A good hack to find interesting ideas to work on is to start with a word that seems to pick out an important concept, but has been rendered annoyingly vacuous by abusive overextension. Examples: strategy, meaning, irony. Other examples?
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Take for example, the word "strategy". It attempts to create agency at higher levels of abstraction in thinking about conflict. The agency involved in pulling a trigger is obvious. The agency involved in moving tokens around on a map in a war-room is not.
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A good heuristic for picking out this condition is to apply John Wannamaker's observation "I know half my advertising works, I just don't know which half." This is why "marketing" is hard. The semantic noise induced by the illegibility of the agency sought.
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One I'm working on right now is "temporality". Why not just say "time"? Because "time" offers no agency unless you know how to travel at relativistic speeds or shrink yourself down to sub-Planck quantum levels. "Temporality" is a way to pick out locus of agency just above "time"
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There are banal things you can do that alter time experience. I'm not even talking drugs or base jumping. I'm talking stuff like drinking coffee or going to sleep. Those alterations are not to bare-metal time proper, but to the lowest level reification that offers some agency.
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Most of the terms people are suggesting in the replies: community, agile, data-driven, fit this pattern. They are reifications in search of a locus of agency that may or may not exist, and you won't know till you try to "land" the concept on a pattern of agency that seems to work
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How do you know your attempt at semantic disruption is working? Two signs: Social proof: people resonate wit your sense of usage. They train on, and add to, your use instances. Material proof: navigating with that concept yields better-than-random results, ie it finds agency
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I'd like to try and teach semantic disruption skills at some point, but I don't yet have a clear sense of what kind of preparedness you'd need to pick up on this. It's a bit like being a meme VC, knowing when a concept is right for disruption and that an angle on it is working
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Implicit in this model is that conceptual meaning is not something that evolves from fluid usages and eventually "arrives" by landing in a dictionary or other canonical reference work, like an IPO. Conceptual meanings are like companies with stocks on a meaning stock market.
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The value of the stock goes up and down as the clarity and agency go up and down through use and abuse. Successful concepts ossify and attract growing abuse, creating disruption opportunities. As a memester, you have to watch the meme markets for "startup" opps basically.
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