Thinking together

i highly recommend reading the full article (10 min read): Thinking together - Steps to an ecology of mind, by: gordon brander

my highlights:

We’ve hit an information scaling threshold
The internet has massively increased the complexity of our information environment, but hasn’t yet produced the tools to make sense of it. Old forms of social sensemaking—institutions, universities, democracy, tradition—all seem to be DDOS’d by the new information environment. They can’t keep up!

The cost of forking realities has dropped below the Coasean floor, and there’s little incentive to merge realities. We fractally fragment understandings, then algorithmically amplify the confusion to maximize engagement. The most effective coordination mechanisms left seem to be memes and conspiracy theories

But, then, maybe the information scaling threshold is why we’re experiencing these crises in the first place? As our problems get more complex, our ability to meaningfully coordinate breaks down. What do we do now? I see three trends that seem like part of the winding path forward.

1. Thinking with a second brain
2. Thinking together at Dunbar-scale
3. Thinking with the network

Thinking with a second brain

How does a system make sense? By constructing a model of its environment. The model is what allows the system to understand changes in the environment, and to adapt.Agency! If the model is too simple, the system won’t be able to understand or adapt to new environmental states. Its actions will stop making sense.Therefore, the complexity of a sensemaking system must match the complexity of the environment. This is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. If you want to make sense of a complex world, you've got to have an internal system that is equally complex.(Karl Weick) The internet has increased the complexity of our information environment. To have agency in this environment, we need to become complex too. We’re going to need a second brain! I suspect this is why we’re seeing a renaissance in tools for thought, digital gardens, Zettelkasten. By offloading a large portion of incoming information into your second brain, you free up bandwidth in your first brain. You might just barely maintain enough variety to navigate our complex environment

Knowledge production is a group activity, not an individual one. (Doug Engelbart, 2002. Improving our ability to improve)
Building a second brain is an effective strategy for coping with complexity. At the same time, it is fundamentally single-player, and most of the interesting things we do, we do together. Can we find ways to make meaning together over the internet?

These cozyweb communities have all of the features that Elinor Ostrom identifies as necessary for governing a commons without tragedy:

Clear boundaries (private)
Managed by locals
Community makes its own rules
Community can monitor behavior
Graduated sanctions for those who violate community rules
Cheap, accessible means of conflict resolution
Self-determination

When we examine our bloodstreams under a microscope we see there’s one hell of a fight going on. All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up. And if we got overly fascinated with our view of our own bloodstreams in the microscope we should start taking sides, which would be fatal. Because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle. What is, in other words, conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level. Now could it possibly be, therefore, that we… are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of harmony? (Alan Watts, We as Organism)

Researcher Simon DeDeo considers it a phase transition in human culture, dividing history into three eras:

The premodern/archaic era, when most information was generated by nonhuman phenomena like seasons, weather, drought, flood, hail, lightning. “The gods”.

The modern/postmodern era, when most information was broadcast by a small number of information “sellers”, and consumed by a large number of information “buyers”.

The user-generated content era, where most information is produced/consumed by users, in a tight feedback loop between attention allocation and content production/consumption.

The feedback loop between thinking and posting is so tight, the two are basically in superposition. We think/tweet. It’s not clear which way the arrow of causality goes. The tweets think us. At scale, we become a medium for manifesting memes, like synapses in some global social brain.