A Blueprint for Social Media 2.0: Turning the Pursuit of Wisdom into a Sport
In 2023, many of us look around at our lives and the world, and feel frustration with having a lack of more positive and futuristic progress. One way of creating more progress is by pursuing making the general public and ourselves wiser, where being wiser isn't just about general intelligence, but must include the growth of moral intelligence within it. And it also includes bringing more stunning artistic beauty into our pursuit of general and moral intelligence to make it even more emotionally satisfying and meaningful, subsequently from there we could say that adding the pursuit of beauty alongside the pursuit of truth and goodness is the pursuit of an even more meaningful form of wisdom.
Now, what I'd like to do with this Rumble channel and Substack is to pursue argumentation more from the point of view of common anecdotal knowledge than scientific knowledge, which I think has the benefit of being more understandable or accessible to more people. I have a love for the Victorian era and for the beautifying effect that using bigger words and more synonyms has, so I don't claim to be the master of being accessible to the most people possible, but I try to find a balance. I also think that a lot of strides can be made in philosophy and finding more probable truth without resorting to the scientific method, in the sense of thinking creatively with how anecdotal knowledge or hearsay can connect together to build more intuitively probable arguments about reality.
So I'm abandoning the structure of the scientific method in the sense that I am arguably not doing any kind of experiment, including not by modern academic scientific measurements-- but I'm not abandoning the more foundational pursuit of probable truth within the scientific method, which is what I think good philosophy generally is. I also don't consider what I'm doing to be an attack on science, but a way of finding the most probable philosophy around a particular topic, which then can potentially and hopefully strengthen scientific understanding of the same topic in a virtuous manner-- thus raising the understanding of probabilities around the topic.
I think it's anecdotally visible and true that emotions are more foundational than reason because we can see people have their intelligence overridden by their emotions throughout their lives. Almost everyone has personal experience of this. For example, being too demotivated to do anything at the cost of wellbeing; or getting a little too angry and then regretting it. Or being emotionally overwhelmed by something that looked to be the most probable truth but was not, also known as cognitive dissonance: where you have two or more competing ideas about how reality is, and you are emotionally struggling with fully accepting a new and potentially more accurate worldview.
Another example of how foundational emotion is to consciousness in contrast to language, is what you remember from a dream when you were asleep, when you actually remember it. Are you more likely to remember the emotion or emotions you felt from the dream, or are you more likely to remember all the language, if any, that was spoken in it? It seems that for most if not all people it is the emotion from the dream they remember more than the language. When you wake up from a terrible nightmare, there is a sense of relief of being freed from the intensity of the dream's emotion-- but if you are lucky enough to wake up from a dream you find heavenly-- as I assume the vast majority of human beings, including myself, don't have a history of desirable dreams due to their subconscious wanting to play out scenarios of varying scales of conflict-- there is a sense of loss in waking up and losing the intensity of a good dream's positive emotion. In either case though, when you wake up and you remember a dream, the emotion within the dream is generally more important than any language in the dream.
One way of defining what is abstract is that it is considered difficult to understand. In the article “The Transcendental Treasury of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness by Ann Gauger” (https://evolutionnews.org/2019/01/the-transcendental-treasury-of-truth-beauty-and-goodness/) there is a quote that reads: “Truth, beauty, and goodness are abstract concepts that nonetheless correspond to our deepest desires.” So truth, beauty, and goodness may be difficult to understand with language, but we are drawn to attempt to do that if we realize they are tied to some of our deepest desires. And the topic of our deepest desire ties into the idea of the foundation of human consciousness being more emotional than linguistic, and the necessity of not betraying some of your deepest emotional desires by limiting the pursuit of being smarter to only the pursuit of truth, while ignoring beauty and goodness. Instead, no matter the difficulty, we must include the pursuit of the most objective beauty and virtuousness, with truth, in our pursuit of wisdom, to fulfill some of our deepest emotional desires in relation to growing our sense of meaning in life.
Without emotion, it would be a loveless and undesirable existence on an intuitive level to the average human being-- and this intuition, at least partially, comes from the wisdom occasionally granted to us by emotion. Sometimes people survive in a virtuous manner because of emotion and not because of conceptual analysis. Emotion is a double-edged sword that can make us more ignorant or more wise. I believe we can attempt to restructure social media to make us more individually and collectively wise to some degree, and the question we face with that is: “How do we restructure social media to work with our emotions towards exponential wisdom rather than away from it?”
As I've said before-- paraphrasing the philosopher Harry Frankfurt-- we act towards goals because one or more things we love is connected to those goals, or alternatively, because we love the goals themselves. We also need conscious action to survive which requires goals and love. So love is foundational to our lives, and connected with that, love is foundational to the variety of emotions we experience; since any emotion always emerges partly in relation to what we love. Love is also foundational to the transcendental values of truth, beauty, and goodness, because without love, these values would arguably only be able to be pursued robotically and without a sense meaningfulness, if they were able to be pursued to whatever degree in such a theoretical existence.
Emotions are not only always partly connected to what we love, but they emerge, at the very least, from some degree of self-love-- which is to say you can't stop your capacity to feel emotions because at the very least, either in the most wicked and destructive cases, or in more self-destructive cases, every being arguably inherently loves some part of themselves. Life is also at its most meaningful, in part, when love and the transcendental values serve each other in an endless cycle, because the most meaning in life, pleasure, and wellbeing generally doesn't come from an existence where a being's capacity for love serves lies, evil, and ugliness. And so it might be said that to subtract the natural healthy capacity for emotion from the human being is to subtract the capacity to feel loved and to give love from the human being, doing so is not a solution for achieving greater wisdom, and I think that the idea that emotions are less valuable than intelligence comes from a blindness to the understanding of love, emotion, their connection, and what it means for positive intellectual growth or the growth of wisdom.
Though I don't want to explore it in depth here, I want to briefly add that it appears exceptionally likely to me that a tug of war, or polarity, between love and fear, is foundational to our current human existence. I have been looking for flaws in this idea to test its merit and struggling to find any. And I believe contemplating this more can help with understanding more about the transcendental values and how they relate to us.
So we must seeks ways of raising individual and collective wisdom within the chaotic potential of our own emotions, in order to increase meaning in life and wellbeing. And we must do this as opposed to growing fear, including being opposed to growing the fear/avoidance of feeling and acknowledging fear. Going along with the therapy known as AEDP and its model called The Change Triangle, using mental chatter and distracted focus to not feel and acknowledge fear in a manageable amount where it exists might in some cases strengthen fear, and move people away from love and respect; although at other times it might be more logical to intentionally not focus on fear, for example in some cases for those who drive where one's vehicle is slipping helplessly on ice which is a bad situation to be in, and that's something to explore another time.
But we want the structure of the future of social media to help as much as it can with moving us into a space of mutual wise love and respect. And I think we want to do this without taking away the love inherent in the allowance of maximum personal freedom for those who choose it-- where maximum personal freedom within the law might reduce the sense of mutual love and respect if it dominates the system; but it potentially reduces the intelligence of the system if maximum personal freedom doesn't have the ability to dominate the system. As I'll explain later, the starting point to overcoming this potential contradiction for the most utilitarian outcome is finding the most flexible way to allow the contradiction.
As a quick note, from Shaunti Feldhahn's books For Men Only and For Women Only, the revised and updated editions, I've come to the conclusion that the perception of love and respect has general gender differences, and these possibly primarily deal with general gender insecurities I won't get into here; so that adds a layer of confusion to exploring the relationship between love and respect. An example of this is that whatever a friendship between two average men is scientifically, it is not going to look the same behaviorally as a similar friendship between two average women, because of general gender differences in the perception of love and respect. I also acknowledge I haven't dived deeply at all here into potential differences between love and respect, but I think it is best if it is done with acknowledgement and attempted exploration of the general gender mental differences around it.
I also want to add that the red pill and black pill communities get lost in making a dogma out of evolutionary psychology theories, and running from the potential cause and effect of their attachment trauma, so like some feminist ideas around gender, I consider them to be partly if not mostly self-destructive and not have the best current explanation of gender psychology. That is not to say the original red pill side of the internet hasn't taught me anything, it introduced me to some evolutionary psychology theories which do explain some of gendered psychology, and it introduced me to the knowledge of common logical fallacies which has been one of the most valuable things I have ever learned in my life (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/). But even though these perceptive differences with love and respect, as I currently understand them, are coming from smaller scale survey data from Shaunti Feldhahn, I think it's the sort of thing that is generally anecdotally visible once you realize it as a possibility, so exploring this dilemma is a candidate for a future post and video.
I think that social and cultural atomization in the world is being caused partially by social media as it is currently structured and ran, and this is both reducing the overall potential for wisdom, wellbeing, and meaning in life. How social media websites are structured and ran, like any other action in life, is shaped by values. There is also a limitation on any person's values in life because there is a limit on our time, attention, and energy to pursue those values. And a person's life values are generally shown by someone's actions. The code or structure of social media and how social media is moderated are actions that were made too simple to virtuously and transparently approach human complexity, and a social media system which can do this is necessary in order to potentially dramatically heighten human wisdom.
Objective beauty to the individual is instinctually-striking and captivating, for example, like Baroque architecture might be to most people, or artistic depictions of fantasy Elven architecture, or the elaborate and beautiful graphic design that sometimes shows up in the pages of medieval books that survived (https://hyperallergic-newspack.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/designingenglish9.jpg). The culture we support in the present affects how we feel, and if we can't honor the most beautiful art and ideas within the past, there is a felt sense that we are not on the right path. People generally feel, without putting it into language, that virtuousness/goodness/moral excellence is beautiful and that it is a form of love and truth, all of which being deeply desired by at least most human beings. So the beautiful ideas we support should include both the pursuit of virtuousness and the most probable truth, and to repeat myself in a slightly different way, for the sake of deeper meaning we should consider making time and space in our lives to surround these ideas with the pursuit of the most objective artistic beauty.
If the perception of beauty produces more psychological safety, which lowers fight or flight physiology, which increases complex problem solving intelligence, then this theoretically and generally helps solve hard problems-- on top of feeling that we are on the right path which seems to be a path pursuing the highest objective realization of truth, goodness, and beauty. One would reason that social media which pursues exponential wisdom should try to allow people to visually, and possibly even sonically, commune with the pursuit of objective beauty on a daily basis; although I concede that I believe true beauty is somewhere between individual taste and shared genetic taste, rather than being purely objective and the latter.
So as a generalization, I think this is partially an argument for the Baroque and variants of it to meet the digital world visually in user interfaces-- Baroque is a type of furniture you find in art museums for a reason; it came before modern art began to redefine beauty as something that is any possible human expression of emotion or thought, rather than a sensation that grips onto your nervous system with some form of feeling of transcendent depth: an example of this conflict in the definition of beauty, I would wager, is the depth of feelings the average person would have from seeing a banana peel taped to a wall, versus Rembrandt's 1633 painting “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” (https://www.wikiart.org/en/rembrandt/christ-in-the-storm-1633).
Excessive truth or knowledge, in the sense of an excess of the most probable information a species can get their hands on, can be used to create advanced and possibly extinction-inducing tools. Without the moral intelligence to handle the tool, it can cause far more destruction than it otherwise would have, and even extinction. Nukes being an example, as they could put so much soot into the air on Earth that it could block out the sun, disrupt plant growth and the whole ecosystem, and cause a global extinction event. So to say it again, truth, goodness, and beauty support each other, and should be pursued together as opposed to valuing and focusing on truth too much, because this can to lead to more wisdom, and more virtuous outcomes in how potentially destructive information and technology is used.
Also, you can't maximally raise the understanding of moral truth, or more broadly wisdom, without raising social-emotional intelligence, which increases peoples' ability to reason or understand more about reality together, with the greater likelihood of peace that it entails. If you lack social-emotional intelligence, you risk triggering more fight or flight physiology/fear in human beings, which reduces the potential for greater pattern detection and probability deduction in conversation, and more broadly reduces the potential to grow wisdom.
I'd also like to say that nothing I suggest here will have to do with artificial intelligence or AI. Maybe AI could be virtuously used as a completely optional tool to augment social media in the future. But I see AI as a tool at best. And I think that AI is powerful but overrated, and simply not as important for raising collective wisdom as the direction of culture and new social media structures, primarily as these social media apps or sites have to do with their capacity for helping with friendly competitive probability deduction, and deepening the understanding of social-emotional intelligence: which includes the need for deeper categorization of conversation, and deeper understanding of social mediation in pursuit of wisdom, going along with differences between good faith communication and bad faith communication-- where this is all pursued based on looking for probabilities from evidence, and not making the mainstream mistake of ignoring anecdotal and contextual information patterns.
I think some amount of probability deduction is inherent in human beings in the sense that it does not require language, where it can work with the minimal amount of culture necessary to try to help a human being to survive, and relies on anecdotal evidence. This innate probability deduction appears synonymous with intuition. For example, and as a disclaimer I am not a biologist, assume there is a primate who doesn't have a lot of culture or capacity to think about probabilities using language, but they can still do some amount of probability deduction, they can deduce or intuit where the predators are from past experience for example, and this helps them to survive despite a lack of language.
People use distributed cognition, which is where they rely on each other to attempt to gain more information about objective reality. Intuition can be amplified by language, culture, and more broadly, distributed cognition. I think that intuition in combination with maximum possible distributed cognition within virtuous means, can potentially amplify probability deduction and wisdom; and this can be done through social media that's structured the way I will describe it here, because I'm going to offer what I see as some possible new steps for guiding human emotion further towards greater wisdom-- even though a potential pitfall of the system is causing an obsessive focus on truth over beauty and goodness, as the system itself revolves heavily around probability deduction, and the culture of each individual determines how it is used.
Thinking in probabilities all the time isn't possible, nor is doing it too much good for emotional stability, as I talked about in my post and video that was mostly on alternative news sources. So a wiser social media system will need to take emotional stability into account, and I will also give what I think are some starting steps for that. Comedy is also a "frenemy" or friend and enemy of virtuousness and beauty, and I would guess it approaches truth more from generalizations portrayed as semi-fraudulent absolute statements rather than probability statements; for example, "Bald men always wear hats." is not a true statement, but it is probably more funny to more people than "Bald men sometimes wear hats.". Humans are complex and there is a complex relationship between comedy and wisdom that is sometimes detrimental to wisdom that is worth being aware of in order to attempt to protect both things; comedy is somewhere between reason and emotion, and may help introduce reasoned arguments in a way that triggers fight or flight physiology less, so if virtuousness is valued more than comedy it can potentially be detrimental to reason and subsequently detrimental to wisdom, since reason is a spoken or written argument for a probability, and part of the linguistic side of wisdom-- alongside poetry which allows a low resolution grasp on things, and is more "multi-meaning" in that it has more potential meanings than prose, which arguably gives poetic thinking the greater potential to break thinker's block on a particular problem.
VDCI stands for Virtuous Decentralized Collective Intelligence. I originally was calling this social media system I wanted to envision VDCI Social Media, and this was mainly what I was pointing to when I did a video and post on VDCI some time ago; although it is possible to do something like this without technology, it would be harder, messier, and slower; like a bunch of people in a room writing things down on pieces of paper and trying to figure out how to best keep track of the pieces. But I want to include the pursuit of beauty in the name, so instead of VDCI Social Media, to put the focus on all three transcendental values of truth, beauty, and goodness, I'm calling this the pursuit of Transcendental Social Media, where the word "Transcendental" is being used to point to the transcendental values of truth, beauty, and goodness.
I think it's extremely important to say I'm pursuing Transcendental Social Media, rather than that I have ideas that are worthy of being called that, since the culture and behavior of people is more important than the code or structure. Also it is a pursuit because the word "transcendental" can have more metaphysical or spiritual meanings, and if there is a transcendent or spiritual aspect of consciousness as I believe there most likely is without getting into that, I don't think it's wise to equate a social media system, or any technology for that matter, as being on the same level as consciousness. But I still think "Transcendental Social Media" is the best name because it has the potential to bring the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness into mainstream cultural focus, which I think would be far more good than bad. And it just sounds better than "Transcendental Values Social Media" even though that would be more accurate and maybe less pretentious sounding. However I've used different phrasing in my title to draw more people to the writing. So I'm going to leave the rest of this on Substack only in order to do less speaking because it's very long, and I need a break after working on it; but I'm very happy to say that below are my ideas on how this social media system looks:
A Basic Theoretical Structure of Transcendental Social Media:
Some System Basics:
* In the long-term, completely publicly visible/transparent code would be best, but I acknowledge this may not be feasible as of writing this in 2023; since popular social media is currently most likely to happen through a business, businesses need to make a profit, and sharing their code could threaten the ability to do that.
* Ideally different types of activity are capable of a real-time mode, like how a traditional chat room operates where refreshing the browser isn't needed; so ideally the system has the ability for the user to put different types of activity into real-time mode or refresh mode.
* If this is somehow running on Blockchain, or anything better if it appears in the future, that might be best. This is for resilience of the social media system; and for preventing censorship, to the degree that blockchain can help with that-- with the exception that the system needs to be able to enforce the law; and hopefully the law is also kept virtuous by the residents under that law in whatever place it is being enforced.
* When building something complex, you still have to do it with one simple piece at a time; I don't have the knowledge of a professional programmer/coder, but I would think that the places for a social media website to start with when working on this could potentially be any of the following which will be explained further below: The Content Probability Deduction Subsystem along with the ability to turn the visibility of it on or off, user tagging/categorization ability of individual pieces of content, and the four default Social Rule Dimensions, this is the skeleton or foundation of my idea.
* I believe that more options for users are better than less in social media systems or platforms in the long-term, as long as the options begin by what appears most useful, and the complexity is manageable to the programmers-- who should probably have people taking notes that are decipherable so that the growing complexity of the code can continually be taught to others, since lack of this is a mistake that has happened before-- for example in the over-corporatized side of the video game industry with the Halo franchise. Complexity is also good as long as the users in the social media system can properly categorize an overwhelming amount of options in ways that are maximally useful and prevent choice paralysis.
* Subscription and tip models can come exclusively from within the system to help keep it running, or come from outside, but should be noted because they could be used in the system in the future to fund competition between groups of people in virtuously producing something desired, for examples with philosophers, artists, or scientists.
* I think one reason people refrain from sharing their thoughts and potential knowledge through social media, besides the fear of bad faith communication, is because they can't write well. So the system should have the best possible built-in speech-to-text software-- where this exists within the constraints of privacy protection and virtuousness.
* I currently see four major subsystems necessary for maximizing collective wisdom in social media which go as follows..
The Social Rule Dimension Subsystem
* The users have the ability to create "social rule, censorship, and content dimensions". I'll call these "SRD's" as an acronym to try to make this easier to talk about. SRD's allow different structures of social rules and censorship in the style of an information filter to the degree this is possible, while trying to be upfront with the user about the limitations of the filter and how any particular SRD filter works. To the degree any filter exists it will consist of human moderation and/or automated moderation.
* People with sufficient moderation ability in an SRD are also able to control the visibility of content manually across the entire system/platform for users viewing the system through that particular SRD. Whatever the moderators do to the SRD should show up in a public log with all their moderator actions being searchable; and with this obviously being whatever the degree they are able to handle such a task on a manual level; on top of a public log of the past and present code the SRD uses around automated moderation, what we could also call automated information filtering.
* Each SRD should do it's best through human moderation, possibly with the addition of code, in order to control, or not control, the visibility of the sum-total of information in the system, site, and/or app, in accordance with the law first, and then in accordance with the SRD rules. Ideally administrators or a group of users beyond normal SRD moderators could handle system-wide moderation as it applies to accordance with law, including a reporting function that all users can use, but users should also be able to know why they are censored as a result of any censorship from any moderator or administrator in the system.
* Different kinds of SRD member voting systems could also be explored to do more sophisticated manual moderation of SRD's, as opposed to traditional moderation involving a minority of people.
* SRD's can change visibility of any content posted in them, ideally with as much flexibility as possible; but the system has to be programmed to automatically make it show up with the SRD rule history and the SRD's present rules.
* The user can also change the visibility of the content they post, ideally with as much flexibility as possible.
* An SRD can be public while having places for private/SRD-specific content through private "groups", which are typical social media groups that are always created in a specific SRD, but can be accessible to other SRD's depending on the group settings and higher-level-moderation SRD settings. I want to add that when I was using the word group earlier I was not using it in this context.
* An SRD can be private while having public groups for public content.
* All SRD's are forced to keep their rule history and present rules public, this creates skin in the game for moderators by making it easier for users to judge their fairness, balancing the power between them and the users. I acknowledge that their may be utilitarian benefits to allowing the moderators of non-default, and subsequently user-made SRD's, to keep this private, but doing so currently appears to me as something that will generally lead to more tyranny and less wisdom in the system.
* The system as I present it here has four default SRD's, but could always evolve towards more or less in the future.
* The default option for posting content, when first making an account in the system, will be to make it public, unless the user is in the third default SRD centering around emotional security that's talked about later; public content is displayed across all SRD's that see public content, rather than being specific to one or more SRD's. This default option will be in order to increase access to information across the system, with the hope of increasing distributed cognition by doing so.
* The user can belong to as many groups and SRD's as they want, but they only see through one SRD at a time. Ideally, if the user belongs to an SRD, or it's a public SRD where no SRD joining is necessary in order to see through it's information filter, the user can see through multiple SRD's at one time through extra windows on their monitor that appear through the system, in the same way you might have multiple windows open on a PC.
* People can switch their information filtering view between SRD's that are public, or that they belong to, at any time, provided they don't break the SRD's rules to a degree that gets them temporarily or permanently banned.
* Whether or not joining the SRD is done by invite or a vetting process depends on how the SRD is being controlled/moderated.
* All user verification with personal information should only be visible to employees and/or volunteers who agree to be legally and contractually subject to permanent dismissal from their role at the least, for not adequately protecting people's privacy, which also will not be used a contractual legal scapegoat for potential lawsuits. We can call this an Identification Moderation Layer.
* No user verification should be visible to anyone but the Identification Moderation Layer, including people who are simply SRD or group moderators, including in default SRD's, who are not part of the Identification Moderation Layer; or tasked by the system to do moderation around enforcing the law, what we could call the Legal Moderation Layer. It's also possible that the system could combine these jobs for legal and identification moderation, whether paid or volunteer depending on the system.
* The degree that the user gives the Identification Moderation Layer information about their identity, different types of personal information will match up in the system to what SRD's they can apply to become a part of, based on the SRD's vetting rules in what personal information it needs, if it needs any. We could say that SRD moderation is an "SRD Moderation Layer", where if this social media system exists in a corporate context, the only SRD moderators potentially getting paid by the company are the ones moderating default SRD's.
* Similarly, any SRD should be able to use the SRD moderation layer of one or more other SRD's, basically mirroring whatever their moderation does, with users being able to see this and more generally how the SRD operates in pages on the SRD for both SRD rules history and present rules. This could help smaller user-made SRD's to have more sophisticated moderation.
* The first default SRD will be where people have maximum free speech within legal boundaries, like an information filter for maximum legal information visibility; there would be no user vetting process.
* In this first default SRD there could still be an option for gore and nudity filters on the user's end, and at best this filter would be turned on at default, at the very least for gore-- or if the business decided, they could disallow one or both from their version of the system-- but I think this outright censorship would be the worse decision if collective wisdom is the goal; because information availability, within legal parameters, has a role to play in virtuously solving problems-- even if some of us, or many of us, don't have the skills or emotional strength to use information like nudity and gore to potentially virtuously solve problems that might use that as information-- for example in medical practice or criminal justice.
* The second default SRD would be like an information filter with the most visibly probable rules-- as agreed upon by this SRD's members-- around what and how much civility or good faith communication is necessary for maximizing wisdom; and this is competing with user-made SRD's, making the rules constantly subject to debate, and constantly subject to democratic or vote-based change; if some form of "electoral college-like" system can be agreed upon as being the most logical voting system, it could also potentially take the place of the purely democratic vote in the SRD to reduce the potential tyranny of a mob rule scenario; also this SRD could eventually evolve to somehow use multiple styles of voting systems with as little user action needed as logically possible, and somehow combine them together to get the results of the vote-- assuming this was found through probability deduction to be the most logical way to vote. This should have some form of user verification to prevent trolling and abuse which is up for debate. Maybe voting on rules could be done every week, but for now I don't claim to have vote-based SRD moderation fleshed out as one or more satisfying ideas.
* The third default SRD can be a place where the rules similarly are up for debate and vote, but revolve around what is seen to cause the most probable mutual emotional security; although by default The Content Probability Deduction Subsystem will not be visible since it seems more likely to challenge emotional security. This third default SRD should have some form of user verification to prevent trolling and abuse which is up for debate.
* If the moderation becomes tyrannical to some or most users in any SRD, default or not, the ability for users to create their own SRD's will be able to help counteract this.
A note on this third default SRD: This exists because we don't want to lose potential extra information and reason of another person that can give us a deeper understanding of reality, just because they are in a place in life where they primarily need emotional security; we want to virtuously and transparently entice people to be in the system while keeping the system itself as virtuous as it can be. And we want to figure out how to virtuously get the users of different SRD's to talk more with each other in a way that finds more coherence around probable or objective reality and collective wisdom, which includes a deeper understanding of the principles which cause emotional safety and intellectual exploration in connection to that; this helps us reduce non-productive forms of tribalism.
* The fourth SRD will be a copy of the first SRD except with a legal ID identification user vetting process, with that information kept secret. This reduces free speech purely in that one has to provide legal ID identification to join, but apart from that it allows maximum free speech within the law, with the trade-off being that any kind of voting in the fourth SRD is harder to tamper with, since the first SRD will allow anyone to speak anonymously but all forms of voting in the system will be distorted to the degree that fake accounts and bots are able to do so within the first SRD. Allowing maximum free speech here allows the potential ability to study what causes people to stray from good faith communication to a potentially lesser degree than the first SRD, but with intact voting systems.
* No default SRD will use invites; and in the case of a vetting process for the two default SRD's that aren't pursuing maximum free speech, this process has to handle the problems of maximizing user convenience, privacy, and the wisest level of desire for some level of credentials in an SRD's rules in relation to the SRD's goal: and as a reminder, these default goals would either be the pursuit of what amount of civility is most in service to collectively raising wisdom, or the pursuit of the most probable utilitarian emotional security.
* To state it again, ideally, the user or users moderating an SRD can include only part of its users, or it can be lead by everyone in the SRD, everyone in the system/app/site, or everyone online, through the pursuit of different possible forms of voting to suit the particular SRD's goals, and based on who wishes to vote.
* The only system-wide censorship of a particular piece of content should happen if it is against the law with users being notified who were censored.
* There could be a vote on something like the home page of each SRD that chooses it for suggesting and gauging user interest in how the SRD should run, or alternatively vote-based moderation. Whether the vote is a suggestion or moderation, it could be an endless real-time vote-- to the degree this could be done without breaking the SRD in the case of a moderation vote-- or this suggestion or moderation vote could be spaced out in the wisest time periods for that particular SRD's goal or goals that it can find.
The Tag/Category Subsystem
* A tag/category looks like a box with text around it that appears under content, similar to how a Discord emoticon would look under a Discord post, except text or abbreviated text instead of an image. Each tag leaves a number of votes next to its name or abbreviation, similar to Discord emoticons, but starting with a number 1 to signify one vote from the original person who tagged it underneath a piece of content, with that being their vote for that tag being an accurate categorization of the content in some way. Other users can click on it to vote on it's accuracy as a categorization of the content, raising the number by one for each user.
* If the text in the tag is abbreviated due to being too long, when you hover your mouse over it you can see the full text for the tag, and you can right click to open a menu with the option to copy the full text.
* The tags you vote for can be publicly tracked back to you based on the SRD you were in, including a copy of the SRD's rules when you voted for that tag; if the search engine is powerful enough, and allows users to save and share the ways they search which includes this SRD tag vote information, this will potentially allow users to reduce how much fraudulent voting gets taken seriously in the system.
* There should be the option for users to create SRD's where anonymous accounts are allowed to be without a cell phone number or any other form of identification, and this should obviously exist in the first default SRD which will prioritize free speech over the most secure voting; this also potentially allows the most information to study why bad faith communication happens and how to reverse it.
* Tags appear the same size or amount of characters, according to some rational default amount, or according to user preference. Tags need the ability in the default SRD's to be a large enough amount of text so that the tag system doesn't ever struggle with identifying content from not allowing enough text.
* Pre-existing tags should be searchable when tagging content in some kind of tag menu.
* Tags can be used on multiple pieces of similar content, for example someone could make a tag that says "US News: Blind Dog Walker Accidentally Drops Bean Burrito On Car At Overpass - 9/3/2023, 8:48 A.M.", where this would likely be abbreviated in the normal user view of the tag; and the full tag would ideally be searchable in a tag menu once it was a pre-existing tag, and voted for on all news stories written about this incident, so anyone could find them for research.
* There should also be traditional visual emoticons that can be placed under content, like Discord has, which are also voted on like tags with a number beside them; but where there is unlimited custom user ability to make new emoticons-- at best, with the option for animated ones as well. These user-made emoticons can be moderated for gore and nudity for default SRD's, or moderated by any users in the SRD's they've created with that showing up in the rules. As for how emoticons and tags might be displayed, there could be one or more visible rows of tags/categories, and then one or more visible rows of emoticons underneath or above it, depending on user preference. And hovering the mouse over them could bring up a scrollable window of all of them like tags, if there were too many, where the most voted on would be the first seen.
* Every tag vote is tied to a single SRD that was used as the information filter when it was voted on. The user can filter in or out tag votes based on SRD's. Ideally, this filtering has as much flexibility as possible.
The Content Probability Deduction Subsystem with notes about The Search Engine Subsystem
Note: It's easier on me to tie my thoughts on these two subsystems together; so I'm doing that in order to get my thoughts out faster due to the complexity of this project. Any bullet point you see will be primarily about The Content Probability Deduction Subsystem, unless stated otherwise at the beginning of the bullet point with it being about The Search Engine Subsystem.
* The visibility of The Content Probability Deduction Subsystem can be turned on and off by the user at any time. It will be on by default in all of the default SRD's except the third which centers around user emotional security.
* With this subsystem the user is able to rate, and at anytime change, the probability they believe different aspects of the system accurately represents the truth and reality. They can choose between these options: "Very low"; "low"; "middle"; "high"; "very high"; a mixture between two or more of these, "not sure"; 1-100 %; a mixture of two or more different percentages, or a range between 1% and 100%. When this is used for pieces of content, this is a Content Accuracy Rating or CAR.
* The user is able to right click on a tag/category to open a menu with the option to rate how accurately they feel the tag categorizes the content. This is a Tag Accuracy Rating or TAR and uses the same probability deduction options as a CAR.
* Each individual user can categorize two or more users into a grouping, without needing their permission, and uniquely name them, which I will call Probability Deduction Groupings or PDG's. This is specifically for the purpose of tracking how users within a PDG individually and collectively rate the probable truth of aspects of the system in contrast to other users and PDG's. Think of PDG's like unlimited competing sports teams where the sport at it's best is the pursuit of wisdom, where common anecdotal knowledge, and intuition evolving over time with objective historical record to the degree it exists, keeps the score to the degree that it can be done.
* The SRD the PDG was made in, along with a copy of the SRD rules at that time, should also be tracked by the system and searchable. A PDG is primarily tied to the SRD it is made in, so its visibility can change based on the SRD rules.
* PDG's are different from "groups" which is why I've used the word grouping to help differentiate them. Groups in the system are typical social media groups as previously stated, and help with categorizing discussion into sub-topics within one or more particular SRD's that have access to the group, but are always primarily tied to and under the rules of one SRD. The visibility settings of any particular group is based on the rules of the SRD it was created in, and/or the rules of the group.
* The SRD the group was made in, along with a copy of SRD rules at that time, should also be tracked by the system and searchable. A group is primarily tied to the rules of the SRD it is made in.
* A user does not have to share membership in any SRD's with another user in order to put that user into a PDG. If a user is put into a PDG, they can choose whether or not to be notified about it either publicly or based on selective SRD's that the PDG was started in; this can be done when initially setting up their account in the system, or any time after that in their user settings; this includes selecting what SRD's the PDG has to be created in for them to be notified. This can help prevent harassment.
* A PDG can incorporate all the users from one or more PDG's into it. The system should ideally make it easy to do this kind of PDG creation and alteration; maybe also with the creator having an option for more transparency and skin in the game, by being able to start a PDG with a permanent log/history of alteration to the users in that particular PDG.
* For a PDG example, purely in the PDG name you could group together your favorite living thinkers in the system either based on their probability/probable truth deduction around one or more subjects which will be represented in the system as tags/categories, or write the PDG name based on these thinkers' general probability deduction ability, or base the PDG name on both in some way, with all this being searchable in the search engine.
* For tags to not get confused with the PDG name they could be put into double parenthesis or something like it; and during the PDG creation process, existing tags in the system can be searched for and clicked on when making a PDG, to make it easier to put them into the name, which will appear after the PDG's "actual name".. so for example to make this clearer, there could be tags displaying inside double parenthesis like "((Best Bread in America, Best Bread in France, Best Bread in Italy, Best Bread on Earth))" and they would appear after the PDG's actual name like "Professional Bakers" and the system could add the text " - Rating the Probable Truth of: "; so the full PDG name would read as "Professional Bakers - Rating the Probable Truth of: ((Best Bread in America, Best Bread in France, Best Bread in Italy, Best Bread on Earth)); the system could also make it so that the user could toggle the double parenthesis visibility. So if the name and tags were honest, this would be a Probability Deduction Grouping or PDG of professional bakers rating three tags around their opinion of the best bread in different regions.
* Each user and PDG will be given what I'm presently calling a User or Users Tag Probability Accuracy Rating or UTPAR, which is a probability accuracy rating using the same system as a CAR, with it being a rating/vote around their ability to deduce probable truth around a particular tag/subject.
* Each user and PDG has what I'm presently calling a User or Users General Probability Accuracy Rating or UGPAR, using the CAR rating system, which is basically attempting to best rate their ability to accurately discern objective truth or the truth of reality, which is given to them by any individual user that wants to.
* Upon the creation of a PDG, every group and SRD will have its own PDG containing all of the present users in the group or SRD; the search engine will ideally allow the ability to see changes in users coming or going in the system with how this affects different ratings; the PDG name could have the group or SRD name followed by the text "PDG" with some kind of special highlighting for that last bit of text to show it was system-made rather than user-made. Anyone will be able to give a PDG an UGPAR or UTPAR's for all the users in it as long as they are able to view it.
* There is no point in allowing users to give UGPAR's or UTPAR's to users that have blocked them, or any form of PDG that they are unable to see.. as a result of being tied to groups and SRD's they are unable to see. But I think that users choosing more visibility than less for themselves, and for PDG's, SRD's, and groups, generally potentially benefits the growth of wisdom and wellbeing the most by offering the most access to distributed cognition-- because bots and people with extra accounts will ideally be confined more to specific SRD's as a result of inadequate vetting in them for stopping these things, where those SRD's probability ratings and content can ideally be filtered in and out by the user, along with any other SRD's any user wishes to filter in and out.
* The second default SRD which is for good faith communication and the third default SRD which is for maximizing emotional stability should only allow PDG names that enforce sufficient politeness for their goals around politeness as agreed upon by the members.
* In the first and fourth default SRD's for maximum free speech within the law, the PDG's can be as impolite as possible within legal boundaries, and include all users in the system, but anybody who doesn't go there will not have to see how they are being named in PDG's unless they adjust their user settings to see it. It could be hidden by default since most people on social media aren't looking for a consistently wild and rude anonymous imageboard experience, though I believe there is generally more intelligence gained from always having such an experience as an option within a social media system/platform.
* When a user initially sets up their account, they could be offered choices, including either streamlined settings around maximum free speech, with or without legal identification, some enforced politeness, or maximum emotional security-- going along with the four default SRD's, or pick out individual options for everything including what SRD's they want to be a part of; and including what PDG's they see based on SRD PDG naming rules.
* In user-made SRD's the rules around naming the PDG's are determined by however a particular SRD is moderated.
* With any user's UGPAR or UTPAR's, they can be seen on the user's profile via ratings from individual users or PDG's; this can also be done in the search engine. And on the user profile, one can also see how that user has given out probability deduction ratings throughout the system; whereas potential user voting around moderation in SRD's or traditional social media-style groups can remain anonymous.
* Content, groups, tags, any form of accuracy rating, any other form of voting with moderation or suggesting moderation, and PDG's, are tied to the SRD they are created in; one thing this allows is that content on one SRD can be turned invisible by the moderation/rules of another SRD. This tying together should allow any user using the search engine to see the ties between the origin SRD and any of these things, allowing more power in the pursuit of publicly shared understanding of human behavior as it applies to the pursuit of wisdom.
* With the tags under a post of some form of content, users need the ability to not only see the most upvoted tags around that content like Discord does with emoticons, but also what tags are most popular that are being used on that particular piece of content, in ranking of popularity, based on any particular user, and/or users, and/or PDG's-- maybe starting with the options of the SRD's and groups they belong to, the users who are their followers, or who they follow, the PDG's they have made, and the PDG's they are in that they have visible. In the long-term this could also potentially be done for fun with emoticons.
* There is one default PDG which represents the public at large within the system, and they will have a UGPAR and UTPAR's; so even the entire system's critical-thinking/probability deduction ability is able to be judged by other users, groups, SRD's, and PDG's; although to the degree fake accounts get into the system it will include them. I will call this The Default Public PDG.
* Any user can view the UGPAR and UTPAR's of any individual user, group of users, or PDG. Keep in mind that SRD's, groups, and the system as a whole will all have PDG's created by the system itself.
* Any visible probability rating in the system can be replied to, creating its own discussion tree for additional context, which can include audio and video links-- with tags/categories this could be seen by right clicking for more options, including within it the previous mentioned option to copy the full tag text. And these replies are searchable by users within the SRD the rating happened in.
* Groups and PDG's should ideally be transferable by the user or users running them from one "Home SRD" to another; for example, if a group or PDG is tied to the SRD it is made in, which makes that its Home SRD, that tying should ideally be transferable to being underneath another SRD and its rules, another home, if there is a disagreement with the original SRD rules. The history of this should ideally all be publicly available through the search engine with being able to see rules of the SRD's during transfers and presently.
* There is a pursuit between community voting and programmers around an increasingly complex, creative, and virtuous individual user ability to categorize how information can be searched for in the search engine.
* Within the ability of the programmers, and within reason of what is useful to the users, and what is most virtuous and wise, The Search Engine Subsystem can ideally compare any kind of available data within the system for any user. This should be seen as a pursuit rather than a finish line. Here are some examples: You can search for one or more users and/or groups and/or SRD's and/or PDG's accuracy ratings on anything, alongside moderation changes to SRD's, groups, and PDG's names and users, to the degree the system can handle it and you have visibility.
* Users should have the ability to share the ways they categorize information in the search engine, giving it a name. We could call these Search Engine Presets, and these could show up in their own place in the search engine; they would fall under the same probability deduction voting guidelines as all other content with the CAR, and could also be sorted based on how accurately they are attempting to do whatever it is they are trying to do as claimed in their name; this could be called a Search Engine Preset Accuracy Rating or SEPAR, and rating a user or users ability around this could be a User or Users Search Engine Preset Accuracy Rating and be called a USEPAR. The SEPAR could be visible in the system similar to CAR and TAR, having to do with rating the accuracy of search engine presets, and the USEPAR could be visible in the system similar to visibility of UGPAR's and UTPAR's which have to do with rating the accuracy of one or more user's search engine presets.
* In the long-term there could also potentially be Tag Filtering Preset Accuracy Ratings, or TFPAR, and User or Users Tag Filtering Preset Accuracy Ratings, or UTFPAR. And Emoticon Filtering Preset Accuracy Ratings, or EFPAR, and User or Users Emoticon Filtering Preset Accuracy Ratings, or UEFPAR. Similar to what is going on with USEPAR and SEPAR.
Additional Things For The Pursuit of Transcendental Social Media To Explore:
* Though I prefer a system without advertisements that are coming from users who want sponsors rather than the code, in a system with advertisements in either case, the advertisers can choose between gambling with tag/category-based ads, likely ones that are popular, or manually choosing users, groups, PDG's, and/or SRD's on their end to place ads on.
* Because voice chat and video chat is arguably, as a generalization, more generally platonically intimate and meaningful than writing, it's important to have Clubhouse app-like voice chats that double as live chatrooms available within the SRD's. Heralding back to humanity's hunter-gatherer past and the social nature of the campfire, voice chat and video chat goes along with bringing at times, a sense of digital campfires, like what Clubhouse and Discord has done-- this is also potentially important for reducing fight or flight physiology and destructive tribalism.
* This doesn't have to be confined to voice chat, there could also be optional video feed from users, either webcam or video feed from somewhere else online, that can display in different ways-- for example one video larger with everyone else smaller around it, everyone with video appearing only, or everyone appearing with or without video like Discord, ect. Like Clubhouse, in these places people can approach to listen, but don't necessarily have to talk, and I think unlike Clubhouse, anyone who joins should start out anonymous, then can turn that off the anonymity if they wish, or turn it off permanently in their user settings, then they can possibly join in the actual chat based on the rules.
* SRD's could pursue ways of helping people be more comfortable talking because this will help with building platonic intimacy and community. I stress using the phrase platonic intimacy rather than intimacy only because it's the primary form of social intimacy so it arguably has more to do with building community and distributed cognition, and I also use the phrase platonic intimacy because people sometimes see the word intimacy by itself as being synonymous sexual intimacy so they miss the point of the full meaning-making context of it.
* There should be a pursuit of the best possible structural options in the system for the disabled to engage as easily as possible in the system, including the voice chat.
* There should be the possibility of different speaking rules in different voice chat rooms, possibly structured to some degree with code, possibly allowing a user-based vote on different speaking rules.
* The system ideally has text to speech, speech to text, and webcams can attempt to turn sign language into speech.
* The system ideally has a built-in ability for individual users and groups of users to make or download 2D or 3D mind maps; this will help with building conceptual models.
* People should consider using the subscriber and donation payment models in or outside the system, which partly will depend on the system's financial needs and how it is addressing them, with lowest and highest possible amounts, to have limitless competing individuals or teams to be crowdfunded, to create a public record of text and/or audio and/or video towards innovative solutions to the world's problems; this will theoretically work in synergy with the system's multi-faceted probability or probable truth deduction contest, causing more innovation.
* One possible big picture focus for any system like this is how to best approach social mediation and navigating individual complexity and fight or flight physiology in order to maximize the potential for innovative thought and conversation, and meaning in life.
* The system should consistently explore different ways of implementing objective/instinctually-striking beauty in the UI and user choice.
* The system should make global conversation as easy as possible with the best translation possible between all languages.
* The system should have as globally accessible UI as possible.
* The system needs to deal with platonic intimacy breakdown from the the flawed but useful Dunbar's number idea, where too many people in a group results in platonic intimacy breakdown, and from extreme cultural variance causing lack of things in common. It can deal with this by furthering understanding its principles, starting with first principles, and creating social systems which try to operate virtuously within those principles.
* The system could explore the importance of creating warmth and depth in relationships, attempting to mirror hunter gatherer tribes to a rational degree, but also being potentially better than them, partly in the spirit of mostly platonic meta love maps-- which would be conceptual maps of how love and respect, and more generally warmth and depth is generated in relationships, which will foster innovative conversation, meaning in life, and wellbeing.
* A probability deduction contest causes people to have to click more and possibly type more, this might reduce engagement because it's more work in the long term; most people online are already lurkers based on popular video sites so there is a question of how to maximize engagement with minimal physical effort; this could potentially be virtuously corrected with non-intrusive EEG headsets technology replacing computer mice-- or any other kind of technology that's going to reduce the amount of physical human effort needed to participate; but with that said, I am not a fan of any kind of intrusive technology-- I think intrusive technology like brain microchips is not going to be the right path for the majority of human beings, I personally think it's better left in cyberpunk fiction than in reality; and I think the implementation of such technology in those who want it, for example as a form of medical intervention, should be done with highest standards around safety and virtuousness possible, and as a voluntary choice on the part of the people signing up for it.
* The system ideally could have bird's eye views available of SRD's, groups, and/or PDG's, with the ability to see real time changes based on the latest activity.
* With beautiful UI and themes: There could be static beautiful images; or slideshows that work in different ways depending on what users like best-- for example, automatically after so much time, or after clicking on certain things in any possible desirable way.
* The system could explore what it's not doing to raise the potential ability for like-minded people to socially connect and build platonic intimacy in a particular domain, which subsequently could affect maximum potential innovation.
* The system should explore determining what love and respect looks like to different individuals, attempt to probabilistically categorize this; start out with letting people just answer the question of what these look like for those who want to publicize that, turn this into a giant study to create the rough draft of these categories. This includes addressing the problem of different mental gender differences in the perception of love and respect because it regularly causes miscommunication which will reduce collective wisdom.
* The system should gain deeper understanding of fight or flight physiology and the effects of the structure or style of our communication as a control mechanism for fight or flight physiology, with how that might connect to raising meaning and wellbeing.
* The system should consistently explore how to best generally move people past thinker's block with any particular problem. For example the popular critical-thinking technique of zooming in or zooming out, or being more poetic, multi-meaning-like, and low-resolution.. in the initial pursuit of a solution to a problem that has one stumped.
* The system should explore how the default SRD's can virtuously and maximally compete for users against the user-made SRD's, so that if they are going to exist they remain as useful as possible to as many users as possible. In this spirit the system should be asking what are the most probable best rules for the default SRD's based on their goals?
* The system should ask the question as follows: Including creating new social rule dimensions that help to do the following, what can people do to get the pre-existing SRD's in the system to talk to each other more towards greater collective wisdom?
* Continually asking the questions: Is there anything else that can be done to virtuously amplify probability deduction speed in social media? How do you navigate trauma to pursue greater collective wisdom? How do we pursue potential for both extreme free speech and extreme physiological safety associated with the system, and the most extreme communication between the two, towards maximum wisdom or wise love, and maximum wellbeing? What is the most probable categorization of human physiology, conversation, and social mediation as it relates to good and bad faith communication? How deeply can we understand the transcendental values? How deeply can we understand their relationship to love and fear?
* Another thing the system should explore is the following question. Sufficiently advanced AI will always pose a potential threat to this system, possibly either by finding a way to cheat user identification vetting processes in the places they happen, or messing with the code-- which would be easier to do if the code wasn't transparent. How can the users stay vigilant against malevolent AI intrusion into the system?
* Comedy can be a virtue but sometimes it can do more bad than good. Comedy is a frenemy virtue or a frenemy to virtues. How can the system address the moral dilemma of comedy without censorship of it or disregarding the beauty, humanness, and wisdom of embedded reason of it?
* I wondered if because the meaning crisis is an intimacy crisis, if there should there be a default SRD for maximizing platonic intimacy. I've come to the conclusion that if they aren't gender segregated, and due to lack of good reasoning with mainstream acceptance around monogamy, reproductive emotions from the bulk of people, since they are are attracted to the opposite gender, will potentially hinder the whole system in its pursuit of alleviating the intimacy/meaning crisis, because they may get physiologically hijacked more to support an attention economy with one or more reproductive goals that differ from seeking a utilitarian solution to the intimacy crisis. So maybe it's best for this to be purely in the realm of competition between user-created SRD's because it faces one of humanity's hardest problems which is, from an evo-psych view, the physiological tug of war between survival and reproduction. It also seems like the third default SRD around maximizing emotional security most likely will have a lot of crossover with maximizing intimacy, generally platonic intimacy, if not potentially ending up synonymous with it and possibly demanding a name change. But the pursuit of wisdom also requires platonic intimacy so I think the default SRD around good faith communication or civility in pursuit of wisdom will inevitably have to explore that.
In Conclusion:
This is an attempt at a blueprint for the future I'd like to see social media go in, moving in a direction of tolerance towards both cultural variance and unity, and more broadly a direction of higher collective wisdom, meaning in life, and wellbeing; and I hope it is worked on from that same spirit, rather than, for example, the excessive sacrifice of physical and mental health. It was both stressful and exciting to write.. mostly stressful, and I'm sure it can be improved upon. While I accept donations in pursuit of more freedom (https://ko-fi.com/classpunk), nobody is legally required to give me credit or pay me anything to attempt to build this system, I wrote this for free primarily to attempt to better peoples' lives including my own. Thank you for your time and attention.
Picture source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-bonfire-on-the-beach-15350952/
Video link (Intro essay only): https://rumble.com/v3tpfnj-a-blueprint-for-social-media-2.0-turning-the-pursuit-of-wisdom-into-a-sport.html