Excellent article and arguments! I will say however, that more signal is not always better, and systems can be damaged by excess signal, adversarial signal, recursive mistrust, coordinated deception, attention flooding, and noise masquerading as diversity.
This is the right correction, and the essay underspecifies exactly where you're pointing. 'More signal' was shorthand and you've caught it being promoted to a principle; the real maximand was never signal, it was modelling - and every failure mode you list degrades modelling, which is why they belong inside the test rather than against it. Flooding saturates attention; deception plants fictions the model then tracks; recursive mistrust eats the error-correction layer you most depend on; and noise in the costume of diversity is the adversarial exploit of the whole inclusion argument - it claims the weight you'd give a missing instrument while supplying none.
What it exposes is that a collective intelligence needs two capacities, and this piece foregrounds only one. Admission - more nodes, more vantages - is necessary and worthless alone; without a filtering layer that weights by reliability, resists flooding, and tells a real vantage from a planted one, a system isn't open, it's just credulous, and credulous systems belong to whoever floods them first. It's the same primitive the two left-failures turn on: the gag is filtering gone paranoid, real signal binned as presumed noise; the ladder is filtering gone deferential, noise weighted as signal for who carries it. Your cases are that primitive failing in the other directions. One missing piece, not several.
I do build the filter elsewhere - in Booting Gaia's Brain (linked in my ‘about’ page and in the pinned piece Workplace Induction for Collective Intelligence) it's the 'bullshit-fog airlock', the entry membrane that won't let unfiltered fog into the chamber. The part that matters for your objection is what i made the airlock do to itself: it has to be corrigible too, because a filter is the textbook place a censor reinstalls himself - 'I'm not silencing you, I'm filtering noise.' So its offsets are crude, provisional counterweights against known tilt, held as temporary correction factors and never allowed to harden into doctrine. That's the same discipline as 'amplify to parity, then stop': correct for the distortion you can see, and keep the correction revisable so it doesn't become the next one. A filter that can't itself be filtered is just the Ministry of Correct Opinion with a spam folder.
Good catch - it's the load-bearing layer this piece leaned on without specifying, and you've made me say so.
It all went wrong 10k years ago when we switched from matriarchy and the gift economy to patriarchy and the scarcity economy. That caused the chaos of greed. Everything is built on that now. The opposite is COORDINATION/Coherence. Living from love, not fear.
I think it might be a mistake to lean too much on the patriarchy/matriarchy dichotomy, and i also consider that greed is kind of secondary; in my view the fundamental dynamic we're on the wrong side of is loved communion versus traumatised individuation. The trauma generates narcissistic traits, feeding that whole ego constellation of contagious shitness, generating more trauma, and at this point all our institutions are shaped that way - it's the water we're swimming in. Greed is just one of the symptoms.
And there may well be an inherent gender bias, but I'm not sure it matters who's dominating when the problem is domination itself. I like this diagnosis because it converges with ancient wisdom like Buddhism, with psychology, with dynamical systems theory. And i like how questioning the primitive notion of free will implicit in our poorly-attempted civilisation leads us to the threshold of unconditional communion.
There's a whole history of pre-patriotic social structure, where there was a group glomming together out of caring/love. That whole history - 10K years and before - which is visible still with some "primitive" civilizations and well documented - and forgotten. The point, though, is that our WHOLE SOCIETY is based on patriarchy/fear/domination. Even the monetary system, capitalism, even democracy, and so on, so unless we get back and root out the whole system we're pretty much just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. Nergiz is writing on the subject well on Substack and recommends "women and the gift economy" edited by genevieve Vaughan. I've read part of it and it's very enlightening. Most people aren't aware that there even WAS a pre-patriarchy period so many years ago. Also they mistake "matriarchy" as just substituting women for men. In fact matriarchy is built basically on the fact that WE ALL are born helpless babies and it takes a village to raise a kid, and society was once actually those villages! So it's more of a family based society focused a lot on the original mother-child bond and necessary support of the all of us who start out helpless. https://www.nergizdebaere.com/ and see her substack.
Matriarchy could probably use a rebrand, in that case... Trying to recall where i saw someone talking about baboons being studied, where just by chance, some diseased meat became available to the more aggressive and less social males (due to the particular circumstances, they were the only ones interested), and after they died off, a far more caring culture developed, and having critical mass it persisted through the following years, with foreign males absorbed from other tribes assimilating into the chill status quo. I think it might even have outlasted the original generation.
Maybe we could build like a cagefight island and send all the arseholes there...
Excellent article and arguments! I will say however, that more signal is not always better, and systems can be damaged by excess signal, adversarial signal, recursive mistrust, coordinated deception, attention flooding, and noise masquerading as diversity.
This is the right correction, and the essay underspecifies exactly where you're pointing. 'More signal' was shorthand and you've caught it being promoted to a principle; the real maximand was never signal, it was modelling - and every failure mode you list degrades modelling, which is why they belong inside the test rather than against it. Flooding saturates attention; deception plants fictions the model then tracks; recursive mistrust eats the error-correction layer you most depend on; and noise in the costume of diversity is the adversarial exploit of the whole inclusion argument - it claims the weight you'd give a missing instrument while supplying none.
What it exposes is that a collective intelligence needs two capacities, and this piece foregrounds only one. Admission - more nodes, more vantages - is necessary and worthless alone; without a filtering layer that weights by reliability, resists flooding, and tells a real vantage from a planted one, a system isn't open, it's just credulous, and credulous systems belong to whoever floods them first. It's the same primitive the two left-failures turn on: the gag is filtering gone paranoid, real signal binned as presumed noise; the ladder is filtering gone deferential, noise weighted as signal for who carries it. Your cases are that primitive failing in the other directions. One missing piece, not several.
I do build the filter elsewhere - in Booting Gaia's Brain (linked in my ‘about’ page and in the pinned piece Workplace Induction for Collective Intelligence) it's the 'bullshit-fog airlock', the entry membrane that won't let unfiltered fog into the chamber. The part that matters for your objection is what i made the airlock do to itself: it has to be corrigible too, because a filter is the textbook place a censor reinstalls himself - 'I'm not silencing you, I'm filtering noise.' So its offsets are crude, provisional counterweights against known tilt, held as temporary correction factors and never allowed to harden into doctrine. That's the same discipline as 'amplify to parity, then stop': correct for the distortion you can see, and keep the correction revisable so it doesn't become the next one. A filter that can't itself be filtered is just the Ministry of Correct Opinion with a spam folder.
Good catch - it's the load-bearing layer this piece leaned on without specifying, and you've made me say so.
*curtsy*
You're all over this
https://marcuscdavis.substack.com/p/institutions-have-memetic-immune
It all went wrong 10k years ago when we switched from matriarchy and the gift economy to patriarchy and the scarcity economy. That caused the chaos of greed. Everything is built on that now. The opposite is COORDINATION/Coherence. Living from love, not fear.
I think it might be a mistake to lean too much on the patriarchy/matriarchy dichotomy, and i also consider that greed is kind of secondary; in my view the fundamental dynamic we're on the wrong side of is loved communion versus traumatised individuation. The trauma generates narcissistic traits, feeding that whole ego constellation of contagious shitness, generating more trauma, and at this point all our institutions are shaped that way - it's the water we're swimming in. Greed is just one of the symptoms.
And there may well be an inherent gender bias, but I'm not sure it matters who's dominating when the problem is domination itself. I like this diagnosis because it converges with ancient wisdom like Buddhism, with psychology, with dynamical systems theory. And i like how questioning the primitive notion of free will implicit in our poorly-attempted civilisation leads us to the threshold of unconditional communion.
There's a whole history of pre-patriotic social structure, where there was a group glomming together out of caring/love. That whole history - 10K years and before - which is visible still with some "primitive" civilizations and well documented - and forgotten. The point, though, is that our WHOLE SOCIETY is based on patriarchy/fear/domination. Even the monetary system, capitalism, even democracy, and so on, so unless we get back and root out the whole system we're pretty much just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. Nergiz is writing on the subject well on Substack and recommends "women and the gift economy" edited by genevieve Vaughan. I've read part of it and it's very enlightening. Most people aren't aware that there even WAS a pre-patriarchy period so many years ago. Also they mistake "matriarchy" as just substituting women for men. In fact matriarchy is built basically on the fact that WE ALL are born helpless babies and it takes a village to raise a kid, and society was once actually those villages! So it's more of a family based society focused a lot on the original mother-child bond and necessary support of the all of us who start out helpless. https://www.nergizdebaere.com/ and see her substack.
Matriarchy could probably use a rebrand, in that case... Trying to recall where i saw someone talking about baboons being studied, where just by chance, some diseased meat became available to the more aggressive and less social males (due to the particular circumstances, they were the only ones interested), and after they died off, a far more caring culture developed, and having critical mass it persisted through the following years, with foreign males absorbed from other tribes assimilating into the chill status quo. I think it might even have outlasted the original generation.
Maybe we could build like a cagefight island and send all the arseholes there...
haha, our president already built one in front of the white house and he's already living thre!