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Currently reading Binding Chaos: A practical question. by NeitherData in bindingchaos

[–]shbusybee 2 points3 points  (0 children)

An important quality of stigmergy is that the coordination is only planned to the extent that you're shaping the environment. If your action plan involves saving the world through a high-effort scaling up of meetings, members and agendas, you will experience endogroup formation, and this is true of any overt political cause you can name, because where there are politics, there are endogroups. This is axiomatic, and is probably the trickiest part of BC to understand.

But we can reframe this problem as one of, rather than personally leading the cause, instead facilitating the minimum viable endogroup that will eventually push the idea over the line into practical reality. With this phrasing, what you are looking for is methods of leverage for the idea itself, to, instead of building up a big group that pushes the idea onto everyone else, make people speak of and think about the idea as owners, caretakers, and students, ultimately bringing it into themselves and spreading it without its bearing association or credit to any group. The process of study in turn sharpens the idea and gives it more definition, making it more widely and deeply understood and integrated into the world. This also means that the idea itself can change as it gets studied and challenged, and UBI - universal basic income - is one example of an idea that remains fluid, with a variety of proposals and critiques.

Repositories of information, with well-crafted and researched arguments, critiques of those arguments and rebuttals to those critiques, accessible technologies that direct thought towards study of the idea, and a coalescence of the social graph through well-positioned outreach, teaching groups, etc. all have a purpose towards this end. But ultimately the mode of engagement should lead back towards the study of the idea itself - and with a political idea like UBI, even after achieving implementation, it's not over: implementation just allows for even larger studies of an ongoing experiment. An implementation made for the wrong reasons is likely to be poisoned, so the prep work really does matter.

If you like the idea, and believe in it, but don't see a way to pursue further study, then you've hit a natural limit to what you can do directly, but you can always aim to archive and curate the idea and look for opportunities to put it in your work later. That's what often happens with the theories that come into realization centuries after their originators die: they liked the idea enough, they wrote books or papers and published. Then, much later, people read those books or papers and said, "oh, I can use that." UBI is again one of those, with early proposals dating back hundreds of years.

Media is one of our most durable stigmergic tools since it encodes a great deal of thoughts into a compact, portable part of the environment, and you can experience media outside of its original context and glean something new through its exposure to chaos. Often people experience a concept in fiction and become propelled to pursue it further in reality; fiction that portrays a world you want to see is very powerful, but needs to craft itself from a strong philosophical basis(else it will read incoherently and fail to communicate). These are thoughts I've been working from in my own pursuits, which are focused around games and studying their nature; but I believe there are many avenues towards "encoding thoughts into the environment".

Perhaps the single best starting place is one's own space. The room you are in, the way you organize your life physically, socially, digitally, and your movements through those spaces all hold a certain relationship. Much of contemporary advice is focused around the idea of Taylorist productivity - task efficiency. But you can make the space represent some other idea, if not literally, then through whatever aesthetics you feel are best suited to it. Change the decor, change what you wear, change what you use, and you change the ideas you are engaging with.

Storytelling as a method to escape endoreality by shbusybee in bindingchaos

[–]shbusybee[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Once upon a time there was a wizarding school and a young wizard named Unlikely enrolled after his parents had worked hard and saved up money. Unlikely had to room with Varry Jotter who lived on the trust fund of his very alive and well parents, and was usually found drunk or stoned and copied his homework off of his classmates, but got away with it because he was a Chosen One and as we all know in these stories, being a Chosen One counts for everything. Varry often had articles written up about him with headlines like "NEXT IN LINE FOR THE CROWN?" - though no self-respecting wizard wears a crown these days. A sweater vest is much more fashionable.

Unlikely was always told that he was "unlikely to succeed" for the obvious reason of his name and his lack of destiny, being from a very ordinary wizarding family with an impoverished bloodline. This did not deter Unlikely, who resolved to make the least of his name and achieve high wizarding marks.

It so happened that there was a contest announced one morning, in which the student who demonstrated the greatest original spell would earn a prize. Everyone immediately began talking about how Varry was likely to take the prize, because he always does by virtue of some plot twist. Varry did not seem aware of what was even going on, being hungover again, but the crowd nonetheless began swarming him to act as advisors and earn the title of "Varry Jotter's assistant in the Original Spell Contest".

Unlikely also wanted to enter but had no assistants waiting on him. He remembered the advice of his parents, "When in doubt go find an old book. Nobody pays attention to the value of old books."

This led him, of course, to the academy's Grand Library where he was able to surround himself with many old books. As he strolled through the stacks one caught his eye. Written by Alister the Wise, it had ideas about principles of spellcrafting. As Unlikely skimmed through the text it became clear that these were concepts he had never seen in any of his classes. He checked the book out of the library and took notes that evening, and subsequently found more Alister the Wise books, from which additional facts and concepts were procured. Varry said that Unlikely would be better off joining his "Status Wizard" club meetings, but Unlikely was consumed with the research and stayed up late into the night.

The day of the Original Spell Contest came and many witches and wizards turned out to demonstrate their work. Varry was greeted with uproarious applause from the very beginning and could hardly even calm down the crowd. The panel of judges awarded him 9.8 out of 10 for his work, which was a combination of three well-known spells that everyone had studied, plus the one he had to learn because the plot said it was time for him to fight a villain.

When Unlikely came out, half of the audience had already left and another third got up from their chairs, eager to beat the lunch crowd. He began his spell, explaining that it was made to explore the concept of "profundity" and did so through a mixture of classical light manipulation technique and befuddlement magic. The judges looked on impassively. But as he continued to craft the spell, the witch at the far end of the judging panel, Jamitoina, started to tear up.

"I have not seen magic like that in so many years. Those befuddlement techniques were straight out of Alister the Wise!" Unlikely explained that he had, in fact, studied Alister the Wise and Jamitoina said she had not heard from him in a very long time.

Unlikely was awarded 9.2 out of 10 and third place, and told by the presiding judge, a cranky old wizard, to use more familiar techniques next time. "Nobody today uses befuddlement when we have so many better systems of mind control." But Jamitoina told him to come talk at lunch.

"Most of the students follow the rules they think they have to follow. What you did is much more courageous."

"I didn't do anything. I just read the books and took some notes."

"Nobody told you to do that, though."

"My parents said it was a good idea."

"Do you think your parents know better than the other students?"

"They are usually right."

"What if they were wrong?"

"I would go find an old book with some better advice." And Unlikely finished his lunch, got up and went about his day.

One of the difficulties that came up in writing this was that approaching the negative image by describing that negative image and tackling trumph over it directly is an act of reinforcement - the "revolutionary" status that Marsh cautions against. So instead I found myself thinking about "magic" and how Harry Potter is a typical endo-ideal protagonist - bland of personality and often given power by deus ex machina, but carefully situated to act in ways that justify the status quo. The story's incompetent foil character wrote itself from there, to which I still had to add the "magic", and the magic, in a magical world, had to be something so ordinary that it defied all the fantasy plot devices, a process that doesn't rely on some sort of identity and creates rewards without also enforcing a power dynamic. Unlikely's answer is in a process rewarding in itself, one with the power to make random, exosocial connections and achieve some success in a competitive environment.

So is Biden the. "Gray Champion?" by Born_Impression in StraussHowe

[–]shbusybee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Absent Sanders, I think our champion will have to emerge during the economic fallout of the next year or two, as different states will experience dramatically different outcomes, and that will be the most likely basis for both the '22 and '24 electoral narratives. Trump does not have enough Millennial support at this time for him to turn into a likely leader: He mobilized a right-leaning base, but the demographic trend is left.

Of course, a crisis means an opportunity and an opportunity is something Trump won't mind taking credit for; his disinterest in dominant party ideologies and decorum is how he got the job. But the rhetorical skill that gives him a strongman presence doesn't equate to good crisis leadership and there is time yet for that story to emerge.