Recently poasted this little gem, which is a framing I've taken from the folks communicating about the Metacrisis.

It argues that there are two things to balance. If we go too far toward chaos, we get catastrophe, if we go too far toward order we get dystopia.

Protopia is the narrow yellow brick  down the middle

You might have seen my friday bait about being anti/acc.

It's my sincere stance, if a bit intentionally provocative.

The heart of my disagreement with e/acc is it says to accelerate, as if that's enough. As if the derivative of velocity wouldn't have a direction.

The only problem is externality pricing.

Building https://negationgame.com

But the neat thing is that by asking, "accelerate where?" we not only get interesting answers, but also describe why exactly we need both AI and crypto to stay on that critical path.

For that I'll have to introduce you to a framing I find useful for thinking about this: Permission & Inference.

Permission is the ability to act. It's the thing you are allowed to do. Who you're requesting permission from is left ambiguous. It could be your parents, it could be your computer, it could be your government, it could be the universe.

But you have permission if you can do something.

Permission can be thought of as analogous to the chaos part of our drawing. The further along the dimension of permission you go, the more chaos there is.

Imagine for example placing red nuclear launch buttons in the cribs of all the world's infants. That would be chaos.

You know not to do this because you can *infer* what would happen if you did. (see what I did there? I smoothly introduced the idea of inference and tied it back to the content of the prior cast. Pretty good huh?)

So, inference limits chaos, it denies permission. It keeps things in order.

But how does inference go wrong? Panopticons. Cameras peered through by unelected officials dictating your life and opportunities. It's centralized, top down plans that don't work because they're out of touch with reality.

What's the solution? Move toward more permission.

So you can see permission and inference are a dyad in this frame. (I'll spare you the yin yang picture)

It's a useful frame because it helps us answer questions about where to go. For one: head toward the star. But for two, if you find yourself with too much permission and chaos then add some inference.

If I wasn't short on time I'd put some points on the graph for you. Like North Korea in the top left and Somalia in the bottom right.

If you go too far in either of those directions you can get stuck. But a healthy society stays close to the critical path. Hopefully, getting better at cleaving to it over time

Weird anecdote I want to slide in. In the Active Inference view of the brain, the theory states that the only way that you're able to move your hand is that your body intentionally ignores information about the state of your hand and it's only by interrupting inference that the hand has permission to move.

Anyway

In sum, this is what got me into crypto: it's the ultimate tool for permission. You can hear echos of this in the term "permissionlessness" which says you have default permission to act

Meanwhile, inference is a term used in machine learning, the "inference cost" is the cost to run a query through a model.

For me, the huge hope of these two technologies is that they'll be used in concert with one another to ensure that we map the territory and leave room for agency.

I have some much more concrete ideas on how to do that, but this is the motivating framework

You might have seen my friday bait about being anti/acc.

It's my sincere stance, if a bit intentionally provocative.

The heart of my disagreement with e/acc is it says to accelerate, as if that's enough. As if the derivative of velocity wouldn't have a direction.

https://warpcast.com/nor/0x036616

Yes! This is a great point, I think it’s the key reason I find this so compelling. 

Two arguments for the orthogonality:
1) we can point to concrete increases in both chaos and order. E.g. more variance and more structure 
2) this is the video that made it intuitive for me:

building /cabin (cabin.city). founder of LBRY.com, odysee.com, vibe.camp, /farcon. more at grin.io

Yes! This is a great point, I think it’s the key reason I find this so compelling. 

Two arguments for the orthogonality:
1) we can point to concrete increases in both chaos and order. E.g. more variance and more structure 
2) this is the video that made it intuitive for me: https://youtu.be/YcbpXN8068I

Order and chaos are usually considered opposites, but you have them orthogonal. That’s confusing

Are you using those words to mean something else? What labels go in the bottom left of each axis?

I like this framing.
True balance is hard.
There's always left or right, good or bad, order or chaos, the sweet spot tends to be somewhere in the middle.

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Weird, I thought protopia is what @jamesstevens just got checked for at the doc 🤔