Just posting to record that this post successfully alarmed me, by raising the possibility that I might be missing really important things.

This feels like a really useful framing. It meshes with other fake frameworks I sometimes use, but the emphasis on the web pulling you back in if you don't break with it hard enough feels true and important.

If anyone remembers the r/place experiment Reddit did, similar dynamics were extremely apparent. (In brief, /r/place was a blank 1000x1000 pixel canvas, where anyone with a Reddit account could place one colored pixel anywhere they wanted every 5 minutes.) It was actually really hard to randomly vandalize anything, because wrong pixels looked out of place and would be fixed pretty fast. The only things that worked were:

1) Building a new pattern in a neutral location (which might eventually grow big enough to challenge existing patterns), or

2) Nudging a pattern into a different nearby attractor.

You didn't see coherent images dissolving into noise, because bystanders would fix things too fast. But you did see things like adding genitalia to Charizard, or changing the text "PC MASTER RACE" to "PC MASTURBATE", because those could start as relatively minor changes that bystanders might decide to help with.

The most skillful application of this I saw was w... (read more)

One lesson I think is really important to draw from this framework is responsibly using the power you have in any given social web. What behaviors from the people around you do you reinforce or punish? Having more choice about what you do here can make a big difference to the behavior of the web depending on your placement in it, although of course your reinforcement is subject to its own meta-reinforcement from others. (At the very least, it's interesting to try being deliberate about what you reinforce and punish, and notice what resistance you get internally and externally from doing so.)

Edit: It will perhaps come as no surprise that I think this is something you can learn via circling. Reinforcement and meta-reinforcement are often implicit and circling is an opportunity to make them explicit so you can vividly see them happening in real time: A punishes B, C punishes A for punishing B, D notices and calls out this dynamic, A punishes D for doing this, etc. Of course it helps a lot to have facilitators skilled enough to manage these sorts of dynamics.

Promoted to frontpage.

I've been trying to clarify my thinking on social reality, and this post has helped. The idea that the scene is a thing that exists outside of the actors in it is a very helpful framing.

It also helps me clarify some of the problems I had when I was deep in the uncanny valley of rationality. I grew a strong aversion to anything that smelt like a role, and I also had no idea how I actually wanted to act around other people. This resulted in me either playing and old role and resenting it, or being as non-interactive as I could be without weirding people out.

" A few months later he told me he’d converted. Last I heard they had moved to Utah. "

This seems more easily explainable as a Crony Belief. The new belief was very valuable and useful to him, therefore it was adopted as true.

Its value as an epistemic belief plummeted as its value as a crony belief soared since the existence or non-existence of god doesn't have value to people's everyday lives (in the way that an armed robber or cancer diagnosis does).

Could I offer a thought on style?

I think this is a tremendous piece and there's at least 3-4 very remarkable insights in here... I wonder if it could be a transcendent piece with a bit more editing for tightness?

EX — if the piece had cut most of the preliminary and opened with "When you walk into an improv scene, you usually have no idea what role you’re playing. All you have is some initial prompt — something like:" — it would have grabbed attention faster. Then the core point from the improv scene could have been made 30% shorter/tighter b... (read more)

Characters often want change as part of their role. And just as importantly, their role often requires that they can't achieve that change. The tension between craving and deprivation gives birth to the character's dramatic raison d'être. The "wife" can't be as clingy and anxious if the "husband" opens up, so "she" enacts behavior that "she" knows will make "him" close down. "She" can't really choose to change this because "her" thwarted desire for change is part of "her" role.

I'm conflicted about drawing this kind of conclusions from people behaviour, it ... (read more)

I think this post introduces a useful concept / way of thinking that I kept applying in my own life since reading it and that helped me understanding and dealing with certain social situations.

In most cases, I don't think this is malice. It's just that they need the scene to work.

"IT IS ALL AN ACT. ASK FOR DETAILS."

I'm really excited about this post on a whole bunch of levels.

One post on my list of posts to write is called something like "Everything is Improv", and I feel like you captured a decent fraction of what I want to say in that post, here! Plus a ton of additional pieces that I hadn't yet notice or connected yet. These two sections in particular felt very important:

"Another challenge here is that the part of us that feels like it’s thinking and talking is (usually) analogous to a character in an improv scene. The players know they’re

Powerful improv metaphor. Powerful post.

Ah, but if we’re immersed in a culture where status and belonging are tied to changing our minds, and we can signal that we’re open to updating our beliefs, then we’re good… as long as we know Goodhart’s Demon isn’t lurking in the shadows of our minds here. But surely it’s okay, right? After all, we’re smart and we know Bayesian math, and we care about truth! What could possibly go wrong?

The trickiness of roles that involve the disidentification with specific ... (read more)

Fascinating essay. It put into words a lot of inferences I've been independently making, while also suggesting a fun angle (the distributed social computations) to look at it from.

I suspect the framework is less fake in certain aspects than might seem at first glance, too! As in, it actually corresponds to some mechanical realities of how human minds are implemented. In terms of the post I've linked, you could view "stopping" as momentarily ignoring the self-model you've derived and looking at the actual shards that implement your values (and then re-compi... (read more)

The subtext is only clear in retrospect.

This post gave me an important set of intuitions and things to be on a watch for. What stands out the most clearly in my mind are:

• The notion of the social web acting as an agent in its own right, and being on a watchout for things which might violate existing scripts
• The thing where, after your role is explained to you, you try to act based on that new information... while still continuing to re-enact your same role, as you don't really know how else to act.

I do think that these things were not explained with as much rigor as might have been good: but

Love this post. As I was thinking about your Intelligent Social Web, it occurred to me that all this character-playing is serving an important role, it is adding value or it would have died out ages ago. In a small ancestral tribe, it is easy to see how this kind of web-force is keeping the whole tribe operating smoothly.

I've a question about times when we are called upon to clearly play a limited role, such as small talk. I really find it unsatisfying and dislike it. I'm curious if/how your relation to small talk has changed after you learned t... (read more)

If you move away and then make new friends and sort of become a new person (!), you might at first think this is just who you are now. But then you visit your parents… and suddenly you feel and act a lot like you did before you moved away. You might even try to hold onto this “new you” with them… and they might respond to what they see as strange behavior by trying to nudge you into acting “normal”:

worth tying this into the subject object transition of the kegan stages of development. See here - meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-s... (read more)

Actually thinking in a way that for real changes your mind in ways that defy your web-given role is socially deviant, and therefore personally dangerous, and therefore something you’re motivated not to learn how to do.

When reading that, I think it's a good reason why Quantified Self is so hard. Looking at data and making real changes about yourself based on it is emotionally taxing.

Yay!

I would be interested in seeing this expanded to talk about what the change you can create by stopping is.

My initial thought is that humans have to exist in one of these stories to participate in society, but stopping could allow you to realize you want to change stories completely.

Maybe it is also possible to dramatically influence the story you are already in, but this seems less likely as the other characters would have to accept that change.

A concrete example of this is giving up drinking. If you give up drinking you usually need new friends. You won't enjoy the story anymore because you aren't drinking, and your old friends won't want a downer like you around.

This really made me think of Gandalf, as being a superb conductor/chef of the social web, based on very raw ingredients (Bilbo, Frodo, Aragorn).

What is the internal experience of playing the role? Where does it come from? Is there even a coherent category of internal experience that lines up with this, or is it a pattern that shows up only in aggregate?

[The rest of this comment is mostly me musing.] For example, when people in a room laugh or smile, I frequently find myself laughing or smiling with them. I have yet to find a consistent precursor to this action; sometimes it feels forced and a bit shaky, like I'm insecure and fear a certain impact or perception of me. But often it's not that, a... (read more)

maybe she wants to say that she is a stoic representative, and a stoic girl does not need flowers and sex?