From: jimruttshow8596
Humanity is currently in the midst of a world-historical transition that necessitates a significant upgrade of both individual and collective capacity for thought and action [02:22:05]. This upgrade is crucial to navigate the challenges posed by “Game A,” the current civilizational paradigm, and to transition towards a “Game B” future [02:31:37].
The Need for Capacity Building
“Game A,” the traditional way civilization has operated, is characterized by an accelerating increase in technological capability within a context of competition [04:46:00]. This has led to an increasing capacity for destruction, from nuclear weapons after World War II [03:25:00] to modern gene-editing technologies like CRISPR, which can enable biological warfare at the level of criminal enterprises [05:18:00]. Beyond overt destruction, technological civilization also has inherent fragilities, making critical infrastructure vulnerable to attack or disruption [06:33:00].
Furthermore, the “Game A” paradigm exhibits an “arms race problem” [07:49:00], where competition drives reckless choices, even in areas like AI research, because falling behind is perceived as a catastrophic loss [08:07:00]. This leads to a game theoretical trap [08:39:00]. The planet’s long-term carrying capacity is also being exceeded due to increasing population and rising lifestyle demands [09:00:00].
A critical aspect of this decline is the “war on sense-making” [11:57:00], where sophisticated AI-enhanced marketing and political propaganda manipulate human cognitive structures, undermining individuals’ capacity to make sense of the world and make effective choices [12:07:07]. This can be viewed as an “autoimmune disease on sense-making” [13:48:00], where the very tools meant for sense-making turn against themselves [13:51:00]. The core issue is that humanity is “approaching the power of gods without the wisdom of gods” [11:11:00].
Game B aims to address these issues by building the capacity to navigate complexity without resorting to complicated systems [16:13:00], focusing on hyper-collaboration [17:16:00] and collective intelligence [30:21:00].
Aspects of Capacity Building
Individual Capacity Building
Individual capacity building in Game B involves internal transformations to foster:
- Courage, Optimism, Integrity, Honesty, and Good Faith: These are foundational for navigating new paradigms [51:04:00].
- Escaping the Matrix of Status-Oriented Consumerism: This involves recognizing and overcoming programming by psychologically astute mass and social media [51:13:00]. A key step is to get one’s financial life in order, which often means spending less and reducing dependence on consumerist impulses [56:29:00].
- Transparent Agentic Mind and Liminality: Moving beyond naive assumptions that one’s familiar paradigm is always the right one [51:36:00]. This means cultivating a willingness to consciously enter a state of “not-knowing” or “child’s mind,” similar to “still hunting,” to truly perceive reality without prefiguring meaning [33:18:18]. Humility is the “handmaiden of liminality” [41:40:00].
- Orienting Choices by Meaningfulness: Developing the capacity to make choices based on what truly feels meaningful, rather than rationalizing or deluding oneself. This requires relearning an intrinsic machinery to know what one cares about, rather than substituting external ideologies [52:25:00]. Meaningfulness relates to the “wholeness of your entire mode of being in the world,” increasing one’s capacity to respond well to the world [58:20:00].
- Vocation or Calling (Ikigai): Building discernment to increasingly move towards one’s unique calling, that which one is uniquely capable of doing with care and capacity, and which lights up one’s sense of meaningfulness [01:13:00].
- Sovereignty and Maturity: Cultivating individual sovereignty and maturity is prioritized above increasing power, as it allows for a deeper awareness of how choices manifest in the world [00:49:03]. This also involves responding to negative feelings with curiosity rather than avoidance, viewing them as signals for deeper learning and growth [02:25:21].
Collective Capacity Building
Game B emphasizes building collective capacity for:
- Hyper-Collaboration: Game B is described as a “meta protocol for hyper-collaboration” [01:16:00]. This implies an emergent, distributed cognition where individuals spontaneously co-discover and co-create solutions without formal coordination or top-down structures [01:42:00].
- Creative Collaboration: Game B is designed to be substantially better at innovation and creative collaboration than Game A [44:50:00]. Unlike Game A’s reliance on extrinsic motivation and hierarchy, which inhibit creativity, Game B seeks to support the “free play of exploring the actual space of possibility” [31:55:00].
- Conviviality: Literally meaning “living together” [01:15:07], conviviality involves the conscious design of culture, including rituals, tools, and gatherings, that support personal growth, relational growth, and connection with the larger whole [01:15:50]. It elevates relationship to a sacred status, realized in the “absolutely ordinary” like singing around a campfire [01:16:59]. This face-to-face interaction is considered a “secret weapon” for Game B [01:17:44], as direct experience shows it is more fulfilling than material possessions or fancy vacations [01:18:41].
- Coherence: This refers to the synergistic relationship between distinct parts that creates an emergent whole, greater than the sum of its parts [01:37:39]. Crucially, this whole must be “autonomy-enhancing” for the individual parts [01:38:00]. This creates a challenging but interesting design problem of “coherent pluralism,” balancing agreement and liberty [01:39:15]. The ability to maintain such coherence while supporting specialization and division of labor is seen as a “huge superpower” for a species [01:40:51].
- Policing and Justice (within groups): Instead of focusing on punishment, a Game B approach views injustice as a signal to slow down and enter a liminal space with curiosity [02:27:00]. The focus is on healing hurt feelings, deepening understanding, and only then addressing imbalances [02:28:30]. The goal is to cultivate “right relationship,” establishing boundaries from a mature and caring place to prevent harm, even when dealing with defectors, free riders, predators, or sociopaths [02:30:57]. Discernment, rather than non-judgmentalism or unchecked empathy, is key for navigating these complex social dynamics [02:34:20].
Challenges and Scaling
A major challenge for Game B is to scale collective intelligence and all the aforementioned capacities beyond the Dunbar number (approximately 150 individuals, the natural limit for face-to-face social networks) [01:42:29]. This is considered “the hard problem of Game B” [01:42:40].
The solution may involve discovering attractors in reality itself – a sweet spot where a distributed cognition group can both accelerate with the “adjacent possible” (new combinations and possibilities) and maintain its integrity [01:43:14].
“Proto-B” communities are envisioned as early attempts to create integrated Game B life, initially dependent on “parasitizing” Game A for resources while consciously building new systems [01:50:04]. While geographically anchored, face-to-face communities are crucial for cultivating conviviality [01:56:01], episodic physical interactions and collaboration between distinct convivial groups may allow for wider networks [01:57:02].
This process will involve extensive experimentation and meta-learning – learning how to learn faster [01:46:25]. Failures of proto-B groups are expected and can be valuable if they are “honorable failures” [02:00:12], meaning individuals involved gain “wisdom” [01:59:50] and deepen their learning, which can then be carried forward to future efforts [01:59:41]. This is analogous to how individuals who have been part of failed startups are often highly valued for their experience [02:01:13].