law

Incorruptible Organizations AMA with Eric Ries. Wednesday 2/4 at 3:00 PM CT

Lean Startup author who now focuses on legal structures to protect mission-driven organizations from corruption. incorruptible.co

Free book giveaway! Register here.

AMA with Rob Miles on AI Safety. Wednesday, 2/4 at 1:00pm CT

AISafety.info founder has spent years telling the world about risk posed by strong AI.

Help. I've been contemplating non-violence and us-vs-them and many people I admire here say that's the way to go. The Texas Supreme Court just ruled that judges can deny gay couples marriages today. 

Help. Please tell me how to grieve. I never see you guys hate online. Is it weird that I don't feel loved when I just see silence on these issues?

Seeing ourselves and our culture in Charlie Kirk. When I first heard about the murder I didn't know how big of a lightning rod it was going to be. Then my friend Kageni challenged me to write about the Charlie Kirk event “from an integral perspective,”* and I’ve learned to listen to her challenges, even when I'm feeling scared or inadequate (like this one). (For those who don't have the context, I apologize).

Also, in writing about this human being as an object of our cultural fascination, I've necessarily moved past the well of human grief and empathy. Forgive my insensitivities, oversimplifications (mapping rather than territory-ing), many omissions, forgive if I strayed from my lane, and may we continuously reclaim our shadows to create a more loving world.

I. We are projecting so much onto Charlie Kirk that says more about us than the real tragedies. This is normal—to quote Valerie Daniel “You can't breathe without getting projected on.” But it keeps us from confronting the raw realities of grief, powerlessness, the horror and unpredictability of life, the darkness and violence in humanity. And the irony—cruel or helpful, depending on your view—is that whatever we’re unwilling to face in ourselves is destined to repeat itself.

So let’s reclaim these projections, for our personal peace, and to prevent future tragedies. All the negative and positive stuff we project onto Kirk, onto culture, onto whoever we deem the other. Eg: If I can’t stand the celebrations, I’m probably hiding from my own schadenfreude, likely hiding how deeply I’m ashamed of my desire for power and holding others accountable. Or I’m unwilling to be tender with myself when I think I'm a victim, leading to over-responsibility: exhausting for me and enabling to others.

Loving like this is fierce. I call it forgiveness. It demands the courage to challenge deep rooted beliefs we use to orient to the world, and stay present in the resistance.

II. There are at least three distinct conversations happening at once:

1. Murder is always a tragedy, including Kirk’s.

2. Kirk's complicated character. His views are taken out of context but even so were offensive and scary to many people.
   
   How do we stay present with that fear and offense? But also the way he inspired so many good things in people, including the kind of integrity and service in young men this his murderer lacked? How do we wrestle with views that appear to span the gamut from traditional christian conservative (amber) to modern defenses of free speech (orange) to post-conventional institutional critiques (green)?

3. Celebrations of his murder are vastly overrepresented online, but are part of a feedback loop that leads to more fracturing, which leads to individuals like Kirk’s killer making specific horrific unethical choices, which keeps the loop going.
   
   (Eg: his success was somewhat a reaction to the increasing cultural power of the radical left (operating from amber/ethnocentric structure despite progressive (Green) language), which is now getting amplified, which will amplify another conservative voice, which will lead to more assassinations).
   
   How can we re-align the system if we don't see we are it? Reclaiming our projections is a necessary first step if we’re highly triggered, because (a) systematically reconstructing our intersubjective meaning-making capacity demands intertribal coordination, and (b) it shows us where our actual power lies.

III. Reclaiming our projections through collective dream analysis (sociosomnia).

What if we see America’s reaction to him like a dream that we can interpret? Here’s one view: our culture is in a tizzy around free speech. We seem to both love it and be so terrified of it that we want to cancel and “kill” it. We’re trying to find orientation and values in the chaos of a post-truth world but we don’t yet know how to say “yes, all these points of view are valid (green) but some are more valuable, relevant, and true in this context than others (teal)."

#TTT
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*The spirit of "from an integral perspective" in this context is making sense of competing claims to truth without demonizing anyone, but being willing to take a stand for goodness and values. To paraphrase integral grandpappa Ken Wilber, if we assume no one is smart enough to be 100% wrong, then how to we stitch together a coherent sense of what’s happening from all the partial truths and fragmented perspectives? In this particular post I’m relying a lot on adult developmental psychology, but the overall theory has a variety of other helpful meta-frames for understanding how seemingly totally different values relate.

AMA - I recently served as a juror on a murder trial. The crime happened within the last five years, and the trial happened within the last six months. I'm happy to discuss anything about my experience except:

• The exact time and location of the crime
• The names of the people involved

Those restrictions are to protect the family members involved in the case, and to protect me in case a family member doesn't like the jurors :|

Any other question is fair game.

And I'll answer the most salient question here first: we did find the defendant guilty of murder.

AMA - I recently served as a juror on a murder trial. The crime happened within the last five years, and the trial happened within the last six months. I'm happy to discuss anything about my experience except:

• The exact time and location of the crime
• The names of the people involved

Those restrictions are to protect the family members involved in the case, and to protect me in case a family member doesn't like the jurors :|

Any other question is fair game.

And I'll answer the most salient question here first: we did find the defendant guilty of murder.

AMA - I recently served as a juror on a murder trial. The crime happened within the last five years, and the trial happened within the last six months. I'm happy to discuss anything about my experience except:

• The exact time and location of the crime
• The names of the people involved

Those restrictions are to protect the family members involved in the case, and to protect me in case a family member doesn't like the jurors :|

Any other question is fair game.

And I'll answer the most salient question here first: we did find the defendant guilty of murder.

AMA - I recently served as a juror on a murder trial. The crime happened within the last five years, and the trial happened within the last six months. I'm happy to discuss anything about my experience except:

• The exact time and location of the crime
• The names of the people involved

Those restrictions are to protect the family members involved in the case, and to protect me in case a family member doesn't like the jurors :|

Any other question is fair game.

And I'll answer the most salient question here first: we did find the defendant guilty of murder.

AMA - I recently served as a juror on a murder trial. The crime happened within the last five years, and the trial happened within the last six months. I'm happy to discuss anything about my experience except:

• The exact time and location of the crime
• The names of the people involved

Those restrictions are to protect the family members involved in the case, and to protect me in case a family member doesn't like the jurors :|

Any other question is fair game.

And I'll answer the most salient question here first: we did find the defendant guilty of murder.

Is it because of national security or something else? A bit of rant... with a desire to understand what's actually happening...

From the reviews I've seen on Chinese EVs, they're super cool and seemingly more affordable. But they're not sold here in the US. Google tells me that it's because of security concerns - i.e. over the air updates that could stop the cars from working or they could secretly be listening on our conversations. 

But what I don't get is that Volvo, although a Swedish brand, is now owned by a Chinese conglomerate (since 2010). You can buy a Volvo so easily here in the States. Why are there no concerns about national security? And Chinese EVs can be purchased in the UK. Are they not concerned about security?

What's actually at play here?

What's good about Trump? I don't follow (American national) politics a ton, but I know Trump is an incredibly divisive figure who just got convicted of 34 felony counts, while still being favored as the Republican candidate for the next presidential race.

 What's good about him, what he's done, and his policies? For example, less death in foreign wars—even the biased ChatGPT admits:

Trump's foreign policy led to fewer foreign deaths due to a reduction in large-scale military engagements, and his administration did not initiate new large-scale wars or military interventions—a significant departure from previous administrations that engaged in extensive military campaigns, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Who am I to decide? California General Election is here and once again I’m asked to decide the fate of a few propositions which I believe I’m in no position to make decisions on.

For example, Prop 2 an 4 are asking for $10B of debt each to fund various important things. Who am I to decide whether that’s a good idea or not? I have barely a clue about the inflationary monetary system we live in and no idea where its limits are. What percentage of state budget does debt interest constitute? Is that too much or on par with the state economy?

Then there’s rent control, minimum wage increase, and a few other, highly debatable props, which I’d guess even the experts would be lost trying to predict the effects of.

Do I assume the government has done their due diligence and my vote is simply a measure of trust?

I feel overwhelmed by the lack of data, expert guidance, anything of real value to me, the voter. I’m only given a few cursory meaningless numbers and a bunch of emotional arguments in the official voter guide.

How do you decide on things like that? Do you do your own research? Do you look at endorsements? Do you use your intuition?

Reproductive rights. I have a really hard time understanding why folks support stripping reproductive rights before we’ve tackled better support for children and families in the US.

From my perspective, the better we can support children, mothers, and families more broadly, the less we’ll actually have unplanned pregnancies.

It just seems wise to really take care of those that are alive right now and try to improve their lives.

Could it be ethically ok to not vote? note: I posted this two hours before Biden stepped down. It’s possible that a different Dem candidate could change my choices, but my overall perspective feels the same.

A lot of people I’m close to have very strong opinions that to not vote in this presidential election is wrong. But I have no interest in voting. It genuinely seems to me that things will be perfectly not ideal no matter what happens in the election.

My best guess of what’s happening culturally is that the mean green meme has gotten really far down its negative feedback loop, and red, orange, and amber are swarming on the attack. If that’s right, a breaking point of sorts will have to be hit for teal to get to its tipping point. In 12-step terms, green would have to hit rock bottom to be able to finally admit it has a problem and needs help.

I wouldn’t be surprised if teal’s tipping point would have to be particularly intense because it’s also the tipping point into second tier, and we have no historical reference for what it takes for a culture to begin to get a foothold in a new tier (the big bang, the formulation of simple cells, and the leap from apes to humans might be comparable but difficult to translate…)

This thought process just leaves me trusting what’s happening, and voting just doesn’t feel like one of the ways I want to participate in this happening.