We’re gaining the power of gods, but without the love, wisdom and discernment of gods—that is a self-extinctionary scenario. Welcome to Game B, a transcontextual inquiry into a new social operating system for humanity. Game A is what got us to this time of metacrisis and collapse. Game B is what emerges in response. Come play with us as we learn to become wiser, together, gain coherence and begin to move towards a new social operating system emphasizing human wellbeing, metastability, and built on good values that we will be happy to call home and we will be proud to leave to our descendants.
The enemy is Entropy. The path is Goal Alignment via building your Autonomous Self; enabling compounded rates of progress to bravely explore the Zeroth Principle Future and play infinite games.
If you’ve also done random walks through cyberspace you might have read this kind of language in some deep corner of the internet as well. It’s characteristically esoteric and stuffed with complex vocabulary. I can tell that the writers have something in mind when they’re writing it – that they’re not totally off the rails – but it still comes off as spiritual nonsense.
Look, I get it! Rationalist writing is stuffed with jargon and machine learning analogies, and self-help books feature businessy pseudoframeworks and vapid motivational prose. It’s okay for your field to have its own linguistic subculture! But when you try to dress up your galaxy brain insights in similarly galaxy brain vocabulary, you lose me.
This kind of writing makes me uncomfortable in a way I can’t put into words, like the feeling one gets when they look at a liminal photograph. Maybe because it’s harder for me to judge the epistemics of the writing. I feel it trying to unfairly hijack the part of my brain which measures the insightfulness of text by presenting itself as mystical, like forbidden knowledge I’ve finally revealed. But if these insights were really all that, they’d have the balls to present themselves candidly!
Yes, metaphors and complex language are sometimes necessary to get your point across and make text engaging. In Cyborgism, @janus writes:
Corridors of possibility bloom like time-lapse flowers in your wake and burst like mineshafts into nothingness again. But for every one of these there are a far greater number of voids–futures which your mind refuses to touch. Your Loom of Time devours the boundary conditions of the present and traces a garment of glistening cobwebs over the still-forming future, teasing through your fingers and billowing out towards the shadowy unknown like an incoming tide.
But unlike the previous examples, this beautifully flowery depiction of GPT-assisted writing works because it’s clearly demarcated within a more down-to-earth post. Good insights survive scrutiny even when nude.
This kind of writing makes me uncomfortable in a way I can’t put into words, like the feeling one gets when they look at a liminal photograph.
I think it’s a fair feeling. There’s a certain very famous (at least in our country) Italian 19th century novel in which at a point a priest sets out to bamboozle a peasant boy to get out of doing something he doesn’t want to. His solution is to begin piling up complexity and adding a healthy dose of Latin on top, so that the illiterate farmer remains obviously confused and frustrated, but can’t even quite put the finger on where he was cheated.
To put it bluntly: talking all difficult is a good way to get away with making stupid stuff sound smart and simple stuff sound complex. You don’t even necessarily do it on purpose, sometimes entire groups simply drift into doing it as a result of trying to up each other in trying to sound legitimate and serious (hello, academic writing). Jargon is useful to summarize complex concepts in simple expressions but you often don’t need that much and the more you overload your speech with it the less people will be able to get the entire thing. Even for people who do know the jargon, recalling what each term means isn’t always immediate. So, given how easy it is to overuse jargon to fool people or to position themselves above them, it’s not that strange that we sometimes develop a heuristic that makes us suspicious of what looks like too much of it.
With the two extracts you posted, the first one sounds to me like just another declination on the theme of “to stop [bad thing] we should all become GOOD” which is always a very “no shit Sherlock” thing. The second extract honestly I can’t quite tell what is precisely saying either, which is worrying in its own way.
So, yeah, +1 for just talking as simple as possible. Not any simpler, hopefully, but there’s rarely a risk of that.
You don’t even necessarily do it on purpose, sometimes entire groups simply drift into doing it as a result of trying to up each other in trying to sound legitimate and serious (hello, academic writing).
Yeah, I suspect some intellectual groups write like this for that reason: not actively trying to trick people into thinking it’s more profound than it is, but a slow creep into too much jargon. Like a frog in boiling water.
Then, when I look at their writing, it seems needlessly intelligible to me, even when it’s writing designed for a newcomer. How do they not realize this? Maybe the water just feels warm to them.
Microsolidarity is a community-building practice. We’re weaving the social fabric that underpins shared infrastructure.
The first objective of microsolidarity is to create structures for belonging. We are stitching new kinship networks to shift us out of isolated individualism into a more connected way of being. Why? Because belonging is a superpower: we’re more courageous & creative when we “find our people”.
The second objective is to support people into meaningful work. This is very broadly defined: you decide what is meaningful to you. It could be about your job, your family, or community volunteering. Generally, life is more meaningful when we are being of benefit to others, when we know how to contribute, when we can match our talents to the needs in the world.
And, apophenia might make you more susceptible to what researchers call ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’: meaningless statements designed to appear profound. Timothy Bainbridge, a postdoc at the University of Melbourne, gives an example: ‘Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.’ It’s a syntactically correct but vague and ultimately meaningless sentence. Bainbridge considers belief in pseudo-profound bullshit a particular instance of apophenia. To find it significant, one has to perceive a pattern in something that is actually made of fluff, and at the same time lack the ability to notice that it is actually not meaningful.
speaking of epistemics, what is it that you actually Feel in response to what is written? I mean, your analogy about “uncomfortable in a way I can’t put into words, like the feeling one gets when they look at a liminal photograph”, seems vaguely reminiscence of the kind of language you are uncomfortable with, does it not?
If I would “translate” the first paragraph from Game B, I believe it means something like this:
”We have this vague sense built upon various experiences that rapid growth in technology doesn’t seem to make the world safer—rather, it increases the deadliness of its consequences. We call ourselves Game B(etter), and really believe that looking up from our respective specializations, and using social/self-development tools to improve cooperation (see page 2), we can shift the feeling of doom, to one of solid good feelings. We connect this increase in deadliness with Capitalism, but believe our focused effort will shift the crisis it has created, into a grand opportunity. How we treat each other now will have lasting consequences, and if you believe that, join us and treat us well—we will treat you well too (see page 3 for details). If we are more altruistic, we can create relationships that oppose the egoistical trend, that also increases deadliness of technology—And so we will achieve two goals at the same time: Make technology safe, and do something that will guarantee that we will feel proud in the face of our descendant.”
Now, this is just an interpretation, but I wonder if it makes more sense to you now? There is a lot of things that could be added, but to me it is just Jargon, or simply that the meaning of words shift towards a different spectrum.
I would agree that it is complex language, but I wouldn’t say it is spiritual. It talks about ‘gods’, but that is much more ‘religious’ lingo, than spiritual. Shouldn’t it have more sentences that say things like: “Now is the time for our personal and collective Transformation”—“Reconnect with your true essence”—“Find others that harmonize with your wish for a more vibrant frequency”. - “An increased connection with the Source cleansing the dregs we have come to Earth to cleanse, ushering in a new Age of Humanity”.
It is of course a minor point, but I also wonder about what you define as Spiritual. Simply because the expression “new social operating system” in and by itself, doesn’t seem that spiritual to me. It is abstract, but so is information and bits. Human relationships and social systems might be more difficult to map, but it follows the same underlying principle, and can be directly traced to things like psychology, social sciences, pedagogy and learning-theory. And neither of those, necessarily, have any Spiritual undertones.
I do agree in a more abstract sense however, even if the minor points above still stands. The quotes you have found, and the Spiritual lingo is probably much more closely related in its applications. The same sciences can be applied to companies, schools or businesses, that ‘make money’, or as above, a ‘Community’ that works towards “increasing certain values”.
A viable future requires thinking-feeling beyond a neutral technocratic position, averting the catastrophic metacrisis, avoiding dysoptian solutionism, and dreaming acutely into the techno-imaginative dependencies to come.
Sometimes I stumble across a strange genre of writing on the internet.
From GameB Home:
From Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint:
If you’ve also done random walks through cyberspace you might have read this kind of language in some deep corner of the internet as well. It’s characteristically esoteric and stuffed with complex vocabulary. I can tell that the writers have something in mind when they’re writing it – that they’re not totally off the rails – but it still comes off as spiritual nonsense.
Look, I get it! Rationalist writing is stuffed with jargon and machine learning analogies, and self-help books feature businessy pseudoframeworks and vapid motivational prose. It’s okay for your field to have its own linguistic subculture! But when you try to dress up your galaxy brain insights in similarly galaxy brain vocabulary, you lose me.
This kind of writing makes me uncomfortable in a way I can’t put into words, like the feeling one gets when they look at a liminal photograph. Maybe because it’s harder for me to judge the epistemics of the writing. I feel it trying to unfairly hijack the part of my brain which measures the insightfulness of text by presenting itself as mystical, like forbidden knowledge I’ve finally revealed. But if these insights were really all that, they’d have the balls to present themselves candidly!
Yes, metaphors and complex language are sometimes necessary to get your point across and make text engaging. In Cyborgism, @janus writes:
But unlike the previous examples, this beautifully flowery depiction of GPT-assisted writing works because it’s clearly demarcated within a more down-to-earth post. Good insights survive scrutiny even when nude.
I think it’s a fair feeling. There’s a certain very famous (at least in our country) Italian 19th century novel in which at a point a priest sets out to bamboozle a peasant boy to get out of doing something he doesn’t want to. His solution is to begin piling up complexity and adding a healthy dose of Latin on top, so that the illiterate farmer remains obviously confused and frustrated, but can’t even quite put the finger on where he was cheated.
To put it bluntly: talking all difficult is a good way to get away with making stupid stuff sound smart and simple stuff sound complex. You don’t even necessarily do it on purpose, sometimes entire groups simply drift into doing it as a result of trying to up each other in trying to sound legitimate and serious (hello, academic writing). Jargon is useful to summarize complex concepts in simple expressions but you often don’t need that much and the more you overload your speech with it the less people will be able to get the entire thing. Even for people who do know the jargon, recalling what each term means isn’t always immediate. So, given how easy it is to overuse jargon to fool people or to position themselves above them, it’s not that strange that we sometimes develop a heuristic that makes us suspicious of what looks like too much of it.
With the two extracts you posted, the first one sounds to me like just another declination on the theme of “to stop [bad thing] we should all become GOOD” which is always a very “no shit Sherlock” thing. The second extract honestly I can’t quite tell what is precisely saying either, which is worrying in its own way.
So, yeah, +1 for just talking as simple as possible. Not any simpler, hopefully, but there’s rarely a risk of that.
Yeah, I suspect some intellectual groups write like this for that reason: not actively trying to trick people into thinking it’s more profound than it is, but a slow creep into too much jargon. Like a frog in boiling water.
Then, when I look at their writing, it seems needlessly intelligible to me, even when it’s writing designed for a newcomer. How do they not realize this? Maybe the water just feels warm to them.
Microsolidarity
When the human tendency to detect patterns goes too far
Hello RomanHauksson,
speaking of epistemics, what is it that you actually Feel in response to what is written? I mean, your analogy about “uncomfortable in a way I can’t put into words, like the feeling one gets when they look at a liminal photograph”, seems vaguely reminiscence of the kind of language you are uncomfortable with, does it not?
If I would “translate” the first paragraph from Game B, I believe it means something like this:
”We have this vague sense built upon various experiences that rapid growth in technology doesn’t seem to make the world safer—rather, it increases the deadliness of its consequences.
We call ourselves Game B(etter), and really believe that looking up from our respective specializations, and using social/self-development tools to improve cooperation (see page 2), we can shift the feeling of doom, to one of solid good feelings. We connect this increase in deadliness with Capitalism, but believe our focused effort will shift the crisis it has created, into a grand opportunity.
How we treat each other now will have lasting consequences, and if you believe that, join us and treat us well—we will treat you well too (see page 3 for details). If we are more altruistic, we can create relationships that oppose the egoistical trend, that also increases deadliness of technology—And so we will achieve two goals at the same time: Make technology safe, and do something that will guarantee that we will feel proud in the face of our descendant.”
Now, this is just an interpretation, but I wonder if it makes more sense to you now? There is a lot of things that could be added, but to me it is just Jargon, or simply that the meaning of words shift towards a different spectrum.
I would agree that it is complex language, but I wouldn’t say it is spiritual. It talks about ‘gods’, but that is much more ‘religious’ lingo, than spiritual. Shouldn’t it have more sentences that say things like: “Now is the time for our personal and collective Transformation”—“Reconnect with your true essence”—“Find others that harmonize with your wish for a more vibrant frequency”. - “An increased connection with the Source cleansing the dregs we have come to Earth to cleanse, ushering in a new Age of Humanity”.
It is of course a minor point, but I also wonder about what you define as Spiritual. Simply because the expression “new social operating system” in and by itself, doesn’t seem that spiritual to me. It is abstract, but so is information and bits. Human relationships and social systems might be more difficult to map, but it follows the same underlying principle, and can be directly traced to things like psychology, social sciences, pedagogy and learning-theory. And neither of those, necessarily, have any Spiritual undertones.
I do agree in a more abstract sense however, even if the minor points above still stands. The quotes you have found, and the Spiritual lingo is probably much more closely related in its applications. The same sciences can be applied to companies, schools or businesses, that ‘make money’, or as above, a ‘Community’ that works towards “increasing certain values”.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
From Pluriverse: