I called it playing your part in the Global Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC). This has now become a much more important part of the argument I'm developing. If you don't build your own 2nd brain, the GSCITC *is* your first brain and the one in your skull is your 2nd brain.
-
-
I find that when I do get sucked into a longer project, I naturally retreat exactly as much as needed to "feed" that project the info stream it needs. If I need to spend more time with 10-year-old books I naturally do that.
Prikaži ovu nit -
This isn't a superpower. It's evidence the addiction hypothesis is much weaker than it looks. And that for nearly any subject, there is a shit ton more signal in the GSCITC than you might assume. Sign: output from "deep work" is generally very underwhelming.
Prikaži ovu nit -
I have been generally very unimpressed with the work people seem to generate when they go waldenponding to work on supposedly important things. The comparable people who stay more plugged in seem to produce better work.
Prikaži ovu nit -
My kindest reading of people who retreat so far it actually compromises their work is that it is a mental health preservation move because they can't handle the optimum GSCITC immersion for their project. Their work could be improved if they had the stomach for more gonzo-nausea.
Prikaži ovu nit -
My harshest reading is that they're narcissistic snowflakes who overvalue their work simply because they did it.
Prikaži ovu nit -
So my recommendations would be: develop an intuitive ability to tune your GSCITC immersion from full-retreat if you got a big grant to do some work only 3 other people in the world understand... to full-speed-ahead gonzo immersion if you need 2y oracular foresight
Prikaži ovu nit -
If you find your natural brain has a comfort zone, then build a second brain that equilibrates it there, and use it more or less as you need to wander from that set-point.
Prikaži ovu nit -
One reason I haven't invested in building as strong a BASB as many is simply that my comfort set-point is mostly near the gonzo edge. I need the full 2+ year foresight potential of the GSCITC for the thinking I'm most effective at. If it means continuous partial PTSD so be it.
Prikaži ovu nit -
One sign of the cost of this tradeoff. Though I can see this thread would be nice to put into a blog post, I don't feel like I can conjure up the energy to do it. It will likely remain in this context, only accessible and grokkable to people who are also in a roughly gonzo place
Prikaži ovu nit -
And also, I need a better term than GSCITC... but something without baggage. Hive mind, borg, AGI, efficient narrative marketplace... all the terms I've been able to think of have inappropriate or misleading connotations.
Prikaži ovu nit -
For those who came in late... this train of thought began with my Against Waldenponding newsletter last yearhttps://mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/against-waldenponding …
Prikaži ovu nit -
Which I recently added a Part 2 to...https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=098f100576 …
Prikaži ovu nit -
The Waldenponding newsletters were Oct 2018 and April 2019. I think I first broached this topic even earlier in this newsletter. Your Passport to the Metabrain (Jan 2017). Shit, this has been on my 2nd brain for a long time.https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=0f299f9100 …
Prikaži ovu nit -
The cost of being in gonzo mode online is admittedly quite high. The effect on more retreated modes of production (essays, books, products) is very noticeable. My best thinking in the last few years has been on twitter, but the reach is far lower than my blog or newsletter
Prikaži ovu nit -
Final point: you are almost certainly overvaluing information from history and undervaluing information being processed live in the GSCITC for *any* project you take on. Why do I think that? At some point AlphaGoZero discarded all human history of Go playing and went full gonzo
Prikaži ovu nit -
This is a form of temporal egotism. We have identities anchored in personal/collective history, and we like to think distribution we are attached to is the distribution of input value. Chances are, an AI approaching any given problem you take on will throw away most of history.
Prikaži ovu nit -
Final final point. I flagged conversational media eating authorial media. This has been my personal ego challenge. It is hard to admit, having spent 10y building up an identity/vanity around my longform, that my conversational thinking embedded in the GSCITC is better quality.
Prikaži ovu nit
Kraj razgovora
Novi razgovor -
Čini se da učitavanje traje već neko vrijeme.
Twitter je možda preopterećen ili ima kratkotrajnih poteškoća u radu. Pokušajte ponovno ili potražite dodatne informacije u odjeljku Status Twittera.