Sorted

Steps toward a better society

I have been thinking about the subject of the new sorting out of society, and this is the longish essay in which I will try to communicate all of that to you. For your information, I am, according to Peter Limberg, a sorter.

Jordan Peterson is the common denominator of these two tribes. One of the most important figures in Culture War 2.0, his central message emphasizes free speech and the importance of truth-speaking. His following of mostly young men, which we dub the Sorters, are attracted to Peterson’s style and message of personal responsibility. The “Intellectual Dark Web,” coined by Eric Weinstein, consists of thinkers who have experienced what they view as thought-policing by politically correct elements of the left. With the ever-increasing popularity of Peterson’s brand and related platforms such as Quillette, the Rubin Report, and the Joe Rogan Experience, watch for both of these tribes to gain members and make a strong push for a return to a classically liberal center in our culture.

That’s over-broad but somewhat close. I basically put up with about 3 of JPs podcasts since 2019 and I never bothered with his third book. But the following remains consistent:

• Label = Sorters

• Telos = Aim towards the highest good

• Sacred Values = Free Speech, Responsibility, Truth

• Master Status = Individual

• Existential Threats = Loss of Free Speech

• Combattants = SJA, #MeToo

• Campfire = Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Campuses

• Chieftains = Jordan Peterson

• Mental Models = dominance hierarchies, Sort Yourself Out, Meta-Hero

• Forebears = Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Piaget

Maybe I’m not exactly a Sorter, because those mental models mean very little to me. Plus, you know, Substack. I don’t know if it’s reasonable to assume that Limberg et. al, will care to update his rubric, but the culture wars continue. For me, the only reason I have use for the label of Sorters is that the existential threat is what angles me to have any sort of political opinion whatsoever. The rest is engineering of that thing I expect to help build and watch people come. That thing will help people sort their way out of the narrow political boxes and mutually exclusive tribes that today’s social media accentuates. In other words, today’s campfires mostly suck.

So to be fair to Limberg, I’m somewhere in a triangulation between {Sorters, Rationalist Diaspora, Intellectual Dark Web} none of which seem to care a whit about religion which I do in fact. Nevertheless, this is a job for AI and there’s got to be at least 15 tribes in every nation with a culture war. The important question for me is the political threshold. We’ll get back to that.

The AI Driven Sorting Hat
Most of us are familiar with the whole Harry Potter universe. There are four sorts of goodies and one sort of baddies. The Muggles don’t particularly count because they are ultimately at the whim of whomever wins the battle. The baddies of course are the legions of Dark Wizards held in thrall by Voldemort. The sorts of goodies go through Hogwarts in one of four houses: Slytherin, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. We presume that the other dozen wizarding schools on the planet have their own selection of houses, but I guess that’s for the AIs too. The point is that we opportunist / heroic types like Harry are likely to be sorted into Slytherin or Gryffindor. Boffins are off to Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff produces the likes of Florence Nightingale.

When I put in my work as a raceman, I am likely to argue that oh miracle of miracles, Amazon doesn’t ask your race but figures 1000 ways to Sunday what you want to buy. It has done so worldwide and changed the way we live for the better. On the other hand, racial identity has remained the same clutch of superstitions the NYT is proud to say hasn’t changed since the 17th century and what good is that? If you don’t like Amazon, understand that there’s database tech behind it and like those systems your banker, travel agent, family doctor, insurance agent, employer, university and Apple Watch use that keep track of all your personal information. Your race is just one bean of info in a barrel.

As a data engineer, I was truly surprised that banks and insurance companies sat on their asses and did nothing before the likes of Google and Facebook came along and sucked all of the identity oxygen out of the interwebz. I thought for sure that the kind of skepticism ordinary people had about e-commerce in the late 90s would have banks and insurance companies compete for becoming the personal information brokers of choice. I figured it would be a slam dunk for them to say “Who would you rather trust State Farm or Google?” By 2008 that window of opportunity slammed shut, and just as nobody had the gonadal fortitude to ringfence bad banks, nobody has what it takes to take back the public’s private information from the likes of Instagram. I’ll be able to direct you to some proof of this when I do some more hanging out with the punks of 2600.la but in the meantime you can take my word for it and just be skeptical.

There’s a lot of talk about Web 3.0 and I think there’s reason to be sanguine about various aspects of it with regard to personal privacy. I hope to help you understand your options. Consider the following matrix. It’s all politics. How are you actually sorted into these 36 buckets?

How might you change over time? What would that mean, practically speaking? Where would you hang out in your city to be among friends? These are the kinds of sorts that AI could assist you with, presumably with the kind of accuracy the data you would hand over to the perfect data trustee. Who is the perfect data trustee? You are. But right now a cluster of laws and terms of service prevent you from knowing what data is collected about you. All of our data today goes into the equivalent of an online roach motel. Facebook will tell you what picture you took 9 years ago today but only when they feel like it.

The Lorite Interrogator
The Lorites were mythical monks who studied and navigated every philosophy known to their species. They were with philosophy where we are with the periodic table of elements. There is nothing more. Everything you think is a combination of these philosophical elements some of which are radioactive and have ridiculously short half-lives. Some are stable for eons. Some are plentiful and worthless. Some are rare and precious and particularly useful, even irreplaceable in certain applications.

The Lorite Interrogator is a proposed system that will ask millions of humans millions of questions and determine, in the known universe of philosophies, which people sort into which general frameworks. The political rubric above is an example of a selection of ‘molecules’ that are comprised of philosophical ‘elements’. The chemistry of human thought will be complex in many cases, but determining the elements and their frequency in people is the primary aim of the Interrogator. Of course it is helpful for people who are interrogated to understand what they might think under certain situations - and where their contradictions lie. But first the machine has to get a good grasp of what’s out there before it begins making predictions. Ultimately the interaction should be good for the machine’s understanding and the individual’s understanding.

This kind of sorting can answer the question: What would MLK say about Malcolm X? Which would help people know whether they are more King or X, or we could throw Ghandi and Bose into the same formulation.

I think people should have these kinds of mental models known to themselves with some level of confidence. There is, from my perspective, a huge market in the West for practical self-knowledge. If I were to be the Elon Musk of this area of expertise, then I would perhaps be putting legions of psychologists at risk in the long term. But a Lorite system would be expensive up front with years of working out kinks. I’ll certainly need psychological experts to help the startup.

But that’s the idea. Let’s get sorted.

Here are some links:

• Climate Tribal Sorting

• Peter Limberg

• Memetic Tribes of the Culture Wars