Function

We are committed to co-creating an open medium of thinking, knowledge exchange, and deliberative problem-solving for the sake of harm reduction. We seek to do this by first identifying structures and processes that–perhaps counterintuitively–perpetuate the problems that they purport to treat. We aim to identify this iatrogenic character, so that we can think about the principles, constructs, and relational (about process) characteristics that may be in need of re-engineering. We suspect that a practice of exploring what we think & what we do, and how we think & how we do things, could mediate collaborations that produce knowledge, tools, and relationships that lessen unnecessary human suffering.

Website Structure

• This site is grouped by concepts and practices that may relate to solving problems and living less wrong.

• This categorical framework will change over time as the content itself changes and gives rise to changing, emergent higher level topics.

Relational Approach

A Comment on How We Strive to Think and Communicate in Order to Enable Function

We like to remind ourselves that the concept of uncertainty or fallibility is inherent to any information framework, epistemic claim, or evaluative judgment. From the heart of the scientific method (which allows for the rejection of the null, but not for an assertion of ‘truth’), to our idea of “self”, uncertainty (or free energy) makes what we think we know “open”. It makes it a probability. As we communicate, we at But What Do We Know? strive to become curious and aware of our hasty preconceptions about “ourselves”, “others”, and “world”, lest we run the risk of a) letting our beliefs close us off to potentially generative interactions with people and ideas and/or b) letting the reflexivity of such strongly held priors about “things”, make them to be so (see cognitive bias or “Rhetological Fallacies” @ Information Is Beautiful). In Desmond Tutu’s words:

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

Social Dynamics

About Processes Driven By the Desire to Feel Good About Oneself Versus the Motivation to Do Good Work with and for All

Note: A more thorough analysis of the concept of “self” is found in the “Social Identity, “The Self”, and Ego”  topic area.

When we define ourselves/others within role-based hierarchies that implicitly value some individual archetypes over others (for example, individuals who write policy for a living are assumed to possess more ‘knowledge value’ than those who sell cars for a living), do we pigeon hole each other? Extant socioeconomic power hierarchies could be functioning to mediate net harm because, at the individual level, they can incentivize self-serving, socially and intellectually dishonest behaviors- behaviors that are driven by a desire to ‘ascend the ranks’ in order to be seen as influential in order to act with power over others. It seems ironic that these social structures may have initially come about such that actual ‘good work’ was rewarded appropriately: those agents who were the means of production of the good work probably never cared about receiving credit for it in the first place– that social reward was merely a byproduct of an initial goal to do good work for the sake of good work itself and for the sake of solving problems. Over time, we see a system that conditions people and groups such that they can no longer distinguish between a priori ‘socioeconomic credits’ and novel value production (a.k.a. good work). As a result, we see a lack of novel value generation because agents avoid the production of ‘good work’ entirely. These agents achieve this by signaling and amplifying their existing social/economic credit which creates the illusion that they do ‘good work’ even in the absence of anything substantive. This is then reinforced (the system can no longer distinguish between what is good work and what is being made to look like it is good work) leading to agents accruing more socioeconomic credits without a corresponding output of ‘good work’. This mutually reinforcing dynamic, particularly in academic settings, undermines the honest pursuit & co-production of knowledge. This is not conducive to individual/collective progress. Under circumstances where engaging with powerful others, status, money, security, etc. become the primary driver (and outcome) of participation, rather than the process of honest work itself, it becomes hard to disengage from a dependence on the attention-seeking or power-mongering feedback loop.  

Made Using Loopy By Nicky Case

To visualize the uncoupling of “novel value” and “reward”, start by playing the animation above with the “^” in the “Seek Attention” node. Observe for ~ 30 seconds. What do you notice?

If we take the claim that these incentives are artefacts of self-absorption (you want to ‘feel good about yourself’, you want more money than other people (so that you can feel good about yourself), you want to feel like ‘you help people’ (so that you can feel good about yourself), you want others to approve of you based on their perception that ‘you help people’ (so that you can feel good about yourself), you want a job title that society deems ‘more valuable’ than other job titles in some way (so that you can feel good about yourself), etc) it follows then, that organizations that refrain from reifying individual reward could make space for the individual-individual attraction toward enacting power with one another in equal partnership in the name of harm reduction. Hopefully, this would lead to the honest co-production of progress, inclusion, and a reduction of net suffering. For those who do not find the power-based incentive structure of the system to be especially appealing, or for those who feel uncomfortable with implicitly being ‘given’ more power than others, or for those who are attracted to the integrity of the process of work itself, it may be important to break from the feedback loop by generating autonomous cooperative interactions within which the co-creation of shared value (i.e systems reorganization and re-coupling) emerges. This emergence functions such that the meta-structure and meta-function of the entire system changes…and with any luck, it changes such that we see substantive connections and less suffering, as part and parcel (See for a biophysical analogue–termed an autopoietic system–that can be applied at the social level outlined here).

Post (after) Meta (about) – Identity

(Moving past thinking about everything in terms of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves)

What we are interested in, is what and how you think, and how you interact with us in the space of respectful, honest, and thoughtful discourse. We hope to iteratively [re]model the “kind of person that we are” vis-a-vis the ways in which we continually interact–in process–with one another and ourselves..

Let’s start talking.

References

Karl J. Friston, Marco Lin, Christopher D. Frith, Giovanni Pezzulo, J. Allan Hobson, Sasha Ondobaka; Active Inference, Curiosity and Insight. Neural Comput 2017; 29 (10): 2633–2683. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/neco_a_00999

Marc A. Edwards and Siddhartha Roy.Environmental Engineering Science.Jan 2017.51-61.http://doi.org/10.1089/ees.2016.0223