Conversation

You’ve heard this principle -: Don’t mistake the map for the territory. When you’re an agent of a swarm intelligence, there’s a similar principle -: Don’t mistake the ant for the anthill.
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Emergence inverts familiar logic. As an ant in an anthill you’re part of the “territory” and the map exists at a level that will only become evident to social media archaeologists reconstructing the hive mind stream of consciousness 10 years later. You’re a thought not a thinker
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This is a really easy mistake to make. You’re on here. You encounter idiot after idiot flooding your attention with inanities. Trending topics seem nightmarishly vapid. The whole thing *must* be stupid, right?
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This is like being a transistor in a CPU complaining that you’re surrounded by dumb idiots who only want to talk about square waves. The emergent layers are not computing the same thing you’re talking about. Occasionally you’ll get an “Aha!” lightning bolt from emergent layer
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The people who make the ant/anthill mistake have a failure of the imagination. Just because they’re used to Industrial Age organizations that are at best only as smart as their smartest individuals, they assume systems that are smarter than their human components cannot exist.
Replying to
weird that we're still figuring this out given that again and again those orgs fail in the face of swarms wonder if its because they make for shitty stories. Maybe we don't know how to make swarms heroic and so we can't tell stories about how they succeed
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Can you be a bit more specific? What exactly is being calculated in all the celebrity discussions with lazy gif replies? What is the value that is being created here? I guess you can call it culture generation, but that's an easy escape catch-all title, where is the value?