Many Western ”leaders”—terrified that the public is waking up to their impotence in the face of mounting emergent complexity—increasingly seek to intern those who threaten their power within a virtual camp of surveillance and behavioral control.

Our Data is Their Fuel. The data we allow our governments to obtain / use becomes ever more consequential, relative to any other flow from a population to its so-called "leadership" (e.g. taxes).

Within any system of government that calls itself "democratic", these data flows must remain *consensual*.

See what happens when one threatens to reveal the actual causal structure that lies beneath the surface level politics and rhetorical facades that constitute “Our Democracy™️”?

If you believe this depicts uncoordinated market behavior, I’ve got a bridge to sell you… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… A good reminder that being the richest man in the world does not make one the most powerful, and that opaque centers of power will do everything within their capacity to keep it that way.

This is Musk’s public spanking. Will be interesting to see if / when / how he capitulates.

There's no one on the planet better positioned to implement an epistemic betting market than @elonmusk, with Twitter newly in hand.

We don't need censors. We need markets capable of assessing the quality / value of information over meaningful time horizons.

Here's why, and how: First, the "why" of it all.

Attempting to centrally verify "truth" is a losing bet, bound to backfire.

Doing so decreases trust in institutions, increases conspiratorial thinking, and plays into the hands of those who tend toward totalitarian control.

The truth must *emerge*.

As we come to more adequately understand representational systems, I expect we'll discover adaptive capacity induces inverse proportionality b/w the expressive dimension of a symbolic system and its strength of semantic grounding.

Exemplars of each form functional complements. First, definitions:

Expressive Dimensionality – The degree to which a system can simulate dynamics of other systems in a manner approaching 1:1 correspondence.

Semantic Grounding – The degree to which a system constrains interpretive correspondence of its symbolic relations.

@speakerjohnash @DerringerPax Yes, this is called proof by contradiction.

Both of those options *contradict* other statements you've made.

Both can't be true while the other things you've said in this conversation remain true.

https://twitter.com/MattPirkowski/status/1566963758983180288?s=20&t=cpUJlZ2mDOeepOrUG2vyuA

@speakerjohnash @DerringerPax If it supplants all functions of money, it is either totalizing insofar as it replaces money in a way that governs processes without intermediate representations, or it uses such representations and is quite a bit like money.

Not sure why that's so impossible to hear.

To help communicate the value of the Active Inference paradigm wrt generating and empirically assessing our theories about the world, I'd like to tell you a story.

It's a story about You, a leaf, and a frog.

But at a deeper level, it's about perception as an active process: Imagine walking along the edge of a forest.

Your senses flooded w/ a continuous stream of info from all directions.

Light bouncing off leaves, grass, rocks, birds, frogs.

Sounds of rustling, stirring, scratching, whooshing.

Feelings of cool breeze, warm Sun, Earth underfoot.

Debate over "inclusivity" recapitulates lumpers vs splitters, but within an acutely dumbed down frame of reference.

Normatively, inclusivity is neither better nor worse than exclusivity, and those who believe differently merely reveal to you the coarseness of their thinking. Even the use of the word "inclusivity" requires that one exclude all other concepts from the semiotic location of its embodied expression, such that the meaning of the term may emerge in the mind of another via a resource constrained channel of symbolic expression / perception.

The word "government" is often more obfuscating than enlightening.

It establishes (or regenerates) the inertia of a top-down phenomenological frame, divorced from its processes of emergence.

Let's explore what the concept of "government" means, from an emergent perspective... We begin with the simple fact that we are not each other.

This observation warrants unpacking: we each represent an exploratory tendril of our biological species, but are physically incarnated such that our perspectives *never* fully align.

This holds even for conjoined twins.

Do you ever wonder why it feels like the Internet has made us collectively dumber, despite the fact that it increases individual access to information?

The answer lies in the concept of a Complexity Catastrophe, and how our present Internet usage patterns create one.

A thread: Before describing exactly what a Complexity Catastrophe (CC) is, why CCs emerge, and how they're relevant to our present Internet landscape, we must first unpack a few theoretical concepts from evolutionary biology.

First up, the Adaptive Landscape model of evolution.

In systems design, one must constantly grapple with the tradeoff between the burden of path-dependent constraints and the temptation to throw everything out and start anew.

What works becomes invisible and is forgotten, leading one to underestimate the risks of throwing it away. The only successful rewrites I've seen were those that prioritized the *continuity of service quality*.

These projects have:
- Accounted for all behaviors of a present system
- Specified their replacement / improvement at high resolution
- Deployed piecemeal, not wholesale

I'd like to explore a concept to which I've previously alluded, but haven't yet outlined in detail:

The Relativistically Adaptive Market Protocol

i.e. the RAMP.

It's an idea that incorporates lessons from complex systems and ecological adaptation into financial markets. The fundamental goal: reduce overall volatility and attractiveness to parasitic actors, while enabling participants whose trades actually boost long term signal, and therefore healthy systemic growth.

But before we get to the protocol itself, we should unpack The Big Lie...

What lies beyond Capitalism and Communism?

Scalable Communal Valerism.

The technologies to obviate monetary coherence are nascent, but here.

Sustainable behavior requires increasingly direct representations of cost and value, not dis-intermediated by money.

It's now possible. Consider that the original monetary systems were higher-dimensional representations of abstract social value (think shells, quipu, etc).

These did not scale well as civilizations structurally deepened, and we thus moved toward more "liquid" forms of representation: e.g. coinage.

While the ideas of "localism" get a lot right, they also demonstrate an ideological blind-spot in their unwillingness to deal honestly with well-known advantages to centralized structures, such as:

- Superlinear returns to network scale.
- Higher short-term collective agency. Centralized structures do not emerge arbitrarily. They are not mere products of corruption, dominance, and exploitation.

They emerge because they represent a formidable and robust strategy upon a wide range of adaptive landscapes.

They also minimize in-group transaction costs.

On Networked Censorship: A Thread

For the journalists etc. attempting to understand what’s going on behind the scenes at large social media companies wrt censorship, there are a few conceptual tools you must equip before making statements in either support or suspicion... Recently I’ve seen debate concerning the degree to which the content of popular (and polarizing) social media users gets censored by platforms like YouTube, Twitter, etc.

Most of these approaches analyze the category of first-order signals to which the public has access...