The Examined Life

Sorting oneself into a distributed community.

If you press me hard enough, my soft inner filling oozes out, like honey from a plastic bear. That’s a sentence it takes a human to interpret, but not really for long. The bots are coming and there is a tremendous amount of capital their implementors are going to have to recover, what with all of the new data centers and high priced Genius they’ll have to pay.

In the meantime, there are interesting humans to meet. But are we really interesting, or do we live in ill-defined bubbles? I got out of politics because I believed that partisans are captured and they seek to capture all thought. They resist and resent discovery because discovery always breaks the party line. The party line is little more than a planned verbal economy because of our congressional duopoly and their obsession with controlling the Overton Window. We don’t even call it public opinion any longer. Sadly most Americans know exactly how to tell if you are Red or Blue. I’ve been promising, but lately I have been building a solution. Check it out.

Got To Find My People
This is exactly what it seems to be, it is the result of me going through five sections of questions aimed at my opinions on my Edification, Philosophical, Political, Religious and Societal views. It aligns me ancient wisdom or not. It turns out, that the answers I provided on the first try put me in contradiction with St Paul and much alignment with Confucius. Imagine my surprise. There are some fairly sophisticated guts in the algorithms for this but that’s not the point. The point is that I can now curate my understanding and see if I am being consistent with regard to my deeply held principles and observe the alignment of tribes I want to fit in.

This kind of assessment is like nothing I’ve ever seen. No enneagram, Myers-Briggs, horoscope or political alignment quadrant has ever looked or felt like this. I expect this to go a little bit viral, but who knows. I should have a working model available to the public by the end of September, and all of you will be invited to a private beta in a few weeks.

The Lorite Interrogator
The original Lorites were a fictional group of monastical clerics who believed that there were no new ideas under the sun. They are taken from the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson, one of my most favorite of his novels. I have sent off a request to Mr Stephenson’s publicist in Hollywood to make sure it’s OK to use the name. No matter what it’s eventually called, I believe it’s the antidote to 23 And Me as well as Google Ads.

One tries to catalog us by genetics, another tries via consumer demographics. Obviously there’s money in that, just as there is, as the current President demonstrates, plenty of money in marketing political merch. My new website is not so much about money as it is about helping you in finding words to describe how you really think and what you actually believe apart from the monetizations of social media and performative productions.

Ultimately, what I want to see are self-sovereign individual identities that can be trusted by the public. I understand how much young people in search of soulmates are focused on that chase. But is Tinder really telling you the most important things about yourself? How do you examine the real you? What are you when you change? What are going to be the things that challenge your beliefs the most? How can you manage all that while your self, your identity remains the same? Or do you? We’re allowing for epiphanies too. You are in that way a Ship of Theseus, sometimes with an intellectual makeover. That certainly happened to me.

Self-Sovereign Identity
Just like there is a SSN associated with you, you probably have Google mail as well. The best little app in the world for me used to be something called Keybase. I still love it but this personal thing about how I think never had a reference. There was never enough information I could place about me in that place. But it did and still does have the advantage of being cryptographically relevant. I feel comfortable putting information out there in the corner of my world. There should be secure ways to send messages to me as well as to my agents. So one of my longer term goals is to make PGP easily usable for ordinary folks.

This will all be joined up with the Circle Protocol and almost completely round out the Logos Project. At the rate I am developing the pieces and parts, I should have a lot of it working fully by this time next year.

The vision is that ordinary and extraordinary people will have a new way to recognize who they are, refine and redefine their online identities, control proxies of themselves which have specific permissions to engage on their behalf, and curate circles of trust with people and institutions that they do trust. In addition there will be ways for you to vote multidimensionally on the next generation of social media which will be chock full of bots who won’t be able to pretend to be your friend (or will at your discretion).

I think the above profile will be preferable to this one below, but this one below has, as I mentioned, the cryptosecure backends necessary. These are the elements of the Logos network. I expect a great number of ethical people will find it quite attractive.

Limberg Memetics, Peasants & Yokels
While the main part is just about ready, I still haven’t added Plato, Aristotle or several others including those I find particularly objectionable myself, particularly the French postmodernists. So I may have overloaded my favorite minds and left my adversaries with no subtle distinctions. That will be adjusted.

In addition there will be supplementary surveys for those of use who continuously examine and re-examine ourselves. That would include my favorite socials compiled by Peter Limberg whose 2018 Memetic Tribes was a serious gobsmack for me. Naturally I will also include Peasant Theory questions which would include (for now) Cosmo vs Yokel, Aspirational Class vs Perceived Class, and some grounding about how you see Rulers, Geniuses and Peasants. Each of these are more tribal sorters which are different markers.

I expect in the future I really want to dig down into some cosmology and theology. As I mentioned on this week’s podcast, I have never given much thought to Calvinism, for example but their ideas about the afterlife are quite intriguing. I also recognize that there are significant schisms in Buddhism. I’d certainly like to investigate various sectarian diversities. I’d wager that people would be very interested in the ‘big topics’ like sexual ethics, birth control, eugenics etc, and all of the martial topics. Plus I think something about physicality in general is warranted, feeding my hobby horse about the people who use the term ‘sportsball’. We could certainly get into diet stuff, but I will just need to be open to feedback.

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It bears saying that the Lorite Interrogator is provocative, and its counterpart WWID is evocative. WWID (what would I do?) is a great deal more personal because it will ask people to generate the questions and answers. Those will go into a big bucket and it will spit them out randomly for others to answer or not. I will certainly seek psychological guidance on that part whereas I would seek historical guidance on the Lorite. Both aim for clarity, not judgement. Both aim to be longitudinal so that you can come back and see if you’ve wavered. It is likely that I will spew out prompts that you can feed your favorite AIs so that they get to know you better whether or not you decide to share data generated from any Logos project.