Is there a place to report minor UpTrust bugs? I mentioned a couple of things at TBEX and just noticed another (very minor) thing, which is that it automatically adds a full stop (period to you in the US) to the end of every optional title.  So here, for instance, I ask a question in the title, which ends with a question mark, but that also then has a period placed after it.  Pedantic, I know, but I guess you might want to know these things... good luck guys!

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
---
*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.

#UpTrustFeedback grab bag

1. I can't write two posts at once.  It shows a current draft if I try to write a new draft in a new tab.  But also it says "can't post, no content", because somehow it hasn't sync'd properly.  I'm currently getting around this by just posting the first one knowing I can edit it later.
2. You just lost some text that I had drafted as a comment [EDIT: maybe it's still there but I can't find it].  This is a result of two distinct failures in how your app is set up:
   1. You didn't use `onbeforeunload` to keep the page from changing when there was drafted text that hadn't been used. "Are you sure you want to..."
   2. I wasn't intending to change pages! I held the Cmd key while clicking on Home, which, if you use links in an ordinary way, would have caused that click to open the link in a new tab. But you're doing some fancy extra javascript, and so it didn't, and instead it just navigated to Home in the same tab and lost my comment draft.
3. I just now tried to use cmd+[ to de-indent the list item, and this navigated to a completely different screen, which would have lost the text again if you guys weren't pretty good at saving drafts.  Please don't violate standard keyboard shortcut expectations by doing something that looks like it completely loses all of my work!
4. If I put a title, it shows up as small bold text at the top of the post.  But if I put a header in the post, I can make the post have a title, visually.  But the "title" is not it.  This is confusing and weird.
5. In general, there are too many options.  Like formatting is kinda nice but it evokes the idea that we're gonna be all fancy.  As an extreme example, why on earth am I choosing whether a link should open in a new tab?  Just have some sane default and don't present me with so many choices.  (Good sane default is "new tab for off domain, same tab for same domain")
6. The lil icon buttons below the post are too tiny.  Also it's confusing to have the reply count distinct from the button to make a reply. I keep wanting to push the reply count button instead.
7. Why are you summarizing all emoji reactions as eg ♡ 4 ? That's not a very good way to summarize 🤔🤷😤😒.  Pick a non-heart more neutral icon, or show the actual reacji! (I'd recommend the latter, as it's much richer).
8. Don't call what we write or read here "content" 🤮  The word has much of its history in advertising and marketing—it's the thing that's not the ads, around which ads can be placed.  That starts us off with a framing that what we write doesn't matter, it's just stuff that fills the space.  Instead be willing to talk about things as "perspectives" or "takes" or if you don't want to be so bold, just "posts".
9. If you can't edit a post after people have reacted to it (which is fairly sensible!) then it should tell you that when you hit the EDIT button, not the SAVE button (after making said edits)
10. Lots of random other lil things
    1. sometimes the title of the page is stuck on a different post name than the one I'm on
    2. inconsistent use of cursor:pointer when hovering over buttons (notable, it's absent from the profile icon in the top right)
11. no way to follow specific people? maybe this is intentional? you want to magic-algo things?  but it's sad—I see someone say something interesting and I want to like...  not lose track of them. and maybe the way to do it is to updoot more of their bops, but it feels somehow unsatisfying, and annoying if I'm like "cool I'm done gonna sign off for now"
12. if I hit the feed again, either show me something I haven't seen before or say "that's all for today", but don't just show me the same few posts I saw before

#UpTrustFeedback grab bag

1. I can't write two posts at once.  It shows a current draft if I try to write a new draft in a new tab.  But also it says "can't post, no content", because somehow it hasn't sync'd properly.  I'm currently getting around this by just posting the first one knowing I can edit it later.
2. You just lost some text that I had drafted as a comment [EDIT: maybe it's still there but I can't find it].  This is a result of two distinct failures in how your app is set up:
   1. You didn't use `onbeforeunload` to keep the page from changing when there was drafted text that hadn't been used. "Are you sure you want to..."
   2. I wasn't intending to change pages! I held the Cmd key while clicking on Home, which, if you use links in an ordinary way, would have caused that click to open the link in a new tab. But you're doing some fancy extra javascript, and so it didn't, and instead it just navigated to Home in the same tab and lost my comment draft.
3. I just now tried to use cmd+[ to de-indent the list item, and this navigated to a completely different screen, which would have lost the text again if you guys weren't pretty good at saving drafts.  Please don't violate standard keyboard shortcut expectations by doing something that looks like it completely loses all of my work!
4. If I put a title, it shows up as small bold text at the top of the post.  But if I put a header in the post, I can make the post have a title, visually.  But the "title" is not it.  This is confusing and weird.
5. In general, there are too many options.  Like formatting is kinda nice but it evokes the idea that we're gonna be all fancy.  As an extreme example, why on earth am I choosing whether a link should open in a new tab?  Just have some sane default and don't present me with so many choices.  (Good sane default is "new tab for off domain, same tab for same domain")
6. The lil icon buttons below the post are too tiny.  Also it's confusing to have the reply count distinct from the button to make a reply. I keep wanting to push the reply count button instead.
7. Why are you summarizing all emoji reactions as eg ♡ 4 ? That's not a very good way to summarize 🤔🤷😤😒.  Pick a non-heart more neutral icon, or show the actual reacji! (I'd recommend the latter, as it's much richer).
8. Don't call what we write or read here "content" 🤮  The word has much of its history in advertising and marketing—it's the thing that's not the ads, around which ads can be placed.  That starts us off with a framing that what we write doesn't matter, it's just stuff that fills the space.  Instead be willing to talk about things as "perspectives" or "takes" or if you don't want to be so bold, just "posts".
9. If you can't edit a post after people have reacted to it (which is fairly sensible!) then it should tell you that when you hit the EDIT button, not the SAVE button (after making said edits)
10. Lots of random other lil things
    1. sometimes the title of the page is stuck on a different post name than the one I'm on
    2. inconsistent use of cursor:pointer when hovering over buttons (notable, it's absent from the profile icon in the top right)
11. no way to follow specific people? maybe this is intentional? you want to magic-algo things?  but it's sad—I see someone say something interesting and I want to like...  not lose track of them. and maybe the way to do it is to updoot more of their bops, but it feels somehow unsatisfying, and annoying if I'm like "cool I'm done gonna sign off for now"
12. if I hit the feed again, either show me something I haven't seen before or say "that's all for today", but don't just show me the same few posts I saw before

Checking where this post goes. Just checking if this ends up in a group

Web Discussions: Flat by Design (2012). web archive (original URL is broken)

A web discussion about threaded versus linear web discussions. I recommend reading the article and many of its comments. I think the two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive and that the best design will be something that includes both. Our tree view is an experiment in combining the two.

Web Discussions: Flat by Design (2012). web archive (original URL is broken)

A web discussion about threaded versus linear web discussions. I recommend reading the article and many of its comments. I think the two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive and that the best design will be something that includes both. Our tree view is an experiment in combining the two.

Web Discussions: Flat by Design (2012). web archive (original URL is broken)

A web discussion about threaded versus linear web discussions. I recommend reading the article and many of its comments. I think the two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive and that the best design will be something that includes both. Our tree view is an experiment in combining the two.

What do you think about this short post? This is so short

What do you think about this short post? This is so short

Some integral philosophy/analysis behind TreeView. Forums like Reddit and Facebook are essentially "Orange" interaction paradigms—there's a static "original post" and a fixed hierarchy. Some benefits of this are that you get some sense of coherence to a conversation, and if you're ten layers deep in replies, you can quickly navigate your way back to the original post to try and reclaim some context. Some drawbacks are that really cool content deep in threads hardly sees the light of day. Also, it's really confusing to navigate, and especially confusing as the tail winds up. (Facebook tries to avoid the contextlessness and lostness of orange by imposing a limit of three deep, but this curtails conversational flow which often goes in strange directions to find the good stuff).

Twitter and all of its clones are essentially "Green" interaction paradigms—you get a personally tailored feed of content that comes from anywhere in a given lineage/conversation. The first post you see could be from twelve layers deep in a convo, the next a reply to a post, and the next an original post. Some benefits of this is that deep content gets surfaced—a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply might be the most interesting bit of the conversation, and on twitter it gets to your feed immediately. Some drawbacks are that it often lacks context, and sometimes is purposely removed from context to be more inflammatory. I believe this contributes to the sound-bite post-truth world we're in today, where context, nuance, history don't matter, only quick dopamine hits.

We believe TreeView is the start of a "Teal" interaction paradigm which allows deep content to be surfaced while retaining the context of the conversation it is birthed from. We believe this will integrate the benefits of both hierarchical forum interactions and pluralistic twitter feeds. I say "start" because right now it still leans Orange; we haven't yet built out the bits where whenever you click onto a reply, it becomes the top-level thingy in the TreeView; nor the feature where you can link "original posts" to each other in playlists, or to multiple originals, and see that there's not really such a thing as an "OP" because all of us are proverbially standing on the shoulders of giants. So where we're going is you'll be able to get a relative hierarchy (a holarchy) of what conversational lineage content is nested inside of. We believe this is models more of "in person" conversation actually works than any of the current paradigms. And even just this start has helped me understand longer threads!

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

Terrence Howard maybe a crackpot, but he isn't all wrong. Terrence Howard is mostly known as an actor, but he’s recently been interviewed by Joe Rogan for his book 1 x 1 = 2. The book is intentionally provocative and intended to critique how trusted math and science are in a civilizational context.

I haven’t read the book, and I think Terrence introduces much more confusion than clarity, I think there is something of value in what he is attempting to do (even though the attempt has little if any merit given the conclusions and claims that Terrence makes).

I think he is attempting to bring a qualitative sense of humanity back into relevance (with a sense that numeracy has overly quantified and objectified our experience).

While Joe Rogan expressed that he didn’t fully understand the point that Terrence was trying to make, he did stay open to the possibility that he was missing something that would help get Terrence’s point.

Most critics have been hard on Terrence (claiming pseudo-science, fraud, sensationalism, or insanity), and have been critical of Joe Rogan because he didn’t push back harder on obviously non-sensical ideas. My friend Erik has posted a video criticizing one of the debunkers for seeming to intentionally miss Terrences intended insight. It can also give you a bit of a brief intro into the topic if you are interested.

But I think there is a deeper motive and validity to be discerned.

One claim by Terrence is that 0 x 1 apple being equal to zero apples is nonsensical because you’ve destroyed something that used to exist (the apple), whereas what is intended by the equation is there are zero occurrences of the abstract category apple which results in zero actual apples.

Another claim is that $1 x $1 = $1 is nonsense if you also say that 100 cents * 100 cents = 10,000 cents.

It is clear in this example that there is a confusion about units (we don’t recognize units of a square dollar or a square cent).

I think Terrence is trying to point out something similar to what Bucky Fuller says when Bucky claims that the continued use of the word sunrise is harmful, even if we know what is meant is a portion of the earth turning into alignment with the sun’s rays.

The very subtle point that I’d make is that saying 1 x category of apple = 1 actual apple seems to be valid to us, but misses that there is still a whole lot of context that is missing from that actual apple, and much abstraction that pollutes our understanding of what is actually happening in the world.

Thoughts?

What are your sci-fi TV show recommendations? Some i loved that jump to mind:

• The Expanse
• Most of the Marvel stuff like Loki, What If?
• Rick and Morty
• Legends of Tomorrow Etc

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

Some integral philosophy/analysis behind TreeView. Forums like Reddit and Facebook are essentially "Orange" interaction paradigms—there's a static "original post" and a fixed hierarchy. Some benefits of this are that you get some sense of coherence to a conversation, and if you're ten layers deep in replies, you can quickly navigate your way back to the original post to try and reclaim some context. Some drawbacks are that really cool content deep in threads hardly sees the light of day. Also, it's really confusing to navigate, and especially confusing as the tail winds up. (Facebook tries to avoid the contextlessness and lostness of orange by imposing a limit of three deep, but this curtails conversational flow which often goes in strange directions to find the good stuff).

Twitter and all of its clones are essentially "Green" interaction paradigms—you get a personally tailored feed of content that comes from anywhere in a given lineage/conversation. The first post you see could be from twelve layers deep in a convo, the next a reply to a post, and the next an original post. Some benefits of this is that deep content gets surfaced—a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply might be the most interesting bit of the conversation, and on twitter it gets to your feed immediately. Some drawbacks are that it often lacks context, and sometimes is purposely removed from context to be more inflammatory. I believe this contributes to the sound-bite post-truth world we're in today, where context, nuance, history don't matter, only quick dopamine hits.

We believe TreeView is the start of a "Teal" interaction paradigm which allows deep content to be surfaced while retaining the context of the conversation it is birthed from. We believe this will integrate the benefits of both hierarchical forum interactions and pluralistic twitter feeds. I say "start" because right now it still leans Orange; we haven't yet built out the bits where whenever you click onto a reply, it becomes the top-level thingy in the TreeView; nor the feature where you can link "original posts" to each other in playlists, or to multiple originals, and see that there's not really such a thing as an "OP" because all of us are proverbially standing on the shoulders of giants. So where we're going is you'll be able to get a relative hierarchy (a holarchy) of what conversational lineage content is nested inside of. We believe this is models more of "in person" conversation actually works than any of the current paradigms. And even just this start has helped me understand longer threads!

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.