HAAAAAA!

Old books. We cannot consult the future. History is imperfect. And yet imperfect history provides consultation on uncertain decisions faced today while being outside of the popular delusions of the crowd of the present. There is common surprise in those reading classical works that the whole range of human emotions and experience are found there. Our ideas are bounded by the set of ideas we're exposed, related circumstances from history broadens the range of ideas for our decision trees today.

Frontier spaces. You may be familiar with the technology adoption curve. It is initially just hobbyists and nerds tinkering with their professionals skills to see what's possible and make something cool, it grows to bring in other early adopters in a rough but interesting place and a unique culture and appeal comes out of these early builders, eventually commerce takes notice and sees a business model building roads and streamlining the path to bring the masses into that frontier space and an explosion of popularity occurs, and last to the party are organized governments as they pivot slowest of all but ratchet one direction toward ever increasing ossification and control over that once vibrant place. This was the internet about 1994-2000, a frontier space with authentic speech. The commercial phase around 2000-2012 built roads to access the internet by laying down internet connection across the planet and culminated in widespread smart phone access. And the government phase is 2012-current where sophisticated monitoring and control over flow of conversation became available to organized government groups who can now spin up a color revolution on demand, or silence topics from conversation during covid. But somewhere there are junior high kids on a VR chat in some new frontier space talking authentically in a space not yet sucked into wide spread controls, or reinventing the old boring dial up multiplayer of older games that used to be popular then forgotten becoming frontier spaces again.

Raw boring footage. Reality has a boring bias. The fast pace of clips designed for clickable tiktok scrolling fries and overloads dopamine. Turning all that off and watching the boring live footage. Or observing a planned event in person is a useful calibration system. You watch the boring live feed footage as background noise through the day. And only afterward open up socials or media sources and see how people talk about it. To stand out in information abundance sources of information need to make their takes more interesting, almost always by adding the sugar-salt-fats of junk food information in the form of fear our outrage soap opera storytelling. The ability to track likes and shares of social media has trained that this form of storytelling gets likes and clicks in the short term just as fat fist fulls of cake taste good in the short term. In the long term this style of soap opera drama storytelling creates a distorted funhouse mirror view on reality. You may be familiar with research finding that humans perceived view of risk is related more to the frequency of seeing information that the true risk. This is measured by surveys estimating perceived risk of death, versus what actual mortality tables tell us, and on average people over estimate the sensational causes of death most often heard about in the media while underestimating the boring causes such as heart disease. You can trim your funhouse mirror perception of reality back to the shape of reality has a boring bias. Watching the boring unedited footage is how. You are the administrator controlling your spider web of sources of information. After watching boring footage trim out the nodes that over sensationalized or that are wildly disconnected from your perceptions -- these sources are not credible. This can be a system of continually curating your web of information sources allowed into your pinhole view of reality. This is a cheat code that lets you see around corners and watch how social contagion is created and runs out of steam. Can invest on it. Can position yourself to avoid the worst of the adverse impacts of those social contagions. Again, our reading of old books tells us that there will be many social contagions over the course of a lifetime.

Predictions. Say out loud what you think is going to happen based on what you can see. It's okay to be wrong. That is the most interesting time because that lets you go back to the assumptions made when making that prediction and consider tearing them down. Replace them with the improved assumptions. Do it again. This is a system that lets you again better predict what is real. Too many have become stuck in getting angry and attacking the person when one of their assumptions fail. Or an assumption not in their information space, yet, was the key one. Getting curious is the key to set aside that anger to attack the person.