lineages and transformative works:

There’s the Silicon Valley bromide, "A’s hire A’s; B’s hire C’s." So there’s this awareness of entropy or degradation or something.

There’s a joke about how philosophers or academics in general produce "lesser clones" of themselves.

There’s a big deal, I think, in artificial intelligence around "artificial bootstrapping," as in, if and how and when is it possible to make something better in some way than its originator.

I think, generally, in the self-help world, an academic or a sharp independent will create a technique, and then people will popularize it. Sometimes the popularization will be recognizable as the original or the original will even be referred to. Sometimes it’s called by the same name, and sometimes this is endorsed by the originator.

And, other times, the popularization will have its provenance obfuscated. The popularizer will call everything by different names, usually water the thing down, make it much easier for people to grasp.

Sometimes this will even be an improvement, but, I think, also, sometimes nuance will be left out that means that people that encounter it won’t be able to use that instantiation to "go all the way" with the material. This can still be a net win if the user would never have known about the existence of the original material or they wouldn’t have had an on-ramp to unlock the original material.

But, sometimes, a couple worse things can happen. First, people can encounter the watered-down version and then think that the original version must be likewise deficient, even though they don’t carefully investigate the encountered original. (They might not know that it’s the original gold standard, or whatever.) Another thing that can happen is that no one will want to invest in the original creator popularizing their work, when they eventually want to get around to it, because "it’s already been done." I vaguely remember at least one concrete case of this.

The above paragraph is sort of looking at potentially bad outcomes at the level of individuals, consumers and the original creators. There’s system-wide potential negative effects, too:

This happens to some extent in academic science, there’s a proliferation of low-quality papers (this is due to possibly too much funding as well as perverse incentives and metrics). And, skilled researchers can identify quality lines of work and build on those, but less skilled researchers and scientists in adjacent communties have a much harder time weeding through all the crap. This might be isomorphic to the idea of a market for lemons, which is a notable economics paper. If I recall correctly, in a market for lemons (as in lemon cars versus cherry cars?), there’s no way to tell which are the lemons and which are the cherries (back in the day), and so there was no incentive to sell cherries, and the average quality of used car was very low. (I’m probably getting something wrong, here.)

Transferring this over to meditation-land. If there’s too many techniques to try because of low-quality and even well-intentioned popularizers and teachers, and say a person can’t efficiently weed through techniques until they find quality ones, because, for that person, it takes too long to know whether a technique is working or not—they might just not try to engage with meditation techniques at all.

At think wisdom traditions, meditation lineages partially solve this by investing a lot of resources into a small number of people and authorizing some of them to teach and appointing one as a successor.

This helps with succession and quality maintenance but is still vulnerable. It’s hard to be invulnerable to quality degradation. (Sometimes synthesizers or revivalists [or popularizers who choose wisely!] figure out or semi-invent things that are as good or better than the originals, at least along some dimensions.) People from the outside still have to figure out which lineages are actually good, and so there’s still a market for lemons problem, even if the lineage itself is doing an ok job of maintaining quality. And there’s the scaling problem.

Even though science has its issues, it’s partially solved some of these kinds of problems, at scale, with with good feedback loops "truth", empiricism, explicitness, etc. Again there’s a proliferation of low-quality papers. And, I think we’ve lost a good deal of our ability to train skilled scientists. But something was working ok for a while, and we’re still limping along, and science and technology are still progressing. (I’m ignoring the moral angle as well as opportunity costs, what could have been, in some neighboring world, here.)

One can do a similar thing with self-improvement and meditation techniques. That is, while meditation traditions have texts, there’s often secret knowledge, or keys to unlocking those texts, that could only be gotten in person. (Sometimes people can bootstrap, one way or another, into unlocking texts without forming an intense relationship with a teacher.)

That similar thing is to write better meditation manuals, and to keep improving them. Make them comprehensively explicit and conceptually clear. (My material has a long way to go, but it’s arguably pretty good. It seems like people do best when they’ve had some prior contact with other meditation techniques, and often it takes at least a tiny bit of question-answering with me, but some fraction of people on-ramp pretty quickly. And it’s my hope that skilled people will be able to de novo bootstrap with my material even if they have no contact with anyone who’s used it before, say if they find it on the internet somewhere.

There’s still all sorts of dangers, here. It’s a trope of people destroying themselves with found texts and people mistintpreting texts or teachers, going too far too fast or perversely misterpreting, becoming dark wizards, cult leaders, arch nemeses, and so forth.

But there’s something better, sometimes, about freely available, explicit meditation manuals versus esoteric knowledge mostly locked up in people. (Back in the day, by being esoteric, that’s how some traditions survived, I assume, making it possible for as to know about them and build on them. They kept the knowledge rare and valuable, so they could eat and keep the thing going. Hard problems, here. It sometimes also avoided the dangers in the above paragraph, probably, but the tropes still exist for a reason.)

In any case, I worry that my material will be cleaned up and popularized in a way that both dilutes it and actually harms dissemination, breadth and depth, for some of the reasons above.

More to say, and more to come, I suppose.

It’s partially hard because I want people to take apart the material and rewrite it, because that’s a good way to learn, maybe the best way to learn. And I do want people to improve on the material, to the point that it becomes unrecognizable, in part because it’s better that way or just that it’s equally good (or whatever) but the new language speaks better to a different group of people.

Often when people recreate something, they get it working just enough for themselves, whether they realize that’s what they’ve done or not, and they distribute it anyway, and this contributes to noise in the system, lemon markets, people thinking they’ve already seen better thing but it’s not worth it, and so on. (I think something like this happens in open source software, for some language and some domains. Also the forking, which is sometimes critically excellent and sometimes divisive, resource-draining, and community-killing.)

So I guess I’m asking something like, if you lightly reshape the material, link back to my thing. If you heavily reshape the material, either make it so unrecognizable (if that’s natural) that’s there’s sort of no brand or community overlap, as it were, so that more and more people can be reached without instead just confusing people. And, in any case, try to make it excellent, try to make it so that it takes people all they way from many, many, many different starting points. Make it as excellent, effective, and comprehensive as you can, and powerful enough to take many different people at different starting points absolutely all the way.

It’s my hope that we can make it really obvious who’s stuff is good, somehow cutting through all the noise. And then we link all the good stuff to all the other good stuff, and then people can choose from superb protocols that meet them exactly where they’re at. And somehow there’s just enough choice to benefit people, and low enough proliferation that there’s a very high signal-to-noise ratio.

This is a theoretical-technical-empirical problem—makes the instructions interpretable and excellent. And partially a sociological problem—guard the community from entropy and noise. And those two problems are interrelated.

Let’s try to have the right thing happen, and I also hope that my writing this doesn’t have a chilling effect, somehow. Let’s do the best we can to get supremely excellent material safely into as many hands as possible.

Maybe it’ll be a long time before people’s work diverges and competes with mine (in a good(!) way or a bad(!) way or both). Or maybe it’s coming up fast. Unclear, at the time of this writing.

See also, if twitter still exists when you’re reading this: https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1200193566749921280

Well, he probably wouldn’t mind if I just pasted it here:

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Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
Me : Gosh, your work is truly amazing.
X : Thanks. I'd like to make it more widespread like your mapping.
Me : That's easy. Just make it open, creative commons. People will ignore for years but don't worry.
X : What if someone steals it.
Me : They can't steal what you give away.
5:23 PM · Nov 28, 2019·TweetDeck
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Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
Replying to
@swardley
X : But wha if someone else makes money with it?
Me : That's good news. The more the better. You're trying to create a community, a space for your work to exist in. Do you seek irrelevance?
X : No
Me : Then open it up.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
X : Can't I get some VC to sponsor or invest in me?
Me : You're more likely to get someone with capital to steal your idea, cut yourself out of a market and never expand it. Entire markets are lost over legal squabbles and attempts to "own" stuff ... see Unix.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
X : I wasn't around at that time.
Me : Oh, no problem. The entire future of the operating system was lost by a bunch of squabbling execs backed up by over enthusiastic lawyers, none of which could spell strategy let alone play it. This is a common story throughout history.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
... into the mix, an "unruly" individual played an open source hand and asked for help. It was mostly laughed at, dismissed as lacking any business acumen and then won the world. It's another reasonably common story.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
X : Reasonably?
Me : Yes ... an open play doesn't exempt people from making utterly daft mistakes. See OpenStack and differentiation on APIs with AWS.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
X : I'm nervous about this.
Me : Well, that's a good sign. The numero uno of daft moves is to open by default. You're struggling with this question which means you're on the open by thinking path. Even my opening of mapping all those years ago had a plan but no guarantees