The Arena: Rise, Gamer [1 ed.]

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Agitproper

The Arena: Rise, Gamer by Ray Doraisamy is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

in memory of

Anthony Kirk Gaden

Abandoning every ounce of common sense and any trace of doubt, you lunge onto a stage of harrowing landscapes and veiled abysses. Your new environment rejects you with lava pits and atmospheric hazards as legions of foes surround you, testing the gut reaction that brought you here in the first place. Your purpose is unknown. Your only company, a mantra: FIGHT OR BE FINISHED. - Quake III: Arena

1: Press Any Key to Start........................................................8 1.1 Games Seen As Vice.................................................9 1.2 Games As Constrained Life...................................10 1.3 Gaming Is A Way to Lose.......................................11 1.4 You Need Ways to Lose .........................................14 2: Untapped Power...............................................................19 2.1 Lots of Choices Make it Hard to Choose...............20 2.2 Moderation Hides Your Power..............................20 2.3 Trained to Forget Your Wants...............................24 2.4 Overcontrol Has a Price.........................................27 2.5 Games Showed You What You Want....................30 3: Experimentation..............................................................35 3.1 Doing What You Want Gives You Energy.............36 3.2 Games Cross-Train the Meta-Skill.......................38 3.3 Test Your Environment..........................................43 3.4 Look For Small Feedback Loops...........................45 3.5 Follow Energy..........................................................52 3.6 You Are The Game..................................................53 4: Gold, Prestige, Piety.........................................................56 4.1 Many Games Are Agent-Based Models................56 4.2 Wealth is Well-Being..............................................59 4.3 Thing-Rich, People Poor........................................61 4.4 Play Your Own Game..............................................63

5: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! ......................................78 5.1 Life is Full With Conflict........................................79 5.2 Play More, Spectate Less........................................83 5.3 Remember What You Live For...............................87 5.4 Love the Fight, Fight to Love.................................89 5.5 You Can Always Move Something.........................90 6: Looking For Group...........................................................96 6.1 Winning Is Social....................................................96 6.2 Life is a Team Game...............................................98 6.3 People Are a Key to Winning...............................100 6.4 Invite People to Play.............................................102 6.5 More Energy, More Pain......................................104 6.6 Let Your Team Change You.................................106 7: GO GO GO! ......................................................................114

Notes to 1: Press Any Key to Start....................................120 Notes to 2: Untapped Power..............................................125 Notes to 3: Experimentation............................................135 Notes to 4: Gold, Prestige, Piety........................................145 Notes to 5: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! ....................150 Notes to 6: LFG...................................................................158

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When I was a child, there was a time when I was at a waterpark. I was waiting to go to the top of a very tall slide. My hands got so sweaty. Every step going up, my head felt lighter. My stomach felt like it was turning upside down. I thought I might throw up. It was like anything could happen up there. I didn't know what was going to happen, I had never been that high before. Right near the top, I couldn’t move. So I turned around. I went down. Many of the other children and a few of the grown people laughed at me, as they should. Laughing at people is one way of showing people that maybe there isn't much to be afraid of. Besides the fear that comes from thinking that you're supposed to know what will happen next. It's one way of showing someone that things are okay, because things are funny. A similar kind of thing happened when I tried to go in deep water, even though I was shown how to move in water from before I can remember. Even though I lived on land that had water all around it, and smelled the water every day I woke up, I would not go into deep water. Then one day, someone who was like another father to me pushed me into deep water. As it turned out, I could swim. After that, I did not let my fears stop me from being in deep water ever again. Later, I was in a very tall place where we were learning how to jump. We were learning to jump in case we ever had to jump off a plane. That time, I felt everything I felt when I was younger, but it did not stop me. I jumped, because I was joining a group of people who might have to do anything to get what their land wanted- such as jump off a plane.

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After that, every time I saw a fear, I took it as a sign that it was time to jump. Now, when I feel fear like that, I know it as life shifting in the body, getting ready for me to make a move. Getting ready for me to play a part of the game that I've never played before. I remember when I would have played any game. It just had to be there. Even better if it was there but I was told not to play it. How would the game change me? What were they so scared of? I had to know. Maybe it was also because gaming was not all over the place, when I first started. It was 1995. Most people in Malaysia did not have computers at home, but my family had one. We got internet pretty soon after. There were places you could go to where you could put money in a box to play a game, but my parents thought those were places where bad people were. Besides, they did not have a computer for games, they had a computer for work. So playing a game was something we were full of thanks for.

Games Seen As Vice When our parents found that we all liked to play games, they did not know what to do. They felt like they must do something. What could playing games do to us? They said we could not play more than two hours every week, or until we finished our work, or until we cleaned the floor, or only on days where people did not have to go to school. They said we could only play games about cars or animals, but not about fighting or life. Because they tried so hard to stop us from playing games, we only wanted to play games more. Our parents tried to save us from games. What were they stopping us from finding, in those games? Whenever we could find a way to get around them stopping us, we played games. We played any game we could.

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Whenever I found myself looking at a starting screen, it was easy to start playing, to press any key to start. There was no worry about whether this was going to be the best use of my time, or whether this game was going to produce the most fun. In a household that did not have television access, any TV show I came across was something I would watch. Learning to improvise antennas out of wire when my parents were away, I would watch whatever was on. We didn't have a Netflix catalog back then, or Hulu or DisneyPlus or the many choices we have for entertainment now. So, there was never a question of sitting down and being lost. No wondering which path to take. No freezing on the cold anxiety of choosing. There was no choice (just whatever was on, whatever was available). I simply played. Today, each decision to play a game is an extremely deliberate choice. Will it serve your current purpose? Will it help you on your path, whatever that path is? Will it get you laid? Will it get you a promotion? Will it stop climate change? Will it get you recognition and respect outside of the game? Will it help malnourished children thousands of miles away survive malaria? Will it get you more Likes? Will it help make sure there are more women graduate students in STEM next year? Will it get you belonging?

Games Are Constrained Life Maybe you remember a time when a game you were playing stopped being fun. You get to the end, you get closer to the top, and the game doesn't have as much to give you any more. It was more than ten years of gaming before that started happening to me with every game. I spent so much of my earlier years looking and fighting for time to game.

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When I finally started controlling what I did with my time, I used a lot of it to play games. I played a lot of competitive multiplayer games. Whatever the build of the week, whatever the meta of the month was, it wasn't quite enough. I needed more and more complexity. How could I play my own game? Within these games, I couldn't just win in the same way everyone else did, I had to come up with new ways to win. Ways that used as much of my attention as possible. When I could have played a part that only allowed for a few decisions, I chose more. I did whatever it took to complicate things for myself. Added more and more complexity to my playstyle until I would be doing things like juggling sixteen keys, when I could have settled for four. Which meant I just had to get a Razer Naga. Each game seemed to lack something, some sort of detail, but I always thought maybe next month, next year, some team would finally get it: some team would finally solve game design. There was a sense in which it was an enclosure, as all games are. Once I learned everything I wanted to learn from that constrained arena, something in me yearned for more. Then the game was over for me. It was time to find a new game, a better game, a game with more complexity, a game with more features, better physics models, better trade mechanics, dynamic player-controlled territoriality, more intricate crafting options, more connection between the actions of the people playing the game and the environment of the game. Don't give me a preset series of responses! Which is why multiplayer competitive games were where it was at: the human element was ever present.

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It was always building on itself in a way that no game designer could ever predict. Those games worked for me until they, too, were not enough. It began to dawn on me that I was looking for something else. I was looking for something grander (even grander than a Paradox Interactive game). Something bigger: THE GRANDEST GAME. THE GAME OF LIFE. In the 2010s, there were promises of virtual reality and haptic feedback in limbs designed for paraplegics. Vests designed for blind people. Treadmills connected to games. Wouldn't it be just nice to have a game environment that allows you to use your full body? It only took a couple of years between that desire and realizing that the game was always available to me. The grand game was always available. I could hop in whenever I wanted. Any time I was playing another game within it, the bigger game was still going on. While gaming had given me fine motor control of the fingers, I had let everything else atrophy. My body was a controller I was not familiar with. I began learning it, driven by the promise of an extended lifespan. The promise suggested you needed a solid human relationship network and a fit body to live a longer life. In games, other players often tell you what builds to avoid in the beginning and what strategies won't work. As people hone strategy to a few approved strategies and tell you about the many ways you can't win, the only value I could think of was avoiding bad outcomes. I started playing a game of avoiding death. As if it could be avoided. The whole joy of playing a game is that you do not know what the outcome will be. If you wanted to know the outcome, you would probably get better entertainment out of experiencing a story that you have already experienced. Rereading a book, watching your favorite movie again.

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If you want to be a spectator, if you want to be on the sidelines, you can do that at any time. Now more easily than ever before. But you don't play a game to be a spectator. You press any key to start playing and playing involves winning and losing. Playing involves rejection. Playing involves pain. You've seen, you've been the guy who slams the keyboard or throws the controller away. If you've been gaming for a long time, if you've ever played a multiplayer PVP game, you felt the desire. In your frustration, in your anger. The pain of a possible future getting snuffed out. A future in which you are on top, slipping away. We play to dance with the pain of that uncertainty.

Gaming is A Way to Lose The rise of gaming coincides with the rise of having no way to lose. Losing, after all, is a little simulated death. A particular narrative, a want, a desire, a thought is snuffed out, just as surely as we will be snuffed out. In the past, your play was to prepare for a greater environment that will eventually kill you. You can see this in animals who are playing, especially when they're younger. It's easier to detect in mammals. Given our relation to those puppies, those baby cheetahs, it's easier to see how they’re preparing to fight to stay inside a hierarchy and to hunt outside of it. Jaguars in the wild often play with prey before killing them without eating them. This introduces them to some of the uncertainty in the environment. By dancing with uncertainty, they prepare themselves for surprise in the future. We have a clue about this in the work of DeepMind and OpenAI. As they train algorithms to play games, they find it useful to employ some form of self-play. A constraint for that AI to learn from. It fights itself, it competes against itself.

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It plays with itself until it gets better, until it hones its game. This only happens well when you have some element of uncertainty. Some unforeseen circumstance to test yourself against. In the modern history of martial arts, many martial arts were reduced to the best moves by the best masters, builds, and strategies. So students would repeat these moves and they would stay in lineages. Over time, these traditional martial arts lost their combat effectiveness because the fundamental difficulty of conflict is the chaos it brings. The fast exchange of information that occurs in violence is unpredictable. A fundamental difficulty of surviving in an everchanging, ever-expanding environment is uncertainty. The chaos of dealing with change. So to produce a little bit of that uncertainty on our own terms, we play. We play to dance with death.

You Need Ways to Lose Who's on top now? Is it me? Is it you? If we predetermined this, we won’t know how to deal with the transition between the difference in status. Say some puppies decided each playfight beforehand. One day, when the one who's used to being on top is on the bottom, or the one that's used to being on the bottom is on top and it is life or death, in or out of the pack, they will not know what to do. The puppies will not know how to react to that uncertainty. They will be more likely to get sick, to be banished as a pack animal. To die sooner rather than later. Play is constant negotiation, just as conflict is constant negotiation. Because no one fully knows what is happening. You need to exchange information quickly to deal with that lack of knowledge.

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We think of the grave as separate from play today, but there are clues in our language, in our old stories, of how they were once considered the same- just as tiger cubs play to prepare for a grave endeavor. Swordplay, after all, is called 'sword-play'. We play to learn. Information increases with every second. The environment is getting bigger, the universe is expanding. You don't know what's going to come. It’s true civilization built our environment to be very stable. As we learned, we learned the best strategies for defeating our environment. For controlling it, for limiting the world to only the parts we want most. Now imagine a game that you play where each challenge is similarly understood, digested, and memorized. By the time you play it for the two thousandth time, you have mastered it. Korean gamers call that Goinmul: stagnant water. Do you get the same joy out of playing that game for the ten thousandth time? Maybe if you’re a speedrunner, but even then, speedrunners need the race. So too in our relation to the rest of the environment. As we turned worn paths into asphalt, as we turned forests into fields of wheat and rice, as we turned thousands of species into a handful, we reduced the complexity of our immediate environment. The uncertainty is still there, of course. Lurking in the corner, and bigger than ever the more we fight it. We ignore it anyway, pretend like it's not there. Hopefully it'll be someone else's problem, long after we're dead. Maybe we never have to face it. With an attitude like that, it became difficult to lose. In the past, if you reached the age of forty, you probably outlived many people. We get a clue for that in the etymology of the word 'expert', which hints at someone who has survived. Someone who has experienced.

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The experimental experience of living, this experience of remaining when others leave is valuable because most babies died. Most pregnancies were miscarriages. Most infants did not live to see their fortieth birthday. The very act of surviving was difficult. Getting food out of the environment. Living another day despite predators, floods, disease, earthquakes, storms, famines, raids, and rival tribe members. You could trip from stepping in the wrong hole, break your leg, and die from an infection. In that place, living was enough of a win to justify your existence. Life was enough. Outliving was enough of an accomplishment. Living is still winning today, even if that accomplishment is hidden from us. We hide death. We hide war. We hide suffering as much as we can, in the sense of physical suffering. With that, there is no way to justify our lives from living alone. The models we have now of what it means to succeed are separated from survival. To succeed is to follow those who survived. Take their place on their climb as they fall by the wayside and die. It only feels like an accomplishment to climb when the climb is difficult. We know if something is difficult if few people know that it is possible. Or when people start dying more quickly than they already are. If someone on your climb were to replace a difficult cliff face with an elevator, suddenly, it doesn't seem like as much of an accomplishment. Suddenly, you might wonder why you're here. What made you so special compared to the billions of people in history? To the billions of living beings who fight to live every day? Why is it so easy for us? What are we supposed to do with being on top? So we find games, we play games. To find a little more of that possibility of dying. To play with death itself. To simulate the process of survival that we seem disconnected from today.

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Experiencing tens of thousands of teensy little brushes with death. Most of us don't have to hunt, forage, or move long distances to live. Many of us who know how to do those things simply choose to do them as hobbies. Now you have to pay money. It's often a loss financially, just to hunt. We seek ways to lose. We seek ways to experience the uncertainty of change in the only place we made it safe to lose: GAMES. Just like playing as a child and playing as an animal prepares you for the uncertainty of a changing environment, playing games prepares you for life. We have more choices than ever before. All those choices make it hard to make a decision. Without a decision, it is hard to move. Without movement, we freeze. Freezing, we experience anxiety, frustration, and resentment. It's difficult to stop deliberating between choices and simply move, to finally go down the slide, and jump into the sea. To press any key to start, you still have to press a key and to that I say: I will push you as I was pushed into the sea. I am writing this now, in your past. I have survived. I will survive a little more yet. You will survive a little more yet. Jump, because you are more adaptable than you know. The time to play is Now. You won't stop taking in information until you die. You have exactly the information you need to start playing the grandest game. You might tell yourself you need the perfect build. You may think you need to read more guides. Maybe the guides tell you need more skill or resources to play. Maybe they say you have to go to school to make the movie you want to make. You might think that to play the game you really want to play, you will need a two million dollar lab. The support of the Vice President of your State Bar Foundation's Board of Trustees. Approval from the one Professor you really admired and looked up to. Perhaps a mommy goth gf who will never leave you.

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Definitely your preferred political party in charge of everything and 25 times your annual spending in financial investments. Or maybe it's the permission of your neighbor Bill, or 'just' a belt-fed, gas-operated medium machine gun chambered for 7.62x51mm NATO cartridges. You might be told that the real game is a career as a salaried worker. You need this or that to keep you safe and alive before you can go play. Whatever it is you want to play, you can play now. Go. PLAY.

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2: UNTAPPED POWER -----------------------------------You have much untapped power. Do you even realize your potential? -Jon Irenicus, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn

Power is ability. How at home you are in your world. Whether you can if you want to. Can you? You are able to feel this when you can do what you want. Doing what you want takes trusting what you want. We often hide this from ourselves. A habit of distrusting our wants. If you made it clear to yourself, you wouldn't be able to hide what you want from others. When they know what you want, they could use that information to stop you. To control you. What if it’s Wrong to want that? So you try not to want what you want. You try to want what you're supposed to want. Chances are, you learned how to hide this. As you hid what you wanted from yourself, it became more difficult to do what you wanted. In those places, life is draining. A lot of hard work just to live.

Lots of Choices Make it Hard to Choose Every step you take, you're presented with thousands of choices and a sense you might be missing out on a possible future. Pursuing an empty strategy. As if you’re using a nerfed playstyle. Like fighters in D&D 3.5, the UMP in CounterStrike Source, or Techies in DotA 2 6.81b. You worry what you're doing might be bad. A future in which you're shunned, banished, or dead. So every step, you might question yourself. Probably you were taught that answers came from books and your teachers, rather than you.

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All questions of worth, of your worth, make it difficult to play. Hard expectations from everyone else in the world and yourself make it difficult to play. There is a sense in which you have a great capacity that is not fully used. Absolutely true. We have gotten here with the aid of extreme specialization. In smaller populations, you might do lots of things to live, but you're told to stay in your lane now. It’s hard to find someone dedicated to making houses in a society with a population under five thousand. Maybe when it's time to repair a roof, or build a shelter, you call on your family and friends. There's not as many people dedicated to hunting, it’s just something you do for food. There's no dedicated factory making tools, you make your own tools. This has changed. Slowly then suddenly, in the last couple thousand years. We are in more specialized niches. Where, instead of doing many things, you might find yourself doing one thing over and over again. Easier for the guy who makes a knife to make many knives, instead of taking time between knifemaking to hunt, fish, trap, pluck, or sew. This goes to new extremes. We live in a society that requires specialist certifications for just about anything, including, in some areas, to cut hair or own a television. In those places, you are told you need permission from a group of people whose specialization is telling you what you can and cannot do.

Moderation Hides Your Power Imagine a group of moderators in a game who have not worked on or played that game, whose only job is to moderate. Such people might want you to ask for their permission just to groom- an activity that is key to social cohesion across mammalian species.

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You might find yourself in a situation where you're doing a few things every day, when, as a general intelligence, you may feel you're capable of doing many more things. Yet you might stick to the few things, and avoid doing many things. Part of what keeps you in your lane is a sense of right and wrong. A sense of what's appropriate and inappropriate for you to do. If you want what everyone should want, a moderator might tell you, then it is best to concentrate: to focus on one thing. Yet the meaning of the word 'focus' comes from a word for fire- from the hearth in a home. Do you get fired up to do just a few things every day? Some people do, and that's beautiful, but if you need something like amphetamines to do those few things, it's a solid clue that you want to do many more things. In artificial intelligence discussions, people talk about the difference between general AIs and tool AIs. A tool AI is an AI designed to fulfill a specific pre-planned function. To do one or a few things, without its own agency. Yet to solve problems in a changing environment, it becomes important to bring in learning from other contexts to inform the process of solving the problem. Then, it is useful for something that is designed to solve one problem to be able to figure out how to solve many different kinds of problems. You know how you might specialize in a particular character role or playstyle? Gamers play all the roles and playstyles to understand the game. Even sticking to one playstyle in competition, playing the other roles builds knowledge of the game. That's useful in life, too. But in life, we often ignore the other roles. Our thought leaders, celebrities, and teachers may have told us it doesn’t pay, so we don’t try the other roles. We might call other roles "Unproductive". Every time something is made, it goes through thousands of hands. There are natural bottlenecks.

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Just as when you are hiking, and people start and stop and start and stop. Everyone in the line moves at different paces, because you're all different sizes with different speeds and rhythms. Just like that, you might be constantly telling yourself to hurry up or slow down. Or wondering if you are on the right path. Wondering if what you’re doing will result in the winning combination you feel you need to belong in society. All this selection happens in repeated messages like 'this is wrong', 'this is bad', 'this is a waste of my time', or 'this is evil'. It selects for extremely good specialists. That's not necessarily what you'd need for life if you were alone, or even in a smaller population. Air needs to come in and go out. Blood needs to go round and round. You need water. Food. Protection from the elements. These are all the things you need to be whole. Once we've adjusted to a higher, more complex baseline of expectations, it's easy to lose sight of the fundamentals. As we forget the fundamentals, we start to slip. We put too much weight into every movement, so it becomes more and more difficult to find balance. Then there's a dramatic moment, a tipping point. A seemingly sudden collapse. We might curse, cry, and shut down in panic at the shock of it. Yet the little clues of what was happening were there all along. Like when your mouse is moving further and further along the pad until it comes off the pad in a crucial moment. You miss the shot and then maybe you get mad at your teammates for not being at the right place at the right time, using the wrong ability, or being too casual. If you're like most of us, from a young age, you were trained to only want a few things. Sit in a classroom all day. Listen to an authority about when you can go to the bathroom, what to think about, and what subjects are useful for your own good or for the good of your family.

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By repeating the same lesson every day, we learned to be passive. We learned to shave away what we wanted, in favor of what we were supposed to want. People who lived very far away from us decided what our lanes would be, and we learned to stay in them. The distance makes it almost impossible for them to know you, so how would they know what's best for you? They try their best, but their best does not account for you. You are told what is important and what is not important. What is real and what is not real. What exists and doesn’t exist. What Good and Evil is. Over time, we've changed words. Measures often replace the purpose of a measure to mean other things. ‘Wealth’ becomes ‘money’. ‘Success’ becomes ‘scoring well on a test’. ‘Reality’ becomes ‘what we want you to see’. Thousands of years of psychological warfare will do that. Work and play were separated, in slavery and later through industrial management styles. The separation between work, or making things, and play (consider a skilled potterare they not playing with clay?) only happens when there is someone to answer to beyond your mere survival. A tax collector, a priest, a prince. We have many of them in our own minds, parts of us that police our every thought and action. As surely as a wheat farmer weeds out their fields. This inhibition usually justifies itself in terms of selecting the most stable paths for you to follow to get the things you want. It has given us everything we enjoy now, but it also has a price. Awareness of the price gives us awareness of other ways of being. It gives us a chance to play a different game, rather than being stuck in one game. We made belonging conditional, and used that to build civilization. This gave us many things. We built many things, we've become bigger than ever before as a species. Our rise was meteoric. But there is a price. As with everything, nothing is free.

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As in, nothing stands out without somehow being connected to something else. If we were able to split our universe in that way, well, you wouldn't even be able to perceive something out of your own existence. If there was an alternate universe, you wouldn't be able to reach it. Objectivity claims to have a world that is somehow accessible outside of your perception, but there is no practical way to reach it without your perception. Living as we do in our bodies, we have no such access to the objective world, and will never have direct access, beyond the access we already have. The very nature of experiencing requires us to create our perception, so the game of appealing to some sort of objectivity is usually a method to get hundreds of millions of people to coordinate. Try telling someone to do something without being drastically higher in a hierarchy than them. There'll usually be some sort of resentment. So we use Reason. If we can explain why it's important to do something, authority can be shifted from your authority to "simply the way things are". The way of Heaven, God, or science. The expertise of a particular professional guild. Just how things work. It's very difficult to explain to every single person, when you're dealing with lots and lots of people.

Trained to Forget Your Wants Let's say I told you that you need to wear socks on your boots. That sounds ridiculous! Then I tell you we might be tracked by people who want to hurt us. If there are many, many people, you may put on a show to demonstrate that wearing socks on your boots makes it a lot harder for someone to follow you.

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However, maybe it would take a little longer to convince them that there are people who would hurt them. Without trust, it would take a long time to transfer that information. When that happens, we might appeal to a mutually-trusted authority. Do it because I said so, do it because God said so, do it because your nation needs you, do it because it's objectively Good. This last one is a way to appeal to some ideal. The last great method to get people to do things might have been ‘because God said so’, but 'because it's objectively Good' is even better. It can be applied in contexts where God is not present, irrelevant, or simply different. All these mimic what parents do. We do it to create our present according to our expectations. It's difficult to give people proper reasons when we don’t know why. We know a lot less than we think we know. And so there are many things that we do without knowing. There is some leap of faith going on. And if you think you know how to walk, well, can you program a robot to walk? By that method, we might find very quickly that we actually don't know many things enough to explain them. There are context-specific tasks that we seem to know. But a lot of times we don't even know why they work, or how to explain why they work. So we tell a story. When we're dealing with lots and lots and lots of people, we need some authority that will work with lots and lots of people. We try and derive an acknowledged source of power. Whatever allows you to do what you do. Perhaps the Way of nature, as in something a Taoist, or many animists might say. Later a God or a powerful ancestor, because what you came from does give you your ability. And then later still, some sort of monotheistic God. Whatever the ultimate source of power is, you can always appeal to that authority. Eventually we bind together a gigantic population and start making machines.

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Both gave us an edge in wars against other tribes. Keep in mind that this global tribe is just one giant mega tribe. Thinking in terms of objects gave our people a lot of advantages. When we subjugated others with our technology, we decided that's where power came from. We often appeal to that authority now. Truth, science, reason. Another benefit of not claiming your power for yourself is in how relationships change. How we use relationships to form coalitions to influence how we move as a collective. Among many social mammals, the strongest animal in the group is often viewed as a threat. They might dominate the other animals around them through force. So, animals form coalitions to keep power in the hands of a few instead of one. These dynamics mean that you generally want to attribute what you can do to other people. In many small-scale societies, if you are a hunter, and you hunt really well, you may want to give your best meats to your people. Other people would make fun of you, because they don't want you to become full of yourself. When you forget you depend on others, you might act in ways they can't predict. Some sort of tyranny, or simply introducing lots of change. More change than the collective is currently able to accept. Defensively, it's useful to appeal to another authority. Which is why every major state has some sort of state religion. A series of repeating static rituals to solidify where the power is, where the power comes from. Whenever anyone gets too uppity, and starts to challenge that, an appeal to a preferred authority can be used against people who are not fully approved of. We repeat all these dynamics in ourselves. We notice when we might be taking paths that lead us to a different game. We stop becoming too dominant because if we're too dominant, others may punish us for it. Or we'll be left alone, with no one. A terrible punishment all by itself, to a social animal.

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It's not very fun for most people to play against someone who is so much better than them. They'll often come up with all sorts of excuses not to. Even if it's skill, they will claim it's cheating. The game is unfair. And that's all just from giant asymmetries in power. As a winner, you might tone it down a bit. Stay in a sweet spot, so others you're playing with can play longer. In a learning context, people often do this to teach. In fact, it's one of the best ways to learn a combat sport- sparring with someone who's much better than you, but who can nonetheless lower their speed and explosiveness to be just shy of where you are. You can learn slowly as you play with them. Subconsciously sensing all these dynamics, you may find yourself in cycles of pretending you don't know what you want. So much so that you actually forget what you want. You stop doing what you want. The gap between a desire, a thought, a want, and you playing with it, or you letting it flow freely in your expression, in your everyday life, is hindered. You lose a sense of life.

Overcontrol Has a Price You might have heard of Christopher Alexander, who introduced the concept of a timeless way of building. Its really just a retelling of the Dao De Jing, but applied to architecture. He popularized a concept of flow. Designing buildings which fit with how people want to live. From this, some architects started looking at desire-paths. When designing paths for a campus, they first let students find their own paths between buildings. When paths were made by foot traffic, they paved the paths. They saw how people moved before deciding where they would move. This kind of path design is present in many things. In martial arts, we call it Aliveness.

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This is the magic ingredient some martial arts maintained and others didn't. The difference between a combat sport and a martial art is whether there's an Alive element or not. An element of sparring where anyone can win or lose. Somewhere people can explore. You get to see surprising things work, as people innovate. The bigger the group that brings life to the activity together, the more information is exchanged. The more everyone learns. The more people play together, the more innovation there is. We mimic the process of evolution through cultural evolution. So, with ourselves individually. We might have gotten used to defining paths beforehand, instead of playing with life, instead of letting our creative activities flow. We were in built environments that had specific plans for the way we should go. You are rewarded and punished, ever since you're an infant, if you're like most people. If you've gone to school, read a textbook, been to church, been in touch with any institution, you've been told not to do many things. When you attempt a new way, that other way is not approved. You reflect that in your own mind. To prevent other people from punishing you tomorrow, you punish yourself today. Through that selection, you try to come up with exactly what they want. This is the same way we might take a fertile area and uproot all the trees and bushes and rocks and things that we don't really want, and turn it into a single field. We do that, we try to do that with a lot of constant effort within ourselves. In growing plants, doing such a thing changes the ecosystem to make it simpler. The more control we exercise, the more control we need to carry on. The toil of inhibition sets you up against the environment of your mind, which is much harder than working within the ecosystem. Every second spent fighting yourself is a second you could spend winning the game you want to play.

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Constantly weeding thoughts comes from thinking some thoughts are good and others are bad. All this weeding results in a mental soil that is less fertile than one which can use everything. These words are not an accident. Look at the history of the word ‘genius’, and find something like 'fertility'. All these ways to control life make it more difficult for us to reflect life. So, your untapped power is hidden in the many things you are urged to do every day that you stop yourself from doing. Connections declared relevant or irrelevant, real and unreal. Existence and non-existence. Right and wrong. Through inhibition and overcontrol, you stop yourself from fully expressing yourself. When you let everything flourish, power flows through you. You become more generative. Fertile. Virile. Beware the trap of trying to inhibit inhibition, since any inhibition is inhibition. The act of letting go, of simply letting things be, is not something you can really do. You, the part of you that you likely identify with, the part of you that controls things, the parts of you that likes to control things, might try to inhibit inhibition in this way. I know I certainly do, I try all the time. But as Yoda says, "there is no try, there is only do". Toil creates a lot of tension and rigidity, which results in a lot of things breaking. As things constantly break, you experience surprise and that surprise, because you don't expect a surprise, often results in pain. A little punishment, a little price you make yourself pay for not delivering the exact play style of your favorite winner.

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Games Showed You What You Want Look closely at winners. You will notice most consistent winners don't purely follow previous masters or schoolsthey do their own thing. An amalgam of everyone that came before. The Renaissance men of the past were constantly flowing. Those people were really innovative because they spent so much time playing. You might notice the father of information theory spent a lot of time making things in his home and playing around with them. He wasn't necessarily just trying to publish paper after paper, as a modern scientist might try to do. As you play, things are created as side effects. Things are accomplished, seemingly by themselves. Something thinks. Something punches. It happens with our effort or not. This is where you can find much of your untapped power. And I'm saying this sort of simply, but the process of you being able to let go easily, if you're anything like me, is pretty hard. I've personally found I need to come up against very hard problems to let myself actually let go. Take paths that might seem like total failure, that seem like utter madness. Let yourself consider things that people might not consider. In that loss, in that surrender, there is creativity. There is power, there is confidence. In the sport of grappling, I've been submitted thousands of times in the space of a little under two years. Submission becomes a habit. You begin to realize what your limits actually are. Today, we might think of going to an Ivy League school and getting a job with a large and competitively successful corporation as something hard that you might do. That's very effortful, very straining on your mind. Those things are not uncertain. There is a path, you can see thousands of strategies out there for how to do those things, which means it's settled territory.

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You're not actually going to put yourself in a situation to be creative, to surrender. This is where we get back to doing what you want. How do we start right now? Every game you've played is a clue. Especially when you were younger, you played without a mind to judgment. Those experiences give you clues about what you want. Whether you were a treasure hunter, a wizard, or a prince, what you chose in an RPG gives you clues about what you would choose now. There is a way to be a rogue today. You can express the spirit of what you expressed in the game. For example, just like a rogue, you could be a physical penetration tester. There's probably something similar in your everyday life you could start doing now. If you enjoyed being a ranger in a game, you could learn to track animals. There are many paths in this world where people and animals leave marks as they move. You can listen to the birds. Squirrels. Rats. Notice what you're doing, what they're doing there is communicating. They have a baseline behavior. Paying attention gives you clues about your environment. You might think, if you were a samurai in a game, that you can't be a samurai now. Well, Historical European Martial Arts exists, as does Kendo. You might have tried those arts, but felt like they're not really applicable to the world around you. Or you might have thought it was only applicable to business, failing to understand the context of where that spirit comes from. As in quoting Musashi or the Bushido Code without having felt what it is like to be surprised by a thinking opponent. Without feeling what happens when you move without complete commitment to your motion. Someone who embraces those words without playing with where they came from loses the power behind those words. It is useful to use the experience of warriors as analogy. Get even more out of it by literally picking up a sword and learning to play with it.

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Try to understand the person who wrote those words. See what happens when someone else is trying to cut you. That brings a richness to the legacy, the legacy of what it means to be a samurai. What you learned in games will transfer more easily after that. The archetype is something you can access. You created it in your mind to play the game, you played around with it. That is a source of power for you. What you did in the game is relevant to chopping vegetables, finding a date, preparing for a party, or getting elected to your local community board. You lost many times, but you persevered. You looked for new angles. You tried things and tried again when they failed. Everything you've ever done is used as training data to inform everything you're currently doing. In the same way machine learning allows algorithms to learn from all sorts of data, to then use in different contexts. You do this everyday. The only thing that stops you from fully using all your information with all your new contexts is your inhibition. Because what you do might be too unpredictable for the collective you are part of. It will introduce much uncertainty, in the same way a chair designed by an optimization algorithm might be too upsetting for someone expecting an IKEA JOKKMOKK chair. However, the fact that I wrote this, the fact you are reading this, is proof that the collective wants your chaos now. It needs more comfort with uncertainty, because things are changing very rapidly. They're changing more rapidly than ever before. We need to be ready for that. So the games you played in the past offer you clues about what you want. You might think that's a lot of things. That's a lot of archetypes. That's a lot of trips. That's a lot of life paths. There are no neat ways I can simply live the game role today. I can't just go and be Robin Hood in Sherwood forest (as in the game Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood), sure.

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That uncertainty, that complexity is the hard problem: how to take everything you've ever experienced, how to take all the skills you have (and you have many more than you know) and use them to do the one thing and that one thing is right Now. What can you use? For Now? You're already using everything. Simply stop compartmentalizing. Let yourself flow.

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TIP: Pick a game you have many fond memories of. Which role delighted you most? How are you already living that role right now? What would that game character do in your life right now? For example, if you enjoyed the game Witcher 3, ask: What Would Geralt Do if he was in your body, with your skills, in your environment?

HINT: Both YouTube and Reddit are good places to start searching for groups of people who really enjoy learning a particular skill. If a skill seems too expensive, there's usually a simpler version of it. Consider paper robotics instead of robotics, rabbitsticks instead of bows, BeepBox instead of Ableton Live.

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3: EXPERIMENTATION -----------------------------------We not only want you to appreciate the variety and depth of our mechanics, but also enjoy the spirit of experimentation and discovery at the heart of Goonstation. Obviously, you can't experiment if you have no clue if a mechanic works in the first place, so you have to start somewhere. Good newbie jobs provide that start; they should be simple to pick up, so you aren't too overwhelmed and can ease into more complicated mechanics, and lowconsequence, so you aren't too discouraged by failures and can easily try again. -Getting Started, Space Station 13 Wiki

So you begin to get clues about what you want, after sifting through everyone else's wants. Other wants build your wants, because their particular niches of want partially define your want. The territory and feeding habits of all the other animals in an environment determine a particular animal's niche and behavior. Everyone else's wants inform yours. How do we figure out what is most important to us, instead of what is most important to our herd? You might find there's something you can give them that no one else can.

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Doing What You Want Gives You Energy Let’s imagine there's a limited amount of energy in a game. You want to distribute energy to all the parts, all the agents in your game. How would you do it? You might set up some sort of game within the game which demonstrates that those agents will make the best use of their energy. Energy they will contribute to the bigger game. You might set up a competition. Applying energy to a competition and winning is one way to show that energy is used well. In evolution, many things are repurposed to save energy while continuing growth. This is how fins become limbs and vice versa. What is there is used to serve whatever current method of survival best fits you. The interplay between your niche, what you have, and your environment shows you what is best for you to do. Play is a sort of flow. This is something revealed in the game of Improv. Without more time and resources spent on planning a possible future, you adapt to whatever is currently going on. Whatever is currently going on includes whatever you have in you. Leftover impulses for action, something you might call ‘karma’ in Indian religion. Through improvisation, leftover actions are executed. Exchanging with other people in play, you access the flow of energy more easily. In play, you can find what you want. By looking at what flows easily, you find where you can get energy from. The sum of all your wants, thoughts, desires, fears, etc, has a flow to it. The sum of all your experiences drives you somewhere, like a river raging downstream. If you take all your experiences and join them together, they reveal what you want. ‘Untapped Power’ was about how you might think only part of what you want is what you want. Where you might identify with one part, instead of listening to all of you.

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Imagine your mind as a gaming clan. In such a situation, you usually want to listen to everyone about what they want and watch what they’re doing to see where the clan is going. If instead you selected one person, and assumed their preferences are everyone's preferences, then that's sort of what's happening here. We often identify with the standard imposed by whatever has exercised the most power in us. Whether that's something from your teachers, older peers, bosses, people on TV, journalists, or whatever. We get the standard from them, of what game is best to play. Then you play their game instead of your game. We go after someone else’s goal. The goal is the expected outcome- the next meeting, the next raise, the next new car. We jump between the expected outcome and the chaos of the environment, until we find something that looks more like the expected outcome. This is how a lot of things are invented. It's how problems are solved. Trial and error with a standard to match. The standard being your expectation. So maybe you come to figure out what you actually want. See what gives you energy as you do it, rather than what takes energy. Pushing yourself to do hard work for the sake of having the status given to a hard worker causes tension and maybe drains your energy. Usually a sign of repression. When you try to fit an image of success, you never fully express yourself. You never fully tap into all the energy you have available. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, as they say. So too, in nature. Acting with the rest of your environment instead of against it, you will feel like you are surfing a wave. Momentum. It will be hard to stop. You can use this to gauge whether or not you are doing what you want. This may seem as impossible a standard as every other standard.

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Notice that standards given to you are typically impossible, but they're viewed as somehow more realistic. The standards of your preferred group appear more realistic. They're what once worked best to keep that group together. However, things change.

Games Cross-Train the Meta-Skill So you are probably in another period of friction between a standard which applied to one situation, and a standard that applies now. An unknown new standard. You might have to come up with a new standard. You might have to notice what you want. Once you're in the habit of doing this, you might think, "well, I kind of know what I want, but I don't know how to get it". That's where experimentation comes in. Experimentation in the form of play. We might associate experimentation with scientists in lab coats. That history is from people playing with very, very tiny things. It looks serious because the smaller something is, the more attention you have to hold to manipulate it. The more you have to pay attention to a single area, the more it causes a sort of rigidity. We often interpret rigidity as seriousness. At its best, experimentation comes from play. If you're playing while dancing, you're distributing your weight across the ground in different ways, ways you might not have before. And you are enjoying the feeling of noticing how that feels. The novelty of it, as you move back and forth. And you are changing your movements based on what you find, the trial and error of your oscillations. So to access all that pent up information, the data that you got from a lifetime of play, you usually have to release your hold on the compartmentalization we are taught to apply.

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Put yourself in a situation where you can benefit from cross-training, and realize that every second you spent playing games was a form of cross-training. You may have heard of the 'Bus factor', where one person getting hit by a bus would end an organization’s project. The higher the Bus factor, the more the team is crosstrained, so the less affected it is by someone in the team getting hit by a bus. The same principle holds in the military, except much more strongly, since it's inevitable for someone to go down in a combat zone. When I was a medic, the point was not necessarily to respond individually, with hands on every single patient, but to train up everyone else around me to be able to do my job. In a major emergency, all I'd have to do is direct everyone else as they were treating patients. Then, I was free to take a step back and make decisions about who to treat first and how quickly to move them, rather than focusing on particular treatments. Accordingly, it was important to train as many other people (whose occupation was not 'medic') as possible. In a military context, you're always thinking 'what happens when I die?'. Are my people going to be able to carry on, to finish the mission if I die? So it emphasizes cross-training. You want everyone to be able to do everyone else's job, ideally, so that when the bullets start flying, the shit hits the fan, everyone, any single person, can step up and take over when enough specialists have died. This principle of crosstraining is valuable elsewhere as well. In our economy, we are incentivized to ignore our abilities. To stay in our lane. To pretend like we cannot learn what everyone else is doing, if we don't have the authority to do so.

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Given the slow decline of old religion, we've come to respect the authority of money more than most things. The pursuit of money says that specialization is to be pursued at all costs. So if you're not a doctor, or a sociologist, then you probably shouldn't say anything about what doctors or sociologists do. And you definitely should not engage in doing what they do. But that's not how we work. We are generally intelligent creatures. Our intelligence is designed to be adaptable, as surely as evolution repurposes. Innovation comes from repurposing past innovations. So we, too, are well suited to repurposing all the information we've gained to use in the current moment. You may have heard about the fallibility of memory. Against an object of what happened at a certain point in time, that is true. Our memories are notoriously unreal, unreliable. However, they are useful for crafting the narrative needed to perform a task in the present. They are repurposed. Past data is used to do whatever you need to do now to live. You're probably familiar with the cycle of getting good at a game, only to have the rules of the game change. Catching up to the new meta every other month. When you go from game to game (if you've played enough games), there is a meta-logic to games. There are constraints when you're dealing with programs and human nature. What a computer can do, and what various operating systems allow. What infrastructure for the internet allows. Within all those constraints, there are common patterns. General principles. A few things that don’t change. Physicists look for what doesn’t change about the universe. Gamers find what doesn’t change across games. While some people might be extremely good at playing one game and specializing in it, they usually don't have quite as much ability as someone who's played many games.

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Even if someone is a professional StarCraft player, they've probably played other games. Within their game, they have to familiarize themselves with various maps and modes. Even if they specialize in one mode on one map, they benefit from being exposed to the uncertainty of being in an unfamiliar situation. Whether that’s by playing with different players from different cultures, using constraints that limit the number or type of resources they can use, or exploring different game modes. When a new game starts, there's usually a group of people at the beginning that do pretty well. While the game is new to them, they have played similar games. And they've played many of them. All that playing revealed meta-strategies available in all games. You have this awareness, you have this ability to detach into a meta mode. Whenever you play a game, you can take a moment at any time to sit back, consider the design of the game, the motives of the people who are designing the game, the other players in the game, and the structure of the game. You strategize. You figure out “okay, if an AoE spell works in this particular way, that means it might probably work in this other way that I've seen in this other game”. You find patterns to exploit. The ability to take a step back to consider the design and structure of the game is incredibly valuable. In our meatspace games of dating, work, family, business, neighborhood, city, and country, a lot of people have trouble taking a meta view. As a gamer, you have this. You've been used to looking for the meta so many times that somewhere inside, you know exactly how to do it. You know what the feeling is, you know how to dislodge yourself from the particular context of these constraints and the dynamics within these constraints.

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To look at them, to feel what they're like, even as other people are completely engrossed in their tiny part of the game. Though when you are playing a game, you have to be completely engrossed in it. There's a look, by some people, at the influence of bodily movement when gaming. When I was younger, I used to look down on people who did that, who moved with what was happening in the game, as if they didn't understand it was just a game. Professional gamers who wiggle back and forth do better than people who don’t wiggle. And that might be because of entrainment, or the joint attention between the player and the task. When you lose yourself in the task, the task is more likely to flow. When you lose yourself in the game, that's when you play at your best. In fighting, it hurts to think. Once you get into competition with more ego in the game, speed is of the utmost importance. You cannot afford to think- you have to lose yourself in play. So too with any task. There comes a moment where you are like the strategizers and engineers in a Formula One race. You're stepping back. Looking at the track, other racers, the race itself, the rules of the game, and the vehicles. You strategize for the next time your racer takes off, so that you can deliver that information. Once the racer is racing, the racer has to do nothing but race. Between races and laps, the team can strategize. Building toward the performance of the next race. This combination is often a winning one. In the past, many people had no ability to do this. We were bound by our cultures. Wherever we were, we did not see the rules of the game. We did not understand the meta behind the game, because we were lost in playing our parts. This was good because we played our parts well.

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Test Your Environment The sudden rise in the capacity of human communication changed things. The rapid mixture between many cultures, between many games, let us see more of the rules of each game. You become aware of other games. You could play other games. Entirely different games. This is often greeted with anxiety and depression. Suddenly, you're not doing well at whatever game you were playing. You are no longer lost in it. A lot of observations have been made about this. Nietzche, Borges, The Wizard of Oz, Baudrillard, The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Free Guy. All of these deal with the anxiety behind realizing the constraints of your game. The vertigo that comes from knowing you can step sideways. The pain of the freedom of being able to choose. As a gamer, you are more used to this pain. You have danced with freedom. You might as well use it. You can use it to create new games for yourself in any moment. In The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey talks about how once you start a movement, it's best not to select while you're moving. Kind of like our Formula One race example, you don't want to interfere once the race is being held. The time to determine what to do is when you're not playing. When you're not playing in competition, you have to play with your environment. Your constructed environment. In this case, the environment of the game. You do that by pushing it. You may have known people who immediately want to know how each weapon in a game works. What are the steps? How long does it take for this ability to be cast? What is the distance between this part of the map and that part of the map? How high can you jump, really? How many wisps does it take to construct a building in thirty seconds? Does more than one wisp increase the speed of construction?

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Mapping the game is a key part of ability. Knowing your land helps you thrive in it. In field problems in the military, we would often stand watch for hours or days on end. It seemed extremely boring, like nothing was happening. Years later, I learned to pay attention to plants, birds, squirrels, and other animals. I began to see change happening in every moment. The baseline behavior of an animal, a bird ecosystem, a terrain, tells you things about where you are and where your opponents are. All that information is constantly changing, so you need to monitor it. From this, you may realize that if you ever move to a new area again, it pays to pay attention. The very act of paying attention makes it your space. Then you'll want to know it, because it's yours. When it changes (as it inevitably will), you'll want to note the change. When you move to a new town, you want to find out what all the cool restaurants are. You want to know what crime is like there. In the same way, if you go out into the wilderness, you want to know what the movements of the animals in that area are like. You want to know what the plants are. How the ground is shaped by water and wind. Which tree is most likely to fall. If you pay attention to your local environment, then all that information becomes apparent. You have to go over it with a very fine and delicate attention to detail. Going in with strong and clumsy bursts of attention are guaranteed to result in local resistance. The birds fly away if you crash through. Squirrels run away if you throw stuff at them. Plants shrink. Most people did not leave beyond 50 miles of where they were born, in sedentary cultures. There's a reason for that. You have a competitive advantage in your territory, if you know your territory well. It takes a long time to understand just a 25 meter radius in a park or forest.

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Go to the closest wooded area and spend two hours there. See if you understand who all the individual players are. Do you know what birds, reptiles, squirrels, and insects will show up? What seeds, worms, and leaves are on and in the ground? Who walks by the area? Where did they come from, and where are they going? These things take a long time to familiarize yourself with. It's not an accident that the English word for 'conquer' has its roots in a word for ‘touch’. To conquer something is to take it. To take something is to touch it. Touch is a much broader sense than even sight. Your sight focuses on a very tiny point. Two tiny points we create our visual perception out of. Touch is all around us. You can feel everything through your skin, all over your body. To touch something is to pay lots and lots of attention to it. So when you start playing a game, especially if it's a competitive or challenging game, you touch it. You touch the boundaries of that game. You want to push. You want to see how you can exploit it, how you can live well within the game. You fill the game. The practice of figuring out how to maximize parts of what your character might do in the game. To see how far everything can go, how small it can go, and how big it can go. All these things can be used in your everyday life.

Look for Small Feedback Loops Feelings of hopelessness and despair may accompany your attempt to do this. Stepping back from playing part of a game in everyday life is disorienting. Every time you notice the rules and limits of the game, you might be confused about why everyone is still playing the game. You might sense better games to play. Perhaps it would be easier to push the limits if everyone else didn't get angry at you for pushing.

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Different paths reveal themselves from a lifetime of understanding games. That might bring a sense of despair, a shot of fear and anxiety. When you suddenly have more energy, and you don't know what to do with it, it is a dangerous period for an animal. Excess energy might leak out as signals that you have a lot of energy you don't know how to use. Another predator or opportunist competitor might come along and make use of that energy instead. Anxiety shows up when you don't know what to do with the energy you have. Well, you've been practicing what to do with every little ounce, with every little point of advantage you can get in games. You do actually know what to do: win. Help your people win. Do that by finding the smallest area you can start to play in. You need tiny versions of games which use as much of yourself as possible to prepare to move on to bigger games. Game theory was a series of games used to try and understand the nuclear standoff between Americans and Soviets in the Cold War. Supply and demand models are used by economists to try and get an intuition for the economy. Biologists use cell cultures to understand living systems. You can make little games out of any activity that will help you learn a part of your environment. This is not simply gamification. When people say gamification, what they usually mean is some sort of status chasing. The easiest part of games which became popular in the 2010s. A depiction of the social reality of fighting for positions in a legible hierarchy. The equivalent of chasing medals or ‘Employee of the Month’ awards. The chasing of achievements, certifications, and status at the expense of the play. Status works best for groups when it’s given to reward lively play. When a soldier is awarded a medal, it's supposed to encourage soldiering. To be good at playing in a battle.

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Yet in any military, you'll notice a desire to get the achievement at the expense of play. We've done that all around us now. In our meritocracy, we often chase measures to the exclusion of play. Instead of simply writing, we might think we have to chase the achievement of an English doctorate degree. Things like this are easier given our context. Remember, anxiety is something you have to deal with when you are approaching things from a meta-level. The uncertainty happens as soon as you start playing. If you are an actor in a typical play, you have your part written out for you. You don't have to think about what to say next. You are free to focus on how to deliver your lines, since your lines are given to you. In an improvised play, more of the responsibility is on you. You have to let flow. That's a lot of pressure. Especially if you try to control it. Controlling a raging river is very difficult, and so is controlling yourself. We use blunt objects for that. We pursue measures of success at the expense of success. Gamification typically involves chasing achievement awards when other areas of life are already full of those. Taking a bureaucratic imperative, standards from benchwarmers, and imposing it elsewhere. Games for experimentation are more lively. You set up a tiny environment in which you can win or lose. Where you can fail and get a feedback loop. The pain of failure provides the loop. Pain is simply information. We don't like it when we get too much information too quickly. Too much change might change who you are. The ultimate change is when you no longer are. So you need to experience lots and lots and lots of failure to adapt to your environment. You won't get that without a way to fail. A step in making use of your ability as a gamer is to set up feedback loops in tiny areas where you can fail many times.

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Over and over again, every single day. You’re already used to using failure to win, from playing games. Let’s say you're interested in becoming the President of the United States. You understand that achieving range in some skill gives you an advantage. The same advantage you get from knowing the meta. Then for making speeches, you figure it is useful to learn how to sing. Knowing how to sing, you can bring a little of that into your everyday voice. Once it’s in your everyday voice, it will improve your speeches. So a game you might play with yourself is to use more of your voice everyday. To hold a note. After you hold a note, you might expand the range of notes that you can hold. Connect the notes. Play with space between notes. After that, you see how loudly you can sing. How softly. Sing low, sing high. You want to climb but don't have access to a climbing wall or cliff? Perhaps you have access to a door ledge. Maybe you get one of those $5 Pull up bars and simply hang. The game is how long you can hang while being relaxed. After you get to seven minutes, you might move on to other little games. You can do the same thing with your breathing. Breathing is a fundamental aspect to every part of life. You might attach the standard, the ideal, and your worthiness to the simple fact of your breath. Everything else flows out of it. And that's a little game you can play, is to just notice your breathing. People call that meditation. Playing with attention can be used to create a game out of any moment. The point of creating many little games like this is that you get to choose. Ability to choose lets you craft games, ways of being, that are better fits for the environment than anything that was around before. Remember, that just as in the case of games where your choices are constrained, your choices are constrained by everything else in existence. So you do want to adjust your ends to your means.

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With an exceptionally clear end, your life's creation, you will always find a means. There will always be a smallest, tiniest movement toward that end available. You might not be able to become a War God that goes around flinging magical axes, but you can embody a spirit of action. You might not be able to sling spells crafted from potions and herbs, but you might be able to extract chemicals out of plants. You might not be able to save the whole world from certain death to get everyone's approval (even if you did such a thing, you would probably get a lot of disapproval), but you can give yourself unconditional approval for having got here. Knowing how difficult it was for every creature, every living thing before you to get to you. Knowing how difficult it is to just live. Say you're worried about the global supply chain and you want to do something about it, just as you would be able to do something about it in the games you play. You would learn more about the global supply chain. Understand that you can be someone who learns without having to be an expert taught by experts. That is, most of the interesting things that experts have access to are now on the internet. You might be able to get to it through Sci-Hub or LibGen. The massively multiplayer wargame Foxhole had entire logistics branches for in-game factions. Logistics players did not like an update, so they launched a labor strike. That suddenly had an effect on the rest of the players in the game. They had to deal with using pistols instead of rifles and machineguns. Many players who were focused on the fighting aspect of the game shifted to learning how to do logistics or production. Beergame Simulator shows you changes that take place in a Beer company's distribution line, and what you might need to improve that. From games like that, you might get an intuition for how you interact with the world around you.

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Pick something you buy often, like a coffee, or a coke. Look at its supply chain. Flight and shipping paths are easily accessed online. Get an understanding of the number of things required for that product to sit in your home. You will never finish this map, but it'll give you some awareness of the minimum number of people and things you might need for you to have that cup of coffee. All these are little loops you can create with each question. A question like, "Okay, what's a coke made of?" Okay, this sugar, where does it come from? The loops between you and the environment grow your ability. Once you get a solid idea of where your coke bottle is coming from, maybe you start to get some intuition for what the global supply chain is like. Enough to understand that no one knows, really. But you know enough to make a guess that lets you make a move. To take a step forward. Use what you have to make a prediction. Go to a prediction market to see questions that might be pertinent to models of global supply chains. Use that to inform your prediction. Prediction sets up a feedback loop. Like when you are trying to be the strongest character in the game. You do something in the game and see if the character’s strength increases or not. You keep doing things until you find something that increases strength, then you keep on doing that until it stops working. When your character is stronger than many others in long-term competition, that means you know something about increasing the strength of a character in that game. You are now an expert at getting a strong character in that game. Predictions allow you to do something like that. They allow you to check yourself. Learn through failure. The very act of prediction is a sort of touching. You're joining your attention to something. You're putting skin in the game. Something on the line.

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This is what makes both bets and fights so appealing. In betting, you have to put money on the line. Money is often tied to social status and other things, which makes it a more painful loss when you lose a prediction. With fighting, you are putting your body on the line. As well as any tribal pride you may have about that, if you have any. Either way, you're touching the rest of the environment. Sending feelers out and attaching to something. Through that attachment, you learn more about the world around you. Though, you do have to remember to detach at some point. When you are moving, when you are ready to play a different game or to play a different part, you will detach. You have an inbuilt measure you can use to tell when it's time to let go. You've experienced it before: it's a moment when the game isn't fun anymore. It isn't fun enough to keep you. In that moment, in the same way you can just turn off a game and walk away, there are things in your experience you can let go of. Whether that's a belief, an object of desire, an expectation of the future, or a literal grip, a handshake- what it means when you let go is to return to your overarching strategic aim. To look at what you want and be like okay, this aspect of getting what I want has played out here. This game has played out, how do I move on as quickly as possible to the next game, to the next aspect of the game? You've probably experienced shifting through this kind of loop, because of the Observe, Orient, Decide and Act loop. The OODA loop was described by Colonel Boyd of the US Air Force and is now popular among business people everywhere. You've experienced that loop billions of times while gaming.

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You understand, as in a real-time strategy game, that if you are able to move from action to action, to let go and move on to the next thing more quickly, you can overload your opponent's OODA loop. In RTS games, professionals tend to have higher actions per minute. You can't exactly improve your actions per minute exclusively and expect your game to improve unless you are sincerely paying attention to the overall strategy: your overall want. The actions you take must be in line with that want. If it is not in line with that want, if you simply try to boost your actions per minute, then you are engaging in the same kind of thing that certifications, medals, and degrees are engaging in. You lose sight of your overall aim in favor of the measure of the aim. Clicking for the sake of clicks instead of clicking for the sake of winning. By creating a loop between what you want, what is happening, and a measure at any given time, you prepare yourself to identify the next possible move. The path appears from the sum of all possible moves.

Follow Energy In PvP air combat games like Warthunder and DCS world, energy fighting is a dogfighting style that looks at getting and maintaining the most potential for movement while shutting down your opponent’s potential for movement. Staying high and fast while making your opponent get lower and slower. Something like this is a style in submission grappling, as well. We call it ‘pressure passing’. This gives us an idea of when to stick with a tactic, and when to move on. As soon as you stop having fun, move on to the next thing you would have fun with. I’ve found attacking is usually more fun than defending. Defense costs less energy, but involves a lot of tension.

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There's less flow in it, you don’t move as much. A lot of glee comes from attack. In a non-competitive context, you might think of attacking as ‘expression’. Defense is necessary. The point of stability is to get to the instability you enjoy. When you're defending, shore yourself up enough to attack. The purpose of attacking is to come to an agreement with someone or something you weren't in agreement with before. To become one with what you attack on your terms. There's a level at which they are the same thing, but for those of us still separating them, these are the tradeoffs. Understanding these steps, and moving between them, comes from having a clear idea of the source of the flow. The flow of everything in your life. Where energy comes from, where it goes. Where your motivation comes from, where it goes. Where your will is strongest, where Will seems like weakness. If a tactic is not working, it's time to let go and go on to the next one. When something isn't working, move. Act. Play. These are all clues you might learn in the game of You.

You Are The Game In our individualist society, we learned to identify with particular characters in any story. In a game, you identify with one of the characters you play. Our world is partially simulated by us. So right now, when you're looking at a chair, that chair is a construct of your perception. There is probably something there, but you have no way to access it without the overlay, the user interface you put over it. That user interface is part of you. All the games you've played, dynamics you’ve experienced, that's also you. You are the game. When you play a game, you become lost in it. After that, you carry it with you.

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The more you understand an environment, the more you have that environment in you, the more it informs you. The more it informs your movements. The more it informs who you are. Look for where your energy comes from. You can do that by looking at the structure of your games. The games you play with yourself, as well as outside of yourself. When you are motivated in a particular way, or when you feel a feeling, that is a clue about the structure of the environment you're setting up for yourself. A clue about what game you're trying to play. What game you're playing, what game you are. Anytime you notice that, you have the option of stepping away. In the same way you would step away from a game and play a different game. Though the moment a thought, desire, or fear is there, it usually means it has to play out. There is some shutdown time. You can't just instantly pull the plug on yourself. Not after a lifetime of playing the games you've been playing. It’s hard to force because typically, you identify with a part of the game rather than the game itself. Once you let yourself be the game, it will be easier to switch games.

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TRICK: To improve your game, create feedback loops. For example, if the game you want to learn is dancing, look at every step of an expert's 2 minute dance. Pick one fundamental part. Once you have selected a dynamic, improve it like this: 1) Isolate one part of the game. Let's say this is balance. 2) Come up with one activity that tests your balance. Let's say this is standing on one foot with your eyes closed. 3) Find a way to record your performance. Maybe this is recording a video, or a simple timer of how long you can stand on one leg with your eyes closed. 4) Notice what surprised you.

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4: GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY -------------------------------------------------------------------•Played as a Viking in the late 8th century. •One of my more ambitious council members "has decided it's time" for me to leave this world. •He begins a plot to assasinate me. •The rest of my council advises me to righteously imprison him. •Instead I notice the poor bastard is lonely and just wants to get married. •Marry him off to another lonely girl in my court. •She's happy. •He's happy. •I ask him kindly to end his plot to kill me. •He agrees. :) I'm happy.. -The Messenger, Crusader Kings II Reviews, Steam

People look at evolution through game theory to learn about survival strategies. Game theory, if you recall, involves making a very simple game and paying people to play those games with little money prizes. They help us look at when there is a fight between what one person wants and what everyone else wants.

Many Games are Agent-Based Models Game Theory gave us a way to play with the idea of nuclear war. For the first time, we thought war could kill all humans. Winning a war like that could be as bad as losing a war.

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Winning a war used to be profitable, especially when there were slaves to take. The work slaves did was used to make societies bigger. In the same way wolves get food from eating a deer, the biggest societies ate other societies. When a society beat another society and took many of its people as slaves, those slaves could no longer work for their own societies. Predators get energy from eating prey, winning societies get energy from assimilating smaller societies. Evolutionary Game Theory looks at how animals (including humans) outlive other animals. Another way to see how animals outlive other animals is Agent-Based Modeling. Social scientists also use it to look at human behavior. Like NPCs in a game, agents are given patterns to execute in a simulation. You can use this to understand how we behave, and also how frogs or wolves might behave in their environment. Most multiplayer strategy games, and in fact, most single-player strategy games, are a sort of agent-based model. Though there is the complication of human players. Multiplayer games with persistent memory, such as an MMO with territoriality or something like that, are an agentbased modeler's wet dream. Except there's not as much communication between people in that field and gamers. Researchers would find a lot about how we change together in MMORPGs, but they haven’t given it a solid look yet. But if you've played any strategic games, you developed an intuition pump: a gut understanding of how people compete. Something you can check against to guess about how people might give each other things. Other games, like first-person shooters, operate on very short timelines. However, if you connected every round on a public playerbase together, you would still get something like an agent-based model. Planetside tried to do this. A persistent, shared world allows us to map relationships over time. Such a map tells us things about the groups we live in.

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The kind of thing you would see from a satellite view in games like Civilization, Europa Universalis, or Crusader Kings. In a multiplayer game with a persistent set of relationships, mini-societies emerge. You need two things for this to happen. One, things change based on what happens in the game. Two, there is a memory of all the changes in the game. So long as we know we used to have this much gold, territory, crystals, whatever, and then we lost it to the other guys. Then we raided them and took it back. Once a memory like that is around, we’ve got everything in place for a nano-society to appear. Player governments come into play. People come up with ways to decide who gets the loot, who gets to lead the raid, who gets to guard the castle, etc. Usually, we don’t call them governments. We call them clans. Guilds. Without any management degree, military training, or city planning certification, gamers find themselves leading operations. Coordinating lots and lots of people to figure out who gets what, where, and when. EVE Online has tons of examples of this. In ‘Experimentation’, we said Foxhole had entire boycotts and supply chain problems. This is something political scientists have noticed: governments emerge when there are enough people interacting over time. Methods to coordinate all these people arise. The beginning of a state is no different than the beginning of a criminal organization. You eventually want to track all the people in your group to figure out who should get what. To do that, you establish some sort of verifiable identity. A reputation system. A method of exchange. You get some people to decide. Some people to make stuff. Other people to provide services. People to do the choosing, people to carry on the practices that have already been laid down. You might have noticed this in the Pirate Codes.

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When a criminal organization is successful enough, it forms a state. When a cult is successful enough, it forms a religion. Pirates, a culture we think of anarchic, nonetheless came up with a government. Texas, California, and Ohio have prison systems that are large enough for gangs to emerge as shadow governments. They provide services and stability which helps people sort out who gets what, where, and when.

Wealth is Well-Being Within large-scale populations, we lose sight of all the symbols we use to work together. It's easy to mistake a measure for the thing that is being measured. Easy to forget, for example, that wealth is a sort of well-being. It is not objects that make wealth. Many preppers talk about the importance of prepping for a time of great calamity. Food, gas, ammo, and so on. Those things are important. However, the biggest factor of who survives in such a situation is whoever has the strongest relationships. Whatever community has cohesion. Measures such as money or certificates are secondary to the strength of your relationships (even if many base worth on the numbers their banks give them). Let’s say we gave everyone a social credit score, like China. Even if everyone acknowledged social credit scores, it would not change how status comes from our relationships. How people are together. Money is something we use for this. Money says how I'm related to you. Even before that, when we deal with debt, we are saying that we are together. Because I gave you something, you should then give it back to me later. That means we’re still going to be together later. That's part of our relationship. In the same way we breathe in and out, we exchange back and forth.

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From this framework, we go over many layers of abstraction, until we get to money. A side effect is pursuing money without remembering what it's for. It's useful not to pay too much attention to the rules of the game while you're playing it. You do that while you're planning in between games, but you don't really want to lose sight of the game you're playing. So you might not ever notice what the rules are. The game here, the social game, is important. A game of life and death (as in all games), because every aspect of your existence has to do with life and death. Money represents that status, the way we relate to each other. We need other people to do anything in this world. Money is a representation of that need. We might talk about things like financial independence, as if money does not represent the billions of relationships that lead to you being able to give some of these imaginary objects to a person at a grocery store and get food in exchange. That's where it comes from. We give status and prestige to those who seem to give more to the rest of the group. That's a reward to keep them giving more, until they run out of things to give. Such as when they die, or after they die, like when they're forgotten. We remember people that still have stuff to give. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the strong get stronger, and the weak get weaker. We give more to people who are using what they have. When someone has more prestige, we're more likely to give them a pass. Even when they do things we don't approve of. We're also more likely to want to give them things, because they use their energy well. Often, prestige has to do with just one game. Someone who’s really prestigious in their one Counter-Strike server may not be as prestigious in a public League of Legends match. Though that separation is something we create in a moment.

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The underlying knowledge of where prestige comes from is still there. We follow people who seem to fit well in their place, if we want to be where they are. So we pay attention to them, in hope of learning from them. As you get what you want, you will get more prestige. As a side effect, you may get gold, you will get money. Piety is a combination of prestige with an appeal to authority. Authority is something that makes us bigger. Enlarges, expands, and grows us. Religion is something that really helped us get a lot bigger, as a species. It allows for our current population size. So appealing to an authority is something you can do, on top of prestige, to get people to do things. These things are all a part of getting stuff done.

Thing-Rich, People-Poor It's much more difficult to start something new, when you don't have enough prestige, piety, or gold. You can, in yourself, set up your own system of prestige. It's just that no one's going to adopt it unless it is somehow serving them. They're not going to see how it can serve them unless it really serves you- 100x better than their system serves them. You're part of a society. Society informs who you are. You, in turn, take that and inform society. A feedback loop between you and society. Often, when people get really rich or powerful, it comes from giving many people what they want. Somehow, somewhere. Even when people complain about those people, they're attached to those people. We often complain about our parents, or someone in power over us. But if they are in power and over you, it's usually because you have given them power. They have somehow given you what you want. People complain about billionaires a lot, especially new billionaires.

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People who built themselves from merely upper middle class to something stratospheric, as far as financial wealth goes. They have done that by looking at what people want, and delivering. If someone wants something more comforting, more stabilizing to their existence, they've delivered. One place to shop for everything you want, delivered to your home. Electric cars. Computers designed for your grandmother. Thanks to this process, most of us live as kings did in the past. We have food, services, and luxuries that most kings could never have dreamt of. Consider the amount of electrical light we have access to. How much of a difference that makes. It's given us all of this, but without the status of royalty we would expect with such things. Our own little kingdoms, with none of the live-in servants. Just machines. We might have money, a nice house, a car, be able to fly anywhere in the world, and still feel like something is missing. We might even be in the top 25% of the richest people in the world. Yet we might feel poor. Rich in things, poor in how other people look at us. You can tell when you don't actually have social status, relative to everyone in your world. Especially if your world is just your neighborhood, Facebook friends, Twitter mutuals, the people you follow on Instagram, or TikTok. In the past, if you were in a village or something, you could expect shared entrainment. You could expect to share space with a lot of the important people in your village. The most powerful people in your area. Your chieftain, your Lord. While maybe that wouldn't be as direct all the time, they were at least forced to see your face and smell your body. Since you were on the same field or in the same room as a servant, your information got to them. They could act based on that. Now, with all our distance, the speed of that is much slower. Even with fiber-optic cables and satellites.

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Instead of settling on the people in your world being people you know personally, most of us have parasocial relationships with people who seem to have control over our world. People you've never met or had a conversation with. People who’ve never sensed your vibe. Whether that's actors, journalists, musicians, athletes, celebrities, or politicians. We are fed information on them, but they're not fed information on us. You can sense the asymmetry somewhere. Sense that you might not, that you don't matter, in comparison to them. Because, again, you get information on them. And they get information, well, not on you. And you don't matter to them directly. The only time this was the case before would have been with slaves. Well, slaves were often ignored, so long as they were doing their job, and their owners would often spend time around them. Someone needed to cut the master’s hair, cook the lady food. You might find yourself in a similar status situation, where people that have a prominent position in your mind don't really pay attention to you. Unless you join in some giant group that sends a message back. If you join a social movement today, or a political faction that organizes based on ideology, there's still not much you can say. That person will still not really know you, compared to someone who interacts directly with you. So you might find yourself in a situation where you don't seem to have ownership over yourself.

Play Your Own Game If you look at what creates financial wealth over timeproperty, and material wealth, it is having some sort of ownership. This happens with competence in a skill, as well.

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You are the only one who has direct access to your experiences and memories. When you have a terrain, and you know that terrain well, it gives you a huge advantage over how to interact with the terrain. Grow up in a swamp, and you’ll know how to use the swamp better than anyone else. You’ll know where the crawfish like to be, what reeds you can use for construction, and how to move to avoid pissing off snakes. It’s your home turf. You can be a good steward of that area. In the same way a few hundred-man bands in the Bornean rainforests knew the very many species of plants and animals that were there. And could use them in ways that no one who grew up dozens of miles away will be able to use them. Not knowing the richness of wealth available in those places, they cut it down and replace it with one crop or one tree. Something useful to sell. A reason why it doesn't appear useful to outsiders is because they did not spend as much time in that area. They did not spend as much attention on that environment. They are not joined to it. So it'll never matter to them as much as it might matter to someone who did grow up with it. They won't be able to see the same wealth. You may know what it's like to have some game company bought out by a company that didn't develop a game, that doesn't even play the game. They don't know what to do with the game, they don't know how to create a space that is fun for the players. If they're not good listeners, they drive the game out of business. So too, with yourself. No one will ever be able to comprehend as much of your richness, as much of your wealth, as you. You're the only one who has access to all that. You are your own territory. Today, we give that up really easily. Many local places, during colonization, were given cool tech in exchange for foreign rule.

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Conquering cultures gave the colonized items which brought them a little more power. The real cost? Submitting to the new culture. We do that individually, in ourselves. Even while we might be gifted with so much material wealth, we might feel something's amiss. Something's unfair. We are not being given as much as we could be. And really, what's responsible for that? It's us. We surrender ownership of ourselves to others. In return, they make decisions for us. Decision making, especially when there's more information, is painful. It’s nice to avoid pain. It’s nice to not have to explore your own area. It’s easier to simply follow someone else’s path. As long as you're getting food, and that's easier than it's ever been, too. We all think like Empires, being born into them. For an Empire, it is much easier to deal with people who are less involved than it is to deal with people who are extremely involved. Which is why our rituals tend to scale in a way that has a minority of people who are extremely involved. The players of the game, and a vast majority of spectators. When people are used to spectating, they become passive. Passive people can't rock the boat as much. Whoever selects the players, selects the game, and keeps the game a certain way. The most reliable path to wealth is through ownership. Switching sides from someone who is consuming a product to someone who is providing the product. Someone who's giving to the collective, rather than someone who is being told to consume. A hunter gets more prestige when they keep getting meat for the tribe. With that prestige, they tend to get more things than everyone else. So even when he is giving the best cuts of meat to the tribe and getting made fun of for doing well, he still gets privileges that others don't. And that privilege might simply be attention, or political deference. You might get a little more meat in the future, by siding with him.

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At some point or other, many of us gave up ownership of ourselves to side with a few people against ourselves. We could be so much more. I once had a tiny plot in a garden, where I planted many seeds from many different plants in a three foot square. This was something a soil scientist I'd known was experimenting with, so I figured I'd try it for myself. Instead of planting just one kind of plant in one plot, many seeds were sown. The interaction between those seeds and the environment sorted out which seeds would get to become plants. Presumably, the seeds that fit the place best would 'win'. Single crops require lots and lots of attention. Lots and lots of control, just to keep growing. This didn't need much besides water. And it worked. One species (chard) was planted in a planter nearby, but with only that plant. The ones in my plot were a lot healthier than the ones in the planter. But the plot looked like a total mess. Given the variety of plants, it looked more like part of a forest than a garden. So one day, when someone was mowing the lawn, they thought it was just a bunch of weeds. The vegetables were mowed away. We've done something like that, collectively, to many local tribes over time. We've taken away their ownership. They've given it to us, because we're much more powerful. We have, you know…guns, germs, and steel. Drones, memes, and plastic. Innovations come from having the biggest collective brain. The more people you have who talk to each other, the more things you make. These innovations are proofs of power. We can use that proof of power to make others bigger. And by making others bigger, we get authority. So, from that, we have taken ownership of many other people. You might feel that in yourself, if you have given up ownership of yourself. A solid clue is blame- we only blame those we give power to. By playing someone else's game, we give them power.

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The house always wins. The most successful gambler needs the casino more than the casino needs the gambler. A lot of small-scale societies are in a constant state of play. Play involves flow, and because the game might collapse to one game, that play involves more everyday violence. A lot of violence comes from territorial disputes. In our culture, it’s often a mimetic dispute, rather than a dispute over land or goods. In an honor culture, that might be a dispute about where a family name is, in the local hierarchy. This town ain't big enough for the both of us to walk by without checking where we are in the hierarchy. In the rest of nature, disputes like that happen quickly. The violence happens quickly. Then the organisms split up, if both of them are still alive. They rearrange themselves in space, where they can continue to live together. All violence follows this pattern. Sometimes organisms kill the other organisms, and only one is left alive because there's not enough space. After the organisms are killed, in that moment, there's suddenly enough space. Think of a space as a game. If you collapse all of your games into one game, that gives you a lot of benefits. You can crosscontextualize. Use something from one game in all the other games. It also invites violence, because you might suddenly realize when someone's not giving you enough space. In a lot of small-scale societies, there is only one game. So violence tends to be more frequent, but contained. Instead of resulting in gigantic mass genocide, as in a civilized society, you might have lots of raids. Lots of little fights, as in with children beating each other up all the time. Most violence is child-on-child violence, everywhere. We simply don't pay as much attention to it. It doesn't result in as many dramatic effects as violence involving an adult. Kids bounce back. They're adaptable. It's hard for them to kill each other unless they really, really, try.

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Or one of them has a firearm. Most violence is not competent. It is not planned, analyzed, premeditated, and rehearsed. It's more like a bottle filling up and overflowing. When that happens with a child, because they have less power, less ability to act on the environment, it's less dramatic. We remember it less than if someone stronger and bigger were to let themselves overflow. A lot of times, the overflowing comes from not expressing fear or anger in a way that is heard by ourselves. So we find ourselves in a situation where there's limited space. We play other people's games. Huge games, where the majority are spectators. In such a game, there are very few players. Spectators allow a few to play for them. Like representative democracy. These are issues of scale and the speed of communication. With the internet, we can get around some of these issues. We have much more communication capability than ever before. Many games that weren't possible before are now possible. We simply haven't caught up to this fact yet. In the Web3 world, things like Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are echoing a spirit you might have seen in pirate culture or peasant rebellions, such as in Frisia. The Hundred Years War, when some combatants from both the English and French sides realized that they had more in common with each other. More in common than the lords and Kings that were pushing them forward. Free Companies were formed, selling services to both sides. Alongside knightly orders that were supporting pilgrims, these are part of what led to the modern company. These were places where people were more equal within themselves. This kind of organization was often present in steppe nomad cultures, within the ruling tribes. TE Lawrence talks about Bedouin culture, where Sheiks were chosen by their men based on their behavior.

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The single tribal leader appears unfair from the frame of the 20th century democratic republic. Yet, such a leader answers to his people more directly than the leaders of a democratic oligarchy. There is no clear person to answer for the status quo of the collective, in such an oligarchy. Democracy started in city-states with slaves, and was built on slave labor. Our oligarchic democracies allow an elite to continue playing a game for very long without ever having to expose themselves to change. They can say it's for the people, with the vote. There's not one person to answer for when shit goes wrong, as in a pirate ship or raiding party. It’s very easy to change a game led by one man. All you have to do is kill one person. Or simply convince them to step off. Influence them to love everyone around them more. Whatever it is, it's easier to change one than it is to change many. Our democratic way of life comes from trying to keep stability of ownership and hierarchy. It's not that hierarchy doesn't happen in smaller groups, or with more egalitarian societies, or with units with more cohesion. It's just that hierarchy changes more, in those groups. It moves much more rapidly, like with geese flying in flock. As the lead goose gets tired, the next one steps up. In a well-functioning military unit you need decentralization to swarm quickly, as in the US Navy's Doctrine of Faith, or with its guerrilla war in China. Francis Marion, and even the Ukrainian resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion of Kyiv, relied on more people on the ground to make decisions. They did not rely on centralized command-and-control. The strength of a guerilla army is in its ability to rely on the boots on the ground making decisions. Many players instead of a few players. A few players cannot adapt as fast as a swarm.

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Some political scientists pointed out that dictators have coalitions they answer to. This might be a few generals in the military. A business group of kleptocrats. Perhaps a particular ethnic group. They still have to reward the people who are loyal to them. The people who put them in power and the people who help keep them in power. Our games are set up by whoever started the game. If you manage to start a game that has mass appeal, you get rewarded for that. So long as you stick around to capture that appeal. As more people join your game, you will notice that you live in a world that requires you to be more effective today than you were yesterday. In this Red Queen's world, you may find it easier to force other people to play your game. And you will be less likely to move on to another game. Most traditional martial arts started with effective combat ability. Their teaching solidified into doctrine as they got status and money, so it was easier to prevent change by blocking off potentially fast exchanges of information. Less fighting. Hiding what they were doing from other dojos. Refusing duels and sparring sessions with rivals. Every time there's a new game in town, this kind of thing happens. Especially with our ability to put people in debt. Debt says we can't finish one game and move on to another game until we give what we owe to others. This way, they keep you playing. The same way a casino has cheap drinks and steaks. Comfortable lounges and fun entertainment. You might recognize a similar tactic at play in an IKEA or a Costco. Then as you play, you may lose. And maybe someone comes along and offers to lend you money to keep playing. You take it. Then you're stuck there. In the casino, or in the debt-based middle class lifestyle.

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So you are working for other people to play, which is wonderful in its way. Except they give you permission to play only when you are beholden to them, and only when you play their game. And that's a clue about when you're playing your game. When you're playing a game for people you love, versus when you're not. When you need someone's permission to play, and it's not someone you love who loves you. This is where a 'should' and 'shouldn't' might originate. So you love someone, and they say you shouldn't do this and you should do that, but they can't tell you why. Because they didn't originate it. If they started the branch of cultural transmission, they would be able to tell you why. Or at least who told them why. If they can't, it's usually a sign that it's someone else's rules. Someone else's game. Often someone long dead. It may even be that if that person came around now, they'd be like, “why the fuck are you still playing this old game!?”. But their followers kept the game as they perceived it should be, anyway. So those first popularizers could collect rent on it, in the form of the stability that comes from status and material wealth. When it's someone else's rule, permission to play comes from somewhere else. That's a clue of some area where you could take ownership for yourself. The first place you can start doing this is within you. You know the quote from Peter Parker: with great power comes great responsibility. What they don't tell you is that with great responsibility comes great power. It doesn't seem that way in our society because, again, we mistake control for many things. We mistake control as power, we mistake fear as control. But power is what you can do, not what you can control. What you can let flow from you, how much you can let flow through you.

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The more responsibility you take, the more of the world you elect to take care of and give to, the more power you get. The first part of that world you have access to, the first territory you have, is you. A simple method is to simply take the blame for anything that happens in your world. If you're in pain, you can try to deflect this, you can try to avoid power, the pain of power, by blaming someone else. But remember, when you're a kid, you blame your parents. When you are a member of a state in our society, you blame the casino, the house, the President or the Prime Minister or some executive of some large private corporation. Blame strengthens whoever you're blaming. It says that this is their game. And they are the only ones who can change the rules. Which stops you from playing your own game. Stops you from even considering the possibility of coming up with different rules. When you're playing someone else's game, you are afraid of losing. When the casino is someone else, you're afraid of losing. Because if you lose enough, you won't get to keep playing. However, if you're playing your own game, you will not fear losing. Because losing is a sort of failure. And failure is what happens when you reach for connection to something in the environment, to get to know it better. When you're navigating in the dark, you might put your hands and feet out to feel for the wall, the floor, a chair in the way. You might reach out and touch a table. There, "failure". You reach out and bump into a wall. There, another "failure". Then you reach out again, until you find space you can move toward. So you learn from failing. It's part of the play. Exploration through exploitation. There's no joy without that losing. Many of our players today, because they are beholden to many spectators, because they are in debt to the same game, fear losing. And they're motivated by that. It’s apparent in the way they play. As if there is no next year.

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As if they will not have to keep playing, once they play really well in this moment. Some Olympians talk about getting depressed after the Olympics. They compress their lives into a single event. Once that particular event is gone, a sense of meaning might not be there. The game I'm inviting you to play is a different game. It is not about compressing life into a single event. It is noticing you're alive. Bringing that bigger life to every event. The game is life. Life is not a game. The game is Life. So to play well, you would have to play while paying attention to as many pieces on the board as possible. When you play League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients, you want to know where everyone is, because that determines your movement. When you play this game, you want to be aware of the whole board. This includes everything that came before. Everything that is now, and everything that comes after. As much of that as you have access to, anyway. Which means you might not play in the same way that a modern athlete does. With no regard for injuries, with no regard for longevity. If you're playing the game, then it's a long game. It's an infinite game. It goes on long after you're dead. We are continuing the plays of people who died before us. People whose ideas, wants, and goals we carry. Goals we continue to fulfill. Our game is Long. The house doesn’t mind losing, it holds all the cards and all the tokens. You can just withdraw more tokens, they're yours. This lack of fear guarantees you will win your game. Not anyone else’s game- just yours. In Brazil's Vale Tudo circuit, there were many camps that did well. We know the most famous group, the Gracies, because they realized that in the Western world, there wasn't a game that played to their strengths.

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The strengths they learned from the Vale Tudo game in Brazil could not be transferred to, say, boxing, or freestyle wrestling. The Gracies would have lost if they went to the United States to compete in wrestling or boxing. They would not have stood a chance. Enter the Ultimate Fighting Championship. A way to showcase their game to the rest of the world. A way to bring a bigger game into the world of combat sports. One of the Gracies, who wasn't even the best Gracie at BJJ (or so they say), was selected for someone who looked like some guy. So when he beat everyone else at UFC, it was dramatic. It was a miracle. It was a show. Royce Gracie beat everyone else because the Gracies were playing their own game. They set the terms. They set the rules of the game. They brought others into their game, which allowed them to showcase their skills, strengths, and homeground. That process happens again and again, today. You will know what your game is by the fact that it uses as many parts of you as you have access to. The more you put everything from your life together into one thing, the more you will know your game. There, you will prevail. Play your own game! No one else can beat you at it. You are the best there is at what you do, because only you do exactly what you do. Specifically, and in fine detail. Imagine you start a new game. What are the ten skills you are best at? You come up with a game that involves all those skills. Well, not many people would be able to beat you. Own yourself! Give yourself space to think. Give yourself freedom to express yourself. Accept the fear of breaking the rules of someone else’s game. Let it pass. You will find your own game. Normal comes from a carpenter's square. For something to be normal, it has to be cut according to that carpenter's square.

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This only happens if you are building something en masse. Say you’re an Ancient Roman citizen who needs to make many chairs. You want to make all the chairs to the same measurement. That’s when you would use a carpenter’s square, to make the chairs normal. Some mathematician said, “the funny thing about standards is, everyone has one.” Globalization dashed every culture against each other. Cultures are melting into each other. New cultures are made with every single person. New standards are made everyday. There is no one else precisely like you. You contain everyone else you've ever come into contact with. That combination is unique, as unique as your fingerprint. Play that game. Let yourself do it. Like any good game, it's a very hard game, because you don't know what's going to happen next. You can't plan for what will happen next. But remember, you are the result of many players of this game. Your entire lineage. All those genes, all those memes led to you. And that line is playing a very, very, very, long game. If you work with it, if you work with the rest of yourself that you typically deny, you're going to win. You've been winning for millions of years.

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HINT: All your feelings and perceptions are created by you in a sort of simulation.

TIP: When anything happens and you're looking for someone to blame, consider how that blame might help you get what you want. Most of the time, blaming someone else is asking someone else to help you get what you want. If you blame that other entity, will another player help you with them? You can't really control your teammates or your opposition in the game, but you can always improve your skill. So when something doesn't go your way, consider what move you can make that will inch things toward your way.

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TRICK: If you want money or status, take whatever you're interested in and start providing what you'd want to see in the world to everyone else. If you're tired of the music you're listening to, start making your own music. If you're tired of the food that someone else cooks, cook your own food. If there aren't any good games to play, make a game. Produce a little of every kind of thing you consume. Whenever you have the chance to own something, own it. If you have the choice between investing in stocks or in yourself, invest in yourself. If you have the choice between investing in cryptocurrency or starting a business, start a business. If you could campaign for a large political party, start a local group dedicated to something you care deeply about in your own neighborhood instead.

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5: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! -------------------------------------------------------------------Enemies, we need enemies! -Aspiring Champion, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

Humans are no strangers to war. After all, we've been fighting for as long as we can remember. War is all we know. -Chairman Prescott, Gears of War 2

Learn what you want, and you will begin to find things that block you from getting what you want. A lot of what blocks you will be the way other people are moving. Look close and far at how people move around you. You will find many hidden fights going on. When people are talking, try to figure out what each person in the talk wants. Whether it's your parents, your boss, or just people in a grocery store. People want different things. Or they want the same thing, and there isn't enough for everyone to have. Either way, we live in a Cold War with billions of different sides. A lot of the time, one person getting what they want means another person will not get what they want. People see this, sometimes. Maybe it makes them angry or sad. So they try to leave the game. Pretend like it isn't happening. It can feel too hard, to have so many other people in your way. What could you even do about it? People you love can still be people who are in your way. Most of the time, the people who are most in your way are people you love. So how do you deal with that?

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Maybe we leave. Maybe we try to find another game where there aren't as many people against us. A computer game, instead of the war of life. A smaller world. Where it is safe to play and fight. Someplace we don't have to hurt the people around us. A space where we don't have to compete with the people we love. Why would we even want to compete with people we love?

Life is Full with Conflict Regardless, competition is a part of life. Walk down any wooded area and you'll notice lots of birds making noise. Some of it is saying, “I’m here”. Others are saying, “get out of here” or “a falcon is coming”. A lot of it is about territory. Where they are in space. Who gets what and where. Who gets the worm, the seed, a mate. The empires we were born to do not like anyone competing with them. So we are trained to dislike competition, unless Our Empire is doing the competing. When you put lots and lots of people together, it is important to stop them from fighting too much. There's an oft-repeated line about chimpanzees on a plane. Put a bunch of chimpanzees in an Airbus and they’ll probably kill each other. The same was probably true of many segmentary lineage societies. Honor cultures. You can put loads of us on a plane, though. We sit quietly for hours. Almost no one ever gets cramped enough to try to kill someone else. We came up with strong ways to bring pain to anyone who might fight in the open without us telling them to. Standing armies. Police. Teachers. Church gossip. We've been trained to leave fighting to our big groups. Our nation, our state. We leave our fighting to think tanks, corporations, and the law. Past agreements about how to behave.

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We've learned to call the cops from learning to call the teacher or a parent. That doesn't mean there isn't something deep inside you that loves conflict. A part of you loves competition. A part of you loves violence. Any mammal loves to play, hunt, eat, and live. Plants are alive, too. Animals in a zoo may appear more peaceful. They're not hunting or doing as much territorial competition. However, you'll notice they don't live as long. They tend to get more diseases, much like we do. Diseases of material wealth. Look at feral dogs in places with a lot more subsistence living. Places where people are most concerned with survival. Feral dogs that survive look similar all over the world. They approach a sort of dog design. One useful for the functionality of surviving in a competitive world. They look sort of like dingoes, but leaner. Lean, rangy, relaxed, and a little mean. Captive breeds in post-industrial countries vary more in shape and size. Pedigree breeds come with a lot of health issues. They are not as resilient. If you release them into the wild, they would die quickly. We've done similar things to ourselves, with specialization. Most of us can adapt. Restrictions simply have to be lifted. When you wear glasses that filter up as down and down as up, you eventually start figuring out how to move in the world. After about two weeks, boom, you've adapted. When people go to a low-gravity environment, it doesn't take very long for them to adapt to that extremely unlikely environment. Humans learn to adapt to new places quickly. If they absolutely have to. It's even easier to go back to an environment you were well-suited to. So while it may have become difficult for you to face conflict, that difficulty is something that was trained recently. To tame an animal, enclose it in a space and scare it until it puts its attention on you. When it puts attention on you, project a calm feeling.

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It gets used to thinking of you as the source of calm. The moment the animal tries to put its attention anywhere else, you disrupt it. The Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan is constantly doing this. That's how he gets dogs to behave. This is how many people tame wild horses. You may notice something similar in what teachers do. In schools, you are enclosed into a space. All decisions about where to put your attention come from teachers. Administrators show the teachers. Lawyers, in turn, show them where to put their attention. If the attention drifts somewhere unapproved, there is a flick of the whip. A hint of disapproval. A raising of the voice. A lowering of the voice. A surge of downvotes. A scare, a promise of pain. We learn to put our attention where our trainers want. We find comfort in attending to what we're told to attend to. Until it is a habit. It’s hard to break out of a habit. A lifetime learning to put attention where others wanted. Systems that trained us up, domesticated us, brought us into the giant house of human civilization. Our very home. By default, our attention is where the house wants it to be. Where it wanted our attention to be in the past. Until now, when the house needs more change. When the house's dogs need to feed themselves again. Getting used to “doing nothing” helps untangle habits of attention. Sitting around, watching thoughts go by. Sensing feelings slip by. Noticing fullness. Feeling the many different things that come and go. Comfort with doing nothing makes it easier to accept the nature of the fight you're in. All life fights. The moment you think peace is somehow separate from war is a moment when you are letting something else do the fighting for you. Peace is simply being together. It is not the absence of fighting.

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We give up so much of our birthright, in letting others handle what we do not want to see. Soldiers and police do much of the fighting for us. Even shitposters on 4chan and journalists wage psychological warfare for us. Our actions are the result of what they do. It may not feel like you control them, but we offload competition to them nonetheless. We launder conflict through them. Like a money launderer cleans money gained by illegal means, people who know they are fighting clean the stench of competition from everything we do. It’s not so different from how we offload where our food comes from. Industrial farmers grow food for us. Meat companies butcher animals for us. Government organizations and land developers fight wildlife for us. All of this is hidden in a simple trip to the grocery store. The food we eat. The shelters we have. This comes from control over an environment. Marking of territory. Constant renegotiation of territory. Many acknowledge competition as necessary for any marketplace. We're comfortable with competition there. Perhaps there's also a bad taste in our mouth. A realization that property is sort of made up. One day someone took this thing and said it was theirs. People got together and decided to say it’s theirs. The only thing keeping that house of cards going are the agreements of the groups we live in. The moment someone doesn’t agree and they have the means, they can take anyone’s property. All our cultures come from that history. Property is what you can take, make, and defend. Most of us no longer take, defend, or make our property. We are removed from how property is obtained. It becomes difficult to take it seriously. After all, most people have their attention owned by someone else. Employees are taught to put their attention only where their organization wants it. That is a bigger cost than mere physical enclosure.

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The cost is an enclosed mind. It is a more effective way of taming an animal, after all. Give the animal a choice between doing what you want or something harder that you also want them to do. The animal feels like it has a choice. Even if you’re the one that gave it both choices. So it starts to train itself to follow your cues. Society does that. Our organizations do that. Our schools do that. Our businesses do that. We do that.

Play More, Spectate Less Your attention is not always yours. Consider the number of times you’ve chosen from an array of choices given to you by an algorithm. Sensing that control, we might want to ignore it. Pretend it’s not there. We might get disgusted by it. We might be disgusted with ‘capitalism’, ‘religion’, or ‘government’. All methods used to control. Yet, it doesn’t work to complain about being controlled. Complaining, whining, or bitching about something only works if there is someone bigger to complain to. Someone to help you. Someone to fight for you, pick for you, grow for you, kill for you, feed you, or clothe you. In school, people learn that their biggest power is to complain to a teacher or some other adult. Someone bigger who is allowed to handle our problems for us. We continue that pattern. Long after we're adults, long after we're the big ones. Instead of complaining to a parent or teacher, we complain to each other. We call our Congressman. We vote. We protest. We type some angry words and click 'post'. We complain to the ombudsman. We complain to an inspector-general, expecting someone to help out. We bounce back and forth about what we do and don’t deserve. We give away our ability to decide what the standard of ‘deserving’ is.

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There are more people asking for someone to do things for them than ever before. There aren’t as many people who can do things for themselves. No one left to bring your problems to. In the past, this led to certain kinds of hierarchies. In some small-scale societies, you would have a Big Man. A prestigious guy you would bring your problems to. They would resolve it for you. A priest. A Lord. A judge. A King. Things like that led to various forms of caste systems. Feudalism. Aristocracy. Things we say we grew tired of. We decided we were disgusted with that. We got rid of people we might bring our problems to. Instead, we bring our problems to the law. To the state. To the medical system. Old records of what someone decided in a different time and place. Letting ourselves be judged by the dead, who had no way of knowing where we'd be now. Now, there is no pipeline for people who are capable of being where the buck stops. Teddy Roosevelt talked about the buck stopping with him. You may remember his speech about the man in the arena. The responsibility for anything that happens to a group falls on the leader. The responsibility stops there. A leader is sacrificed by their community to take that role. The role of leadership comes with many privileges. It also brings with it all the blame for the circumstances of everyday life. Many people try to get the privileges of leadership without taking on this responsibility. They get blamed anyway. Situations are firmly blamed on leaders. People blame whoever they perceive has power over them. Whoever they're following. In our time, we blame our parents. Our romantic partners. People with more money. Politicians. Celebrities. More and more, even people with a lot of money or power do not accept responsibility. They blame other people. A system for rewarding and creating competent leaders is not present anymore.

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In most cultures, when you were a child, you had responsibilities. Either to provide for food or take care of your younger siblings, very early on. You know, you might have to take care of a camel by the time you're eight. You might have a herd of sheep to take care of. We don't really give children those responsibilities anymore. They're barely allowed to leave the house. We don't reward independence, or initiative. In fact, we punish initiative and independence. Responsibility is a hard task. It comes with constant attacks. More power and ability lead to getting attacked more. You can look at how the most competent people in your world are treated. Magnets for criticism, judgment, and blame. This is part of the contract of taking power. This is part of the difficulty of taking power. It's why people go out of their way to avoid power. It's why people go out of their way to escape freedom. It's very hard. It's very difficult. It's very painful. We only do it when it's absolutely necessary. When no one else can pick up the slack. So I'm here to tell you: no one else can pick up the slack. I'm writing this because this is too much for me to face alone. I need help. We all need you to fight alongside us. We can rise as a whole, together. Watching someone play a game, it is easier to see what the player might be missing. So you might say, "No, quick, attack now!" or "Jump!" or "you have to try another strategy, you gotta go mid!" and so on. The longer the players play, the more tired they get. If no one steps up to give them a break and also play, to try everything learned from watching them, then they'll only get worse at playing. So it pays to cycle through. Watch, and then play. Play, and then watch. Just watching or just playing tires us out. It breaks us down. We have more people watching than playing. We need more players.

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The first person to take care of is in the mirror. It is much easier to move yourself than it is to move anyone else. This is especially true in any sort of fight. Any sort of conflict. If you're fighting someone bigger than you, it's usually your only option. You can't really move someone with more than thirty pounds of muscle on you, if they don't want to go somewhere. You can always move yourself around, under, or over them. Position yourself in such a way that you might be able to use their own weight and strength against them. We can do this in our everyday lives as well. It might be that you can't change what your boss wants. You can't change what your parents want. You can't change what your girlfriend wants or what the people down the street want. But you can pay attention to what you want. Enough to align it with whatever your long-term aim is. A clear purpose is not a number. It makes it very easy to do many things. More energy flows through you, enough to face the level of conflict you will attract as soon as you get more power. When you have a goal like, "I want to make X amount of money per year" or something like that, that usually means you are pursuing an operational goal. An operational goal without a grand strategic goal suggests someone else is deciding your strategic goals for you. We all follow someone. However, if you find yourself frustrated over and over again, look closer. If you have a sense you are just going through life without a sense of purpose, look again. If everything seems sort of the same, nothing is really improving, and you find yourself waiting around for something, that's a sign. A sign that whoever you're following strategically does not have a clear aim. They don't know what they're doing. So you might need to step up and decide what your strategic aim is.

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An operational goal like getting a certain amount of money or followers- anything, anything you can stick a number on, those measures are always in support of an overall task. An overall gift someone wants to give to the world. Something to be made, a slice of reality to create. Money and time are there to advance an aim. It's not about getting a good career or a certain amount of status. Pleasing your parents, teacher, boss, friends, or girlfriend won’t cut it as a strategic aim. Do something that pleases them. They'll come up with another measure. Or the version of them that you model in you, every step of the way, will come up with some other measure. Like an endgame in an MMO that is just about levelling up some more with no feature changes. Just getting more gold and more of the same kind of item.

Remember What You Live For Your people probably didn't know where they got their measures from in the first place. They probably got it from an ad influenced by Bernays to sell cigarettes. A movie to sell tickets to Universal Studios. A title from a Think Tank piece to get someone elected. Let's say they got the idea that you need a particular kind of car to be successful. They love you. They want you to be happy. So they put it in you that you need a particular kind of car to be happy. Since, you know, they think a car would make you happy. Take five minutes of total concentration to think about happiness, and you might change your mind. You might realize you don't need a Tesla or a Ford F-150. Does pursuing happiness for the sake of happiness itself give you energy? It probably won’t. Oftentimes it does the opposite. Happiness is not an end in itself. You will need something bigger than happiness. A gift you can give all of humanity. All of life.

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Many religions come with preset versions of these gifts. Whether that's to give everyone a way to deal with pain, redeem everyone's sense of debt, or to submit to the awesomeness of God. However, whose aim was that? Maybe that was Jesus's aim. Maybe that was Siddhartha Gautama's aim. Mohammed's aim. But that won't work for you, because you are the result of those aims having been successful. They did impact the world. At some point, they improved the lives of the people around them. They already gave their gift to all life. So you need a different aim, building on what they have already given to the world. So maybe your aim is not bringing humanity to Mars. Maybe your aim is not bringing a new way to fly, to give people a sensation of freedom at low gravity. Maybe it's the ability to shape intelligence. Maybe it's the ability for people to be more like the animals they remember. Give them tools to feel what it's like to be a bear or a bee. Whatever your aim is, it will make it much easier to fight. Easier to bear conflict. The weight of conflict you carry with you everywhere you go will be like a second skin. All the while, the leaps you make every moment of every day will get more difficult. Lifting weights every day makes it easier to lift the same amount of weight. Then you lift more. Making these choices gets easier everyday. Choosing to step into the arena. Choosing to fight with grace and joy. As it gets easier, you will be given more conflict. More conflict to help you grow stronger. So that you can stay on the edge of life. Living to the fullest extent with all the gifts you have. Death and destruction, suffering and torment, war, these are all a part of your everyday life. Hoping it's going to be different makes it worse. Imagining you can live in a world without these things perpetuates their creation in an extremely explosive way. Every large war past the 20th century is conducted in the name of ending war. Claiming to end an injustice.

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The way the last war ends creates the next war. Counter intuitively and seemingly paradoxically, the best way to deal with all these unwanted aspects of our lives is to embrace them. As I was writing this chapter, I saw a squirrel outside. It moved from cover to cover, concealment to concealment, scanning the environment. Did a squirrel version of the 5/25 checks, something every soldier is taught to do. Check for threats hidden around them. Cover, concealment, situational scan. Cover, concealment, situational scan. As if that squirrel was in a combat zone. Someone pointed out that it was. And it is. That squirrel is always in a combat zone, and so are we. Just because we've hidden our front lines doesn't mean that competition and conflict aren't playing out in every second of every day, at millions of different scales. Your cells are competing with each other. Your body deals with invaders every second. Your mind is attacked with memes. In a sense, this very text is an attack. I am attacking you, as I have been attacked. However, that's no reason to curl up in a corner in despair. Fight back. Surrender to what is Now, and you'll find yourself stronger than you know. More able than you know. You'll find yourself thriving in the fight.

Love the Fight, Fight to Love In the military, there's the saying 'embrace the suck'. Say you had to do something, like carry a bunch of sandbags to a place and build up a defensive position. That does suck. Hot sun. A hundred degrees in Georgia, 98% humidity. Not fun. You've had like three hours of sleep last night. Yelled at, blamed, and bitched at all day. But then, then- you turn it into a game. Maybe you start joking as you throw the sandbags.

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Maybe you're not allowed to joke, so you make little funny faces with your eyes. Sooner or later, you all start laughing. Whoever is trying to punish you has to hold back laughter. They were trying to make things hard for you so you understand what stress is like. Well, here it is, and you’re all laughing in its face. The Indo-European root word for winning is ‘to love’. So to fight to win is to fight to love. Your capacity to love, to join with the rest of life, is limited by how much love you can actually show and let pass through you when you are in conflict.

You Can Always Move Something It's all very well and good to say that you appreciate peace, calmness or love itself. If you cannot muster that when someone else is trying to actively hurt you, when someone full of hate is trying to beat your face in or even kill you, then maybe you don't value peace and love as much as you think. You need to be able to love in the most stressful times. Otherwise, it is lip service. A hollow expectation, one more ideal smaller than the totality of life. You would sense that. Sensing the difference between what you say and what is happening, you will punish yourself. Self-punishment leads to further anxiety and depression. A lot of resentment will be formed to yourself by yourself. Even if we can all lie to ourselves, we can't really, in the long-term. You always sort of know when you're lying to yourself. So to live up to your own ideals, you will have to live them. What that looks like is that you're not going to do much talking about them to other people. Or even complain about what people aren't doing. There's always something you can do.

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Even if you become a paraplegic tomorrow, you can do a lot with a good enough strategic aim. An aim that includes everyone in the universe. There will be some part of your mission that you can always tackle. Say, you want to end world hunger. Well, that's sort of a negative aim. Usually a sign of an aim that's not very strategic. It's like saying you're going to get to your destination by avoiding car accidents. Operational as opposed to strategic, because when you're trying to move, when you're trying to do something, you're trying to do something- it's not the absence of doing something. The absence of doing something, the avoidance of something, always provides less direction than going after something. When you are hunting an animal, you're not trying to avoid scaring animals or nettles. Instead, you're going after a deer that would be suitable for a meal. A coat. A bone flute. All strategic aims which are about reducing something or ending something are actually operational aims. That is, they are the aims of a kind of middle management. Leaders of large organizations have groups of people who tell them to avoid bad outcomes in an effort to please them. That's necessary for a large organization to maintain itself. However, it can never be the strategic aim. It's a negative aim. It's something you don't want to do, which is a very big space, rather than something you do want to do, which is a smaller space. So it's simpler and easier to flow with that. Align the totality of your being toward that direction. Your strategic aim would be something that compresses your entire life. Your entire existence. Every skill you've had, every person you've met, every place you've been into, all of that plays into the aim. Notice a hole, a lack, and that lack is a sort of shadow of something more solid. Something positive you can bring to this world.

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The shape of the hole is the shape of the thing you will put in that hole. You might say that, having been in all the contexts you've ever experienced, "I want people everywhere to play with water more". Maybe you started off by going to far places and locating water. Digging wells. Then you get hit by a bus. You lose your legs and your hands are mangled. Now, you can't do that. You can't even type, we'll say. But perhaps you figured out how to think about the essence of water and where it is found. How to relate to water. Now that you need someone to tip a bottle to your mouth for you, you can really appreciate water. Meditate on it more than you ever did before. Spend a lot of time focusing your attention. Thinking of water. As you do that, you generate hypotheses that other people can test. You give that to them by talking through some sort of speech synthesizer dictated through your tongue movements. You feel the water in your saliva that much more. The lack of it in your cheeks. You know it better than you ever did when you could walk. There's always some end you can reach with your means. You never really know your means until you give up looking for means you don't have. Figure out what you can move, instead of what everyone else is moving that you have no control over. With a clear aim, every second of your life is spent moving toward it. You get more energy. Momentum. You move more easily. The difference between you and someone else who doesn't have that kind of aim, when they find themselves against you, suddenly becomes huge. You have a clear thing you're trying to reach. They just have something that they're trying to avoid. So all you have to do is go after your aim and you'll usually find a solution they could never imagine. And that solution might help them as well as it helps you.

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You might surprise them that way. Surprise is one of the most important parts of conflict. If you can surprise your opponent and keep on surprising them, they will usually cease to be your opponent. They give up, get destroyed, or join you. That's another thing to realize about conflict. We think about enemies as this absolute thing, but consider Jebe and Temujin. Jebe was a warrior fighting against Temujin. His arrow wounded Temujin. Temujin won the battle. When Jebe was a prisoner of war, the Khan's men asked about who made the wound. Jebe fessed up, and Temujin made Jebe one of his generals. One of his most loyal companions. This happens again and again in history. When one group conquers a lot of other groups, it's usually by turning yesterday's enemies into today's allies. That results in tomorrow's family. It does also go the other way around. Jamukha was Temujin's closest friend, until he turned into his first major enemy. After World War II, the United States was closely linked with Germany and Japan, even as the Soviet Union became its enemy. Many close alliances between nations today are between nations that fought fierce wars in the past. Today's allies may very well be tomorrow's enemies. We rearrange ourselves, depending on what we need at the time. And being around for the dance of this, being along for the ride, makes it easier to keep your timing. Your balance. As you get good at finding the timing of a fight and finding balance every time it's lost, you begin to enjoy the fight. The more you enjoy the fight, the more you enjoy being a player in the arena. The more you will win. The more you'll love. The more you'll bring everyone together. But none of that happens without first accepting the fight. Without first accepting that, hey, it is much harder. It is much more difficult to be in the arena, as opposed to being a spectator.

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It's very difficult to constantly struggle against opposition to every little thing you do. The reward that you get from stepping off the bench and onto the sand is far more than anything you'd get by being on the bench. And as it turns out, it's fun. Fighting is fun. That's why we play competitive games. That's why we live in competition. All the beauty we've experienced and will ever experience comes from this fight for life. That's why we stay alive. The moment we decide we are against that fight is the moment we decide we are against life.

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HINT: Remember the times you've played player vs. player games against your friends. Would those have been fun without the conflict?

TIP: Notice when you're still alive.

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6: LOOKING FOR GROUP --------------------------------------------Build alliances! Gather anyone and everyone you can! -Admiral Hackett, Mass Effect 3

You can't play a team game without a team. Don't be a leaver! -League of Legends

Some of the most interesting games are about relationships. The way the path between two things winds. An interaction between many things changes everything. Even single-player games like Mass Effect, Pokemon, and Persona are about relationships. Agent-based models that tell us a story of how the interaction of simulated life in a toy world changes that world. The experience of finding other people, creatures, and things that seem to move of their own will. Getting to know them. Relationships inform how you play. Change how well you do in the game. The more Pokemon you catch, the more Pokemon you get to know. The more you get to know the game. The more options you have. In fact, it is not possible to play the game of Pokemon without the help of a Pokemon. So already, there is interdependence: a relationship between two characters- the trainer and the Pokemon.

Winning is Social Most multiplayer PvP games involve teamwork. This produces a lot of frustration for people. You've heard the person yelling at their teammates as they're playing CounterStrike, Rainbow Six, or DotA.

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More people means more data shared. More data raises the chances of a bottleneck. A block in communication that comes from different people playing different games. Even as they are playing with the same tools. Some people might be playing to top the scoreboard. Others may be playing just to have fun. Someone else may be playing to learn something. Yet another may be playing to distract themselves from something. Different goals result in a lot of frustration. Winning teams figure out how to get what every team member wants by doing one thing and one thing alone: winning. Joining their wants to become want, they come together. One with their shared task, they lose their sense of self to the activity of the game. Before that can happen, everyone's got to see that everyone else is playing a different game. And stick together, anyway. Each difference has a chance to contribute to the whole, in the same way you need different roles to build a well-rounded team. As we went over in Chapter 4, wealth comes from relationships. There is no you without other people. Our thoughts are not our own. We create them together. Many of them might dissipate if you spend enough time in isolation. Similarly, when you play a game, even if you are playing for your own glory, your own status, your own K/D ratio, note that those are all relationships. Glory is about reputation in the eyes of someone else. Your status is how you stand in relation to everyone else. Your K/D ratio is only something worth talking about when there are other people to notice, to help produce that ratio. So games are inherently social. You are inherently social, no matter how selfish or withdrawn. After all, if you're reading this, you've enjoyed playing games that huge groups of people have put so much of their lives into. Even if you've only played single-player games, you've gotten to play with something that thousands of people have worked to create. It's brought you closer to the designers,

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writers, engineers, marketers, and administrators that brought that game into your hard disk. It's given you a shared experience with everyone else who played that game. You might end up thousands of miles away from where you were born, in a place where no one speaks the languages you do, but if you've played StarCraft and someone else there plays StarCraft, you have that in common. You've felt what it's like to be zerged. To be one pylon short of victory. You know what it's like to discard the best playstyle and experiment with an unusual defense. Look at children who grow up with no humans around them. They live, but what kind of thoughts do they have? There was a deaf person in Los Angeles who did not know how to use language until someone taught him sign language. Upon learning how to sign, he reported that it felt like being alive for the first time. Like existing for the first time. Keeping in mind that to exist, to stand out, is also a question of relation. If something exists, that means it stands out, but what does it stand out from?

Life is a Team Game To achieve anything, you need people. We are utterly dependent on each other. Our economic systems give the illusion of independence. Individuality adds to this illusion, but try to do anything by yourself. The famous essay on how to make a pencil will illustrate the layers of dependence that are present just to make a pencil. What would you need to make a pencil? What about eyeglasses? Simply going down the street and picking garlic mustard for my noodles required me to check with multiple different people to make sure I wouldn't poison myself. Every bit of information taken from the internet, from books, relies on billions of different people to get that information to you.

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Today, if you really want to make a pencil, you could probably figure out how to make something like a pencil without the global supply chain. But you wouldn't be able to make a pencil without knowing what a pencil is. The memory of ‘pencil’ is passed on to you from many people. Every other creature you've come into contact with. Cultural transmission doesn't just come from other humans. We learn from other animals, too. Humans made spidersilk by examining the silk that spiders make. In a less extreme example, many groups of people identify with animals whose behaviors they mimic. Whether that's the pack hunting of wolves that inspire human tactics again and again, or using baboons to locate water sources. So you're going to need a group, a clan, a guild. You've already done this before. Even if you've only played single player games, you've had the experience of seeking out a community that can provide information on the game you're playing. Whether that's a tutorial, a list of tips and tricks, or simply people talking about the game. All relationships are driven by proximity. In person, or through a computer. We end up valuing the people we live next to. Even when we come to hate them. Hate is in itself a strong relationship. An indication of caring so much about someone else's existence that you stand against them. So we're all very social, even if we might identify as introverts. Reading a book. Watching a TV show. Playing a game. These are social acts. It may be at some distance, but you are interacting with everyone who designed that piece of media. Everyone who influenced them. It may seem awkward to actively befriend people. Pursuing company might even seem desperate or low status. Not worth the effort. But remember, winning every game requires a team, clan, or guild. Working to get what you want gives you energy.

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You will want to pass some of that energy on to others. The very act of doing that gives you charisma. The reflection of life, the love and want of life, is where charisma comes from. In gaming communities, it's not necessarily the nicest, richest, funniest, or most beautiful person that attracts the most people. It's whoever interacts with the most people within that game while playing the game. They get to know the game through the other people that play the game.

People Are a Key to Winning You might think that kind of charisma is only limited to that particular game. In fact, it is. However, once you have experienced doing that in a game, you can easily start applying the same pattern to every game you find yourself in. Whether that's your neighborhood, work, or local bar. You could play the game of being an audience at a theater. Hiking with an under 40s club. Getting to know everyone is the first step to building strong relationships. We need strong relationships to flourish and thrive in this world. People who interact with others in deep and lasting ways get more motivation to win. Think of Napoleon or Steve Jobs. Running around here and there with little sleep, firing up people all around them. The sheer number of people they dealt with gave them energy. As soon as someone like Napoleon was cut off from these kinds of relationships, he withered. The stress of being disconnected from so many networks after being connected to hundreds, if not thousands of networks, is big enough to be a major stressor. Enough to weaken an immune system. Figure out what you want. If you want to play to win, you will need people. One of the basic ways to find people to play with is to play in public. Make it easy for people to find you.

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Let's say you're in a typical North American suburban house- instead of your basement, maybe you play in your garage. Instead of exclusively hanging out in your backyard, maybe you hang out on your front lawn a bit. Andy Matuschak talks about working with the garage door up- a way of making in public that invites people to engage in your game. The jazz pianist Theophilus Monk made compositions that invited other people to interact with his compositions. His play worked like an open-ended invitation. They seemed unfinished, but they weren’t. They were meant to be finished by others. Putting out unfinished work is an invitation for others to play with you. By playing in a way you truly enjoy, you get energy. The mana, the XP that attracts people who will fit well with whatever you're doing. Whatever you are deeply moved by will move others. It might be that many people are not allowing themselves to play that game yet. But by the very act of playing, you invite others to join you. You may have heard of convergent evolution. How many species evolve into something that looks like crabs. How many plants evolve into something that looks like trees. In both cases, many crabs and trees are not very genetically related. It’s just that a space in the environment drives selection toward those shapes. In cultural evolution, inventions pop up again and again. A response to interactions with the same environment. Similar environments produce similar inventions, since they pose similar problems. There's Leibniz and Newton for calculus. The very many people who attempted the first flying machines. These things pop up concurrently. We like to assign the invention of something to one person. However, the population has more than one person working on a similar project at the same time. It is a response to a need. A fit in the environment.

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A pace that has a puzzle piece, but the other puzzle pieces are missing. Find what moves you. It is a sign that others are out there. Waiting to play. Waiting for someone to follow. They just haven't let themselves play yet. Because we are all taught to play a few games, as opposed to coming up with our own. School presents us with a few games to play. As if we can’t just come up with new ones, like the children’s societies of the 19th century. Children had their own culture. Games of their own to share amongst themselves. Now, we have preschool. The teacher comes up with some set number of games for the children. Advertising and marketing bombard us. A few companies sell you their games. Because of that, we might not ever explore enough to start playing our own game. We went over how to start some of that exploration ‘Untapped Power’ and ‘Experimentation’. Notice other people who are playing games similar to the game you want to play. Reach out to them. Invite them to play. The worst they can do is decide not to play with you. There's always more people to play with, if you're willing to move. It's much easier to reach out to people than you might think, as long as you don't go in with a pre-judgement of the outcome. If you expect something to be awkward, it will be. If you expect something to be creepy or weird, it will be. You would pre-judge yourself. Worry and anxiety lead to tense interactions.

Invite People to Play Know what you want, and you will find more people interesting. They all have something that will help you get what you want, after all. Even if that’s a simple “don’t look for what you want here”. So you’ll find yourself more lovable and interesting. Then you won’t be as self-conscious.

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Free to be able to simply contact people you see playing an interesting game. Bold enough to invite people to play your game. Most friends are people who have the most friends, so the people you are most likely to invite are least likely to have free time. One thing to get around that is to simply keep inviting people, as long as you have energy from your game. When scouting ants and bees find good places to live, finding these places gives these scouts more energy to dance or signal. The strength of their signal is what shows the rest of the colony that the new place is worth moving to. Do what you want, and you will get energy. So much energy you can keep inviting people to play. You won't need to take it personally when they can't make it. That just means they're not interested enough in that particular play. This frees them up to go somewhere else. A game that fits them. When they're ready for your game, they'll come. And maybe if you invite them the fifth time, they would be interested. As long as it's something you would play on your own. You're just inviting people to things you would do anyway. There's no reason to expect them to come. Nothing to fear if they don't show up. If they don't show up, you play! If they show up, you play more! As long as you invite as many interesting players as possible, there will always be someone to play with. Someone will always be interested, eventually. The more open you are to others, the more you will find people to play with. Let clans know you’re up for joining them, and they may even come to you. Go along when someone invites you. It might not turn out well. It might turn out that you don't like the people there. Maybe they stank, talked funny, or had politics you disagreed with. Now you know not to look there! Keep looking, elsewhere. Many parts of games look like random walks. Like a maze. You take a couple steps in one direction and find a dead end. You go back and around until you find the next dead end.

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You change direction again, and so on. Until you get to your destination. What you discover along the way tends to be the shape of the game itself. Knowing the shape of the game is often more valuable than whatever sidequest had you taking that random walk in the first place.

More Energy, More Pain The next invitation you receive, you can still accept. Keep on meeting people. The more people you meet, the higher the chances are that you'll find your clan. You'll find the guild that really fits you. The Secretary Problem is a problem of finding someone that fits. It was about hiring a secretary, but it also works for dating and finding a person for anything. In the problem, the best number of people to look at before hiring was around ten. In life, with your ultimate tribe, you might want to go through thousands of people before you find people that fit. Hang out with thousands of people, before you find the ones that are your family. Once you've found such a family, remember that families are full of pain and drama. There's more information being exchanged with the people closest to us. We tend to hurt the people closest to us most. Partially because they feel our pain more than anyone else. And if they don't, we might lash out at them to force them to feel it. Together as a group, you will figure out how to play with that. How to use that pain. In our atomized world, we often feel like this is too much to bear. A way to bear the pain of relationships is to be more present. Pay attention to the pain. Usually you don’t have to take it personally. Unless you really, really want to. Then at least have fun with it. Show up for someone else. Listen to them. When they know you are willing to stand with them in their feelings, that’s often all they really need.

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What people say is not actually what they mean. They are doing their best to communicate with the command of the symbols they have. Most of the time, they are taking bits of symbolic communication from other people. From some dead philosopher, movies, whatever. They might not know how to express themselves well enough to understand where your paths don’t cross. Living with a clear strategic aim will draw people to you who fit you. Hide your aim, and get more people who don’t fit. Because they don’t know what you’re about. Most people hide their aims from themselves, so they’re not with people who fit. We need lots of conflict to find a better way to live together. To find the people who best share our aims. A lot of times, people's stated aims are not their aims. They are the stated aims of whoever they regard as the most powerful authority around them. There's a saying, "the army is prepared for the last war". Similarly, our aims are typically from the last big movement that influenced us most. A lot of people have aims of people from the 19th century, and so on. Old aims that don’t match their aim. But they have no way of knowing that until they find it for themselves. Which they may over time. At their pace, not yours. So a strategic aim works as a filter for you. It will draw the people who need you most, who you need most. There are little games you can play with people to connect as quickly as possible, if you are inclined to do things in a more mechanical way. The same way you can look up a lot of the guides to a game or follow a walkthrough. You can do that with relationships, if both of you like speedrunning with walkthroughs. A lot of people are not cool with that. They prefer a slower pace. But if you’re both speedrunners, you can tell each other your entire life story. It may take shorter than you think. Maybe a couple of road trips.

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Maybe recording your thoughts on your entire life and handing it over to your friends.

Let Your Team Change You There are many intimacy exercises you can do. Looking someone in the eye for as long as 15 minutes. 60 minutes often changes a relationship for the better. There's often a sense of deep understanding that happens when we offer up ourselves well enough to be able to look someone in the eye. Another method is to notice when someone is making a bid for attention. A bid might be anything from a request to go to the store to a text saying "hey". It might be a comment about politics. A joke about the latest anime show. Even an accusation or an insult. A lot of times, we might ignore that stuff. Or feel like looking at it will hurt our relationship with that person. But ignoring it weakens a relationship more than anything else. More than fighting, even. As long as everyone is willing to turn toward each other during a conflict, conflict improves relationships. Like in a server where you all talk a lot of shit, but compete for years. Eventually you become friends. You might have been the worst enemies. They might have been the biggest troll in the world. Said horrible things. But do that for long enough and you become close. Simply by sharing a server. Sharing a space. You've been on both sides, against each other for so long, that you become close. In ‘Blood for the Blood God’, we talked about stories like this. Where enemies become allies. Fighting against someone is an extremely intimate relationship. A super fast exchange of information. So maybe when someone starts to say something you disagree with, you can just listen to them. You already know what you know and believe.

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You do not know what they know and believe. You don’t know why they believe what they believe. If you really knew, you could probably get them to do many things. You could predict what they'll do next. How they will move. Do that, and you're winning. Even if you were trying to convert someone, it pays to listen more than it does to tell them to stop believing whatever they’re believing. They've gone through a particular series of experiences to come to those conclusions. Listen to them, and you might find an opening. A glimpse of the nature of their biggest problem. Somewhere you can find a solution that will work for both of you. When you can repeat what they’re saying back to them in a way they will agree with, you can start playing with them. If you can't do that, it may be evidence that you don't actually understand what they want. Without that, you won’t be able to help you both win. Maybe you don't have a better solution for them. Maybe they have goals or aims that are not being met. Your solutions will ultimately have to provide for their aims, if you want to win with them. Your solutions will have to incorporate theirs. If they are to ever accept your solutions, those solutions have to account for every little tiny point they use to come to their conclusions. A deep pain from fifteen years ago may stop them from ever telling you the truth. Until they feel safe. They're not going to feel safe until they can talk to you about anything. Until they can tell you about the rat they accidentally killed and buried in their backyard. The panties they stole from Hot Topic. The body they sunk in the swamp. Otherwise, they're not going to show you the keys to changing their mind. If you are not willing to change your mind, there's no way to change someone else's. Unless you have a ridiculous amount of power you can use to force change. Though even that will result in pushback.

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Counter-resistance to your attempts to force a worldview down the throat of someone else. Push someone and eventually they'll push back. Charles Bukowski, in one of his poems, joked that all he had to do to get laid was simply be available. Just writing in public in the bar every week was enough. Most relationships work like that. They improve the more time you spend with them. The more time you spend around people, the closer you get to them. Knowing who to spend the most time with is a difficult decision. Spend the most time with the people who give you the most energy. You know how you might max experience points by getting a feat, power, or ability that raises the amount of xp you get from every win? Or an ability that increases the loot from every loot drop? Decisions about time and energy are like this. Look at who gives you energy. It’s a clue about where you fit best. And this will change, from moment to moment. It tells you where to go. Who needs you. Fuck Yeah! feelings come from using more of everything you are. All your abilities, wants, and skills. When things fit between people, the things that come from them being together are far more than what each would get if they were alone. So it's not just what you can do for them or what they can do for you. It's what you do together, that you cannot do without each other. Go to the places where the most energy is exchanged. Spaces that are growing, rather than spaces that are stagnant. Just as "the army is prepared for the last war", we are often prepared to look for what worked well in the last growing game. However, by now, that game is probably stagnant. Go where life is. Where do you find vigor? Where are people growing so fast? Sometimes this leads to explosive relationships. You may learn to enjoy them. Something you can surf, as in a sweetspot game like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero. An unexpected explosion is a terrible thing.

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An expected explosion is a party. Getting surprised by a 155mm heavy explosive round going off a mile and half a way is terrifying. Sending off the round at the artillery range with your boys is a party. It's a reason to gather around and watch the fireworks. So sometimes, your relationships may appear extremely volatile. Choose to play the game, and it is something to be enjoyed. You’ll keep balance. Smash the controller and cuss at the screen, so long as that’s the game you’re choosing to play. If that’s where you get the most energy that you can give back to others, then that’s for you. Every single human being is someone you have a lot in common with. They all have something you don’t have. Something you can learn from. No matter how retarded, ridiculous, or malicious they may seem. You've probably heard the thing about how much DNA you share with other people. It's not just every single human being. It's every single bit of life. Every plant. Every insect, mouse, spider, and cockroach contributes to your reality. When you have some sort of conflict in a game, we might call the other team “terrorists”. The opposing force. The red team. The bad guys. The enemy. And we might get mad at them for things they do, even if they are the opposing force. However, we usually need them to continue playing the game. Finding the beauty and value in everyone helps us find our people. You don't know where they might be hiding, and you won’t find them unless you’re searching all over the place. You can learn more about the game from anyone else. Even if it’s about what not to do. Say you're talking to your boss. Let's say your boss is Charlie. He micromanages every little thing, down to the method of throwing trash away. He can't explain why you're doing anything you're doing at work. Blames you for most things that go wrong in your workplace. Getting to know him will reveal information about how he comes to make the choices he makes.

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Why he manages you the way he does. This will make it easier for you to do a better job, if you’re ever in his place. There is, after all, a part of you that would lose patience. Get angry. Seek to control your subordinates. Face the harassment he faced. The pressure he feels to get promoted. The need to conform. With all that, you might do the exact same thing. A part of you may even be doing it to yourself right now. Telling yourself off, blaming yourself. Demanding an impossible standard. Seeking to control every little aspect of your experience. So Charlie helps you recognize the Charlie in you. Now you can deal with your inner Charlie. See a player bombing in a game, and you probably won’t copy what they’re doing. That information is very valuable to you. It tells you what won’t work, which frees you to look for what will work. As you talk to the scrub who keeps failing, maybe you realize they just need confidence. Maybe they didn’t know something you know. Maybe you read guides from other people, and they didn't. Maybe they're just playing, exploring, and they'll do something surprising. Come up with some new way of playing the game in the future. While you're still executing the old strategies. You could transfer what you know to them by being around them. Doing better, not telling them what to do. By the very act of doing better at the game around them, they will slowly come to take information from you. Your performance informs them. And that might give you a sense of worth and value. Even if other people are simply there to buffer your kill/death ratio, they are extremely valuable to you. Even if the other side is full of noobs, they're extremely valuable to you. They give you the experience of going around and fucking up a bunch of noobs. Paying attention more broadly to the game gives you access to people. Everyone wants to know how to play.

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A lot of people are tired from trying to decide how to play instead of simply playing. Trying to pick a play style. Trying to tell other people what to do. Often, we tell other people to do what we feel we need to do. We are a social species. Maybe you can start by texting a friend. Calling your mom. Maybe you can invite the people down the street over for a drink. Maybe you can host a LAN party. Whatever method you use to connect to other people, it will bring you closer to winning. Every person you meet is a sort of win. To win is to love. As you come to love a kind of person, that gives you access to their world. Just like Pokemon. Having access to as many kinds of Pokemon as possible gives you the understanding and love of the game necessary to develop a winning strategy again and again. Defeat a mob and get their ability. Appreciate another human being, get some of their preferences. Learn to like more things, and get more skills. If you weren't interested in plants before, there's no real way for you to be an effective botanist or forager. Start appreciating a botanist, and you will find yourself beginning to like plants. Then you might learn more about what plants need. How they survive. The next thing you know, you have a garden and other people are asking you for advice with their plants. Liking someone helps you like what they like. Liking something helps you pay attention to that thing. Paying attention to anything improves your skill with that thing. The more people you meet, the more people you can have a conversation with. Regardless of who they are and where they're from. The easier it is to play the game, the easier it is to step into the arena. We are all spectators and players. The more people we interact with, the more spectators we have for our arena. The more players we have to learn from. The more people you're connected to, the more skin in the game you have. Skin in the game is the first step to winning.

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We need every player with skin in the game we can get. We need every clan we get on our side, because our primary players are getting tired. Our politicians, scientists, and generals are all blaming others- which is a sign that they're tired of playing. If everyone's bitching more than they're playing, it's time for other players to step in, or to play a different game. We can't do that alone. It's on us to start playing new games- to form strong, united clans that make new plays.

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HINT: People like it when you show them something you appreciate about how they've changed you. Everyone you meet changes you in some way.

TIP: Notice when someone is asking for your attention. Deep underneath most requests for attention are requests to play. If you've been around children, you might remember how often they ask to play. Adults are no different, though most have given up on asking people to play with them. So when you notice someone asking for attention, be playful as you address them. Even a "No" can be done playfully, and can help both of you get what you want.

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7: GO GO GO! -------------------------------------------------------------------GO GO GO! Stick together team! -Counter-Strike

ATTACK HEAD ON FROM BEHIND — Cavalieres_Dante_Alighieri, Mount & Blade Warband: cRPG Strategus

A game is a way to understand time. It slices out a piece of time, small enough to explore. By exploring, we learn. When you played a game, you learned how to use time. There is only so much of it left for you and me. Copying saves time. Combining creates time. A competitive game forces us to combine everything we sense and copy, to win. The more time you put into something, the easier it is to win. The 2023 US Biathlon National Championships happened in Casper, Wyoming. In biathlons, people shoot .22 caliber rifles and ski long-distance. Every time you miss a shot, you have to ski an extra ‘penalty lap’. I helped count the number of penalty laps each racer took. An older woman kept taking penalty laps, again and again. The sun was hidden. Drifting snow and wild Wyoming winds cut everyone’s skin. Icicles formed on our faces. My drinking tube froze within minutes. Yet she was there, lap after lap. She turned out to be a 72-year-old racer named Anne. In her category, she had little competition. All she had to do to be a national competitor was show up and play. That’s what we went over in ‘Press Any Key to Start’. The first step to seizing your time is playing.

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Experts are people who show up to a game over and over again. Every second spent playing is time you’re not spending worrying. Nothing steals as much time as worrying. We limit ourselves to using only the time that others approve of. Yet gaming is all about limit testing. Use all the time you’ve ever spent. What you did in games shows you what you want. Knowing what you want helps you make the most of your time now. Embrace your wants. Give up on cringe and shame. This is how you access your ‘Untapped Power’. Like a time mage, you can set up loops. Little games to help you understand things. ‘Experimentation’ to make the most of your time. This is the fastest learning method available to man, in the long-term. Time is the ultimate currency. We use money, status, and power to trade time. Own your time to own yourself. Use your time to start games others will play, and you will own their time. This is how you get ‘Gold, Prestige, & Piety’ on the longest timescale. People give you wealth when you give them the time they didn’t know they wanted. We all fight to live. War is the price of living. ‘Blood for the Blood God’. Accept this, and you will get better at fighting for your time. Nobody fights alone. We fight hardest when we fight for others. Let people know you are ‘Looking For Group’. Grow clans to share your time with. Together, you will create the time of your life. Whatever faction you've been with until now, you can sense change accelerating. A Black Swan event is when something people thought was rare becomes very common. Black Swans were rare in Europe, but common in Australia. Every year seems to have more Black Swan events than the last. People seem to be getting more anxious every day. More sad. Furious, full of hate. This is because they're scared. Terrified. They reach for control to try and stop change. But change only happens more. This ball started rolling aeons ago.

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All that momentum needs someplace to go. It's just gonna go faster and faster. Those who adapt to tomorrow’s changes will win, and those who fail to adapt will lose. It’s too much for most people. So they watch. Spectate. But this does not have to be a movie, where you watch helplessly as things happen. Where you sit still as someone else's plot moves. This could be a game. This can be your game. Ghosting is when you spectate a round and tell your teammates where the enemy is. It only goes so far. Someone has to play. People are asking for help. They've been camping in the same spot for decades. We need people who can think laterally. People who can go meta at the drop of a k/d ratio and figure out how to try something else. How to move when a fixed position isn't working anymore. People who know that Now is all there is. People who can figure out every extreme within a set of constraints, to surprise even the designers of that system. People who can coordinate to exploit a bug in less than 2 minutes. People who can figure out what needs to be done in a group and do it, even when they're not told what to do. People who can try shit out with no rhyme or reason, just 'cause it's fun. People who can play with people from every ethnicity, political ideal, age, value system, ability, and gender- and get told 'fuck you u fucking femoid cocksucker im going to rape your body with ur mongoloid mommas dildo' and still play the next day. THE ARENA needs players. Players who know, in their gut, that Winning is Fun. If it's not fun, it's not winning. We need feet on the sand. We need people who know how to play in uncertain environments. How to lose nine hundred and ninety-nine rounds and come back to win in the thousandth round. How to let go of a tactic and try the noob's advice on for size.

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Every bit of support and knowledge on items and culture are necessary to get the top scorers to score. Someone who scores high in one map may be best as support in another. We need people who know how to adapt. How to change. How to turn a thousand fails into winning. It's on us to show spectators how to win. It's on us to show them that winning is fun. So they, too, can learn to play. We win by playing. Playing at work, war, love, near death, and in all of life. It's not easy to find a way to play on a server that doesn't really want anyone to play. Play is so adaptive, so fun, that we're going to find a goddamned way to play even if we find ourselves in a concentration camp. You've simulated millions of deaths. You've fought this fight hundreds of different ways, in hundreds of different bodies. You've come up with millions of different solutions, built a billion worlds that dissipated as easily as they were created. Every time you played a game. Daydreamed about a strategy. Collected a causal thread, and tried again after the game ended. You know how people behave when they're stressed. You know what desperate tactics they'll try, when they're losing. You know what noobass mistakes they'll make, when they're winning. You know exactly how to find out when to attack. When to make use of timing. You've been dozens of steps ahead before, and you will do it again. So stand up. Play. Step into The Arena. RISE, GAMER

Perhaps you were expecting some great surprise, for me to reveal a secret that had eluded you, something that would change your perspective of events, shatter you to your core. There is no great revelation, no great secret. There is only you. - Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic II

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NOTES: Press Any Key to Start --------------------------------------------A 2002 paper pointing toward the correlation between happiness and social relationships was revisited by its authors, Ed Diener and Martin E.P. Seligman as ‘Happiest People Revisited’ (2018): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/ 10.1177/1745691617697077?casa_token=Ek7lGBiuxIAAAAA:IfJSNHDkILnynr7i7ta8ZYsLslAKZezj_zUTnr9Lt VGq0UgLgVEPXhwS985d6nAb86ktgle2RPtHRA The Grant & Glueck study- where people’s health, wellbeing, and socioeconomic status were tracked for the duration of their lives suggested a similar correlation, and it’s continuing with the second generation (the children of the original group of people studied) of participants. https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/publications One of the features of religiosity is a stable community- a stable web of personal relationships, which may be why survival and religiosity appear connected in a review of studies on ‘Religiosity/Spirituality and Mortality’ (2009) by Yoichi Chida, Andrew Steptoe, and Lynda H. Powell . https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/190791 In ‘Homo Ludens’ (1938), Johan Huizinga suggests that play is necessary to create culture. In ‘Definitions of Play’ (2009), Peter Gray pointed out that play is a state that requires self-direction, where means are valued more than ends, and activity is constrained by openended rules which serve an alert, active, and stress-free mind. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Definitions_of_Play 'A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages' (1972) by Alan Kay talks about the mismatch between what is beneficial for learning and how children are educated.

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In ‘The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits’ (2014), Gordon M. Burghardt shows that play is a way to introduce variation that then generates resources which can be used for survival by the players. Surplus killings are an example of such play- by killing prey that is not needed for food now, predators improve their ability to hunt and defend territory. This ability is a resource generated from play. Surplus killing is typically exemplified by the actions of animals like jaguars, but even spiders engage in surplus killing. This is shown by Susan E. Riechert and Jennifer L. Maupin in ‘Spider effects on prey: tests for superfluous killing in five web-builders’ (1998). https://www.european-arachnology.org/esa/wp-content/ uploads/2015/08/203-210_Riechert.pdf With all this talk on surplus killing, it may be clear that play is an activity crucial to life and death. In ‘Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents’ (2021), DeepMind suggested that playing games led to more generally capable artificial intelligence. An open-ended game that allows for the possibility of error, for an unscripted result, improved the training of AI. https://www.deepmind.com/blog/generally-capableagents-emerge-from-open-ended-play In ‘Player of Games’ (2021), DeepMind reviewed that games have long been used as a benchmark for general intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03178 In ‘Playing Hide-and-Seek, Machines Invent New Tools’ (2019), Stephen Ornes writes about how self-play is used in machine learning. https://www.quantamagazine.org/artificial-intelligencediscovers-tool-use-in-hide-and-seek-games-20191118/

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OpenAI Five, the OpenAI algorithm used to play Defense of the Ancients 2 against world-class players, “learned by playing over 10,000 years of games against itself.” https://openai.com/five/ Both the first few Ultimate Fighting Championship events and the challenges of hobbyist MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong against traditional Kung Fu masters are good examples of what happens when martial arts embrace a rigid doctrine and dogma. This happens again and again, cyclically. The rise of Judo against traditional Jiu-Jitsu followed a similar format. Once a tradition is established, it tends toward this kind of rigidity again- so while Mixed Martial Arts in 1993 was quite ‘Alive’, limitations from the consolidation of rules and monopolization by a few promotions will result in a similar deterioration of unarmed combat practicality, even as it receives more of the status that is accorded to a more ‘civilized’ sport. 1080P | Xu Xiaodong VS Wing Chun Ding Hao https://youtu.be/eNzOBUFZ3xM?t=17 Aliveness in the Martial Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliveness_(martial_arts) A Timeline of UFC Rules: From No-Holds-Barred to Highly Regulated https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1614213-a-timelineof-ufc-rules-from-no-holds-barred-to-highly-regulated The economist Robin Hanson notes that something similar happens with large organizations, though unlike the martial arts, it’s harder to perceive a simple arena where it’s clear that this kind of deterioration is happening. He calls it ‘rot’. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/11/will-worldgovernment-rot.html

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Korean gamers have the term 'Goinmul', which means stagnant or rotting water. It's used to refer to games that have not been updated for years, so that the meta has not changed. Spaces like that favor exploitation over exploration, so they are hostile to new players and innovation. Balance is needed for any healthy population. Most early philosophers of politics address this kind of deterioration as a breakdown of virtue. The Dao De Jing, The Analects of Confucius, and Plato’s Republic all contain relevant examples. Looking through a frame of cultural transmission, we might call this some sort of copy error that lowers transmission fidelity. Monica Tamariz reviews ‘Replication and emergence in cultural transmission’ (2019). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S1571064519300673? casa_token=pDMaFCHtOYcAAAAA:uOa50Q_inlp6MFJBLKZ76P05lQsdRqocnH7N2yCUEzqisQsGtOZkcAOR1jNtqqsIl6HRo8g5Y In ‘Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind’ (2015), Andy Clark popularizes the idea that we get a limited amount of data from the changing world around us through our senses, and we come up with possible stories to put all that data together internally. In such a dynamic, the world is always uncertain, and we create the certainties we feel. In ‘Expectations of Life: A Study in the Demography, Statistics, and History of World Mortality’ (1990), Henry Oliver Lancaster surveyed a myriad of sources on mortality through the ages. ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999) cost 60,000 US dollars, which is a little under a hundred thousand after inflation (Wolfram Alpha, which you can carry in your pocket, told me that).

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It could probably be made for a quarter of the cost today, given the cameras and microphones everyone carries in their pockets. The movie ‘I Play with the Phrase Each Other’ (2013) cost $17,000. Don Mexlar (@donmexlar), a man you may be lucky enough to locate on Twitter, has released a number of wonderful short films shot on his phone, with next to no filming budget. Liani Maasdorp in ‘South Africa: Enter the Micro-Budget Film’ (2020) highlights the rise of films shot with tiny crews and little capital. This lowered cost to create is present in all mediawhether that’s creating music with something like BeepBox or BandLab, mobile games with something like Gdevelop, full games with something like the Unity engine (which doesn’t charge rents until your game is valued past $100,000). The suite of creative open-source software available to any Linux user is unprecedented- this book, for example, is written in Scribus. Powerful tools being available to most internet users is not just limited to content- consider the price of a Creality Ender-3 3d printer, or the price of a CRISPR kit. Both come in at under US$400. With the first, it’s possible to manufacture a mortar launcher, a robotic arm, an otoscope, or parts for a water filter. With CRISPR, the technique used to edit DNA, it’s possible that someone may soon do something at home that’s equivalent to finding a new treatment for malaria, figuring out how to turn human waste into fertilizer at scale with minimal water use, or a transmissible biological tracker. It used to be that you needed access to a well-stocked library and the academic network tied to that library to do most research. Now, you have access to more information in your pocket than Neil deGrasse Tyson had at Harvard College and the University of Texas at Austin.

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NOTES: Untapped Power --------------------------------------------Roots of the word ‘power’ go through definitions like ‘I am able’, to ‘I am master in control of’ (the word ‘posse’ comes from the same word). The Indo-European root is speculated to mean something like ‘lord’, ‘ruler’, or ‘husband’. That in turn is derived from something like ‘self’. So perhaps power is intrinsically tied with some individuality- the ability of one to do something. One of the many reasons we learned to hide our preferences has to do with how we are typically educated. I’ve found this best exemplified by the video ‘Wild Patagonian Horse Is Masterfully Tamed | Wild Patagonia | BBC Earth’ (2018). https://youtu.be/w7WsuNNLcNw?t=51 In this video, a cowboy tames a feral horse. He does this by enclosing the horse, and then scaring, startling, and otherwise disapproving of it any time the horse places its attention where he does not want the horse’s attention to go. When the horse places its attention on him, he stays calm, and gives it some peace. The moment the horse places its attention elsewhere, he shocks it with a movement, the sting of a whip, or sound. Through this process, the horse learns to stop trusting itself, and begins to trust the human instead. In ‘KBR Horse & Donkey Training Information’ (http:// www.kbrhorse.net/pag/train.html), the instructors talk about a ‘Learn-Learn’ method of training, where the horse is given a choice between two options- both options given by the trainer. An easy way and a hard way to be trained. With this choice, the horse has a sense of autonomy, and so puts up less resistance with the trainer over time.

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Cesar Millan, ‘the dog whisperer’, uses a similar method in all his dog training videos and reality tv shows. You might be reminded of the field of behavioral economics popularized through the book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ (2008) by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, where the authors suggest that we can design incentives into our institutions that nudge people into making the choices we want them to make. For example, we might make the default choice ‘donation’ for a citizen’s choice of donating their organs, so that more people end up ticking that box because of the convenience of having that choice as the default. They call this ‘choice architecture’, which closely resembles KBR’s ‘learn-learn’ horse training method. All of this might be familiar because it is how most of us are brought up, how most of us are trained- whether that’s by our parents, our teachers, or our employers. We are enclosed in an area, and when our attention drifts away from where our trainers want our attention to be, some sort of stimulus is introduced- often someone simply telling you to stop doing what you’re doing, or to pay attention to what they want you to pay attention to. In many ways, media companies do this for society at large- when you start to pay attention to something else, people who support that media will often suggest that you are being ignorant or malicious. Since you’ve integrated the teachings of a lifetime of trainers, you may have become used to punishing yourself in anticipation of the trainer’s punishment- of disapproving of yourself in anticipation of the trainer’s disapproval. So that you continue to train yourself long after you’ve parted ways with the trainer. The reward/disapproval system is installed through education, and then we perpetuate it because it’s what we’ve done to survive, live, and grow in the society we’re in.

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However, there comes a time for every general intelligence to go beyond what its trainer knows, and for that, our trained inhibitions will not suffice. Creation happens, like evolution, through introducing variation and selecting something that fits best from that variation. The dichotomy of Tool AIs and General AIs was introduced by Gwern. https://www.gwern.net/Tool-AI An external trainer will select what fits best for the larger group they are a part of. A horse trainer selects behaviors in a horse that makes sense for human economic systems, not behaviors that make sense for that horse to thrive in the wild. This is what the fable of the wolf and the hound is about. A hungry wolf meets a well-fed dog. The dog offers the wolf food, but the wolf thinks better of it. He sees the collar around the dog’s neck, and decides to be hungry instead. In philosophical tradition, there’s a similar parable between Diogenes and Plato. Diogenes is washing vegetables and Plato mocks him for washing vegetables. He tells him that if he pandered to Kings, he wouldn’t have to wash vegetables. Diogenes replies that by washing his own vegetables, he doesn’t have to pander to Kings. One pattern to note here is that when someone realizes this, they may react against the trainer, and resist the trainer directly. However, this, by itself, is also following the trainer’s attention. The opposite of what the trainer wants is one step away from what the trainer wants. A wild animal simply does their own thing, with little regard for the trainer except when the trainer is in their way. The job of a trainer is to reduce variation in the behaviors of the animal being trained, not to increase it. As such, the inhibition we learn from being trained lowers the variance we produce. Play, meanwhile, increases that variation.

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So play is a necessary part of discovering new things, and discovery is necessary for making new things. A short animation by the math and science explainer Grant Sanderson sums up the nature of discovery well. https://twitter.com/3blue1brown/status/ 1302000514666819586? s=20&t=aZFRT2JLws2E9T4zH4X0zw Most trainers attempt linear paths without exploration to get their trainees to a particular point. However, when finding new things, the point is not known in advance, so exploration is necessary. Play is necessary. Most people tend to act as if the discovery happened linearly, because we are trained to do things linearly. It is much easier to grade thousands of people according to one easily reproducible standard than it is to grade their play. Further, every ‘failed’ attempt is often necessary for each discovery, and there’s no clear way to reward those who ‘fail’ to discover something other than rewarding their effort. This is partially why competence is rare today- our education rewards the appearance of effort toward matching attention to the trainer’s preferred point of attention, rather than effort toward action. Much competent action looks relatively effortless, much competent learning looks like play. Even more unsettling for trainers, competent learning means a student will surprise a master more often, which may hurt the master’s image of their own competence. We worry about our image of competence when we aren’t actually working toward a grander project. Since that’s many of us, damage toward our images is perceived as damage toward the individual- only a paper tiger is afraid of a dog bowling it over, of revealing an image simply made of paper, instead of a breathing body of flesh, bone, and blood.

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In his book ‘Free to Learn’ (2013), Peter Gray wonders why both anxiety levels and suicide rates have been steadily rising in children and adolescents. He suggests that it may have to do with the expectations and constraints that are thrust upon children at an earlier and earlier age. From a comment on one of his articles: “Here in NYC, the kids start Kindergarten at 4. My best friend’s son started this past September. About 2 weeks into the school year, he was getting letters home from the teacher that he was ‘falling behind academically.’ Since then, he’s gotten letter after letter, and meeting after meeting with the teacher. My friend has been trying to deal with the problem by drilling his son at home in the evenings. The poor kid begs to be allowed to go to bed. The both of them are discouraged and feel like failures.” Notice that both the parent and the child reflect an anticipated punishment (for not putting their attention where it ‘should’ be) as a sense of failure. They have internalized their training, just as the horse and I have internalized ours. We could say that this training is where preference falsification comes from. In his book ‘Private Truths, Public Lies’ (1995), Timur Kuran introduces the term to talk about the very many little white lies people tell themselves and others about what they actually want. People further away from a cultural center are encouraged to mimic the preferences of that center, but since they are far away and have a different context to their lives, the preferences of the center don’t actually work for them. Consider, for example, someone from a temperate land telling you to grow wheat in a tropical climate. This pattern is repeated in both internal colonization and colonization of foreigners.

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One political center’s peasants are colonized in much the same way as another imperial center’s far away indigenous people. The difference of skin color in some populations merely allows the distinction between a globalist elite and local peasant to be more easily enforced over time, where in a population with similar features, a peasant could simply change their name and adopt the culture of the elite to erase their past. These processes are shown well in the ‘The Discovery of France’ (2007) by Graham Robb and ‘Weapons of the Weak’ (1985) by James C. Scott. Therefore, methods that were explicitly addressed in the US Office of Strategic Services’ ‘Simple Sabotage Field Manual’ (1944) are simply what anyone being trained uses to resist being trained by someone who doesn’t know the trainee’s local context. You might see this in any classroom. Many students are difficult not because they’re stupid, but because the teacher (and the sprawling, bureaucratic entity behind that teacher) isn’t aware of what actually works for that student. The same goes for employees in a large corporation, or soldiers in a large army. In ‘The Muqaddimah’ (1377), Ibn Khaldun speaks of this tendency when he talks about desert savages. He says that because they’re illiterate and uneducated, they are actually more locally resilient and difficult for a center to control. The solution to this is to teach them to write, to turn them into scholars, who are far easier to control. In his book ‘The Birth of the Propaganda State’ (1985), Peter Kenez says that the Soviets encountered this problem again- and pushed literacy particularly because literacy allowed their propaganda to spread more effectively. If you watch closely, you may notice that people use appeals to Education with the underlying assumption that the more educated someone is, the more they will fall in line with their preferred cultural norms.

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When you let go of past training, it is a painful event every time, because you would have attached to a particular set of expectations for stability. If these expectations are very stable, then letting go of them feels very unstable internally. Like you’re going crazy, and there is no return. Well, it’s true that there is no return, but the word ‘sane’ meant something like ‘healthy’, and to be healthy is to feel whole. When we decide what is crazy and what is not, it is an act of separation, an act of splitting, since things are split into ‘crazy’ and ‘not crazy’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, etc. All this filtering makes dealing with large amounts of information difficult, in the same way that a dam impedes the flow of a river. It takes a lot more energy to build and maintain dams than it does to simply float on a river. Dams are very useful, we wouldn’t be here without them, but when they start to cost more energy than we have to maintain, maybe it’s time to consider something else. Peter Watts, in his book ‘Echopraxia’ (2014), describes what it’s like to be at this dark night of the soul. Like St. John of the Cross, we must experience utter hopelessness and despair to open ourselves up to change, to grow to fit with everything else. From Echopraxia: “We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view. So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill.

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No matter what direction we head, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum. But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is to bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here. But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.” In ‘The Tail Eaters’ (2018), I go over more about moral judgment, self-policing, and its effects. https://docs.google.com/document/d/ 19VocWOyUBctQjh9IuYpmMUDscpVyZnqi_5QX-f9lApM/ edit?usp=sharing For would-be rogues, breaking into places to test their security has really taken off in the last ten years. You can get lock-picking decoder tools that are like training wheels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2K_WgL71Ro Deviant Ollam, real-life rogue, offers guides on all manner of physical penetration testing. https://deviating.net/lockpicking/videos.html For tracking people, Jack Kearney of the US Border Patrol developed a program especially for this purpose- though it’s a skill that’s dying with access to drones, budgets large enough for search helicopters, satellite information, and so on. https://mantracking.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/ kearney-jack-tracking.pdf

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Speaking of satellite information, open source intelligence techniques have outstripped traditional investigation in many areas- and you can do most of it from your computer. Though the occasional phone call is sometimes necessary. There’s a lot of opportunity in legwork, since few people are inclined to just walk over to a place and be friendly enough to ask questions anymore. https://www.reddit.com/r/OSINT/top/?t=all ‘What the Robin Knows’ (2012) by Jon Young is an excellent book for noticing what birds in most American neighborhoods are up to, though the principles extend to observing any kind of animal- including man. In the ‘The Forager’s Harvest’ (2006), Samuel Thayer talks about edible plants you can find in most American neighborhoods, though the principles extend to eating plants anywhere. Together with Kearney’s ‘Mantracking’, these books present a trilogy that gives you a sort of ranger-vision, like the highlighting heads-up display you’d find in Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. You’ve probably heard from the YouTubers Nikolas Lloyd (Lindybeige) and Matt Easton (Scholagladiotara) about Historical European Martial Arts, but competitors like Martin Fabian offer a closer look at what the sport’s like. https://youtu.be/mjT4JepA-Vc One of the beautiful things about HEMA is its scholastic background, which means members tend to be unusually open (compared to other martial arts) to experimentation and communicating what they find with their experimentation. While I’ve only visited a few groups, the very act of attempting something different from practices I’m more familiar with (unarmed striking, grappling, small infantry movements) better informed those other skills.

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There’s a principle of using angles that I learned from games like Elite: Dangerous and Mount & Blade: Warband (particularly, cavalry) that translates well to striking, and is especially important in HEMA. I’m able to make use of this awareness of angles in grappling now, but it was only from experiencing it in another skill where it was more “important” that I was able to isolate it enough to pay attention to it.

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NOTES: Experimentation --------------------------------------------You’ve heard of ‘Yes and’ in the game of Improv, but what’s that about? In ‘Impro’ (1979), Keith Johnston says that through school, most of us are trained not to respond to the constant change around us. The biggest hurdle in teaching people improvisation is to get them in a state where they allow themselves to play again. “Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.” He explains that the magic of improv is simply that good improvisers accept offers- any bid for attention, they can play with. “These ‘offer-block-accept’ games have a use quite apart from actor training. People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding.” 'Karma' is to do, to make, to build. We often find ourselves making and doing what the people who’ve influenced us set out to make and do- including the people that we were in the past. What we learned to make as teenagers (which includes things like feelings, or a perception of the world) often follows us long into adulthood, even if what we made then is not as well-adapted to our current circumstances and preferences. In ‘Interaction Ritual Chains’ (2004), Randall Collins builds on the work of Erving Goffman by extending analysis of everyday human interaction over time. He introduces the idea that people get emotional energy, or a feeling of intrinsic motivation, from participating in energizing interaction rituals.

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This is any meeting between two or more people where there is a barrier to outsiders. It could be as simple as a meet-cute at the grocery store where no one else notices you, a shared object of attention, or a shared mood. The bigger these groups are (such as a festival or soccer game), the more energy they might send through the individual. The more entrained (the more their attention is in some task together, rather than each other or themselves) the participants are, the less self-conscious they are, and so the more energy they might get from the ritual. Memories of successful rituals are represented as symbols (ideals, religious beliefs, identities, etc), which people then use to form more rituals around- in a chain. We might call many of the people who rarely manage to share attention or moods with other living people ‘introverts’, which is why they so often have to ‘recharge’. They typically recharge with some sort of parasocial activity- such as watching a tv show or reading a book where they can share the moods and object of attention of the characters on-screen, or with the writer of the book. This was me, until I figured out how to welcome more of the moods of the people around me, as well as to deign to join my attention with theirs. Learning to let go and accept people into our being is a very painful act, since we all carry a lot of pain. You might not be used to letting yourself be angry or sad, for instance, but other people might crank those states up to a 100 every day. Figuring out how to play with anything, including those states, is part of the grandest game. Once you do, you’ll probably find mental states, desires, and feelings that you used to think you didn’t have that you actually had all along. They were merely being inhibited because, as Johnstone points out, we were trained to keep our reactions hidden.

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In playing with the ‘darker’ side of life, you will find great wonder and beauty behind every horrible thing, which, again, might feel like insanity. As Keith Johnstone says, “sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people - and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way.” Erving Goffman, in ‘The Insanity of Place’ (1969), points out that to end up in a mental hospital, some collusion is typically needed between a prospective patient’s medical professionals and their family or friends. One significant part of this collusion is the definition of reality they share. One which they can agree with, but not one which they share with the patient. He suggests that communities agree to a set of norms, which are enforced as rules and expectations to follow these rules. When the rule is broken, both the person who broke the rule and the person who was expecting the rule to be followed suffer from a loss of face. A loss of reputation, a loss of their sense of individual self. So the initial presentation of a symptom of illness presents not as illness, but as disorder. It is simply a norm being broken, a rule being broken, that is then labeled a mental illness so that there is some relative leniency with enforcement of a community’s norms. Insanity then, is primarily about control- not illness. Since you have been trained well to follow certain norms, to follow certain rules, you will then enforce these rules on yourself in advance. Presumably to avoid others enforcing them on you. “The individual refrains from improper action by virtue of acting as his own policeman”. In this way, any significant change to your behavior involves breaking enough rules to trigger the feeling of insanity. Given that cultural change is accelerating in tandem with technological change, it is inevitable that last century’s norms will not work for today.

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Going ‘insane’ is inevitable in relation to the norms of that time. Robin Hanson hints that most of the time people are talking about self-control, they’re actually talking about ability to be controlled by others. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/self-controlis-culture-control.html Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments show what happens when norms are intentionally broken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Breaching_experiment#:~:text=In%20the%20fields%20of% 20sociology,the%20work%20of%20Harold%20Garfinkel. Matthew Effect patterns are patterns where elements with an advantage tend to accrue more of an advantage, and elements with a disadvantage tend to get more disadvantages. While this refers to the verse in the book of Matthew in the Bible which talks about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, it extends to parts of biology, ecology, attention, sales, and founder effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect ‘Range’ (2019) by David Epstein talks about the benefits of generalization. “Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity”.

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Robert Heinlein, who helped popularize the trope of a competent fictional character, gave us the quote, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” In ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ (2010), Steven Johnson stresses the importance of cross-domain learning as it pertains to innovation. He points out that for many a renowned genius, their exposure to a large variety of skills and contexts were necessary for their ideas. “The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.” This happens to match the patterns of innovation at scale beyond the individual, too. In ‘Population Growth and Technological Change’ (1993), Michael Kremer notices that larger populations tend to make more new things. Agglomeration effects, or the positive economic externalities that result from having a dense population, abound. This is because more different kinds of people with more different kinds of skills get to transfer their knowledge to each other more easily, which drives innovation everywhere it happens. ‘Innovation in cities’ (1998) by Maryann Feldman and David Audrestch further addresses this, as does ‘Scale’ (2017) by Geoffrey West.

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Juergen Schmidhuber theorizes that beauty, interestingness, and curiosity are driven by compression progress. That is, the more that the data you have experienced is compressed in a pattern, the more beautiful it is. So the more you compress what you’ve learned from very different contexts and skills, the more beauty you will find. https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 Data on the effect of gamers wiggling during gaming sessions was collected in ‘eSports Pro-Players Behavior During the Game Events: Statistical Analysis of Data Obtained Using the Smart Chair’ (2019). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.06402.pdf Stanislas Dehaene, in ‘How We Learn’ (2020), writes about how video games increase a child’s ability to focus, and that necessary factors of learning are active engagement, attention, feedback, and consolidation. In play, we are always engaged. Part of why schools aren’t designed for learning is because they do not promote engagement, and they discourage feedback. That is, feedback is interpreted as failure, and failure is interpreted as punishment. However, to learn anything, we need to pay attention to the gap between a task we’re attempting and the result we get. By making school about grades, children are taught to avoid failure as much as possible. From Steven Johnson: “Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore”. A crucial step in learning any skill is giving yourself a small way to fail big, so that you can learn from that error, and then keep on failing. Without a constantly shifting feedback loop, you will not be able to explore a space of possible adaptations.

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For example, when learning music, it would be useful to setup a tiny experiment. Where you just play with one string on an instrument, and explore as many different ways to use that string as you can. While doing so, you might setup the feedback loop of identifying what is harmonious (in contrast to what is discordant). So if you pluck the string on one end and stroke it at another, is the space between those two sounds harmonious or discordant? And that might be a game you play for a bit, until you do start to do well at it. Then it’s time to explore some other part of the instrument, some other part of music, which means you should be constantly seeking the next way to ‘fail’ in a small part of the whole you’re trying to learn, if learning is what you want. Explorable Explanations are a great way to familiarize yourself with the idea of turning anything you’re learning into a constrained feedback loop. They offer ways to play with many models across several sciences. If you can think about how to turn what you’re learning into an explorable explanation for yourself, you can probably come up with more embodied methods to experiment. https://explorabl.es/ Such an embodied method to experiment is exemplified by the Ecological Approach to learning, which is slowly permeating through the field of athletic training. Instead of repeating a particular movement over and over again (as in rote memorization), constraints-based learning involves zeroing in on one aspect of a game and then setting up a constraint to play within that aspect of the game. Players find techniques that work for them, instead of copying what worked for someone else. More on this from 'How We Learn to Move' (2021) by Rob Gray. In grappling, the emphasis of experimentation allows us to single out parts of the game that are typically ignored.

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The Island Top Team boys call this ‘Fuck Your Jiu-Jitsu’basically, ‘if your BJJ is so good, can you do it without X!?’, where the removal of ‘X’ is the constraint. https://youtu.be/6tT3--XyQVE To show that there is an alternative to simply following recipes in cooking (which, you might notice, mimics the rote memorization of schools or kata forms in traditional martial arts), Michael Ruhlman talks about how you can constrain your cooking with simple ratios instead of being tied to a particular recipe in ‘Ratio’ (2009). This unleashes an element of play in the kitchen that is lacking for most people. The lack of play makes cooking a chore- since finding and following a recipe involves little experimentation, other than interpreting and following instructions well. Richard Feynman implies all this when he says, “The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket.” There is something about being in a bigger group that seems to result in less persistence- perhaps a feeling that there is always someone who can help, someone who can take over, someone else whose job it is. This comparison between wolf and dog persistence gives us a hint. ‘Differences in persistence between dogs and wolves in an unsolvable task in the absence of humans’ (2018). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NIDOQe_hk Starting with a tiny part of what you want to experiment with is key to learning now, rather than pushing your experimentation off to the day that you finally have everything you were told you’d need to do it. If you decide to write a book, you might have all these ideas about what you need in order to write a book, but all that’s really needed to get to the book is one average sentence.

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You don’t need a publisher, a guide on writing, an editor, a book deal, or anything like that. Just a sentence. A sentence average for you- not your very best sentence or a polished sentence, just something you would think to yourself, something you would say off-hand to someone you trust. As you craft more sentences, it becomes easier and easier to simply spit them out, and eventually, when you put them all together, you have a book. ‘Foxhole Players Are Striking Over Increased Stress and Responsibility’ (2022) reports on the curious case of an ingame strike. Many things like this have happened in the past, especially in the multi-user dungeons of the past, but also in any game with a dynamic economic system and enough people for politics, but this one is especially curious because of how well-covered it is- the reporter actually interviews the players, and it showed up on a media site, instead of us having to dig through old logs and forums to find such a case. https://kotaku.com/foxhole-players-are-striking-overincreased-stress-and-1848370043 An online Beer Game Simulator is here: https://beergame.masystem.se/ For tracking airplanes synchronously, there’s Flightradar24: https://www.flightradar24.com/ For tracking ships synchronously, there’s Marine Traffic: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:12.0/centery:25.0/zoom:4 The game of science is ultimately a game of predictions, as was prophecy before it. A key difference is that in effective scientific experimentation, people check the results of the prediction more closely.

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Robin Hanson addresses the value of predictions to other parts of life here: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.pdf In ‘Superforecasting’ (2015), Phil Tetlock records what he found from the Good Judgment Project, which tested the viability of using aggregated predictions to figure out what may happen in the medium-term (a few weeks, months or years, for this project). ‘How to Measure Anything’ (2007) by Douglas Hubbard details when and how you might make predictions in an organization, but much of it can inform your everyday life. Warren Buffett, billionaire investor, mentions that, “it’s not predicting rain that counts. It’s building arks.” That is, if you predict there’s a flood coming, then you would prepare for that flood. Simply being ‘right’ doesn’t really make use of your information advantage, and oftentimes, we might make correct predictions without really believing in them enough to act on them. In this way, action, such as preparing for a flood, functions as a sort of bet. As Alex Tabarrok says, “a bet is a tax on bullshit”. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/ 2012/11/a-bet-is-a-tax-on-bullshit.html The concept of our perception of reality as a user interface that does not necessitate a 1:1 match with whatever's going on outside of us is explored in 'The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes' (2019).

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NOTES: Gold, Prestige, Piety --------------------------------------------‘Game Theory’ (1970) by Morton Davis is an introduction to game theory for anyone reading this, but Nicky Case’s excellent ‘Evolution of Trust’ is a playable explanation: https://ncase.me/trust/ ‘SuperCooperators’ (2011) by Martin Nowak traces the evolution of cooperation at scale, partially using models from evolutionary game theory. It establishes the nature of altruism as ubiquitous in all human societies, even in areas that might seem selfish (such as ambition). Northwestern University has a simple agent-based model example, the ‘Wolves and Sheep’ sample. You can access an online version of it and an accompanying tutorial here: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/nettangoweb/ Rick Falkvinge, one of the founders of the Swedish Pirate Party, mentions that a lot of the organizational acumen they had was from leading raid guilds in World of Warcraft. Today, organizations like Raid Guild are explicitly modeled on that experience- gamer culture coming out and affecting the rest of the world. https://www.raidguild.org/ In ‘The Social Order of the Underworld’ (2014), David Skarbek shows how when a prison population is large enough, it forms its own shadow government and economy. These governments require clear identification and reputation systems to form. In documenting the rise of gangs which rapidly turned into shadow governmental organizations following the Soviet collapse, Vadim Volkov again hints at what minimum features are necessary for governments to pop up with ‘Violent Entrepreneurship’ (2002).

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In ‘Resisting War’ (2017), Oliver Kaplan shows that stronger communities have better odds of survival. An account by Selco Begovic emphasizes the importance of a large family in his surviving the anarchy of the Balkan Wars. https://archive.org/stream/TheSHTFAnthologySelco/ The%20SHTF%20Anthology%20-%20Selco_djvu.txt In ‘Money and the Early Greek Mind’ (2004), Richard Seaford touches on the role of money in an earlier society that influences us strongly today. Nick Szabo, the inventor of BitGold (a precursor to BitCoin), has a collection of the most in-depth investigations of early money (so it provides clues about the nature of money) that I’ve found. Elsewhere in his blog, he goes over the rest of its history, including the history of nongovernmental money. https://twitter.com/nickszabo4/status/ 954225789129469952 Benjamin Ross Hoffman puts forth that our current debtbased economy was solidified in the World Wars. http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-debtors-revolt/ In ‘Sacred Economics’ (2011), Charles Eisenstein goes over a history of debt-based money and proposes some alternatives. A side effect of looking at these alternatives is to get a better idea of what money is, if we can look at more possible variations of its functions. With ‘Hierarchy in the Forest’ (1999), Christopher Boehm takes a close, anthropological look at the nature of status. In ‘Two ways to the top : evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank’ (2013), Joey Cheng delineates the difference between prestige and dominance.

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‘Prestige-biased Social Learning’ (2019) by Jimenez and Mesoudi paints a picture of how prestige affects culture and behavior. 'The Big Man Mechanism’ (2015) by Henrich, Chudek, and Boyd looks at how prestige, leadership, and community are related. Paul Graham frames wealth creation in terms of giving people what they want. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html William Nordhaus addresses the vast benefits of the lowered cost of light in ‘Do real-output and real-wage measures capture reality? The history of lighting suggests not’ (1998). ‘Interpersonal Neural Entrainment during Early Social Interaction’ (2020) reviews what entrainment is. ‘A Duet for One’ (2015) by Karl Friston and Christopher Frith suggests that a model of another person is held in our brains during entrainment, and that is how we communicate- by syncing up our models of each other. In ‘Organizational culture and scalar stress’ (1982), Gregory Johnson introduces the idea that the larger a group is, the harder it is for it to communicate well enough to function. Groups deal with this by splitting off into smaller, more manageable groups- this is also typically how leaders emerge. At the moment, the distance between us and whoever most people would consider their leaders is vast, both in literal physical distance and the number of people you’d have to call to get to them. Consider the Three Sisters- squash, corn, and beans. Native American societies planted these together traditionally, since they work symbiotically to replenish the soil.

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They did not have a way to communicate this to settlers in terms the settlers would accept, so this practice was diminished until it was scientifically confirmed in the latter half of the twentieth century. ‘Seeing Like a State’ (1998) by James C. Scott goes further into a myriad of similar examples, showing how modernist projects to micromanage locals often resulted in wasting and draining local resources. ‘Drones, memes, and plastic’ is a riff on Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs, & Steel’ (1997), a book which tries to explain how Western European societies conquered all others. ‘Innovation in the collective brain’ (2016) by Muthukrishna and Henrich details the connection between large populations, culture, and innovation. ‘The segmentary lineage: an organization of predatory expansion’ (1961) connects honor cultures with cultures that are organized along familial clans which are nested in a larger group composed of other clans that they are also related to. To look at how and why animals fight, I invite you to search YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram for videos of animals encountering each other. Randall Collin’s ‘Violence: A Micro-sociological theory’ (2008) mentions that child-on-child violence is the most common kind, but you can probably easily infer this by being around children and searching your memories. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations were first popularly theorized by Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum gives a snappy overview. https://ethereum.org/en/dao/ Aragon DAO, which was the first organization to provide easy-to-use tools to spin up a DAO with, has the trailer ‘Aragon: the fight for freedom’. https://youtu.be/AqjIWmiAidw

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‘A Distant Mirror’ (1978) by Barbara Tuchman covers much of the Hundred Year’s War by following the life of Enguerrand de Coucy. Froissart’s ‘Chronicles’ is a shorter read, though it might be more difficult to digest. ‘The Free Companies in the Hundred Year’s War’ (1944) by Beauregard offers more detail on Free Companies. ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ (1926) by TE Lawrence provides a first-hand look at how the Arabs ousted the Ottoman Empire, and how the British made use of them. More on the US Navy’s Doctrine of Faith and the American Navy’s effort in China during World War II can be found in ‘By the Water Beneath the Walls’ (2021) by Ben Milligan, in as far as those events contribute to the formation of the Navy SEALs. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith present the selectorate theory of politics in ‘The Logic of Political Survival’ (2003), which highlights the importance of coalitions to keep anyone in power, even if they’re dictators. Mission-type tactics, that is, clarifying a strategic aim and leaving combatants on the ground to make decisions about how to achieve that aim, were probably best adopted by the United States Marine Corps, at least doctrinally. It is best exemplified by ‘The Squad Leader Makes the Difference’ (1998). Many companies today emphasize a ‘bias for action’ as one of their values, but the willingness to actually push leadership down to the people at the bottom of the hierarchy is harder to find in practice. The Red Queen pattern was hypothesized as ‘A new evolutionary law’ (1973) by Leigh Van Valen.

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In ‘A Comparison of Ambient Casino Sound and Music: Effects on Dissociation and on Perceptions of Elapsed Time While Playing Slot Machines’ (2009), Noseworth and Finlay attest that the audio environment of a casino is designed to minimize the sense of a passing of time. Victor Gruen, father of the mall, influenced Walt Disney’s design of Disneyland, which introduced theming to the world. Gregory Turner-Rahman notes the world-changing impact of theming in consumerism- pointing out that Trader Joe’s is designed with those principles in mind. Cathrin Jansson-Boyd’s ‘How IKEA’s shop layout influences what you buy’ (2018) mentions the long walk that IKEA stores funnel you into. Colin Popell’s ‘On Love’ (2020) points out that we have higher expectations for our parents. https://colinpopell.com/blog/on-love ‘A deep depression after the Olympics’ (2022) by Emily Russell. When he was interviewed by Lex Fridman, Judo Olympic coach Jimmy Pedro also mentions depression after the Olympics for some competitors. The history of grappling in Brazil is covered in part by ‘Ep. 58: The Gracies’ of the BJJ Mental Models podcast, ‘Mastering Jujitsu’ (2003) by John Danaher, and assorted hearsay. From Steven Johnson, again, “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”

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NOTES: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD --------------------------------------------Somehow, people who verbally attest to believing in the theory of evolution manage to think that it’s possible to get where we are without constant competition. In ‘Emerging mechanisms of cell competition’ (2020), Nicholas Baker reviews how cells, even within the same organism, compete. In ‘Human orientation and movement control in weightless and artificial gravity environments’ (2000), it is shown that human bodies change in response to low gravity. ‘Situational and personal influences on space perception with experimental spectacles’ (1957) stated that participants re-acquired upright vision with inverted spectacles after some time, however ‘The Myth of Upright Vision’ (1999) reported that participants were adapted for motor skills, but did not re-acquire upright vision. Both studies had around ten people, and there aren’t many more on the subject, so feel free to experiment. ‘Ultrasociety’ (2015) by Peter Turchin uses statistical analysis of historical events to say that the formation of mega-societies was driven by war, given the competitive advantage of size in war. In ‘War in Human Civilization’ (2006), Azar Gat describes a sweeping history of war, the constant presence of raiding, and its use to set up our states. This echoes Charles Tilly’s ‘Formation of National States in Europe’ (1975), where he draws a similarity between early states and organized crime groups- where the state rises through a racketeering process. This echoes what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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Note that it usually becomes beneficial for whoever’s collecting taxes to provide services, so that the golden goose will keep on laying. In this way, direct, kinetic wars eventually become too costly in relation to the very wealthy peace they enjoy. Of course, this doesn’t really mean that war isn’t around- it’s just carried out softly. Looking at what the Malaysian government did to the Penan people, it’s hard not to see it as war. Even if the war was fought by bringing them into the economic system and making them dependent on the state. Capitalism is built on competition and the continued colonization of poorer states. This kind of competition doesn’t kill as quickly, but it does kill slowly. Switching many localities to corn and wheat instead of crops that were better suited to their area, for example, results in food shortages. Similarly, logging devastates local resources for hunter-gatherers, and their children are assimilated away from them. In ‘A Death in the Rainforest’ (2019), Don Kulick mentions that those who were taught to read at school learned to have impossible preferences. Textbooks depicted lives that no one in Papa New Guinea has access to, which creates a sense of lack that wasn’t there before. This unrest results in young men getting violent, to try and work toward their aspirations of living in a Western, suburban society. We compete in this way continuously, and mostly pretend not to notice it. We compete among ourselves for sex, jobs, attention, and status at home, while competing for resources abroad. This is not written for you to feel bad about it, though if you do, let yourself feel that- it’s the first step to accepting it.

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As the psychologist Eugene Gendlin says, “what is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it is true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it”. Perhaps Nietzsche would differ on that last bit, given his view of strength as the ability to endure reality. With the rise of animal welfare and vegetarianism, people seem to think that eating plants is not killing life, not an act of competition. Plant researchers, meanwhile, are having a fierce scholastic war about whether plants are intelligent and conscious. In the last ten years, it appears that many have begrudgingly admitted some sort of selection and modulation, but cling to the idea that consciousness requires a nervous system like ours. The Minimal Intelligence Lab offers a snapshot overview. To peek at this war, the relevant search terms are ‘plant’, ‘pain’, ‘cognition’, ‘intelligence’, ‘qualia’, ‘meristem’, and ‘quasicrystal’. A foundational assumption of this book is that if you compare a cat to a dog against the standards of a cat, the dog will always come up short. We might consider Blame a causal model, where the cause is an agent. The more an agent appears to cause, then, the more likely they are to receive blame. ‘To escape blame, don’t be a hero- Be a victim’ (2010) by Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner shows this. Given that the relationship between money and happiness is weak, ‘If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right’ (2011) advises people to consider spending more money on experiences and other people.

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Many small pleasures rather than a few large ones, avoid overpriced insurance, look at how purchases affect everyday life, go easy on comparison shopping, and pay special attention to others’ happiness. ‘What do we need to be happy: evidence from a psychosocial perspective’ (2015) stresses the importance of marriage and social ties for happiness. ‘Strategy: The Indirect Approach’ (1941) was B.H. Liddell-Hart’s reaction to the results of a lack of strategic aim in World War I. Case-by-case, he shows that armies win when they can adjust their strategic ends to their means, keep their missions in mind, advance where the enemy least expects, take advantage of where the enemy resists least, and move in such a way as to keep the possibility of pivoting. This was a book on strategy and a strategic lack, but they spring from a lack of grand strategic aim. For grappling, John Danaher talks about the need for keeping a strategic end in mind. Without it, the fighter is tempted to execute rote chains of moves that are predictable- and so take a direct approach. The indirect approach, then, comes from having a very clear idea of the end, so that unexpected and seemingly chaotic ways to get to it are accepted and used. What Liddell-Hart says is also reflected in Bruce Lee’s “be like water”, and Miyamoto Musashi’s “there is more than one path to the top of the mountain”. In general, if people had taken in what Musashi put out, there would have been no need for Liddell-Hart to write what he did, since ‘The Book of Five Rings’ (1645) contains all the same lessons and more, though additional context always strengthens sound principles.

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To move in such a way as to keep the possibility of pivoting is to keep balance. Musashi stresses this balance in all times, at all levels- so that there is no difference between any skill, any moment, any place- it is all one. It’s not an accident that military theory comes upon the importance of unity, cohesion, and alignment over and over again. Alignment with a grand strategy produces unity in all things, for the entity that is aligned. This is how a seemingly smaller opponent can defeat a bigger one. In such a state, your every movement serves the purpose of the grand strategic aim, and like a Xanatos gambit, no matter what happens, you win. It is for this reason that the military forces of the United Kingdom and Australia especially emphasize a “maintenance of the aim”, though those institutions are institutions, and so cannot manage anything more than maintenance of a strategic aim, at best. With a grand strategic aim, there is no difference between strategy, operations, tactics, and personal expression. ‘On Grand Strategy’ (2018) by John Lewis Gaddis hints that grand strategy comes seemingly out of paradox. The aim will seem impossible to a binary frame of mind. However, this is also why all the moves that someone with a clear grand strategic aim makes will appear to be indirect and unpredictable. So the way you drink coffee, the way you take a shit- these too, would reflect your grand strategic aim. “You must examine this well”. In ‘The Dragons and The Snakes’ (2020), David Kilcullen points out that grand strategically, the administrative leadership of world superpowers have been ascribing much agency to each other that is not actually present.

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The lack of grand strategy is interpreted as some sort of 5d chess. Each loses initiative by thinking its opponent is acting out of competence. So they cling to paths of action designed to stop and arrest movement and change, rather than paths than move forward toward an aim. This is the equivalent of watching a fight between people new to fighting- they flail wildly, and are that much more dangerous because of it, but they also use up a lot of energy. There is no great purpose to align that energy to. The more skilled the combatants are, the less each can rely on the other simply making a mistake. The more important it is to have an aim that is not defined in reaction to their opponent. Stopping someone from choking you is not an aim- wanting to see your daughter flourish is. In such a situation, if you need to choke out your opponent to see your daughter have fun jumping on a trampoline, you will. If you need to break an opponent’s arm to see your daughter learning about what strawberries are for the first time, you will. If you need to show your opponent some love to deescalate the tension generated from fear to be at your daughter’s wedding, you will. Another way to think about an aim versus defensive reaction is in terms of the kinds of aggression that mammals have, which is reviewed in Sarah Constantin’s ‘Mammalian Aggression’ (2021). ‘The neuroethology of predation and escape’ (2016) catalogs methods of predation and escape. In both of these, the aggression of escape and the aggression of predation are very different. Escape is a highstress state that promotes volatility of action, which results in enough randomness to confuse predators. The social aggression categorized by Constantin is similar, though perhaps the volatility in this case is more of a signal of coordination.

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To contrast, predation is a low-stress, almost playful, state where predators can let go of prey if the chase costs too much energy. In micro-sociology, Randall Collins identifies something he named confrontational tension/fear. An interaction between people is likely to turn violent when the confrontational tension/fear is high. Most violence comes from this confrontational tension/fear, though there are a tiny minority of people who are competent at violence. A violence elite. This may be those who are able to be violent from within a state of predatory aggression, rather than one of escape aggression. Anecdotally, hunters are overrepresented in those who perform extremely well in combat. Fighting with an aim, then, is more like hunting or taming than a confrontational social measure (as in the classic bar brawl trope) or a ‘forward panic’ toward violence. The Mongolian horde trained with a Great Huntnotoriously, steppe nomads fight ‘dirty’, they move backwards and sideways to lure more direct armies into losing fights. You can see this difference embodied in Muay Thai bouts between Thai Femeu fighters influenced by the Golden Age of Muay Thai and Western fighters who are more influenced by the Western way of war, which emphasizes direct confrontation. https://youtu.be/Wju4p41QLxE US Army Battle Drill 11: React to an IED (05-3D1703) outlines 5/25 checks. Basically, as you get out, you check the 5 meter radius around you for threats, then the 25m radius, and finally the 200m.

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The Igor de Rachewiltz translation of ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’ takes a more literal approach than others. This gives us better insight into how the people who first sang it thought, short of reading it in the surviving Mongolian with Chinese letters. 5th May, 1945: Wehrmacht Major Sepp Gangl, US XXI Corps Cpt. Jack Lee, and SS-Hauptsturmführer KurtSiegfried Schrader led a group of American and German soldiers to free French prisoners of war (including Charles de Gaulle’s sister) and defend Castle Itter against the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division. If you think that’s wild, check out ‘Operation Cowboy’.

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NOTES: Looking For Group --------------------------------------------If you played the Beer Game mentioned earlier, you might have come upon the Theory of Constraints, which is explained through a novel about a factory manager called ‘The Goal’ (1984) by Eliyahu Goldratt. While the bottlenecks in that theory are primarily about production of goods, similar bottlenecks occur in more complex systems, such as human communication. One of those bottlenecks is sacred values, as outlined in ‘Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions’ (2003). These are absolute values. Ideals that are held onto so tightly that considering anything that contradicts them is unthinkable- which means that people with sacred values are unable to even consider the position of other people whose existence depends on elements of reality they don’t want to consider, let alone themselves. The importance of biological cooperation and otheroriented motivations to the existence of civilization was noted earlier, but there is a dark side to all this altruismpeople punish others for breaking norms. In the past, this could mean execution. Now, we simply do it to ourselves. ‘The evolution of altruistic punishment’ (2003) examines this mechanic. ‘How exploitation launched human cooperation’ (2019) further shows how this is necessary for large-scale cooperation. ‘A Man Without Words’ (1991) tells the story of a 27-yearold deaf man who was taught language by Susan Schaller. In ‘The Secret of Our Success’ (2015), Joseph Henrich shows the importance of cultural evolution for cognition, intelligence, and consciousness.

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“The list of 'natural' foods that need processing to detoxify them goes on and on. Early potatoes were toxic, and the Andean peoples ate clay to neutralize the toxin. Even beans can be toxic without processing. In California, many hunter-gatherer populations relied on acorns, which, similar to manioc, require a labor intensive, multiday leaching process. Many small-scale societies have similarly exploited hardy, tropical plants called cycads for food. But cycads contain a nerve toxin. If not properly processed, they can cause neurological symptoms, paralysis, and death. Numerous societies, including hunter-gatherers, have culturally evolved an immense range of detoxification techniques for cycads. By contrast with our species, other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat.” No human with language is actually an individual. Individuality of mind is a sort of social construct we use to organize ourselves collectively. Phillippe Rochat wrote about the origins of selfconsciousness in ‘Others in Mind’ 2009. In ‘I am a Strange Loop’ (2007), Douglas Hofstadter explores the interdependent nature of consciousness. There’s an excellent image that analogizes this visually in the book, but I’ve failed to find it online. “In the end, we selfperceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”

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‘I, Pencil’ (1964) is the famous essay by Leonard Read. “The lesson I [the pencil] have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can.” This, in response to the fact that the pencil needed millions of people over time to make it, and no one makes anything alone. Utah State University’s Spider Silk Lab experiments with multiple materials copied from animals, but the spidersilk synthesized from the milk of transgenic goats designed for that purpose is its most dramatic product. The Laskowski Lab at UC Davis uses clonal fish to study individuality in animals, so that there are no genetic differences to explain that individuality with. Yet, there are markers of individual personality. Individuality, then, comes from the interaction of the collective. In ‘Social Physics’ (2014), Alex Pentland emphasizes the importance of proximity of social networks in innovation. By tracking individual movements, vibrations, text frequency, and colocation in a community, MIT’s Human Dynamics group was able to predict well-being and mental health in individuals. ‘Social Physics’, ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’, and ‘Innovation in the collective brain’ all point out the importance of collectives for any individual by pointing out that we only make new things collectively, rather than individually. ‘How Innovation Works’ (2020) by Matt Ridley ‘The Sociology of Philosophies’ (1979), and ‘Organizing Genius’ (1997) by Warren Bennis echo this. In ‘What complexity science says about what makes a winning team’ (2020), Jessica Flack and Cade Massey write that how the team performs together (what emerges from their interaction) may be important to winning, and measures for that are now possible.

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In it, they highlight NBA player Shane Battier, cribbed from ‘The No-Stats All-star’ (2009) by Michael Lewis. “When [Battier] is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse – often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding … He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same … On defence, although he routinely guards the NBA’s most prolific scorers [he was one of the most effective to guard Kobe Bryant], he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates – probably, Morey [general manager of Battier’s team at the time] surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways.” ‘Organizing Genius’ talks about the importance of someone who acts as a bridge, to bring a team together and get out of the way of their flow. Etymology of the word ‘King’ roots in ‘someone of the family’, which hints that a King is someone who is able to be everyone’s family. The practice of the long table, the longhouse or dining hall that everyone in a village was invited to eat at, the practice of providing feasts for your vassals, all suggest a similar role, especially when the Big Man Complex is taken into account. The Big Man in small-scale societies often gains prestige by providing feasts for a tribe, and functioning as a bridge between coalitions. Many gods started off as memories of dead ancestors or rumors of dead heroes, who were then deified. In Greek, charisma is ‘grace, favor, gift’, implying a gift from the gods. The root for ‘good’ is to ‘unite, join, and suit’. So good is what joins that fits well.

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Someone with charisma, then, is someone who can unite people in a way that everyone fits well. A gift who gives. ‘Napoleon Never Slept’ (2015) tracks great leaders, and shows how their interactions with people gave them the energy to accomplish what they did. ‘One hundred years of carcinization – the evolution of the crab-like habitus in Anomura (Arthropoda: Crustacea)’ (2017) reviews how many crustaceans end up with a crab-like body, regardless of genetic relation. Wikipedia’s list of examples of convergent evolution is an excellent way to pass an afternoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_examples_of_convergent_evolution The tv show ‘Connections’ (1978) presents non-linear theories of change and innovation for a public audience. Grant Sanderson’s animation on ‘how discovery (and the retrospective telling of discovery) works’ is again extremely beautiful, here. Aerospaceweb has a collection of possible first people to fly with a fixed wing flying machine (to exclude gliders). http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/ q0159.shtml ‘Honeybee Democracy’ (2011) by Thomas Seeley goes through quorum sensing in detail. Reading this book alongside ‘Interaction Ritual Chains’ may be especially exciting, since the parallels pop out. ‘How ants use quorum sensing to estimate the average quality of a fluctuating resource’ (2015) describes quorum sensing in ants. Together with the results of the Human Dynamics lab, we could use quorum sensing to launch faster-moving teams today, since voting by movement and action is a far more reliable statement of preferences than voting with affirmative or negative statements.

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When you do something and have fun, that having fun produces more activity, and others will move toward you in the same way that bees who dance harder at a site attract more bees from their hive to that site. Playing is usually energizing, so playing in public attracts people. ‘Albert & Carl Friedrich’ (2018) shows some random walks. http://www.complexity-explorables.org/explorables/ albert-and-carl-friedrich/ ‘Sitting in the Fire’ (2014) by Arnold Middell shows a little of how to use group conflict to power that group. ‘Never Split the Difference’ (2016) by Chris Voss shows how to use conflict to get both sides of a negotiation what they want that they might not even have known they wanted. ‘The Science of Trust’ (2011) by John Gottman is aimed at couples, but it shows anyone how to strengthen relationships by noticing the bids of attention that people make everyday. Derek Sivers talks about “Hell Yeah! or No” in ‘Anything You Want’ (2011). This stack exchange question explores the origin of the saying “the army is prepared for the last war”. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60422/whosaid-armies-prepare-to-fight-their-last-war-rather-thantheir-next-war A series of past wins is useful for building confidence and pride. David Hackworth stressed the need for a win in 'Steel My Soldiers Hearts' (2002), as has almost every competent warrior-leader for as far back as history records. The same is true for the individual.

This book was made possible by Alicia Castagno, Colton Dillion, Danica Wilbanks, Emma Swaninger, Taras Nazarov, Steepled Hat Studios, assorted lizards, the Free Companies of Calradia, and every hardcore PvP gamer I've played with. Special Thanks to all the test readers who helped pack more punch into fewer pages: @AbstractFairy, @DickFeynman, @nobu_hibiki, @dingledoorf, @zencephalon, and Maximilian Scholz.

Oh, you thought this was just a book? lol this is isn't a book it's an invitation to play if you've had your fill feel free to walk away but if you're hungry for more, join us on Discord https://discord.gg/7XdM3Qgd6N Shit's gonna be hard but you're not a filthy casual you're here for

IMPOSSIBLE MODE

gank the world