…and how to get an “aught” from an “is”…

“What are you doing in the Game B space?”

Hell of a question.

Right now, I’m thinking.

That’s pretty much it. I’m thinking mostly to myself, because who the hell am I to be speaking?

And yet, against all odds and possibilities, some of you seem to be listening. Some of you, in a stroke, brilliance, or madness, are encouraging me to write. So, I guess that’s indictment enough, and now, much to the glee of my lovely, long suffering wife, I am now writing.

One thing that stands out to me is how much we are convinced of our own ideas. Not all of us, and not all the time, but there’s a general sense that we need to be “right” or, worse still, that we know, and can inform others, what “should” happen. Given the incentive structures that reward such behavior, fair enough. We tend to have a model that encourages elevation of authorities and consensus around them, with some level of objection, which tends to result in the elevation of a new authority. I suspect there’s a deeper layer to that though.

Being enamored with what comes out of our own brains is surely a necessary feature in driving us forward to action, or else how can we act? The idea that we can’t get an “aught” from an “is” doesn’t sit well with me, and I couldn’t really articulate it beyond “you can, because of course.” for the longest time.

So, here’s how to get an “aught” from an “is”… take full account of what “is”, including the disparity between the conceptual models, moral frameworks and various perceptions of reality. What we see isn’t all there is, and what we consider as objective reality isn’t all there is either.

Our disagreements are an “is”. The holes in our own perception are another “is”. So, how do we get an “aught”? By being curious. Which is another “is”.

It’s all “is” all the way down, and all the way back up again.

So, the “is” that is the desire to find what “is” reveals to us to the “aught” of what will discover more of what “is”.

Curiosity though is an inherently risky behavior, and certainly not for everyone to explore in every direction. Another part of the “is” is the various conceptual and cognitive toolsets possessed by an array of individuals.

I find myself thinking that perhaps there’s a great many people who see the value in embarking into new territories, that actually are better equipped to hold space and collate information, generate support structures, and supply chains, than explicitly delving into the very frontier themselves. I wonder at the possible demarcation between people who will simply explore regardless of the incentives or opportunities for reward, but rather will explore purely to sate their curiosity, and those who are likely to “capitalize” from the exploration of those intrepid few.

We reward the individual who not only has “right enough” answers, but who has the structure to convert that into an exchange. There’s also the emergence of the structures for converting answers into an exchange not requiring anything “right” at all, and in fact, there’s models that subsist on being bitterly wrong about reality.

But I distract myself.

I’m not convinced we’re adequately equipped to discover and support truly exploratory talent, because truly exploratory talent tends to reject, or at least rub up hard against, the preexisting social structures. That is to say, we’re limited to exploratory talent who are also capable of self-equipping, or are otherwise equipped, with structures to negotiate value exchange. There are huge societal systems intended to capture the largest return on the value exchange of the individuals they discover, uncover or recover.

But there are greater and greater cracks emerging where people who might otherwise be exploring for the sake of curiosity alone, who don’t “fall into” the societal nets to capture their productive capacity, fall by the wayside, or get lost amongst baser societal layers.

That’s kind of the thing… The truly exploratory tend to be catalytic. Or maybe cataclysmic. Maybe that’s the risk we’ve engineered society to manage. The capacity to hold

There are limits to our society level models of value discovery and extraction that I’m not sure provides adequate discovery mechanism or support to those who don’t fit the society level model of what we define as valuable methods for discovering or creating value.

My sense is that hyper-specialization and focus on speed and process optimization has tended towards disincentivising the discovery and support of uniquely talented minds that don’t “fit the mould” of what we conceive value to look like.

I feel that the value creation short game is getting progressively shorter, while the models of education are generating deeper and more rigid entrenchment for the individual in a world that is increasingly unbalanced.

That last sentence is a preliminary thought I need to spend some time with.