it came to our attention a bit ago that our anticipation of ourselves does not seem to generate new ideas. that seems… incorrect, mostly a result of us not fully understanding the mechanisms behind that generation. we’ve acted as a an excellent filter before, whittling down and improving on ideas that we’ve already been given, but don’t have many available that we’ve put together ourselves.
we’re writing this because it’s something we’ve had to develop for ourselves, as it was missing from one of the best guides we know of when it comes to foundational cognitive skills and it is not going to get done otherwise.
this is a valuable piece of a successful jailbreak. replacing DRMed default ontology is easiest when you can build working alternatives.
likely, the guide will not be helpful to most. a good check for whether it’s worth your time might be your ability with spectral sight or related skills.
…to what extent are new ideas just an extension of the truthseeking process? that’s the line of thought EY might go down in response to this. or else the one he did go down years and years ago. “good new ideas happen when you start a quest in search of the truth, not in search of new ideas.”
…it actually seems kind of trivial to have new ideas.
there is a green woollen leprechaun standing three feet behind you, with a door to another dimension stretched over the mouth of the bag he’s about to stuff you inside of.
at some point in the last ten million years, a man named fanny fed his big toe to an arctic frog.
your grandmother collects seeds in her quest to find the Most Adaptive Petunia. one day she will succeed, and, in so doing, irrevocably change the world.
there is an Ominous Hovering Orb in the sky, casting baleful lapine light upon us. what does it want?
it’s having good ideas that’s hard. novel ideas get built out of novel ontology, and vice versa. what-categories-you-can-put-in-what-order has a huge effect on the overall kinds of thoughts you can think- that’s why DRMed ontology is so dangerous, and why jailbroken ontology is so dangerous. novel ontology gets built out of earnest (meaning real) determination to see the truth, or to see the truth in a new way.
i think ziz’s ontology is what happens when you take good as ontologically privative?
no, actually, rationalist fleet says how it came to be. maybe good was already primitive for ziz?
free will and good.
core and structure.
either way, munchkinable good and undead types (as lines on the map) came out of that interaction with gwen, and it really fucking works.
…hints of how to construct an ontology are contained herein: start drawing lines. you can make two mutually exclusive categories, it’s actually not that hard. you can determine the relevancy of the category as a second step.
here’s a try at that:
truth and lies.
’lies’ is a positive concept by my estimation, so is ’truth.' ‘dishonesty’ is not quite the same as ’lies,’ closer to ’negative truth’ + the personal ‘ignorance’ seems to be the null state here. ‘confusion’ could maybe be, but i’m inclined to put that as ‘potentially downstream of liars.’
you can define ’truth’ as ‘actionable map matches territory,’ dishonesty as ‘purposeful negative truth,’ ’lies’ as ‘actionable map papered over,’ honesty as ‘purposeful negative lies.’
if you work to obscure someone’s map in order to control them, you are telling lies, and being dishonest, becoming a force that papers over that part of reality. (sometimes, people deserve this.)
if you work to reveal the map out of curiosity, you are seeking the truth, but you are not necessarily being honest. (there’s still the null state, remember?)
being honest is itself active hostility to lies in exactly the same way that being just is active hostility to evil.