I just listened to the Intellectual Explorers Podcast on Game B. Pretty interesting.
I liked BJ better than Hall. He's an engineer. Anyway, the important thing that I see that he's doing is that he is avoiding Pinkering. He understands the fundamental framework of religious meme propagation, to use one of the dozen or so new terms that I'm going to have to deal with.
First Idea. - Faster Better OODA
How do you inject OODA into OODA in order to have the fastest OODA? Well it's about making each particular aspect faster and/or better. If you make it better then you incorporate more information into each loop. If you make it faster, then you may get to fail forward more often.
Second Idea. - Context of the MetaGame
All of this has to evolve, and while it's evolving there are going to be schisms and heretics among the priesthood as well as billions of the great unwashed. So I am thinking about some of the practical problems that are going to arise once this magical manifesto appears. And when it gets into those weeds I'm pretty interested to figure out if it's going to stay coherent. The first observation is that there pretty much hasn't been anything like the Well since the Well. And when the OGs were putting together Mondo 2000 and whatever that corporation was up in San Francisco the whole gang of us didn't profit. In other words, once upon a time was Ed Krol. His book, the Whole Internet Catalog was everyone's bible. All of his rules and all of those protocols have been superseded, and there is really no new book. So there are going to be some meantimes and in-between times. And yeah there will probably be GameC, unless Hall's regime is actually the Trilateral Commission. But we can start.
Money
I'm going to try and just ignore my grass roots (ha) anger against Hall's 40 people who have been working on it for 5 years. It just sounds so Silicon Valley that it makes me ill. I understand that everybody has to make money. Really I do. I just don't like the track record of IP.
Nationalism & Law
I agree 100% that we have too many 'thou shalts' in our law. I think nobody in search of liberty objects to the rule of law but we are overdetermined by the million rules of law. I'm not certain that is determined by nationalism, but in any case, there should be a small, ethical superset of laws against which no surviving human culture rejects.
Antlike Apes vs Blue Apes
I do agree with Hall that there is a bandwidth problem with the Ant Game and that human society has a massive advantage. I am very confident that the lot of us can keep abstracting denser packets of information between ourselves. As he hinted at human / compute interfaces perhaps extending what we can learn, yeah maybe. What I'm trying to figure out is how long did it take for alligators or sharks to evolve as animals appropriate to their environments? Maybe it only took 5000 years and that happened X million years ago and then they stopped evolving. If human beings are in fact still evolving and it will take us 5000 more years before we stop, what is Game C that we are not appreciating? Or what if the whole idea of Game B is actually a Game A tactic?
A couple things pop into my mind. The first is that we haven't quite learned how to live underground. What if that is what we're supposed to do? What if The Matrix is prophetic in that regard and the Machine Morlocks simply have not yet arrived to take over the surface in a flipside of Time Machine? I mean that party in Zion was pretty banging. This lives along side of the idea that we have not yet evolved into the Eloi. That maybe all the toxic masculinity and toxic femininity has not been bred out of us yet and Beta Males will become the new Alphas. After all, none of us culturally resemble Angles, Saxons or Jutes.
Sex
Nobody talked about sex. So here's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about during the in-between times we're going to have to deal with questions of personal sovereignty. Specifically, I'm thinking about the idea that people have a right to life and death decisions. So I'm talking about the spectrum between abortion and infanticide. The spectrum between wealthy people with few children (oh boy the advantages of disembodied heirs, no drama between actual siblings for the Trust) and poor people with many. I'm highly doubtful that we apes are going to be able to wrangle any ruleset with the force of religion on matters of sexual ethics. Why are men protective of women? Why do women talk in terms of 'my man'? We have to think about our possessiveness and territoriality around sex and reproduction. Maybe we are at a point in the social pendulum where nobody really cares enough for their sexual partners to defend their humanity with deadly force - maybe rape will always be less heinous than murder. But it might swing back. I'm trying to imagine if there are natural limits to human aggression over matters of sex. It's not a history I am familiar with aside from Helen of Troy. Maybe we'll never go to war over the rights of women because by definition they are not worth fighting for, but do we really know that for sure?
Ritualized Violence
I have a hinky feeling in anticipation of watching the Tinfoil Hat podcast with BJ Campbell. I will leave speculation out of this, but I think he'd do a lot better than those weirdos by talking to Jocko Willink. With a backwards glance at the depopulation of Japan and the sexual attraction women have towards aggressive men, what is wrong with football? After all, we're talking about memetic tribes here, and on the off-chance that they do not totalize, that there's not a binary choice between the SJWs and the Alt-Right, there is the church of sport. That includes the honor of personal combat. If we do not completely kill war, maybe we regress it to the point at which we accept something rather less which nevertheless satisfies our bloodlust. It's got to be something a bit more consequential than a dunk tank for Nancy Pelosi or a pieface pillory for Donald Trump.
Altered States
I really love the distinction made between wise ethics and authoritarian morality. I put them in the context of Heidegger. Those who accept morality eventually lose the understanding of the process of discovery (of ethics). That is the privilege of those who noodle over the New World Order. But as part of that process of propagation, the entire blueprint has to be open sourced, including all of the heresy. Because people get hit by buses. BJ rightly sees that people will not be wise, and they will refuse to be wise. In fact they may choose, in a world without war, to be contrarian in all sorts of ways, not the least of which will be the alteration of consciousness. Are people at liberty to be drunks, fools or louts? Will there be classes of people who are determined to not obtain or destroy their ability to obtain any modicum of wisdom? Will they have the right? Therefore must we police them? Jail them? Exile them? What do we do with the apes who drop out, and who will protect them?
Creeping Malthusianism
I am going to say that I seriously doubt that the Hall Group will come up with something that appeals to China. So at some point in the in-between times we are going to have a half-assed solution. Just like we do with oh say university education in America. I wonder if the players of Game B are thinking about their victory over Game A in Leviathan terms or if they're more like Locke. If the former, then maybe we'll all have to accept our new overlords, be they the B Commission or the CCP. But if we go Locke's way, which I hope, is there some lurking assumption that scalability is simply impossible? I guess that depends upon how soon we expect Game A to implode or if it only takes out the EU.
OK That's enough for one day.
Recent Comments