accusation and respond in a sense-making sort of way. Because if you just say “no I’m not” then you’re basically accusing me of a false accusation and we’re into a caustic game of “he said she said”.

Suppose that you have some subsystem that is trying to screw me over, but you have no conscious access to that subsystem—in fact, it’s something in your shadow or blindspot, that is actively trying to hide itself. If I accuse you of trying to screw me over, the “you” that I’m talking to is not trying to do that, so once again you’ll be inclined to respond “no I’m not!” But the “you” that I think is trying to screw me over includes this other force in you that is trying to screw me over, so your “no I’m not” is speaking on behalf of a misleading “I”. But once again, it’s hard to respond any other way. It is possible though—sometimes I’ve said to people “well, I’m not aware of any part of me that wants that, but I imagine if there were such a part it might be hidden, so I’m not sure”. I’ll generally add further remarks encouraging them to listen to their distrust—more on that below.

Both the “no I’m not” and the “I’m not sure” look fairly similar to how you might respond if you were actually knowingly trying to screw me over, and were simply denying it!  And the fact that we both know this also sort of make it easier for someone to hide their malevolent intent by shifting the argument onto the unjustifiability of the accusation—which is a layer remove from the actual question of what’s going on.

After all, I have said something that’s kind of an overreach: I attributed motives to you that I can’t directly know, and so when you point out that I can’t know what your intent is, we might falsely conclude that therefore I should trust you…  and thereby slide into the gaslit quadrant described below. This can happen independently of whether you’re actually consciously or subconsciously or not-at-all trying to screw me over.

Even if there is a friendly resolution possible, if I open with this accusation, there’s a decent chance we’ll end up not finding it and I’ll end up concluding that I was right all along.

Meanwhile… if I’m making an accusation about your motives and I have any sort of power over you, then there’s a chance that even in a situation where your motives are good, you’ll end up doubting yourself and obsessively trying to extricate any parts of your motives that are less-than-wholesome, even if they represented approximately none of what was actually going on for you in the moment.  This is capitulating to an accusation, and results in you being blamed—that is, we explain our problems only in terms of what you’re doing, and our attention is directed clear away from whatever I might be doing that makes the situation weird or tense or hostile.

Other phrases from this quadrant:

• “I can tell you just want to sleep with me”
• “this is your X pattern again”
• “obviously you’re faking being nice here”
• presupposition: “but since you’re just trying to screw me over, …” or “which is how you’re trying to screw me over”

This quadrant directly speaks to the common sense of things, and if it’s allowed to stand then it changes the shared sense of what is so.

Some people will find that the directness of this quadrant is more tractable than the one I’m about to talk about, even though it encounters these issues of defensiveness, because it at least brings everything forth. This is more true in more arms-length domains where such statements are simply claims rather than accusations, eg if talking about whether a particular strategy or policy would work, compared to talking about someone else’s intention. It’s even easier with math or science or engineering, where we can mostly keep ourselves removed from what we’re talking about and simply say phrases like “that’s not going to work”.

“I have a story that you’re trying to screw me over”

This one is all humility and no confidence. I’m making no bid that I get to say what’s actually going on between us. I’m… telling you what’s going on “in me”, and you can choose to treat that as me being crazy or deluded or whatever. This speech act is often called “owning one’s experience”, and at its best, it invites perspective-taking. But it can also invite dismissing or psychoanalyzing.

Saying “I have a story” creates a kind of space.  I’m saying how I see it, but I’m not asking you to agree—you can have your own story.  Here’s “agree to disagree” land.  It also implies I could have other stories too, and that this is just one of them.  Good for not ruffling feathers too much, and papering over real issues.

This mode can be transformative, which is why it’s frequently recommended by books and courses on how to communicate better, from Circling to Landmark Forum and beyond.

A great example can be found in this short article and worksheet from counselors Marlene & Bob, about how to “Speak the Unarguable Truth”.  They recommend starting with observations about the world that are framed in a neutral way, then sharing bodily sensations with minimal narrative, and then finally sharing “interpretations”, which have this “I am making up a story” or “I imagine” frame.  You can’t argue with how my body feels, and you can’t argue with the reality that I have a story.  Their framing accords with the meta-protocol vibes of “there’s no right answer, just what works” in that they say:

How do you know that it is unarguable? You don’t get an argument back. If you are getting an argument in response, then you likely haven’t gotten to the unarguable truth yet. There is usually another layer of truth that you can access.

When the revealing of the story produces surprise and curiosity for the other person, this is owning one’s experience working well.  Saying a more detailed and personal story than “you’re trying to screw me over” might help with that, as it really makes it clear the extent to which the story is very much something going on for one person and not the other, who would never have remotely considered conceiving of things in those terms.  And then you get to satisfying resolutions like “Wow, yeah, if I’d known all this context and why you care so much about this, I would have been much clearer about what I was up for.  And I will be going forward!”  And the new sense of things lands for everyone involved.

But often this is not what happens.

Once again, suppose you were actually doing something that is likely to screw me over, but don’t know it, whether because you’re missing information or because the subsystem in you that has a screwing-me-over strategy isn’t available to the parts of you that I get to talk with.  In either case, if I reveal my story…

• I might get dismissed: You respond by saying “huh, interesting.  well, I’m not, so don’t worry.” …and I’m left still feeling kind of uneasy but now feeling like there’s not a good way to bring it up again.  “Cool story bro.”  Shrug.  Note that while the fact that I have a story may be unarguable, the question of whether the story is relevant is very arguable, and is essentially the whole thing in question.  These dismissals are fairly overt, but this can sometimes be quite subtle: the life of the conversation simply moves on and doesn’t change course in a way that would indicate it had incorporated it.  And if I let this slide, I may also let myself slide from this quadrant to the gaslit quadrant: “I have a story that […]… but I’m sure that’s not what you’re really doing…  how silly of me to doubt you.” Sometimes people do this habitually, before the other person even replies.
• I might get psychoanalyzed: “Okay,” you say, “you have this story.  That’s probably your attachment trauma again. But I’m not your mom.” Here your argument is not that the story is altogether irrelevant, it’s that it’s only relevant to me, not to you.  “This has nothing to do with me! It’s just a projection.” And maybe we get to something, or maybe we don’t, but it’s been all about me the whole time. Likewise, sometimes people will also do this habitually, ignoring their own accumulated lifetime of wisdom from various betrayals by reframing them as “my patterns” or whatever.

And once again, we will note that these responses are just as usable by someone who is actively, knowingly, consciously, trying to screw me over.  They’re broadly symmetric weapons.  Which means that they will tend not to build trust—at least, they won’t build non-naive trust.

On the psychoanalysis track, it’s possible that investigating the origins of my story causes a spontaneous mismatch experience, where I notice some way in which I’ve been viewing this scene is totally not relevant.  You can tell this has happened because it will feel like a simple relief, and sometimes funny. “Haha wait what? I was concerned that you would be mad at me if I spoke my mind? That’s…  yep, I really was worried about that until I looked at it, but now that I have, and I compare it with what I know of you, and that just really doesn’t feel likely here, since you always favor directness. Well, that makes sense!” It may be more painful than funny.  But it feels obvious and clarifying.

If instead the investigations yield a tentative sense of “I guess it’s this”, then that’s almost surely not it.  It might be part of it, or it might be a complete red herring, but if it doesn’t feel like “oh of course” such that it makes total sense why you were concerned and you can see now why it’s not an issue…  then there’s some other concern that hasn’t been noticed. That’s what it feels like to rotate your inner coalitions to repress a view.

As I mention in Dream Mashups, just because I’m projecting something on you doesn’t mean I’m the only one who can do anything about it. You have the power to find some way to act that would be incompatible with my projection.

Other examples of the owning one’s experience / story quadrant:

• “I’m afraid you’re trying to screw me over” might also go roughly here. Unlike “I feel that X” which is below, by saying “I’m afraid” it locates what’s going on more firmly in me.
• “I just want to reveal something that’s going on with me” said in a way that has no skin in the game, and backs down if there’s any sense that it would rock the boat.

“I think you’re trying to screw me over”

This one, it seems to me, attempts to strike a 50/50 compromise of humility and confidence. I’m not saying definitively that you are trying to screw me over, but I’m still kind of asserting it as something worth considering. It shows up in the spirit of truth-seeking, voicing a concern into the shared understanding space while not withdrawing my “I” from the mix. This speech act is a proposition.

As a proposition, it invites considering whether the proposition is true—something in the realm of truth-seeking, debate, argument. If I think X, and you think not-X, then we disagree! We might assume therefore that one of us is right and the other is wrong. Or perhaps it turns out the truth is somewhere in between, or we’re both confused.  Maybe we even know about higher dimensional thinking, and so we try to resolve the paradox between our two views!

“I think it’s going to rain tonight” is the sort of thing to which someone might respond “actually I checked the forecast and the storm is supposed to blow past us to the south”. And this makes sense to the other person and things are resolved.

In a mostly-useless sense, “I think that” is also unarguable—it’s hard to argue that I don’t think what I think—but in practice of course we treat “I think that” statements as being primarily about the proposition.  So the usual response is to try to investigate the proposition, whether via debate or via inquiry… sorting through the details of what it means and whether we agree.  Unlike the un-stemmed “you are” above, implied here is that even if I’ve mostly made up my mind, my thoughts are in principle open to being influenced by evidence, argument, etc.

Other ways that people express propositions include:

• “I feel like you’re trying to screw me over”
• “this evidence would suggest that you’re trying to screw me over”

Success at this register of exchange requires some combination of the situation being a simple misunderstanding or us to be skilled at clarifying and giving each other the benefit of the doubt—the kinds of moves described in elements of rationalist discourse, though not necessarily consciously or based on a list.  It gets extra hard if you’re in a situation where there’s a lot of tension about the kinds of frames we’re using and the kinds of evidence that are relevant.

I said that “I think” is sort of a 50/50 compromise, but exactly where it falls depends on the situation and the tone, and it can end up looking much more like a story or an accusation depending on those, and falling into similar pitfalls.  But if we stay in the middle, then this ends up neither really being about what my story says about me nor what my accusation says about you, but just a matter of sorting out what’s so.

What’s nice about this compromise is that it at least attempts to seek common ground, not demanding that someone agree or defend, but inviting them to make their case.  However, you can still run into situations where the underlying energy ends up being one of “look I know you think that I […] but you’re wrong.” And implied in that is usually some amount of “and since you’re wrong, you should trust me.”

But the whole issue is that…

“I can’t trust that you aren’t trying to screw me over”

As far as I can tell, this manages to max out both confidence & humility at the same time. I’m owning that my distrust is mine, and not accusing you of anything, but I’m also presencing into the reality a social fact: that I cannot non-naively trust you, given what I know. It’s not just a story I have, and it’s not just an opinion. It is my best sense of what is going on and what I can rely on. This speech act is… well, I call it non-naive trust-dancing. Or more narrowly, revealing-distrust.

It invites recognition and respect of distrust.  Even if you know you’re not trying to screw me over, we can get on the same page about the fact that I don’t—and this is a fact, not just something I’m imagining or a thought that I’m having.  If I could trust you more, I would, but I can’t, so I don’t. The reason why this is so powerful is that there’s a very immediate need for conversational/relational shared reality to track is people’s trust in each other, so sharing distrust is of a different type than sharing a story or thought or feeling.

Unforeclosing: the double-negative

Another way to put it is “there’s a way I would feel if I weren’t worried about you trying to screw me over, and I don’t feel that.” This is more verbose but it’s also more precise, and it is, I think, synonymous with what people often mean when they say they distrust something or someone.  Since I don’t trust you in a whatever way, I have to take appropriate precautions whether physically or psychologically or whatever—obviously.  Which might mean guardedness or distance, or could simply amount to checking that I could recover from whatever betrayal I’m worried about.

The fact that it’s a double negative is vital to it being as powerful as it is. You can argue it’s complicated, to which I will argue that it’s no more complicated than the situation it’s attempting to describe. Being in a situation that involves distrust means being in a non-simple situation—especially if there’s some pressure to trust in some way that you can’t. There are competing senses of what’s going on.

In the magical ignorance wisdom of Unforeclosing statements, I highlight the difference between:

• I know you don’t care (confident but hella not humble!)
• I don’t know you care (depends on the tone)

The former is clearly “fightin’ words”, whereas the latter creates space for the absence of knowledge to be filled in. That creating of space is what I call “unforeclosing”.

Here’s another phrasing, still unforeclosing but different: “if you aren’t trying to screw me over…  well, I can’t tell.”

The best assertional phrasing I can find for this quadrant is “it seems to me that you’re trying to screw me over” — you’re directly talking about not just your thoughts or stories, but your very sense of the world. So if someone tries to argue, but it doesn’t change your sense of things, then you can say “I hear that but it doesn’t change how things seem to me.”

The word “trust”

The issue with saying “I don’t know you care” is that the word “know” here tends to sort of still imply that the care is present. Like it’s available to be known, I just don’t know it myself yet.  Whereas “trust” leaves that question open as well. “I don’t know if you care” sort of fixes that, but then tends more towards implying a binary yes/no, with a single ground truth, a single propositional fact-of-the-matter about this care, that I could know or not know. “Trust” makes it more clear that I’m talking about my relationship with your care.

Maybe this is different in other languages, maybe it would have been different in English hundreds of years ago. In any case, I am communicating here and now.  So here I might say “I don’t trust that you care”, or “I can’t tell that you care” or perhaps, equivalently but more verbosely “I don’t have what I would need to know that you care.”

When I talk about trust, I’m generally talking about something I’ve been calling “non-naive trust”.  A more precise phrase for it might be “uncompartmentalized trust”. It’s trust that comes not from repressing distrust but from honestly doing the dance to build the trust. It’s the kind of embodied ease you have in relation to people and situations that make sense to you and your skin-in-the-game—ease that you can’t control, that emerges naturally and obviously from your sense of “I can tell for myself”. Pretty much everything else that gets called “trust” amounts to some kind of pretending or forcing.  You can’t directly choose to trust (or to distrust) in this sense, but you can bring your sense of trust in contact with new information (or old information from a new angle) and see how it shifts and evolves.

If someone says to me “well but you should trust” then I simply say “ah but I don’t—shoulding something doesn’t make it so”.  If they say “just choose to trust” then I simply say “ah but I can’t—I could maybe pretend, or keep my distrust while choosing to take the sort of risk I’d take if I did trust, but I can’t trust what I can’t trust”. Trust cannot be conjugated in the imperative.

Therefore I use “can’t trust” and “don’t trust” pretty interchangeably, because when it comes to this kind of trust, you always do trust what you can trust, and don’t trust what you can’t trust.  So these are synonymous.

If parts of me trust and parts of me distrust, the only honest thing I can say about me-as-a-whole is that I don’t trust.  To try to trust is to try to slice off the part of me that doesn’t trust.  Thus honoring distrust is an inherently integrative move.

Trust-dancing

As with all of these, it’s partially about the stance and tone, not just the words. And of course, sometimes people find it very uncomfortable to not be trusted, so they might push back anyway. But this quadrant gives the best shot of getting serious shared reality in tricky situations, especially where both people have a lot of trust in their own experience.

So if I say to you “I can’t trust that you aren’t trying to screw me over”, you might not like this, and it might threaten your identity if you think of yourself as trustworthy.  And you might have trouble imagining how it could possibly be the case that I don’t trust this about you, given that you’d trust it about basically everybody in situations like this.  But nonetheless—unless you don’t trust that I’m not straight up lying—it’s not that hard to accept that (for whatever reason) I’m not able to access that embodied ease here.  There’s a good chance I even want to trust you here, and it might be helpful for me to say that I’d like to build that trust. And you might not understand or agree with whatever narrative I have about it—whatever story or language or whatever—but that’s sort of just the surface level.

The inescapable unshakable fact is that, at this moment, the trust isn’t there.  That doesn’t mean that you should distrust yourself—your trust and my trust are different, obviously.  There’s nothing to disagree about here!

When I’m grounded in my sense that I trust you as much as I do, in the ways that I do—no more, no less—then if you try to argue with me about why I should trust you, or psychoanalyze my distrust or whatever, I have plenty of space to explore with you in whatever directions, while knowing that I’m not going to get tricked out of my distrust by some clever line of reasoning or introspection.

But more importantly, when you’re also grounded in this sense—when together we both are letting the trust unfold how it does and not trying to force it—there’s clearly little point in arguing.  You might want to share your perspective to see if I’m able to trust you more once you let me in, but there’s no sense that it should convince me—we’re both just there to find out.  And to the extent that we’re doing this, the whole experience tends to become exquisitely playful as long as there’s not some high-pressure decision that hinges on the outcome (or some giant sunk cost we’d have to lose).

And this is conscious trust-dancing.  We’re always in the dance of our trust for each other, and in some sense we’re always revealing exactly how much we trust each other, but sometimes we’re trying to pressure ourselves or each other to fake it, to adopt an unquestioning attitude in a situation where that feels unsafe or unwise.  And when that becomes a habit, we end up with bizarre twisty responses like…

“I should trust that you aren’t trying to screw me over”

It took me awhile to figure out what goes in the bottom-left quadrant. It’s clearly the worst of all worlds. But it ended up being simple to find: take the self-evident wisdom of the top-right quadrant, and say that it should somehow be not how it is. Making such a move, I am not confident, because I’m negating my own sensemaking…  but I’m also not humble, because I’m assuming a particular conclusion is correct.

If I say this “I should trust”, the obvious actual subtextual content of what I’m saying is still that I can’t trust that you aren’t trying to screw me over—otherwise I wouldn’t even feel the need to say this—but then I’m just completely betraying my own perspective and turning it over to the authorities for arrest. This speech act is self-gaslighting.

The authority in question may be the “you”—who I don’t trust!—or it may be a superegoic injunction from my mom or a spiritual teacher or some memeplex.  It may have a specific target, eg “you should trust adults” or “you can trust Bob”, or it may be generic, eg “it’s wrong/sinful not to trust”.  Regardless, in holding this stance, I have swapped out my trust, my knowing, my sense of things… for someone else’s.

The self-gaslighting invites a kind of narrative domination from the other, which is tricky to get out of—a bit of a double-bind. If you agree—“yes, you should trust me!”—then you agree that I should doubt my own knowing. If you disagree—“no, you shouldn’t trust me”—then you’re still positioning yourself as the authority, and moreover you’re giving off a weird twisty message around your trustworthiness. Whether or not you trust me, given whatever information you have, is not up to me.

If you want to support the person’s self-trust / “I can tell for myself” sense, you’re doomed if you respond in the “should” part of the frame. But there are plenty of available moves that can help the person shift from self-gaslighting towards their “I can tell for myself” sense—to tap their self-trust and get into the humble+confident stance.  Depending on context, I might respond to “I should trust that you aren’t trying to screw me over” with phrases like:

• well, not if you don’t trust it!
• well can you trust it though? if you can’t trust, it doesn’t really matter if you should
• seems to me that either you trust it or you don’t, and “should” doesn’t really factor in
• if you don’t trust it, you don’t trust it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• who says you should trust it? I don’t say that
• where does the should come from?
• I’m fine if you don’t trust that
• I won’t ask you to trust me more than you can
• idk, if I seem screwy to you then maybe it’s good to listen to yourself

More on this in “trust” can’t be conjugated in the imperative case.

Each of these does some mix of:

1. highlight that their trust is not should-able, because it already is what it is
2. invite them to notice and acknowledge whatever distrust is there
3. invite them to investigate the source of the should
4. communicate that I am okay with them not trusting something about me (this requires of course that they trust this utterance of mine; if not, I’ll try again with different language or suggest we not interact if we can’t get any purchase on it being okay for their distrust to be there)

A lot of the responses I gave above are also pretty close to how I might respond to people coming at me from the other quadrants, although of course many of them have to be phrased slightly differently if they haven’t already used the word “trust” such that I can reflect it. But ultimately they’re all a way of differentiating between our two viewpoints and acknowledging that things actually seem the way they seem to me to me, and that they actually seem the way they seem to you, to you.  And that that is how it is!

A more common way that the self-gaslighting gets expressed is “I know you’re not trying to screw me over”, because the fact that it’s being said is usually precisely because you don’t know that—you cannot tell for yourself. If you could tell, it wouldn’t even be coming up, and if someone else brought it up maybe you’d say something more like “yeah I’m not worried about that”. So this “I know” is an attempt to ally with some social process that says that I’m supposed to agree that you’re not trying to screw me over, not an actual statement of clear direct-knowing. Other ways that people self-gaslit here:

• “Obviously you’re not…”
• “I’m sure you’re not…”
• “I know you only want what’s best for me”
• “I know I can trust you”
• “I know you’re trustworthy”

A more complicated 2×2 and more examples

To this image, I’ve added the names of the kinds of speech acts, plus a description of the opposites of confidence and humility.

Below are a few quick other examples for flavour. Again, don’t take the exact words too seriously, just pay attention to the stance.

“I’ll be here at 7pm”

• “No you won’t”
• “Fwiw, I’m imagining you arriving at more like 8pm”
• “My estimate is 8pm”
• “I’m going to bet on 8pm”
• “I should trust that you’ll be on time this time”

On care:

• “You don’t care”
• “For some reason a voice in my head is saying you don’t care”
• “I think you don’t care”
• “I can’t sense your care here”
• “I should trust that you care”

Ok…

• “You’re not okay with this”
• “I have a story that you’re still not okay with this”
• “I think there’s something still bothering you”
• “I don’t trust that you’re okay with this”
• “I shouldn’t be worried about whether you’re okay with this”

Is that so?

• “That’s not right”
• “I have a different view”
• “I don’t think so”
• “I don’t see it” / “That’s not what I’m seeing”
• “I’m sure you’re right…”

Okay, so you’ve got a car—

• “You’re just trying to impress me”
• “I have a story that you’re just trying to impress me”
• “I feel like you’re just trying to impress me”
• “I can’t trust that you aren’t [mostly/primarily] trying to impress me“
• “I should trust that you’re not just trying to impress me”

Skilled trust-dancing means being able to skillfully respond to it all

This means meeting people wherever they speak from, receiving the content of what they’re saying, and responding back with something that encourages their sense-making and collective sensemaking, where that’s possible. I gave examples of this in the section on the self-gaslighting quadrant.

If you’re dealing with a slippery complex situation where there’s something you want to talk about but the mere idea of bringing it up gives you brainfog, you might appreciate my template for conversations about blindspots: How To Gently Blindly Touch the Elephant In the Room Together.

If you’d like some general guidance for how to navigate these dynamics in the moment, check out 3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue (3SED).

If you want to better see the precise thing I’m calling “trust”, and understand how it works, the best pieces are probably:

• distrust is new information
• “trust” can’t be conjugated in the imperative case
• The many meanings of “NNTD” (with usage examples!)
• Non-Naive Trust Dance—why the name?

Unlike practices like Circling, in Stemless you don’t particularly try to own your experience by using stems like “I have a story that…” or translating your sense of betrayal into a body sensation plus a request or whatever. Instead, you’re invited to recognize the shocking fact that we are all in some ways exquisitely owning our experience simply by having it and by acting from it at all. Very dzogchen-flavoured (and, I think, -inspired).

There’s something about it that feels deeply relieving. Some sense of “wow, the right hemispheres just get to talk now, and the left hemispheres are a bit confused but along for the ride.” And a sense that it immediately gets to the meat of what’s actually going on, rather than caught up in endless preamble. Clarification is done not by backing up and pinning meaning down, but by beholding it in all of its nebulous glory and then saying whatever needs saying give however things seem to be landing.

And it’s not exactly a skill so much as a stance, although there are perhaps skills that can help scaffold the process of shifting stances.

Dream Mashups

In Dream Mashups, I write:

Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and their old emotional meanings. Like dreaming you’re at school but it’s also on a boat somehow. And as in dreams, somehow the weirdness of this mashup goes unnoticed.

Stemless is about noticing the weirdness directly and bringing the emotional meaning into the foreground—at least for yourself, possibly also out loud. “I’m sitting in a classroom and the prof has tried to answer another student’s question, but he didn’t understand the question, and I’m supposed to re-ask the question but better, to get clarification.” That’s a thing I said at one point during tonight’s session.

It’s in part about noticing the supposing process, that creates the supposed-tos. Someone says something, or does something—or outside of a conversation, I notice something or read something—and I feel compelled to respond in a particular way. Quick: what is the scene I have just cast on the situation, such that that’s obviously the next move? You can’t tell me what mine is, although you have whatever you’re sensing and it might shine some light for me.

Leaning into blame

One playful thing that the Stemless hosts encourage is leaning into blame. One way to really see the situation you’re in is to find the way in which you feel a totally helpless victim—where reality is just forcing you to perceive things a particular way and there’s nothing you can do about it.

What will happen if you don’t say something immediately in response to what someone else said? It depends on the person or the situation, but various answers might be:

• I will look stupid
• I will look slow
• I won’t be cool
• I will make them feel bad
• It’ll be awkward

And then you can ask “why’s that a problem? who’s going to punish me? where is this urgency coming from? who’s forcing me to respond this way?”

Not to disagree with it or try to shift it, per se, just to take it as object and allow it to more fully exist as the force that is compelling you. Although indeed, once you bring it into conscious awareness, you’ll often find that the urgency vanishes and the compulsion fades. After all, if you’re doing something to please your mom and she isn’t even in the same timezone as you, well, maybe you will find that you don’t have to do it quite so urgently.

The point is not to enact the blame, but to see how the world you experience is pre-generated by a bunch of stories you don’t remember choosing. By externalizing the sense of where that all came from, you can see it more clearly than if you go looking for your interpretations as something you are already aware of doing. Your interpretations will just feel like reality. Your sense of things.

Projection 101 on steroids

There’s a common trope in spiritual or personal development circles that what someone says about you says more about them than it does about you. Sometimes this will even be stated as the extreme “it has nothing to do with you; it’s all about them.” This is a confusion, in my view; if it weren’t for you doing what you’re doing, they’d be projecting some completely different weird thing onto you.¹

But there’s also a deep truth to it worth seeing, and Stemless does a great job of pointing at that truth in direct experience, and actually taking it seriously.

“If that’s so…” it says… “…if everybody can’t help but speak only out of their own entire momentary visceral crazy world with even the smallest utterance… then what are we doing pretending there’s any such thing as small talk, or any such thing as real judgment?”

Someone just said a thing to you that feels kinda underhanded. Well, they may have not been honest on a surface level, but they’ve actually revealed to you in high-resolution their own construal of the situation by the precise way in which they avoided showing themselves. And then you feel some whole sort of way about that, because of all of the past experiences you’re projecting onto it in order to make sense of it. And that’s all going on in vivid detail for you—and maybe if you turn your gaze quickly enough you can glimpse it before you’re just acting into the story.

Right now: what is your situation? You’re at the end of reading a blog post, whether on my site or in your email inbox or some reader. What does that mean? What are you compelled to do right now? How does this last, more direct addressing of your situation change that from what it might have been if I’d ended with the previous paragraph? Can you glimpse it?

1. More on the limitations of Projection 101 in dream mashups. ↩︎

We’re all going around making sense of everything. We have different kinds of models that we use without even realizing it. A non-exhaustive loose sketch:

• small simple models that explain things like “why did the food go bad?” (it was out of the fridge too long)
• precisely generalized scientific models that explain things like “why does water expand when freezing into ice?” (water’s hydrogen bonds lock into hexagonal crystals with empty spaces)
• messy complex wide-sweeping models that explain things like “why am I having trouble finding a partner?” (< insert ideology/worldview here >)

The first we mostly learn from direct experience.

The second we mostly learn from studying and reasoning, plus confirming that it doesn’t contradict our experience or our other related models.

The third type we largely get from seeing how other people think about things. These models have too many details for us to properly verify them for ourselves. They may also have reflexive effects where believing them causes you to acquire more evidence in their favour. We may be very influenced by the popularity of the ideas, or the status afforded to those who hold them.

But just because we can’t directly verify these models, doesn’t mean that our personal experiences don’t play a critical role in model adoption. It’s just that instead of it being directly obvious or based on conscious checking, instead it happens more out of our awareness, as more a kind of sudden click-match or a gradual subtle seduction.

Gender Examples

Suppose that someone is living their life, and they keep being told what a man is and what a woman is, and finds themselves thinking “uhhh I keep being told that I’m a man/woman, but I resonate more with the description of woman/man”. There’s an experience they’re having, that they don’t know how to make sense of, and they feel like they can’t talk about this with anybody. Then they come across some writing or a podcast from someone about their experience of being transgender, and they go “OH!” and something clicks. The world makes more sense.

Meanwhile, suppose that someone is is living their life, and they keep being told that gender is completely a social construct and that they shouldn’t notice or care about differences between transwomen and ciswomen, but they find themselves thinking “but I really do feel differently in relation to them” whether it’s about safety or attraction or whatever else… There’s an experience they’re having, that they don’t know how to make sense of, and they feel like they can’t talk about this with anybody. Then they come across some writing or a podcast where people are talking about evolutionary biology and how these differences are real and matter, and they go “OH!” and something clicks. The world makes more sense.

How do people end up with crazy worldviews?

There are non-crazy takes on transgenderness. There are non-crazy takes on evolutionary biology.

There are also crazy versions of both.

Pick your flavour of crazy

By “crazy” here I mostly mean that the worldview has arranged itself in denial of some facts that are pretty obvious to many people. If you perceive a worldview as crazy, it’s likely that you’re like “how could they ignore these facts that are so obvious to me?!” And usually, implied but not stated is “so obvious to me and the people around me.” But the people holding that other worldview are, usually, surrounded by other people who hold similar views and who are collectively denying those obvious-to-you things. But often from their perspective, your worldview is doing the same thing.

I’m not saying worldviews are equally crazy, to be clear. Almost all of them are at least a little crazy though, and that’s okay. We get by. But some of them are orders of magnitude less crazy than others.

Often, but not always, when someone has an experience like I describe above, the worldview they’ve come into contact with is quite crazy.

I’m not entirely sure why this is—the algorithm favouring incendiary controversial takes? Political “if you’re not with us you’re against us” dynamics? Internal polarization due to coalitional coup dynamics, where the new ruling coalition tends to suppress whatever other knowings it doesn’t know how to integrate? A more thorough investigation into this topic would attempt to falsify these explanations and come up with a more robust model.

But in any case, the person—unconsciously—weighs their existing ontology with the new one on offer… and the new one comes out ahead, despite various downsides. Some things that used to make sense now no longer make sense, but the net experience, perhaps weighted by emotional intensity or salience, is one of things overall making more sense.

What facts become obscured by the new worldview can be partisan-political, or they can be about mundane matters: many people who are paranoid-psychotic begin with a situation of feeling like the world is out to get them to a degree that they can’t easily explain by reference to obvious shared reality facts. They feel as watched or as manipulated as they imagine someone might if they were the target of a CIA investigation… and from there it’s not actually that huge of a leap to start seeing such an investigation as being the cause of the feelings. This gets them out of sync with most other people, but their worldview of being subject to real persecution keeps them from being gaslit about how threatened they feel.

If you read my recent post 3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue (3SED), you might notice how it points at an alternative to losing your old viewpoint when you adopt a new one: instead, you affirm and strengthen the old one, then bring it in contact with the new one, and then after some patience and maybe some prayer, a deeper richer new one shows up that reflects both.

The self-reinforcing social effects

As I’ve written about in depth in Coalitions Between are made by Coalitions Within, once someone’s internal psychic landscape switches to a different ruling coalition, there tends to be an allegiance between that inner coalition and interpersonal ones, where they rely on each other for power. Plus it can just be uncomfortable to be around people who are pointing out facts you are actively attempting to ignore—and to ignore that you’re ignoring.

So people tend to spend time with other people who are ignoring the same facets of reality as they are, and this reinforces their worldviews. They watch the same videos, go to the same parties, whatever. And this means that even if someone started out with a relatively sane version of some worldview, they can still end up exposed to crazier versions, which pull them deeper and explain more weird things at the cost of pulling them further away from knowing the sorts of obvious things most people know.

Let’s destroy crazy worldviews’ monopolies on obvious things

Every obvious fact your worldview, ideology, cause, party., denies is a weapon you hand to any opponent willing to acknowledge it.

It’s possible to acknowledge and incorporate many facts at once that people aren’t used to seeing held together. Doing so offers a worldview that is even better than the crazy one that someone has adopted. There’s still the downside that they might lose their social scene or feel silly if they let go of certain overreified beliefs they had before, but this is mitigated substantially to the degree that they won’t feel like they’re completely betraying their friends or old view.

If you can really honestly agree with all of the facts that their crazy worldview thinks it’s got a monopoly on, and then also point out other things that are quite hard to ignore, you have a good shot of loosening something for someone.

If you have the courage to do so in a public forum like twitter, then even if that person’s mind isn’t changed, some bystander might get a bit of loosening as well. Interestingly, this can work in both directions: patiently saying the obvious about the costs and benefits of X and Y, to a pro-X anti-Y person, might both cause them to realize that not all people who see benefits to Y are naive, but might also cause an anti-X pro-Y person to realize that not all people who see benefits to X are evil. Or brainwashed, or cucked, or racist, or woke, or cruel, or whatever.

See Anatomy of an internet argument by @DefenderOfBasic for an in-depth guide on how to actually play this game. This is glorious non-naive trust-dancing in action.

When I hear people saying things like “trust this” / “he should trust me” / “I know I should trust…”

…I ask “but do I trust?” / “but does he trust?” / “but do you trust?”

I aim to get people in touch with the sense of what they can tell for themselves. Not trust as a thing that you try to declare or choose. And I orient towards the question of how that trust might be built.

Unpacking each of these examples:

If someone says “trust me/this”, I will comment to them something like “hm, well, conveniently I do trust that, although I wouldn’t pretend to if I didn’t” or I’ll say something like “well, I don’t currently trust that, but here’s what I would need in order to trust it…”. This is always only a guess—someone might be able to satisfy the letter of that constraint, but something would still feel off to me, at which point I’d go “huh, I still don’t trust it.  interesting.”

If someone says “he should trust me”, then I’ll inquire eg “why do you think he doesn’t already trust you?” / “what do you think he’s concerned will happen?” / “what do you think you could do to earn his trust?” …and if someone protests that they’ve already done what they needed to do to earn his trust, but he still doesn’t trust them, then I’ll highlight that it’s not up to them what earns his trust, it’s up to him. 

If someone says “I know I should trust…” then the whole reason this is coming up is because they don’t have what they need to trust whatever this is.  So to some extent I’ll investigate where the should is coming from—have they been memed into thinking that trust is a virtue, in the abstract?  And I’ll investigate whether that trust can be built, or if not, what to do about it.

“Trust” and “distrust” come through experience.  It’s part of my basic sense of things. In other words, when someone says the world is a particular way, I can tell how much I trust their word by the extent to which my sense of the world changes as a result. When someone says they’ll handle something, I can tell how much I trust their followthrough by the extent to which it then seems to me like it’ll be handled without my needing to manage it.  When someone says “that won’t be an issue”, my trust is the degree to which I am in fact no longer concerned as a result of them saying that.

the ground is kind of cold on my bare feet

but I trust I can handle it and this does not produce an objection

I don’t choose to trust—I listen and observe that I do trust

I listen and observe, and I may observe that I trust, or I may observe that I do not trust.

Why do we ever think otherwise? Why do we think we could choose it?

Sometimes the compartmentalization move sort of works temporarily—the social pressure is great enough that it reshapes the psyche to produce a new persona running the show that DOES exhibit something resembling trust even though the distrust has been merely repressed. And what’s trippy about this is that the nature of trust is that this system will optimize for feeling like nothing has been repressed—for you to not be able to tell the difference.

A system set up this way will have some friction, but for most of history such fractured selves have been the norm and it’s been advantageous for certain powerful forces (memes, not just people) to maintain the popular idea that one can and should choose to trust in certain ways, because that keeps the inner coalitions in line with particular outer coalitions. This is a historical reason why people think that “trust me” is a reasonable thing to say.

A different reason is that by its nature, our trust in ourselves is something we tend to feel very confident about, so if we’re not sufficiently differentiated then we may be inclined to think that it implies others should also trust us…  but that’s simply not true.  Others have different data, and a different situation for which the trust is required. Our words may not make the same sense to them that they do to us.

Trust can be thought of as a sense organ—perhaps a meta sense-organ.

And just like it would be weird to tell someone, including yourself, to perceive an apple instead of the orange they’re looking at, or to perceive a twenty dollar bill where there isn’t one, it’s the same kind of weird to tell them to trust something or someone.

Newcomb’s problem: You face two boxes: a transparent box, containing a thousand dollars, and an opaque box, which contains either a million dollars, or nothing. You can take (a) only the opaque box (one-boxing), or (b) both boxes (two-boxing). Yesterday, Omega — a superintelligent AI — put a million dollars in the opaque box if she predicted you’d one-box, and nothing if she predicted you’d two-box. Omega’s predictions are almost always right.

If you haven’t heard about this yet, you might as well take a moment to consider what you’d do.

While you do, here’s a quote by Robert Nozick in his 1969 analysis of it:

In his 1969 article, Nozick noted that “To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly.”

One argument is: what you do right now can’t control what’s already in the box, therefore obviously you should two-box and get more money.

The other argument is: if you think like that you will not get very much money at all, because there will be no money in the other box.

But doesn’t that second argument imply that the choice you make now can in some sense control the past? “Yes”, answers Joe Carlsmith in his Betteridge’s-Law-of-Headlines-violating essay Can you control the past?, “and this is a wild and disorienting fact”.

Building trust in Omega

The whole essay is worth reading if you’re at all interested in the topic. My aim right now is to analyze this one beautiful hypothetical:

Imagine doing “tryout runs” of Newcomb’s problem, using monopoly money, as many times as you’d like, before facing the real case (h/t Drescher (2006) again). You try different patterns of one-boxing and two-boxing, over and over. Every time you one-box, the opaque box is full. Each time you two-box, it’s empty. 

You find yourself thinking: “wow, this Omega character is no joke.” But you try getting fancier. You fake left, then go right — reaching for the one box, then lunging for the second box too at the last moment. You try increasingly complex chains of reasoning. Before choosing, you try deceiving yourself, bonking yourself on the head, taking heavy doses of hallucinogens. But to no avail. You can’t pull a fast one on ol’ Omega. Omega is right every time.

Indeed, pretty quickly, it starts to feel like you can basically just decide what the opaque box will contain. “Shazam!” you say, waving your arms over the boxes: “I hereby make it the case that Omega put a million dollars into the box.” And thus, as you one box, it is so. “Shazam!” you say again, waving your arms over a new set of boxes: “I hereby make it the case that Omega left the box empty.” And thus, as you two-box, it is so. With Omega’s help, you feel like you have become a magician. With Omega’s help, you feel like you can choose the past. 

Now, finally, you face the true test, the real boxes, the legal tender. What will you choose? Here, I expect some feeling like: “I know this one; I’ve played this game before.” That is, I expect to have learned, in my gut, what one-boxing, or two-boxing, will lead to — to feel viscerally that there are really only two available outcomes here: I get a million dollars, by one boxing, or I get a thousand, by two-boxing. The choice seems clear.

Makes sense, right? Like if you had those experiences, with the monopoly money, that’s how it would feel.

And I would describe this as “you have gained trust in Omega’s prediction abilities”.  You can tell for yourself that Omega can predict you effectively perfectly.  Your sense of things includes this perfect predictor.  Let’s contrast that with the scenario as presented:

Newcomb’s problem: You face two boxes: a transparent box, containing a thousand dollars, and an opaque box, which contains either a million dollars, or nothing. You can take (a) only the opaque box (one-boxing), or (b) both boxes (two-boxing). Yesterday, Omega — a superintelligent AI — put a million dollars in the opaque box if she predicted you’d one-box, and nothing if she predicted you’d two-box. Omega’s predictions are almost always right.

“Omega’s predictions are almost always right.” — says who?

When we act in the world, we don’t generally do so on the basis of sensational claims we have not verified.  And here we are being asked to stake our skin in the game on a claim about the predictive capabilities of a very strange sort of being with whom we are unfamiliar.  How does Omega know what we’re like?  Where did that information come from?  And why should I buy the claim that Omega is almost always right?

(Maybe two-boxers are like the children who eat the marshmallow immediately not because they have no self-control but because given their life experiences they have no trust that if they don’t eat it that it won’t get taken from them, let alone that they’ll be given a second one after 15 minutes!)

Of course, the act of stepping into a thought experiment involves buying such claims, which is why I generally recommend not pressing the button. But suppose one does. This one raises at least more interesting questions than “why am I standing next to this lever and how did I come to have perfect knowledge of how trolleys work while somehow still being me?”

Being someone

This “while somehow still being me?” question is central. The aforereferenced trolley problem is famously framed as one of ethics, and while I’m an ethical realist in the sense that I think there are objective truths about ethics, the most important of those truths as I see it is that ethics is necessarily contextual.  So it doesn’t work to reason about it out of context.

Anyway, Jacob Falkovich writes:

Newcomb’s problem is the *most* interesting thought experiment because it gest to the heart of the problem with this entire approach to philosophy: are YOU *somebody* or are you *in a thought experiment*?

Simulating & trusting

Newcomblike situations show up all the time where people are simulating each other—this is what happens when other people show up on time only if they think everybody else will show up on time.  The basketball player who throws the ball to the place in the court where her teammate is headed, not because she can see him but because she knows he’d be heading there.  His movements are part of her sense of things.

“Simulating each other” is a way too third-person clinical kind of way to put it.  Your sense of reality simply includes what you expect to happen, including the results of others intentions, skills, and integrities.  It’s so immediate.  It’s simply what is going on.  It can be wrong—if you’ve ever arrived where your car or bike is only to encounter NOTHING it was stolen or towed, you know how gut-turning this can be.  It’s visceral.  It’s reality, as you know it.

What’s weird about the original Newcomb’s problem is the lack of any opportunity for the requisite trust to be built—or distrust.  The lack of entanglement, of basis for simulation. It’s also odd for situations to be so perfectly onesided, where one side can perfectly simulate the other but not vice versa. Where did Omega’s sense of you come from? Where is your trust in Omega’s sense of you supposed to come from? Central questions to how we actually navigate these questions, left utterly unanswered.

Meanwhile, the monopoly money scenario, while it would allow trust to be built if you somehow got in it, requires even more suspension of disbelief to enter—magically, Omega not merely picks the sort of thing you’d do when faced with your real skin in the game choice, once…  but manages each time to simulate you so perfectly that she manages to know which feint you’ll do or at least which choice you’ll eventually make after the feint.

Staying with that scenario longer…  you could imagine that if you got thousands of opportunities to try this with the monopoly money, you might eventually be able to find holes in Omega’s simulation process.  Maybe she can simulate your natural behavior fine, or a coinflip, but not a random number generator, and so if you choose based on that, she actually does no better than chance—she simulates you well enough to know you’re going to decide that way, but can’t simulate the actual outcome.  Or maybe ordinary algorithmic randomness is easy for her but a quantum one is impossible for it.  Then you’d actually start to be building not just a sense that you control the past via your choices, but a sense of how.  Not merely a sense that Omega can predict you, but your own sense of how Omega can predict you.  You start being mutually entangled—still not symmetrically, but no longer one-way with no loop.

And this changes how you relate to Omega, which changes how Omega relates to you.

Collective integrity and identity

Meanwhile… there’s a much more realistic example given in Joe’s post:

I find that my two-boxing intuition strengthens if Omega is your great grandfather, long dead (h/t Amanda Askell for suggesting this framing to me years ago), and if we specify that he’s merely a “pretty good” predictor; one who is right, say, 80% of the time (EDT still says to one-box, in this case). Suppose that he left the boxes in the attic of your family estate, for you to open on your 18th birthday. At the appointed time, you climb the dusty staircase; you brush the cobwebs off the antique boxes; you see the thousand through the glass. Are you really supposed to just leave it there, sitting in the attic? What sort of rationality is that?

Leaving aside the “leave it there”—obviously there’s some simulation about whether you’ll donate it to charity vs take it for yourself. And let’s leave aside the 80%.

There is a kind of family lineage that would absolutely prize itself on its ability to have a kind of integrity in the form of being able to make choices like this—and predictions like this—and part of how it might do it is via rituals like this. And in such a scenario, the ritual would be awesome and meaningful and you would be prepared for it by your trust in the kind of person your great-grandfather is and the kind of person he would know you to be, by the entanglement via your family, even if you never met him. You’d spend your whole childhood being trained to pass this particular intergenerational marshmallow test, though perhaps without knowing of the specifics.

Meanwhile, if such a lineage was intact generations ago, if you get to age 18 and see your great-grandfather as an old kook or whatever, you’re not likely to respect the meaning of enacting the desired entanglement.

And in a scenario where there’s no lineage, well, you’re choosing just based on trying to think about what he thinks you would do, but the whole thing is very weak and sparse, and your simulation of his simulation of you, conditioned on your simulation of him… breaks down.

(And in contexts not that dissimilar to this one, there’ll sometimes be the idea that you somehow should trust him to have put it in, because only if you make the leap and trust him, will you be the sort of person who will have earned the reward. But of course, only if he’s trustworthy should you trust him. This is a reflexive system, with no right answer, so trust cannot answer the question. This is a matter of faith—more to come about that in future posts.)

Some religious or cultural or family traditions are seemingly unnecessarily costly (“irrational”) and maintaining them is part of how collective identity is maintained over space and time… and the benefits of that coalition can vastly outweigh the costs. Newcomb’s problem is a weird half-slice of such a thing, that has no wholeness. More on this lens on Newcomb’s problem in The Intelligent Social Web.

Closing thoughts

What I want to say here is about how thought experiments in general tend to involve some sort of confusion or violation around how your trust in what’s going on is always the basis for action.  They ask you to take someone’s word for it about something that often you cannot make sense of, and then make an important decision.  Even worse, they then attempt to generalize about how you’d act in real situations, on the basis of contrived ones.

In some sense, this is how the mutual simulation process works, but…  it’s also utterly not.  It’s an absurdly crude and confused approximation, that would not enable you to be a good friend, let alone to play Omega.

When we come to know and trust each other, we are being who we are in the actual kinds of situations that we’re in, together, and our very sense of the world and ourselves becomes imbued with our sense of each other. Actual entanglement is shockingly intimate.

The basic premise is as follows:

• each player has some hidden constraint(s) / win conditions
• each player takes turns offering candidate solutions
• each player shares whether their constraints are satisfied by those solutions
• everybody wins when you find a solution that works for everybody

I called the concept the “omniwin training game”.  While collaborative games are not as common as competitive zero-sum games, there are still lots of them out there: Hanabi, Pandemic, The Mind, and of course many video games.  However, most of them focus on coordinating your actions around a single shared known goal.

Words

So for my tiny proof of concept, I used the medium of words.  Each player would secretly pick some constraint a word could have—often based on the spelling but you could do “verb” or something else. I didn’t have specific rules for that. Then each person would take turns naming a word, and the players for whom that word worked would say “ding!” Initially I had the rule that players had to only offer words that satisfied their own constraint, but I found that when the game lasted more than a few minutes it was pretty obvious to want to say things like “‘banana’ doesn’t work for me, but it works for you, right?” and this felt within the spirit of things.

This version of the omniwin training game worked well enough, and produced one astonishing and instructive result I’ll tell you about at the end of the post, but it had the unfortunate property of feeling a bit too simple, and of the possibility of people making totally incompatible constraints and getting stuck forever until they give up.  Of course, “we mutually recognize there is no win-win” is a kind of win-win on the meta-level…  but it’s less satisfying. On the other extreme is…

Soup

…calculate every possible combination of every possible constraint and ensure they’re all satisfiable at once.

That’s the approach Jarrah Bloomfield took for creating Too Many Cooks, the card game version of the omniwin training game. The premise is that you are a team of expert chefs, collaborating on the ingredients for a soup, and you all have very strong preferences from family secret recipes, so you need to make modifications to the soup without revealing what matters to you, only whether or not you’re satisfied, until everybody is satisfied.

Jarrah showed me the game personally at the Metagame 2025 Night Market—I sat down at his booth and he told me the basic premise and I said “I’ve been meaning to make this for years!” He spent hundreds of hours tuning it and playtesting it and getting it right, so that it works with a wide range of difficulties…  and he did some sort of computer simulation to ensure that every if you put in all 10-20 constraints from a given difficulty level at once, there still exists a solution—highlight unlikely you’ll find it beyond 12 or so though. But this means that for any given 3-6 constraints, several solutions exist and you’ll likely be able to find one.

He initially gave players a limited number of turns to find a solution, but this resulted in overthinking, so instead he switched it to a timer-based challenge, which encouraged trying things rapidly and iterating—even if your change causes 2 problems by fixing 1, it’s still forward progress in learning, so it’s good that you made it. 

One obvious difference is that this approach to the omniwin training game has persistent state, whereas the word game has fresh words every time.  There’s pros and cons to each of these approaches.  It probably becomes basically necessary in order to handle such a large number of constraints, and also helps you see smaller differences in order to figure out what is or isn’t relevant to someone.

Another thing that’s neat about Too Many Cooks is that when you first play, you look at your own constraint cards and they’ll say something like “same number of red cards as carrots” and “no blue potatoes or corn”, and you’ll assume that everybody else’s cards are also about quantity of particular cards, but they have something like “red in every corner” and “no greens next to yellows” and theirs are all about position! So you learn not just “other people want different things than me” but also “other people want kinds of things I hadn’t even imagined someone could want“.

…which is a very good insight to have about why omniwins are more possible than it usually seems. Your apparent intractable conflict is because you’re projecting their requests onto the dimensions you care about, when in fact they care about something completely different that’s only incidentally causing you problems.

I LOVE that Too Many Cooks exists.  I’ve played it a few times, and it’s quite fun and indeed focuses your attention on the skill of how to get your own needs met while avoiding causing problems for others.  Politicians would benefit from more of this.

And…  it doesn’t satisfy a few things for me.  The main is that the conditions are perfectly known and unambiguous.  In the real world, while you’re ultimately the only one who can answer “does that work for me, given everything?” you don’t have perfect knowledge in advance of exactly what your constraint is. Your concept of what you want, and what you actually want, are not quite the same.  Win-win solutions often involve being surprised when one of your assumptions doesn’t hold.  But I realized that you could solve this with…

A digital black box

…a constraint that you somehow have privileged access for testing things on, but that you yourself don’t exactly know how it works or what satisfies it.

I haven’t yet figured out exactly how to do this, but I imagined some computer game, where:

• each player has some hidden constraint(s) / win conditions—generated by a computer, that checks they’re compatible
• each player can privately test one input every 10s, but these don’t build up, so you’re encouraged to be iterating often—this is how you gain self-knowledge about what your system wants
• every minute or so, the group as a whole tests one input and sees who is satisfied
• everybody wins when you find a solution that works for everybody

One thing that’s cool about this version is that you can actually allow people to speculate openly about what their constraint might be!  This is way more realistic to an actual good faith negotiation, where there’s minimal need to hide what you want.  There’s at most some need to be a little vague about how well it works for you or exactly why, but even that is minimal in healthy families, companies, communities.

I think this system would allow you to add in that kind of element: you have players’ satisfaction be a number out of 10, not a yes/no, and then the game ends in a win if you reach everybody at 7/10 satisfied within the time allotted, but players earn points equivalent to the total satisfaction they personally had.  In that case, there’s some incentive to bluff or deceive, to encourage people to go further in your direction.

However, if you reveal the results each time, players who bluff a lot become distrusted…  so the iterated game theory here could end up reincentivizing honesty, both for the collaborative victory and for the personal points.  And then you could get into versions where part of the puzzle is “how many players can we fit into some sort of win-win in the time allotted?”, where you have perhaps dozens of players and the game is no longer about finding something that works for everybody and instead about forming coalitions you can make it work with.

Lots of trippy possibilities here.

Some other ideas:

1. have a version of zendo where instead of one player rating each guess for “does this match the hidden rule”, each player has a hidden rule. insofar as zendo is a toy version of science, this analogy highlights how the omniwin training game is a toy version of subjective science.
2. literal skin in the game but now you can talk fully openly: each person wears a shock wristband, and at the end of the round, everybody whose rule isn’t satisfied by whatever the group has somehow chosen gets shocked (many many many implementation details needed here to make it not just cause majority dominance)
3. a less punitive way to do the previous idea would be to have some external person offer real prizes for those whose constraint is satisfied. but at this point probably better to ignore the fake incentives and just try solving real conflicts.

The story I promised

In 2022, as part of our courtship, my now-wife-then-girlfriend and I went on a bit of a camping roadtrip around Cape Breton, during a visit to my family in Nova Scotia. At one point, to pass the time in the car, I proposed we try this game I had come up with.  We did the word version, which has the convenient property of working quite well as a game to be played when all you have are voices.

It turned out to have another amazing property too.

We had a few fairly easy rounds, and then we had one round that seemed impossible.

She opened with “beat”.  I played “lackadaisically”.  She played “kite”.  I played “transpersonal”.  She played “seven”.  I played “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.  There was an obvious tension between long and short words.  Nothing that worked for me worked for her.

After 10 minutes of this, we started guessing words that would work for the other, and were usually right but not always.  It clearly wasn’t just about word length: “stretched” worked for her but “beauty” worked for me.

Eventually we both became increasingly confident that it wasn’t going to work, because we knew what our own rule was and our best candidate for the other person’s rule was something that directly contradicted it. And if we had stopped there, and stated our rules, we would have agreed that indeed, it was impossible.

But I wasn’t so sure.  I felt like I had one or two examples of places where her constraint wasn’t exactly what I thought it was, which might mean it wasn’t impossible.  “Give me a minute,” I said, and with my new model of her constraint in mind, racked my brain trying to think of a real word that would fit.

“NONSYNERGY!”

“…that works for me,” she said.  “it works for me too!”

And we had found our win-win.

What were the win conditions?  I had “at least 4 vowels”, and she had “exactly two vowels”: a perfect contradiction.  Except, she was counting only “aeiou”, and I was, at least sometimes, counting “y”.

Good thing we didn’t give up.

As I said, finding win-wins is often surprising and delightful.

Constructive constraints

There’s a tool called pol.is, which offers a prototype of a solution for the non-voting part of democracy: how do you even come up with the policies on which one might possibly vote?  And they do something really brilliant, that I thought of while telling the above story, in such a way that makes pol.is itself kind of an instance of the omniwin training game—except that it’s real life, with real skin in the game, not just a toy training context. (The main active usage of the algorithm is Twitter’s Community Notes feature, which is used to add user-generated and swarm-moderated context to misleading tweets. There’s also this clone, contextengine.xyz)

Here’s the basic premise: people write statements, and people vote agree/disagree on them.  Statements are ranked highest based not just on total votes, but diverse votes: votes from people who disagree with each other on other topics.  And if you want, you can even see which clusters of anonymous voters are voting for which statements…  which means you can attempt to bridge their views into something they might both agree with, by writing a new statement.

The real kicker is: there’s no other way to make any sort of commentary at all.  There’s no comment feature, no “critique” or “argue” feature.  If you want to critique someone’s idea, the only way to do it within this system is to articulate a better version. And if your version satisfies everybody who liked the original, plus some people who shared your critique, then it’ll win.

This upward spiral medium is a good way to domesticate memes in the political sphere.

The invitation, written as if I were Ivan

I’m assembling a crew of 5-6 people for the purpose of creating a human+AI superorganism that will be the full-meta-trust kernel of a scalable high-meta-trust network.

The foundational hypotheses of this project are:

1. a small devoted group of people working to care for each others’ needs and desires and growth, and to orient to the world together, can produce outsized upspiralling for those people compared to people attempting to navigate alone
2. we have access to adequate psychotechnology to do this without it falling into a cultish attractor, given sufficient starting maturity and integration of the people
3. current and imminent AI tech can allow us to
   1. increase our mutual surface area to find win-wins and mutual insights
   2. embed our process and culture into a system that can much more readily scale:
      1. laterally, to adjacent similar groups
      2. vertically, to allow our crew itself to grow in size
4. doing this will be profoundly good for the individuals involved and for the world at large, with no sense of compromise between scale.  in a sense, the mission is to create a tiny eutopia and then scale it to everybody.  or put another way, a tiny stronghold of God’s Kingdom, which can then reach out and invite everybody in
5. an even deeper hypothesis is that in general omniwin games are everywhere for those with eyes to see, and that there’s no fundamental conflict keeping everybody from being satisfied, only skill issues—and relatedly, that one man’s problem is another man’s opportunity

As Malcolm Ocean put it in his notes on [[homecoming]]:

I want you to have: everything that you actually deeply coherently want and the entire path of clarifying and realizing those wants, exactly how you want it, with other people who want it with you, accounting for all of the things that feel naive to you about the previous description.

I want everyone to have that, and, we have to start somewhere and with a smaller group, and what I want you to know is that if you are in and can access in yourself wanting the same for me, I’m game to invest in this relationship in order to make that happen for all of us.

What’s the aim?

A care attractor is a system that many distinct agents all have a vested interest in maintaining the health of, because its surviving and thriving enables their surviving and thriving.  There are many kinds of examples of care attractors: families, cities, countries, companies, friend groups, communities, ethical systems, religions, myths, networks, platforms such as twitter.

Our aim is to create a conscious, reciprocally-amplifying care attractor: a system that has the property that the more we care for it, the more it cares for us. Where we get in way more than we put out. And where we trust that it has that property, and where it doesn’t just care for our main cares while shadowing our other cares, but ever-increasingly enfolds more and different aspects.

And of course it’s not going to be perfect at that on day one, but that’ll be what we’re ongoingly aiming towards as we steer its development.

That system will involve a culture—a shared set of assumptions, views, practices, for coming into sync etc—as well as hard technology that enables us to increase the amount of information about each of us that we’re able to work with.

Caring for each others’ needs

In general, here the aim is to cultivate a lived reality of a culture that intends to and is broadly capable of welcoming everything that arises for everybody in it. And then, to the degree that it is able, not just welcoming the reality of the needs and desires, but working to solve them.

There’s going to be a bunch of low-hanging fruit:

• problems people have that they know about and are trying to solve, but just lack some insight or skill or ability to orient to it
• problems people are having trouble solving because they just need a bit of encouragement or hand-holding
• problems people have that they don’t feel like they’re allowed to care about or take seriously, and simply having other people be like “no, that’s worth attending to and doing something about” makes a difference
• ways in which people’s lives can be improved or problems can be solved that they just haven’t even heard of but that they’re stoked to try once others introduce them

We’d come at the needs and desires from a few angles:

1. have each member write down:
   1. the main things they’re struggling with on a functional/survival level
   2. the visions/dreams/ambitions they have that they feel blocked on realizing
2. do an inventory of various dimensions:
   1. health {gut, sleep, exercise, &+}
   2. life ops {taxes, IDs, finances, &+}
   3. relationships {family, friends, past networks, &+}
   4. romance etc
   5. spiritual connection
   6. life ambitions, artistic endeavors
   7. &+
3. have people orient to each other and gently consider what seems like it might be blocking others

Then we’d investigate where the highest leverage moves seem to be, and help each other take them. Maybe we help someone who’s dealing with low energy due to gut stuff finally get set up with some medical tests and a modern AI-yurveda programme.  Maybe we help someone who feels hopeless about romance because of their last breakup sort through that.  Maybe we help someone finally launch a product they’ve been stuck in a perfectionistic loop about and need a bit of help creating a marketing plan for or even doing some of the marketing steps. Maybe three people form a daily meditation & chanting ritual, and another two form a daily tennis practice. Maybe two people realize they’ve both been wanting to learn something, like a language or a skill or something from a niche online course, and so they create a shared context to practice together.

Psychotechnology for compression bandwidth

Talking about some of this stuff can be hard for many reasons.  Sometimes people have shame, where it’s hard to acknowledge they have a problem.  Sometimes people feel like they’re unworthy of having their problems solved.  These techniques might help.

In bullet-form, some things we might use:

1. communicating
   1. general authentic relating type practices: circling, stemless, &+
   2. metaprotocol stuff – working with breakdowns
   3. practicing giving difficult/weird feedback
2. prioritizing
   1. inviting people to notice where they don’t feel free and why
   2. personal-hamming-problems: where are you most blocked? why are you blocked on it?  recurse until there’s wiggle room.  how can others help?
   3. money pile, collectively acknowledging needs and making offers
3. inspiring & synchronizing
   1. faith/worldview-shifting work (Malcolm is working on writing this up)
   2. singing together, sports, hakas, and other means of group sync
   3. shared readings, including reading together
   4. writing up our understandings
4. healing
   1. unwinding original spin – deals with shame and unworthiness
   2. therapy and other emotion-work
   3. trauma-release exercises, bodywork, etc
5. chilling
   1. playing video games, hanging out, making & eating food, road trips
   2. inviting friends over, going out to other events
      (these sorts of things help things from becoming too intense and high-demand)
      (…we’re not here to fix ourself, we’re here to live awesome lives!)

We’ll be basing our psychological approach on Malcolm’s How we get there, which outlines the basic process of how to build meta-trust among a group of people, by treating the obstacle as the way.

AI technology for raw bandwidth

One hypothesis we hold, gestured at briefly above, is that there exist many unnoticed win-wins that match the following description: one person has a problem, that another person would love to solve.  Could be:

• interpersonal, eg: I’d like a massage, you’d like to give me one; I’d like to share my singing, you’d like to listen to singing
• project-y, eg: I’d like to build an app, you’d like to market it; I’d like to share my singing, you’d like to produce someone’s song
• business, eg: I’d love to build an app but need money, you’d like to pay for it or invest
• intellectual, eg: I have a confusion, you have a helpful framework you’d be happy to share
• (maybe some other categories, these are loose anyway)

How can we notice way more of these opportunities?  Places where once we realize that such a win-win exists, there’s hardly even a step where we need to agree to do it, because it’s just so obviously the next move.  Actions that release psychological energy, that once you know about them you would have to exert effort NOT to do them.

There are probably many of these, but we don’t know what they are!

We need to increase our interpersonal surface area.  Essentially, a recommender system but one that works for us rather than for the platform/advertisers.

Consciousness can be understood (via global workspace theory) as the space into which different cares/concerns/considerations/conflicts need to be brought and held until the obvious move emerges.  Can we create a digital workspace that enables that to happen at a whole different scale, ongoingly/continuously? LLMs might allow the right connections to be made, solving certain combinatorial problems at various scales.

Currently a lot of what is going on for me and for you is buried in private data in our own journal entries and LLM chatlogs.  And we don’t want to make that data fully public, for many reasons, but it would be nice if a trusted system that mediates between us could look at both and suggest to us things we might want to know about potential win-wins.

We’ll need to build trust that sharing our information with such a system is beneficial and safe.  Building the system ourselves will be a great start for that, but even so it may have to be a bit of a gradual process.  We’ll experiment and see how it feels.  It also may scale faster if it starts with more like semi-automatic upload of many things. Automatic upload of everything may cause people to start hiding certain thoughts they don’t feel ready to share with the system.  Transparency is surveillance, and some thoughts need a bit of time to percolate.

We’ll also need to be able to model not just the current needs/problems of the people involved, but also their tendencies, interests, general skills and capacities, and so on.  This may involve psychometrics and other mapping systems.

We’ll need to iterate to tune the system, to do the right amount of deliberate matching vs serendipitous / hunch-based connecting, and to find the right balance of AI-proposals and human filtering.

Autocatalytic sets

In some sense, we’re aiming to create a denser higher-bandwidth autocatalytic set—riffing on Stuart Kauffman, about the origin of life being not as a single “replicator” that makes more of itself but as an ecosystem of molecules that together create more of each other. The economy is already kind of an autocatalytic set, but it misses tons of opportunities because of how it’s structured. Every product that could be made that tons of people would love to buy but nobody is making is an example of one of these missed opportunities. But also much smaller-scale things.

An analogy is like, there’s a difference between having a loose collection of molecules that happen to generate more of each other, and having an organism.

The autocatalytic set metaphor applies on two scales:

1. it might be that for any given 2 people, only moderately energy-releasing win-wins exist, where one person’s problem is the other’s solution.  but maybe there are some epic win-wins that require simultaneously modelling what 3-5 people want and coming up with a proposal that will work amazingly only if all of them get involved
2. in order to have enough energy-releasing interactions to have an epic scalable dynamo that grows and is capable of more and more, we might need interactions between than just the 5-6 people in the core crew.  but we can get that!  we know people—friends, twitter mutuals, etc.  and if this is working well at all, others will want to plug into it.  and we might be able to also use other larger scale systems to identify potential collaborators outside our network

Building this tool together and dogfooding it will be the initial central shared endeavour of the whole group.

Conclusion

🚀

Appendix: preamble

In writing this for Ivan, I wrote the below before the above. but I felt it made a better presentation on my blog to start with the invitation since it’s self-contextualizing whereas the below is not.

How we get there

The first thought that I have is that this is exactly what I talk about in How we get there.  But after a few more beats, while I think that HWGT is very relevant, it’s got a slightly different focus. It was written, to be clear, in response to an earlier instance of somebody asking “okay so you have all these cool visions of the meta-team, but how do we actually get there? what’s your theory of change?”

What they have in common is that both are about creating a group with high trust.  However, I have some sense that this AOAL concept is starting more with “how can we actually solve each others’ viscerally-felt problems?” whereas the HWGT concept is focused more on something like, including everything dialogue-wise.  I ultimately think both elements are needed:

• If you have amazing dialogues but you can’t actually turn your attention and energy to solving the problems that are dear to your heart, and succeed at that, what’s even the point? It’s as if the dialogue is made of floating abstract perspectives, not organisms with skin in the game.
• But meanwhile, if you are focused on solving immediate problems and you can’t sort out the trust issues that come up, it’s gonna fall apart or explode or turn into a techbro scene where you’re solving lots of concrete external problems but failing to orient to psychologically-blocked ones.

So I’d recommend HWGT as required reading for this lab for sure, especially social surface area is high, eg if living together or working full-time in the same space. But it doesn’t answer the whole puzzle

HWGT is also missing some of my new mid-2025 understandings about the role of faith shifts in generating the vivid experience of everything being welcome.  My understanding of the core engine needed to create such a crew, when I wrote HWGT, had underappreciated the faith/choice stuff, because it had been so central in Waterloo, and so intense and challenging…  and was focused on the trust/welcoming stuff, because it was a critical patch that the Waterloo scene was missing.  But after a few years of using my trust/welcoming theory of change, it’s clearly insufficient to generate the magic we experienced in Waterloo.  But I think I’ve reverse-engineered the key pieces now, and am ready to experiment with a version that has both the original mechanism as well as my new patch.  Feels since leaving Waterloo I’ve been trying to build a nuclear reactor with only control rods and no uranium, and while that’s safer than uranium and no control rods, it also doesn’t get any energy.  But both…  now we’re talking!  Tho still a lot of care and careful slow scaling up needed.  And also, if the nuclear energy analogy holds, some models & math to predict where the safe limits are.

Pragmatics

Okay, with that established, what do I have to say about this project as proposed?

One initial question is: even IF it’s the case that founding it on AI allows this mutual aid mechanism to scale, wouldn’t it be fucking dope if you were able to create a crew that solves all of each others’ problems without AI?  and if so, why are you not already doing it?  like in what sense is AI the bottleneck?

I ask this in part because it seems to me that it’d be quite possible to end up doing a sort of premature automation/optimization here, where you don’t actually know the basic mechanism by which such a thing would work in a non-scalable way, and so how are you supposed to scale it?

But having said that, I do like the idea of a crew that is simultaneously:

• building an AI/data tool to help 100× usable surface area between the members
• working on figuring out the immediate win-wins that are available with whatever level of transparency is already present

Feels like it could be a good engine.

Concretely…  if I imagine you describing to me that you’ve got some sort of arrangement for this, what’s the description of it that would make me think that you’re most likely to succeed?  I feel like that’s a good frame for tapping my intuitions here.  Similar but distinct is like, what would make me most likely to want to join?