I vaguely remember this one puzzle from back in school where you had to draw a certain symmetrical shape without lifting your pen off the paper. The only way to do it was to use some creative additional scaffolding outside the shape to complete it. It was an extremely unsatisfying way to "solve" the puzzle but bizarrely enough, that puzzle was far more popular than it deserved to be.
To connect that terrible solution with the subject of retailing the world, I think there's one important aperiodic tile you should add to your list, not just for 2023, but over the medium to long term: "facts". It's probably more of a meta-tile. The way the whole idea of what constitutes a fact has come into question over the first two phases of the interregnum, I have a feeling that it is now something like a wild card tile piece. It can be added at any point to mirror any existing edge tile and dictate which way the puzzle pseudo-builds out from there. I'd even argue that it subsumes the COVID and Climate pieces. Those two wouldn't even be pieces on your list if the facts around them weren't considered so slippery and amoebic. Another way the facts tile will affect the puzzle is by clumsily tiling any unpluggable hole you create as you build out...
What's worse is that I'm afraid that one tile is going to outnumber and outsize all the other tiles in the puzzle as we go along.
By definition they assert themselves whether or not they’re believed. “Reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.” -- PKD.
In fact, I had this odd thought that like key-pairs in crypto, they will become the specialized concern of an ideological minority that cares, while the rest of the world hits solipsistic escape velocity safely. I should write this up. A big idea in my clockless clock book is that there are 2 relevant levels of being in time that affect your relationship to facts: the “actuality level” of the subset of facts you can’t retreat from, and “escaped reality” level of facts that you can retreat from and be safely in denial about. For eg: believing the moon is made of blue cheese is an escaped reality. It’s not factual, but I can safely retreat from the fact that it is made of rocks, with no real consequences. Otoh, believing fire is cool and safe to touch us an “actuality” that will hurt me if I live by it.
That's a great way to look at it! But it's not really that clean of a dichotomy, is it? Given that the retiling puzzle is one that has to be solved or played in the collective, the actuality vs escaped reality levels overlap across the population. For a healthy 30 year old, COVID was pretty much an escaped reality, but it was an actuality for a 70 year old with comorbidities. The section of the population that saw it as an escaped reality could comfortably co-opt alternative facts around it, but that did still affect the 70 year old who was very much dialed into it as an actuality. A lot of those alternative facts did materially affect how the world was tiled along the
covid vector.
My point being, an escaped reality like the moon being made of blue cheese doesn't really have any externalities, so someone can just continue to live by it at very little collective cost. But reality closer to home is always an actuality, directly or indirectly...
Yeah it’s not super clean, but I think good enough... arguably we’ve never been a fact-based species and we’ve survived fine so far. The 20th century was a mass delusion of our own factfulness, mistaking, confusing mass literacy for a mass scientific sensibility. The potentially new factfulness is externalities. My escaped reality is your hardened actuality. But a lot of society is creating consequences = new actualities for the escaped types. In this case the 30y heightens the risk for the 70y old, but the latter can vote to create consequences for the former they cannot escape as easily.
I'd love to see this paradigm of finite-game epochs get layered through theories of history and evolution. Is history the story of those who emerge from interregnums to define the rules of new finite games? Are there selection pressures that reward finite games for adapting to the infinite? Are the aperiodic tiles the evolutionary pieces being driven by more fundamental developmental forces?
Far more fundamental is the ability of "value flows" to define everything, including "facts" and define every "protocol" : whatever be the protocol. Everything has "value" from some perspective or the other. There is an aspect of ubiquitous applicability and even versatality. The Amazing Versatility of (crypto) Tokenised Protocols.
For one, ChatGPT uses byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenization, which is a type of subword tokenization. BPE works by repeatedly merging the most frequent pairs of adjacent characters or character sequences until a predefined vocabulary size is reached. This allows ChatGPT to handle rare or previously unseen words or concepts (value representations) by breaking them down into smaller subword units that are more likely to appear in the vocabulary. Esentially, a tokenised protocol which seems to have ability to analyse and interpret anything using concepts of value.
I think it might be useful to decompose and recombine those 6 tile pieces differently. Crypto and AI are both broad areas and many people have an allergy to one or both terms. The key themes I see in crypto are digital currency, distributed algorithms, and decentralized autonomous organisations. Themes within AI include conversational interfaces, automation, and enablement (i.e. a dramatic increase in what people can do individually given their current knowledge). These can be recombined in different ways, for example digital currency fits with inflation and monetary policy and points to a number of new levers in this area which weren't available previously. I suspect many of the more interesting changes here are outside the crypto space. The DAO theme fits within other changes in organisation/governance - future of work and digital democracy for example. The AI components show them as continuing themes over a long period of time not something which arrived suddenly in the last couple of years.
Obviously 10 points is less punchy than 6 but they could be refined further, I'm interested in your thoughts on which are significant or not.
I vaguely remember this one puzzle from back in school where you had to draw a certain symmetrical shape without lifting your pen off the paper. The only way to do it was to use some creative additional scaffolding outside the shape to complete it. It was an extremely unsatisfying way to "solve" the puzzle but bizarrely enough, that puzzle was far more popular than it deserved to be.
To connect that terrible solution with the subject of retailing the world, I think there's one important aperiodic tile you should add to your list, not just for 2023, but over the medium to long term: "facts". It's probably more of a meta-tile. The way the whole idea of what constitutes a fact has come into question over the first two phases of the interregnum, I have a feeling that it is now something like a wild card tile piece. It can be added at any point to mirror any existing edge tile and dictate which way the puzzle pseudo-builds out from there. I'd even argue that it subsumes the COVID and Climate pieces. Those two wouldn't even be pieces on your list if the facts around them weren't considered so slippery and amoebic. Another way the facts tile will affect the puzzle is by clumsily tiling any unpluggable hole you create as you build out...
What's worse is that I'm afraid that one tile is going to outnumber and outsize all the other tiles in the puzzle as we go along.
I’m actually not super concerned about “facts”
By definition they assert themselves whether or not they’re believed. “Reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.” -- PKD.
In fact, I had this odd thought that like key-pairs in crypto, they will become the specialized concern of an ideological minority that cares, while the rest of the world hits solipsistic escape velocity safely. I should write this up. A big idea in my clockless clock book is that there are 2 relevant levels of being in time that affect your relationship to facts: the “actuality level” of the subset of facts you can’t retreat from, and “escaped reality” level of facts that you can retreat from and be safely in denial about. For eg: believing the moon is made of blue cheese is an escaped reality. It’s not factual, but I can safely retreat from the fact that it is made of rocks, with no real consequences. Otoh, believing fire is cool and safe to touch us an “actuality” that will hurt me if I live by it.
That's a great way to look at it! But it's not really that clean of a dichotomy, is it? Given that the retiling puzzle is one that has to be solved or played in the collective, the actuality vs escaped reality levels overlap across the population. For a healthy 30 year old, COVID was pretty much an escaped reality, but it was an actuality for a 70 year old with comorbidities. The section of the population that saw it as an escaped reality could comfortably co-opt alternative facts around it, but that did still affect the 70 year old who was very much dialed into it as an actuality. A lot of those alternative facts did materially affect how the world was tiled along the
covid vector.
My point being, an escaped reality like the moon being made of blue cheese doesn't really have any externalities, so someone can just continue to live by it at very little collective cost. But reality closer to home is always an actuality, directly or indirectly...
Yeah it’s not super clean, but I think good enough... arguably we’ve never been a fact-based species and we’ve survived fine so far. The 20th century was a mass delusion of our own factfulness, mistaking, confusing mass literacy for a mass scientific sensibility. The potentially new factfulness is externalities. My escaped reality is your hardened actuality. But a lot of society is creating consequences = new actualities for the escaped types. In this case the 30y heightens the risk for the 70y old, but the latter can vote to create consequences for the former they cannot escape as easily.
I'd love to see this paradigm of finite-game epochs get layered through theories of history and evolution. Is history the story of those who emerge from interregnums to define the rules of new finite games? Are there selection pressures that reward finite games for adapting to the infinite? Are the aperiodic tiles the evolutionary pieces being driven by more fundamental developmental forces?
Far more fundamental is the ability of "value flows" to define everything, including "facts" and define every "protocol" : whatever be the protocol. Everything has "value" from some perspective or the other. There is an aspect of ubiquitous applicability and even versatality. The Amazing Versatility of (crypto) Tokenised Protocols.
For one, ChatGPT uses byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenization, which is a type of subword tokenization. BPE works by repeatedly merging the most frequent pairs of adjacent characters or character sequences until a predefined vocabulary size is reached. This allows ChatGPT to handle rare or previously unseen words or concepts (value representations) by breaking them down into smaller subword units that are more likely to appear in the vocabulary. Esentially, a tokenised protocol which seems to have ability to analyse and interpret anything using concepts of value.
I think it might be useful to decompose and recombine those 6 tile pieces differently. Crypto and AI are both broad areas and many people have an allergy to one or both terms. The key themes I see in crypto are digital currency, distributed algorithms, and decentralized autonomous organisations. Themes within AI include conversational interfaces, automation, and enablement (i.e. a dramatic increase in what people can do individually given their current knowledge). These can be recombined in different ways, for example digital currency fits with inflation and monetary policy and points to a number of new levers in this area which weren't available previously. I suspect many of the more interesting changes here are outside the crypto space. The DAO theme fits within other changes in organisation/governance - future of work and digital democracy for example. The AI components show them as continuing themes over a long period of time not something which arrived suddenly in the last couple of years.
Obviously 10 points is less punchy than 6 but they could be refined further, I'm interested in your thoughts on which are significant or not.