In an engineering ethics class in college, my professor often raised the concept of the Golden Mean. He would typically use the same example: “confidence is the golden mean between timidity and hardheadedness.” In the same class, we would discuss historical or hypothetical engineering case studies. Should a firm invest in a safety measure and eat the cost of downtime? Should a firm deliver products that are only half-baked to keep up with competition? These concepts may appear similar, but the conflation of practical optimization and a philosophical pursuit of ideal ethics could hardly be more confused.

Ethical dilemmas aside, all engineers know that their trade is a study in compromise. Engineering effort is directed towards trade studies or simply “trades” to select optimal strategies before beginning to execute any strategy.1

Engineering optimization is totally different from the pursuit of the golden mean of some moral value. An engineering trade for performance or an actuarial study of risk, whether they pose a hazard to human life or not, is ultimately a utilitarian objective! The golden mean seems to allow this inherently pragmatic analysis to contaminate the essence of virtue ethics— the goal of describing values that stand as guides regardless of the situation!

You might imagine a local optimum of kindness where marginal kindness leads to diminishing returns in philanthropy due to generosity towards unfair players who take advantage of the kindness and waste resources. However, there is not an optimal moderation of kindness that is most virtuous. This waste is as much a symptom of lack of wisdom, a lack of resources, or a lack of any number of other goods, as much as it is an "excess" of kindness.2

I put excess in scare quotes and not lack, because I think wisdom and kindness are both unilateral goods! In other words, the "excess" of a good is only so because of the circumstance. There are multiple ways to solve the problem. The pragmatic optimization is the addition of cynicism, but the optimistic optimization is to be more kind and more wise.3

Pursuing this behavior is following the God-like path. Though it's difficult for mortals to be able to do the God-like actions, I think it may be more tangible than it sounds at first. Orthogonalism means avoiding the illusion of trades as opposites.

Logic of Extrema

Despite all this, there is a strong logical argument for the unavoidability of tradeoffs. This comes from the question of disjoint optima of distinct criteria. This is explained very well in this conversation between Daniel Schmachtenberger and Bret Weinstein on the fastest, bluest car. Bret explains that the distinct extremes of blueness and fastness are almost certainly impossible to maximize in a single car. This is closely related to the fact that two random high-dimensional vectors or, similarly, two random words are nearly orthogonal. If marginal blueness sacrifices the most minute degree of speed, then it is impossible to make a car that is the simultaneously the fastest and the bluest.

Simultaneous optimization is possible only when the optima are exactly coincident. While most characteristics are independent, some are components of others, like weighing less and being less massive or being circumstantially and generally true. I would offer that God as the extreme degree of love is the coincident optimum of many other virtues that appear to be tradeoffs to us. Unlike the exclusivity of blueness and speed, the tradeoff between generosity and wisdom is an artifact of our constrained capacity.

Gold and Bronze

Characteristics offered as the extremes that generate a golden mean are often orthogonal axes of a trade where you must choose a bronze mean.

Even with the reality of tradeoffs, never lose sight of the ability to go for more instead. Never lose sight of the golden horizon.4

ORTHOGONALIST

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The ascendance of minimalist ontology is a well-distributed excuse to avoid the hard problem of invention.
A technical renaissance should not be limited to the Great Feats of space travel, supersonic jets, or even a proliferation of the elusive flying car.

We have the Neuromancer's rejectionist drugs and the ‘trodes are on the way, but where is the ultrasuade?
We have polyester hoodies and retro leather, but where are the aerogel kimonos?
We have retina displays to repaint our space, but the walls are cardboard. Where are the alabaster cloud ceilings?

Return from minimalist to baroque? Orthogonalists build the ultramaterial future.

When in the dark, explore as fast as possible. Sprint at the unknown. When working in a program I'm unfamiliar with, I find that I learn the fastest by experimenting spastically. I mean literally moving my hands faster, clicking buttons quickly and almost at random. The goal is to bump into structure and start to get a sense of where you are — a flat-out rejection to clean sheet paralysis.

A pro knows many routes to achieve an effect, so they smoothly move from step to step. A good teacher highlights the direct routing, explains why it works, and illuminates the obstacles that students are most likely to trip on. However, sometimes, we find ourselves without teachers to explain or pros to imitate.

The key addition to spastic exploration for efficient learning is the mandate to always retake good paths smoothly. Stumbling through the same straight path twice shows that you haven’t learned from the experiment. If you have already poked around a local region and uncovered a highway, you'll illuminate the map much more quickly by taking the highway to the next fog and stumbling around there instead. Later on, it will be worth exploring parallel paths, but the goal is never distance traveled, but new territory mastered.

Striving for more distance traveled is one manifestation of the general trap of measuring inputs (how many hours worked, how many dollars invested, how many jobs created) rather than outputs (skill accumulated and product generated by your study and labor, the capitalist’s return, the improvement in the public’s wellbeing).

Someone very skilled “makes it looks easy" because they have the routes rote. Expert users of any tool can still get stuck though, sometimes even as a cost of success. A traveler with a perfect map of a useful route is a valuable merchant. This is a perfectly good state to achieve, but re-running the same route means stopping at a local minimum (i.e. not exploring).

Improvement comes with another a psychological trap built-in. As a new explorer, your average speed is very slow due to tripping over roots, wandering through new neighborhoods, and bumping into trees. As you discover clearer tracks and retrace them more and more, you continue to accelerate. The trap is attributing that new speed purely to strength (global) rather than experience (local).

When you venture into a new forest expecting your strength to whisk you through, the trees and rocks turn out to be just as tough as in the last wood. Tripping and falling again are signs of a lack of experience, while, through an egoistic lens, they are signs of weakness. In reality, few have the strength to fight tree roots1 and nearly all would benefit from finding better routes.2

Luckily, speed isn't derived exclusively from local experience or highway shortcuts. There are useful, global skills which arm you for caverns and the open road. They can be discovered or taught and can be improved by reps in disparate domains.

Global Technique

Fundamental skills apply everywhere. The scientific method is a torch for the darkest cave, empathy is sustenance, and humility is a helmet that makes encounters with obstacles less painful.

Another meta-technique is actively choosing to learn a new skill. A great engineer from my college robotics team would find himself in a rut on CAD techniques. He was already the best designer on the team, but would intentionally set himself with a challenge to design something (often lower urgency, but still useful) in a different way — a profitable merchant stepping off the highway and into the thicket. He repeatedly came back, not only with treasure and the local experience of another road, but with tools applicable to other paths.3

This gives a chance to comment on the purpose of teams. Teams are entities aiming to optimize the set of routes for generation of the desired outcome.4 In this frame, success isn’t a point on the map, but the product of the complete set of travelers, tools, and roads that continually generate progress towards a goal outside the territory.5

Nature pursues this structure across many levels of life. However, you can choose where to direct the effort of structure from yourself and up. Choose wisely, learn, and build.

The Odds and Taking Advice

“Don’t trust advice.”

Cynical, ambiguously encouraging agency, and of Escherian aesthetic quality, the opening imperative must be tempered with priors.

The power of advice about what to do is proportional to the density of pitfalls, while advice about what not to do is inversely proportional.

There are massive biases in advice that depend on who is giving it, their outcomes, the underlying landscape, and the goals of the person receiving the advice. The mistrust of advice from the most successful people in the world likely stems from the fact that there was hardly anyone who could advise them up to the highest heights!

If the terrain is full of traps, it's better to be shown the narrow path to success. If the terrain has few hazards, it's more efficient to know what to avoid instead. I’ve illustrated each of the combinations below where the four left-most images represent different types of advice of similar value. In a highly lethal landscape you get a more informative (less compressible) update by learning one narrow path to success than by learning a hundred typical paths to failure.6

This Bayesian view is intuitively clear, but what about in technical domains?

In an exhaustive (Edisonian) search you simply try over and over again, gaining little insight from incremental rounds. Testing thousands of different filament materials was useful and scientific, but less transferrable (and charismatic) than the combined scientific and engineering process of the Wright brothers’ pursuit of flight.

The Wright brothers imitated the mechanics of birds and repeatedly iterated on their machines, but they ultimately succeeded, not by stumbling in the dark, but by learning the fundamental mechanics. The brothers invented the wind tunnel to systematically sweep the landscape of aerodynamics by conducting parametric studies of airfoils. Compared to the (Edisonian) Otto Lilienthal, the Wright brothers more efficiently traversed the aerodynamic subspaces of the problem and took fewer runs in the genuinely dangerous arena of flight test - the one that ultimately ended Lilienthal’s search.

This is all to say that in technical matters, the “odds” of success are merely another proxy anti-correlated with the narrowness of the precise, physical solution space.

Unity and a Prompt

The preceding sections are all united by Bayes, except one.

Transitioning from learning spastically to retaking paths efficiently is about being realistic with your prior knowledge.

Judging recommendations by the adversity that faced your advisor is again a simple calculation of a prior of their odds.

Lastly, parametric study of the falls into the framework when viewed as the next order7 on the progression from spaz toward retracing paths smoothly. Testing yet another filament candidate (with an effective experimental setup) is like methodically retracing your steps two paces to the left. Parametric study is intentionally walking to the left or right to understand why there are so many stumbling points.

Calibrating your priors for the landscape helps resolve when to explore, when to repeat, and when to study closer.

The one section of the essay that doesn’t fall cleanly into this pattern is global technique. You always want more of it, and it’s not blocked exclusively by having enough reps. Some techniques can be taught in minutes and resolve countless hours of puzzling or experimentation. Scientific methodology, intelligence, empathy, and humility come to mind. What global techniques (secrets) are most underdeveloped?

ORTHOGONALIST

Imperious, demanding reverence,
giving direction, drawing sights upward

Fixed by the gravity it calls you to oppose

Human craft
Of the Earth, a beacon of the beyond

Rooted, growing, branching life
Fiery flower for the future

Falcon 9 - Obelisk in Bloom

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Fire and language might compete as the most important developments in human history. Our mastery of fire and the rest of the material world has continued to grow along with our knowledge of its bounds. While our fundamental understanding of information is catching up to that of fire1, our techne for transmitting ideas doesn't seem to have advanced other than in the practical matter of distribution.

Ideas are slippery high-dimensional things. They are passed around and connected by means of words. Sensory input and other symbols (e.g. math notation) also play into the creation and manipulation of ideas. Minds create containers for ideas and label them. Ideas can wear multiple labels, labels are their own ideas and can be labeled themselves.

Communication is challenging for many reasons, but miscommunication due to different staking of words is a familiar one.

Verbal communication consists of roughly two stages:

• Semantics (/pragmatics) for connecting words to objects

• Syntax (/morphology) connecting words to each other in meaningful structure

Ideographic communication attempts to make symbols that explain their own connection to reality. These include some character/hieroglyphic languages and some mathematical notation (e.g. "=", "( )").23 Words composed from letters are practically beneficial for reducing memorization load and for allowing interesting recombination (e.g. learn 26 letters instead of 3,000 characters; prefixes don’t require different brush strokes, just add the letters in line).

We could go even further down the line of symbol to object-label realism with the help of Magritte and Hofstadter,4 but I'd like to go back up a level from the substance of the object of a label, to the processes of labeling and the methods by which this labeling is exploited. This is the world of label-object hashing functions.

Label-Object Hashing

Computer science presents the concept of the hash function, which we'll explore mapping onto the problem of labels.

A common example of the use of a hash function is the way that websites store passwords: when you log in, your password (key) gets passed through a hash function producing a hash. The hash function is intentionally designed to make it difficult to work backwards from a hash to the key it was generated from. This means that if the list of login hashes is stolen, the thief isn't much closer to logging in, since they need to enter the correct key.

A central problem in hash function design is avoiding collision - the case where multiple keys map to the same hash.

By now, you might be getting an idea of where we're headed.

The world of communication already suffers from the complexity of tenuous links between ideas and their names. Those seeking to persuade will push the limits of the connections between ideas and their labels by the following method:

• Chose labels with the explicit purpose of antonym collision.

• Deride opponents for using the (often reasonable!) trivial hashing function (hashing a word to what it means).

  or
  Deride opponents for signaling meaning through increasingly non-trivial hashing functions.

Demagogues play groups against each other by knowing which phrases are "hash function wedges." Every person runs a different hashing function and similar ideas render differently in each person's mind. This leaves us with the rough map - Key : Hash Function : Hash :: Label : Mind : Object/Idea5

Language Saboteurs through time

Bolsheviks

The Russian Revolution of 1917 against the tsar brought to power the Bolshevik party. The Bolsheviks were forked from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) as a stronger independent political party after originating as the hard Leninist wing of the RSDLP. After a marginal victory in elections of the RSDLP, the Leninists began calling themselves the Bolsheviks, which translates to "majority."

Discourse against the hard communists was subsequently weighed down by the literal reading of opposing "the majority." This is the same naming technique as other communist nations calling themselves “People’s” republics and so on. Our modern American political party names seem to have leveled out on this dimension since the names "democrat" and "republican" don't tell you much more than "whig" or "tory" without knowing the particular context.

Peacekeeper

If you are a nation upgrading your nuclear weapons portfolio with an ICBM designed explicitly for a retaliatory strike and the program was previously canceled, what should you call it?

The Peacekeeper missile program6 was successfully restarted in 1982 by Ronald Reagan after the program was terminated by Congress in Jimmy Carter's presidency. The program at that time was called MX. Peacekeeper missiles were installed in former Minuteman missile silos, which I must say sound more positive than MX missile silos.

Present Day

We’ll cover some present day examples in a moment, but I’d first like to present a visual framing of the effect that the language saboteurs are applying to the idea landscape.

Spin Visualized

When naming something to make it difficult to debate against, a saboteur’s goal is to tie an opponent’s point to something that is undebatable. You sabotage the debate by twisting the axes.

Take a simplistic 2D map of the underlying idea domain. It’s obviously difficult to say where any idea exactly goes, but understanding this trick doesn’t require it. Instead, we care about the effect of intentionally conflicted naming.

By naming your view with a moral positive or the negation of a moral negative, you rotate the map to look at it side-on and hide the full picture.7

Wanting war and making missiles are not the ends at odds. Leninism and rule by the majority are not aligned. Narrative spin is about hiding the idea landscape to collide labels. Debate about the content is obfuscated by directly involving a moral statement.

Density

Another pernicious aspect of the spun idea domain is the way it presents a false sense of the typical person to an ideologue. Here, an overwhelmingly good population slightly favoring View -A are recast by spin.

Anyone associating moral goodness and view A now see a distribution peak of middle-of-the-road goodness. Furthermore, the false map indicates that being stronger in view A gets you further from the immoral masses who lean toward -A.8

This false framing is obvious once you’ve separated the two components, but compared to the typical compression of topics to one-bit for-or-against positions, it’s a huge step up in breaking the trick.

Propagation

Logical systems, by their nature, are broken by just one falsehood, so the trick of the saboteurs is to use the emotional charge of an issue to slip in the logical contradiction. The emotionally implied version of the opponent's view then propagates out to break other parts of the underlying idea landscape.

Of course, there are real correlations between views held across issues, but failing to compartmentalize allows the contagion to spread. An imported moral invective can generate caricatured views of opponents along other dimensions.

Modern spin

BLM

What does “Black Lives Matter” mean?

The trivial hashing function (the literal reading) tells you that supporters believe that the lives of black people matter. Alternative contemporary hash functions pointed the “BLM” label to specific goals like "end police brutality." Simultaneously, BLM was also made to point to the idea "defund the police."

Remarkably, the most surprisingly part of the whole affair was not that defunding the police would likely make majority-black neighborhoods less safe (though, trivially, police brutality would be ended if there were no police).

The most surprising part is that the unspoken part of the literal hashing, black lives matter as much as any other lives, gets you to a statement - All Lives Matter - that BLM true-believers hash to the opposite meaning!

How could you be against Black Lives Mattering? It's anti-democratic to oppose the will of the bolsheviks (majority)!

It's almost cartoonishly simplistic, and yet it weighs down every conversation.

Those who named BLM knew what they were doing.

• The non-trivial hashing of BLM points to empathy for people who have suffered at the hands of bad police (even though police and brutality are nowhere in the name).

  Then the promoters of BLM advocate for positions like defunding the police using the support accrued by those using the non-trivial hash to empathy.

• People who oppose these recommendations (object/ideas) get labeled as opposition at the level of the key, as "anti-BLM."

• Then the same people who use the non-trivial hash function to understand BLM, use the trivial hash function on anti-BLM. They see this confirming their existing belief about their opponents - whom they believe don’t value black lives.

Some supporters get caught up in the rush, but others feel little smug about their branding, all the while hanging onto their uncharitable prejudice.

Leading up to the 2016 democratic primary, Hillary Clinton was bashed for saying "all lives matter." Bernie Sanders said "Black lives matter. White lives matter. Hispanic lives matter" in an interview and was later shouted down at his own rally. They changed their rhetoric.

What does this do? Groups with other afflictions take a different non-trivial interpretation- that saying BLM is intentionally leaving out whether white, Hispanic, etc. lives matter.

The whole thing is gross- intentionally inflammatory and polarizing (sorts people by interpretation). Now, finally the visual with a new question:

Again, the rotated map hides the real landscape of idea space from view. Take a moment to consider- who is this center person?

At the center of the sabotaged spectrum, the distortion is the most severe, projecting good beliefs and terrible ones as coincident. This is even worse when paired with the tendency to view this poorly defined “middle” as typical, as previously illustrated.

Again, this map doesn’t usually exist concretely in mental space, but the diffuse, emotional version and group bias cloud rationality to make your enemy the “other” or an average simpleton.

Anti-fascist

Now, surely most people aren't falling for the same trick of confusing negation at the key and hash level for an organization who puts the negation in the key as literally as the "Anti-Fascist" Antifa?

I wish I had some solid statistics on social media posting during the summer of 2020. Instead, I will just report that I saw Instagram story reposts with the sophistication to explain that anyone anti-"anti-fascist" is a fascist.910 sigh

“Anti” indicates a 180 degree rotation, but you have to be explicit about the axis. Subsequent “anti”s don’t necessarily rotate around the same axis.

Orthogonalism means not being complacent about which axes you rotate about.

In this case, the difference is between rotating to oppose the object held under the new label instead of just taking the opposite of the label.11

It may be illustrative to imagine both interpretations of an anti-antifreeze activist.

Pride

Pride is perhaps the perfect example of the wedge label. Textbook antonym collision.

Again, people often choose to see what they already believe, and only use labels to be more combative.

Liberals take the antonym of "pride" and get to the word "shame." They are proud of supporting people who were made to feel ashamed of themselves.

Conservatives take the antonym of "pride" and get to the virtue of "humility." They see people boasting, and boasting about something which they believe shouldn’t be.

The combativeness of the term is ramped up to draw attention. So, a general question is- who is looking for attention?

Trump

Yeah, that guy is. Trump mastered picking the statements that most acutely divide people. He also balanced which side was doing the trivial and non-trivial hashing to hide this.

Eric Weinstein brilliantly illuminated this by the analogy of a coin landing on its edge, over and over and over again.

In each case, here, you could also interpret alternate hashing or literal vs. implied as the order of the interpretation. 1st order interpretation is the literal meaning, 2nd order is what you get by contextualizing, 3rd order by contextualizing that, and so on.

This interpretation shows why there is confusion about whether Trump is an idiot or an idiot-savante or a savante-idiot-savante and so on.

The term Rorschach Test also pops up a lot, which is a great analogy in that it emphasizes how the ink on the page is the same. Nonetheless, people automatically recognize something in a way that reveals how they think.

I mention all this to say that the examples tabulated above are again just one way of going from first to second order. There is simply no such thing as a complete parsing. Presenting the mechanism and demonstrating a sample of mappings are ways to explain a pattern without claiming to know internal states of mind.

The Trivial Hashing

Technical names

It's not a trivial task to name something well-enough that the trivial hash function tells you what you need to know. This is where we get to the meta problem of this entire essay needing to be hashed as an idea. The maps become too complicated and recursive to untangle.

Here are just a few examples of well-named technical terms

• Pulse width modulation. It could have been called Smoothed Digital Control or Binary Output Weighting, or some other marketing term that isn’t as good.

• Metadata. Data about data.

• Shock Response Spectrum. The distribution of amplitudes of responses to a shock impulse by mode frequency.

• Chicken Noodle Soup. Like it says on the tin.

Working in technical fields, you can get accustomed to the benefits of a concrete space, though science naming can suffer from hieroglyph and saturation problems.12 Acclimating to ubiquitous literal labeling likely elevates susceptibility to deception by mislabeling.

Axis Twisting Arms Race

You are now armed with the familiarity you need to diffuse the traps of mislabeling and axis twisting. The brain is a pattern-matching machine and once you see a new pattern you can spot it other places. However, you don't want to pattern match too strongly since that opposes the compartmentalization necessary to evaluate new or distinct topics in the first place.

Every tool in deception is another round of an evolutionary arms race.13 That is, you can take each concept out another order.

Under damning names like conspiracy, and perhaps some less emotional name, compartmentalization is used as a tool to hide bigger patterns. The arms races of ideas, communication, and deception all continue at many different levels.

Finally, these examples are not perfect, they are chosen datasets that show a way to turn the data and find a very well-fit function. I don't consider this cherry picking, but rather applying the necessary scientific view of attempting to isolate an effect. As previously mentioned, the world is extremely high-dimensional, so there may be other strong explanations. The world is also structured to allow many-step-deep self-reference. The best you can do is to apply the theory to more complicated problems and see what other patterns you can find.

I particularly like the framing of the paired tools to move up and down self-referential systems like orthogonality-mimesis (from my last article), axis hiding, and now compartmentalization-conspiracy.

Theories develop by broader testing, so I'd love to hear about patterns that these tools explain or new tools you discover.14 Fare well, fellow function finders!

x = giganticNDimensionalArray(idea)
antiX = not(x)
antiAntiX = not(y)

12

In exchange for discovering and characterizing a truth of the universe, scientists often get a discovery named after them. I think this is a fair prize, but over time the library of historical terminology without literal verbal ties to the content grows. The problem can certainly end up like the character/hieroglyph memorization problem.

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem has a much better ring to it than Symbolic Recomprehension Proof of the Mutual Exclusivity of Consistency and Completeness

In an early version of this essay’s illustrations I went looking for this type of diagram

I could have hand-drawn, but I knew that this type of graph was common enough to exist in a way that I could make it with a python library, but I couldn't find the name of it to search for it!

I searched for "percent flow graph", "input output graph", "flow splitting graph", and others before switching exclusively to image search and trying "percentage flow graph category" where I scrolled until I found an example of what I needed.

It turns out that it's called a Sankey diagram.

An alternate name is alluvial graph, which does have a literal meaning close to "flow splitting" graph, but scrolling through Google images and letting my eyes do the work to find an example was definitely faster than trying to find “alluvial” in a thesaurus.

Because science does the work of explaining new and often invisible things, I think made up words are difficult to avoid and even warranted, making the names of their discoverers seem more reasonable.

Now I like the term alluvial graph, but either way once you know the term “alluvial” or “Sankey” you can start recombining to name other new things: “Income-Expenditure Sankey diagram”, “Evolutionary alluvial diagram“

Footnote footnote:

• There is one other problem that can arise from naming things after the people who discovered them: Leonhard Euler.
  Honestly, this is ridiculous. Leave something for the rest of us, Leon.

How flattering is it that your aesthetic/functional taste is good enough to delight/help someone?

While your tastes aren't necessarily bad if someone doesn't like something you made for yourself, when people do like your work, that's a pretty strong signal. Beware shaping your tastes based on what you believe others' tastes to be though.1

How humbling is it to realize that your tastes aren't so different from anyone else's?

The act of making the thing is what makes you different, but flip the roles (since you would presumably use the same thing it if someone else made it2) and, just like that, you're part of the masses!

Economics - Asymmetry

At first glance, the situation appears a bit like economic chicken, where you can benefit from waiting for others to do the work.

Of course, value can accrue to the creator in terms of wealth or reputation, but the ratio of value created to value captured varies widely and can be pretty extreme.

Taking the value capture efficiency framing in terms of the consumed value makes it appear that the creator has hugely missed out. The fact that so many people create without material gain is clear evidence of how valuable the act of producing something is.

Thinking about what ratios favor the creator, I thought of the total effort input vs. the effort input of the creator. In a successful company, the founder's work becomes an ever smaller fraction, and yet they keep claim to all of it in some ways. This can be true of artists whose work is imitated, open source coders whose projects grow beyond their initial contribution, educators who inspire others to educate, etc.

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Exemplifying the asymmetries

Here are just a few cases that interested me in how creation and consumption can be so asymmetrical.

Writing and Art

Central to the tension of the value from producing vs. consuming is the fact that consumers rarely have a view into the the production process. While the making of sausage and law may not be great to watch, I wonder how creative producers think and work.

Livestreams sharing the raw process of creating or practicing have grown in popularity, but I honestly don't watch much because it's so drawn out. I would rather learn the takeaways, or if I’m going to spend time learning in real-time, it’s best to be doing the work myself. Also, I can watch highlights of the process of things I’m unlikely to try myself.3 That said, I would love have to watched Escher work start to finish or endlessly doodle, but most of us simply wouldn't be able to spend the time reading Dostoevsky writing Dostoevsky (though now it does sound interesting!).

While it may be useful in most cases that creators do filter to show off their best work, you have to wonder what great work the best artists are filtering out.

If your perfectionism has filtered your output to nothing, then don't fear and create! Produce and filter later! I’m late to publicly posting my writing due to an overloaded undergraduate, though I've been thinking and writing all along. In retrospect, I should have started posting my notes raw or at least some highlights regularly.

Philosophers

Philosophy may be the occupation with the most extreme ratios of public consumption value capture to private production value capture.

A philosopher who writes little and seldom shares their thinking appears to have created and captured no value. But would you criticize someone for reading thoughtfully? Most people's philosophy accrues value only to the individual doing the work in their own mind. Agnes Callard explains that those expecting the field of philosophy to deliver the answers have totally missed the point that this framing clarifies.

Meanwhile, a few philosophers, despite spending their lives writing, spill out and influence the whole world! Some do so after their death when they can no longer capture any of that value. Some do it through their death. Perhaps only one of those was so confident that he had to come back to watch it play out.

Publishing

If the private production value often outweighs the captured consumption value, why share at all?

Of course, publishing your work opens it to criticism that helps you grow, but I’d bet a different factor weighs more. Putting out work lets you take some credit for the work you did. I wonder how much of the personal gain from producing something comes from being externally validated?

I’ve been writing in personal notebooks for ages, and I think I resisted posting publicly to avoid any goal beyond processing my own thinking. The privacy is helpful and quiet progress is satisfying. But now I feel glad to be seeking discourse, curious readers, and the accountability of an external audience. Most of my notes aren't published and likely never will be. Realizing that ideas can do more when activated in more minds is exciting. A company or song or novel acts much less strongly in the world if it lives in only one mind.

If the process is useful, but livestreams are too slow, I imagine a writing timelapse. To watch word by word would be impossible to follow, so an idea level map could guide you along the text itself. I proposed Autolinking to do just this in my first post. With no additional technology, stepping one level out is where every reader resides. Slowly, the evolution of the whole blog is this kind of revealed presentation.

Now seems like a good time to mention that this section so far has been rather conversational and almost livestream-like. Did you make it this far? Did following the mental path teach anything? What is the difference between learning from reading and learning from writing?

Open-Source

This one stands out because it is just so cool. Labor is converted into capital and multiplied indefinitely.

While many a Stack Overflow thread will show the duplicated library thread, it's incredible how well some open-source communities manage to collaborate in making truly giant projects. If you asked each of the individual contributors, many would tell you that it’s chaotic. However, this is true in all human activity of importance.

Thinking about the total value, here’s a very rough estimation from the Linux Foundation from 2008 suggesting that the development cost of Linux up to that point would be $10.8 billion. The total value of the plethora of free software would certainly be underestimated by the production cost due to the enormous userbases.

Comedy

A bit or a joke is funny when you have enough context to understand the references. More references typically make a joke more clever. Everyone knows that jokes are timely, but I’m amazed how well a simple callback lands at the end of a sequence. It shows command, memory, and completes an arc in a way that feels like musical resolution.

A joke can also work when it's something someone wants to hear, but not say. Clearly, the value of production has to be internalized when you risk your image to make people laugh!

The thing that grabs me as strange is what happens when multiple people arrive at the same bit at the same time. This sounds like total overlap of making for yourself and for others. Sometimes a simultaneous arrival makes the joke that much funnier, but I often feel like it’s a catastrophic collision. I wasn't quick enough to get to the end of the line first, and the path clearly wasn't unique enough. This sounds like the quality of a joke is relative to the group, because it is. If you make a surprising connection as a bit and nobody else is surprised by it, people will not be laughing at the bit.

Mimetic Crunch - Optimal Crowding

Much of my thinking, and indeed the title of this blog, comes out of my study of Peter Thiel and his of Rene Girard. Central to the tension of the apparent paradox of this article's subject is the difference between the one who produces the thing and those many who share his/her taste. Why do people have common tastes and yet feel the need to recreate their own versions? Girard hits the bullseye with disquieting precision.

The consumer pleased with a creation feels an honest gratitude and connection with the one who provided it. Then, envy of being that duly appreciated creator wells up. People in need of such a thing imitate each other in their desire to consume the solution, but quickly realize an imitated desire to produce the solution!

Especially among those most able to create an alternative, the smallest differences between their vision and the present solution appear greater and greater. This is especially true while attempting to justify the effort of recreating the solution.

Luckily, we don't all occupy ourselves trying to go out and recreate the newest phones and computers, despite how desirous and socially visible (through no coincidence) they are.

Following this line a ways started to make me appreciate the vast diversity of things that people do spend their lives working on. It’s great that a real diversity of skills and interests keep us from total convergence.

While technology and other sectors of business often flock strongly, the producers are not the main consumers. In this case, consumers benefit from the piling in markets of perfect competition without engaging in the destructive mimetic conflict.

I write to sharpen my thinking, to periodically offload some thinking to make room, but also through a mimetic desire to meaningfully interpret Girard's work.4 Was that part to be said allowed?

To give one more exoteric admission, even with my time reading and studying Thiel and Girard, the idea of mimesis is so totalizing that it still hides in plain sight. I had already written much of this article before acknowledging a sense that this sounded familiar, only to realize that the whole thing was textbook-Girard with a ready moral prescription to the address tension.

Still a concern remains- the natural consequence of pursuing creative differentiation, the high goal of the Orthogonalist - discovering dimensions, inventing basis vectors - is to be ensnared in imitation! Even though Girard’s metaphysical desire jumps up a level to analyze Girard’s analyzers, the commentary can still be meaningful.5 The world of startups isn’t new and yet new startups can have value. We have art that predates history and yet there are masterpieces unmade. So what is at work?

Luckily, even though mimesis always moves up a step up to swallow an invention, orthogonality is on the same footing to sprout a new direction!

So get out and build! Build what you want to see and be glad when others enjoy it. When someone creates what you want, enjoy it and be glad. Orthogonalism is the densest-possible worthwhile field. It gets monotonically denser and yet still has plenty of space. Emulate invention’s excitement!

ORTHOGONALIST

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Yet,

There is a universe to explore.
There are billions of humans whom you could befriend.
There is good to do in the world for our neighbors.
There is joy to find along the road of discovery and invention.

Debate and, frankly, conflict, are part of the intellectual process.
However, while new ideas often oppose existing ones,
the world is not a zero sum game or a linear tug-of-war.

Orthogonalism is the contrarianism of creativity
Half pi turns — not negative signs
Growing the pie and refusing to fight over the crumbs

This is Orthogonalist

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Ordering a set of things is a combinatorial problem. When lining up N elements there are N! permutations to choose from: N! = N(N-1)(N-2)…(1). An essay with 5 main topics has 5!=120 potential orderings. If you look instead at the number of sentences the numbers get gigantic. Most reshuffles of this post’s sentences wouldn’t turn out well.

What’s the big deal, though?

The structure of every thing we interact with shapes our understanding of that thing. Creating linear news stories implies a simple straight line explanation cutting through the events. Independent concepts (scientific, political, personal) can come to be seen as causes and effects if they are presented in a linear format.

While permutations have a completely defined order, combinations radically expand the number of possibilities and allow for groups of topics to sit at the same conceptual level.

The structure of our writing is by default linear, and this implicit structural framework poses a series of limitations that are not immediately obvious because the format is so familiar. In reality, the world is hierarchical, networked, branched, multivariate: 

• Cyclic

• Multivariate

• Networked

• Hierarchical 

  • Branched

  • Tangled

Why Linear? 

Chronology

While a story is chronological, meaning each particular line (ie. a character's experience) is linear, the entire story is really the combination of all of these linear pathways. The pathways overlap and connect in various ways and it is the job of the author to create the story and weave these lines in an interesting way. 

At a level even before writing, sequences of pictures were used to convey meaning. Hieroglyphics and cave paintings are interpreted for sequence even when it's hard to be certain of the order. In modern days, sequential pictographic stories are called comics. These have been studied in detail for their visual narrative structure by cognitive scientist Neil Cohn. Even having a sequence of pictures is not enough to resolve the structure precisely because history or even a single story is not a single narrative thread but many. Cohn elucidates the role of the filmmaker as parsing a linear time in his 2013 paper Visual Narrative Structure: 

Narratives also appear in the visual modality through film. In film, cameras capture events as they unfold in time — just as in perception. This ongoing temporal progression records a single unbounded stream of events from one camera’s viewpoint. Filmmakers then break up this recording into “shots” in the editing process, which combine with other shots to create a novel sequence in which a new temporality emerges (sec. 7.1, paragraph 4)

Cohn goes further to explain that even a single narrative thread can be ambiguous in sequential frames because of the combinatorial possibilities of combining pictures in series or parallel. The serial-parallel dichotomy is the most basic element that makes linearity underpowered for explaining even simple chronological stories without more structure- even before arriving at the problem of limiting the number of “shots” out of practicality. 

Of course, in explicit symbolic writing, it’s possible to denote parallel and serial structures with much greater clarity, but in nearly all writing writers proceed to collapse this structure into a series of paragraphs of sentences. In this format, a segment of a story loses the ability to have structural parallelism because paragraphs of sentences always have just one word following another. This collapse of structure into a crumpled line, a paragraph, is simply a larger linear interrupt than switching to a new sentence with a period. Functional improvements in writing structure have improved more, but the basic technique of paragraph breaks wasn’t really invented until around 900 AD (Johnson, 2015, p. 110)! Poetry has continued to evolve and more recently hypertext has emerged, but most writing is still structured only by a table of contents, paragraph breaks, and periods. Today, writers and readers can choose to break the overly chronological linear paradigm with the help of modern technology. 

Alternate Narrative Timelines

There are many different ways to weave story lines together that aren’t just a close following of one character or chain of events. For instance some authors will write following the perspective of just one character or switch which character to follow in different chapters. However, the bottom line commonality is the fact that the book as presented to readers structures the entire story in a single line. The extreme opposite case is that of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. In this format the actions undertaken by characters depend on the path the reader takes. This is a branching structure and is representative of how events might unfold in reality. Another alternative is a book where chapters that take place at the same time in the story are not necessarily ordered for the reader. That is, the perspectives of different characters could be read within the context of a single storyline as chosen by the author as opposed to a set of many options in the case of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Syllogism

Note: This section was edited to remove my own rather confusing graphics. I’ll eventually return to this topic to try making some clearer visuals of how I imagine stacking syllogistic logic visually (and interactively) from a tabular presentation of a proof.

In scientific writing there's a sense that linearity is inherently connected with logic, however this is a limiting notion since most concepts are multifaceted and branching, requiring multiple premises and lines to converge to a single point. It is critical that there is a direct line from assumptions and axioms to conclusions. However, this is still not strictly linear as many arguments rely on multiple premises that stem from different origins and have a branching structure as well. 

Syllogisms are a particular type of proofs and are often presented in a tabular format. Syllogisms are statements of the properties of items in a set and conditions of set membership.

Especially while going to higher depths of sub-statements in multi-syllogisms, the table needs more and more indenting. However, great visuals of set membership and conditional syllogistic logic are available in the hardcore cousins of Venn diagrams.

A proof may be directed at using just one subsection of these complex inheritance structures. It’s clear how quickly theory space expands as more premises are introduced. Each line of a tabular proof points just towards the final result without commenting on the complexity (necessarily!) left aside.

Technical Concept

Another technical writing area is the presentation of a scientific concept. While scientific concepts still have cause and effect, there are many other aspects to consider in explaining a topic. An equation for instance doesn't have an inherent chronology. Each of the terms stand on their own conceptually, and explaining one after another can imply structure that is not strictly part of the definition. Different terms in an equation may be at one level of a hierarchical structure while the components of those terms have their own meaning. Each subcomponent still has its own origin and derivation or story, and together they have a different total meaning. By writing a scientific paper or textbook or article to describe such a topic in a linear/narrative fashion inherently builds in some order. 

In explaining a technical concept it is good to start from the beginning and the end. This is true from an engagement perspective and theory perspective where it is desirable to capture the fundamentals. This is part of the detailed argument made by David Montanges and his colleagues in a 2022 paper titled Finding your scientific story by writing backwards. A story sounds linear, but the authors give strong framing for how to work from a pile of unstructured data to a coherent argument. This is about producing the best overall linear path through idea space. The author motivates this as follows: “Writing backwards may seem like an odd concept, but it’s not. Think about telling a joke to your friends. Knowing the punchline is essential.” (Montagnes et al., sec. Writing Backward?). A hierarchical breakdown (which the authors promote mapping visually) is ultimately still in service of the global trajectory of the useful takeaways. 

Providing Other Structures

Lectures must be delivered in a single order, but it's important to indicate the structure in the medium through which the information is conveyed as much as possible. This means going beyond the table of contents as the exclusive organizational tool.

Nonlinearity for Learners

An indicator that alternate formats of information are better for communication is the plethora of education research demonstrating different techniques used by students to break information down into smaller parts to reassemble. Most famous among these examples is the Cornell notes system developed by Pauk and Owens in the 1950s (Pauk & Owens, 2010). Cornell notes divide every page in two and encourage a hierarchical and dialectic style that connects the reader. 

Linearity Recast as Cyclic

However it is also the case that writing that is attempting to be presented in an objective manner can become too sterile and categorical. According to Julie Davis, a professor of education at Queensland University of Technology, the view of research as an objective, categorical assessment instead of a linear narrative, weakens the understanding of the analysis provided: “After much anxiety and considerable experimentation, I resolved the problem of `fit' between action research and the traditional thesis format by creating an alternative architecture based on each of the action research cycles.” (Davis, 2007). Although Davis frames this as defecting from the traditional research format, she identifies a new version of linearity that gives new meaning: cycles. The cyclical process is a two-dimensional structure as each pass through the one-dimensional research progression overlaps with the previous cycle. This means that the beginnings of cycles can be mapped to each other, and the cumulative result provides a new collective understanding of a work. Davis also emphasized that this is increasingly enabled by the digital nature of the production of theses. 

Network 

Another information structure is the network. Our modern communication world is defined by the social media networks that exemplify this distributed archetype of information storage. It is not obvious how to extract meaning from a large group of posts based on their time reference and reactions, but the algorithms that recommend this content could actually be said to understand this. New AI models may be able to help sort, visualize, and explain the thinking process or thoughts of a distributed network. It may never be possible to summarize research in a presentable way like this, but utilizing this as data and presenting it in an analogous form instead of an over-compressed linear structure could be highly valuable.

The development of scientific information is a branching, networked structure as alluded to in the Syllogism and Technical Concept sections for problems with linearity. Certain papers create entire branches on the tree of knowledge, while others fill out small details. This was visually demonstrated by one of the premier scientific journals, Nature. For the journal's sesquicentennial, the publication released an amazing, interactive three-dimensional visualization of the graph (web) of citations that connect papers (Gates et al.). This isn’t just interesting to look at. It could be used to look for areas where the branches should reconnect by combining disparate fields. 

Nature publications citation graph. Connections by citation, colored by topic. (Gates et al., 2019)

Enabling New Structures

Technical Limitations and Solutions

In order to facilitate changes in typical writing practices, some researchers advocate moving away from word processing technology that is limiting in this respect. It's easier to sketch alternate kinds of diagrams and information structures on paper with pencil than in a word processor. Although text boxes and columns are supported in word processors, these aren’t the default, are difficult to format and have clunky interfaces. 

To take the perspective of an academic outside of linguistics and computer science, Joo Hee Huh, an academic in the field of design, provides an analysis of the technical limitation. Huh argues that word processors inherently stifle the scope of creative thinking because they assume the structure is just ready to be received. Expanding a web or brainstorming network in Word is difficult. Huh writes in her thesis The Dynamic Interplay between Spatialization of Written Units in Writing Activity and Functions of Tools on the Computer: “The structure is something that needs to be made, thus, it exists as indeterminate and needs to expand. But, it should have a logical order for the argument. I criticize that the space of Microsoft Word, with respect to all those needs, presents novice writers with one simple structure while spatial and mediated activities are essential.” (Huh, 2012, p. 9). I strongly agree with this point and find the freedom of writing anywhere on a paper to brainstorm and structurally separate points to be extremely freeing mentally. 

Some new note-taking tools like Notion and Obsidian support an open canvas architecture where you can insert links, images, videos, tables, or sub-pages anywhere on the screen (Notion). Every paragraph is an entity, not just a particular subset of the linear text. This means that you can drag and drop or collapse a paragraph or link to it from other locations. The intrinsic understanding of informational units and support for building simple hierarchy makes the organization faster and clearer. 

Beauty of Hyperlinks

The earliest great digital tool in enabling more nonlinear writing was the hyperlink. Hyperlinks provide active, recursive, unintrusive connections between concepts and allow for simple expansion of hierarchy all the way to representation of complex network spaces that map high dimensional connections between ideas. Citation of sources is really the key technique of course. Other related techniques include footnotes and endnotes, but bound books, let alone papyrus scrolls, aren’t the most convenient to use with these! Hyperlinks allow for a piece to be written normally/linearly while providing structure and references to external sources in place. These can link to others and inherently represent the branching and networked nature of information. Wikipedia exemplifies the power of this modality and even provides previews of links in-line while reading an article. This greatly amplifies the ability to understand more topics and the network of ideas that make up a complex topic. Other websites are limited in their ability to do this by copyright (while Wikipedia is composed entirely of openly available material). Additionally, most websites have a direct disincentive to providing useful hyperlinks. Specifically, websites are trying to retain you for viewership. 

Beginning as early as the 90s hypertext systems were already evolving around the use cases of scholars and literary fields. Contributions to study in literary fields or Advanced by academics working primarily from hard technical fields. Stephen DeRose is one such computational linguist who advanced these systems, characterized different types of linking in great detail, and identified the applicability of the technology to study in highly text based classics fields in the 1989 ACM conference on Hypertext: 

Research in the humanities, particularly in text-oriented fields such as Classics and Religious Studies, poses particular challenges to hypertext and hypermedia systems. The complex set of primary and secondary documents form an intricate, highly interconnected network, for the representation of which hypertext is ideal. (p. 1)

Now that computers have greatly advanced, the technological limitations identified by DeRose and others are no longer present. This finally will allow for hypertext to achieve its full potential in expanding text into the network that allows writing to carry meaning and why it is often complicated to tease apart. 

Auto-Linking, A Proposal

I would like to return briefly to what I consider the fundamentally strange thing about English (and most languages): the structural connections between words are not drawn out. Sentences follow a format that includes consistent elements like subject and predicate, nesting elements like objects, and a hierarchical structure. This structure is drawn out for instructional purposes at times, but never reappears in “real life.” I was unable to find academic studies regarding the benefits of including this highlighting/diagramming, but I have to imagine that it could be a help, perhaps for those with dyslexia. One answer for the absence is that it would be time consuming to produce. However, powerful software tools have been developed to parse language like the Stanford Parser from Stanford University (The Stanford NLP Group). Other tools built on top of this model allow for active highlighting of the parser’s breakdown. While this tool was methodically developed from English grammar rules, new systems like OpenAI’s GPT models have learned the English language by digitized osmosis (OpenAI, 2023). 

To create a truly structural writing tool, I would build on top of the base of something like Notion/Obsidian for the construction of paragraphs as entities (Paragraphs remain an effectively-sized chunk/idea and would be the smallest unit of purely linear content). The key addition is a parser that highlights not the connections within a sentence, but the ideographic connections between paragraphs arranged in space (like the Nature citation graph or Stanford Parser output scaled up). This addresses the limitation of hyperlinks that is that they don’t show you where you are going in relation to where you are coming from. I call this technique Ideographic Auto-Parsing and would like to develop this as a technology after graduation. 

There is a huge amount more to discuss in the matter of nonlinear writing in poetry, code, song, and more. Even in this essay I was limited to heading hierarchy as my primary nonlinear tool. I would also have liked to put the sub-headers on truly equal footing instead of choosing an order for them at all. I intend to keep developing this idea and plan to release a new incarnation of this blog in a way that uses all the techniques here more. For now, you can already go out and use the tools of nonlinear writing to report events more honestly, explain complex concepts more clearly, and understand the world more deeply. 

Bibliography

Cohn, N. (2013). Visual Narrative Structure. Cognitive Science, 37(3), 413–452. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12016

Davis, J. M. (2007). Rethinking the architecture: An action researcher’s resolution to writing and presenting their thesis. Action Research, 5(2), 181–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750307077322

DeRose, S. (1989). Expanding the notion of links. Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia: Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Hypertext, 249–257. https://doi.org/10.1145/74224.74245

Gates, A. E., Ke, Q., Varol, O., & Barabási, A. (2019). Nature’s reach: narrow work has broad impact. Nature, 575(7781), 32–34. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03308-7

Huh, J. H. (2012). The Dynamic Interplay between Spatialization of Written Units in Writing Activity and Functions of Tools on the Computer (Order No. 3520852). Available from ProQuest One Academic. (1034721600). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/dynamic-interplay-between-spatialization-written/docview/1034721600/se-2

Johnson, G. M. (2015). The Invention of Reading and the Evolution of Text. Journal of Literacy and Technology, Volume 16, Number 1: May 2015. http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/uploads/1/3/6/8/136889/jlt_v16_1_johnson.pdf

Montagnes, D.J.S., Montagnes, E.I. & Yang, Z. Finding your scientific story by writing backwards. Mar Life Sci Technol 4, 1–9 (2022). https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.purdue.edu/10.1007/s42995-021-00120-z

Notion. (n.d.). What is Notion? Notion. https://www.notion.so/help/guides/what-is-notion

OpenAI. (2023). GPT-4. https://openai.com/product/gpt-4

Pauk, W., & Owens, R. J. (2010). How to Study in College. Cengage Learning.

The Stanford NLP Group. (n.d.). https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/stanford-dependencies.html

T. Piesk. Syllogism. (2023, August 1). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#/media/File:Modus_Baroco.svg

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