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Welcome to Social Insight Tools, an interactive blog by markothell.

I am working to understand and visualize human aligment. This site contains interactive experiments related to the creation of social algorithms and my thoughts on their design.

Manifesto below. Activities to the left.

There exists an algorithm for human alignment.

It is possible for us to understand how humans work in relation to eachother.

This won’t be something as inflexible as a book of laws and it won’t require blind trust in an all knowing AGI. We can collectively design systems that allow us to create, adapt and improve the learning feedback loop of our culture.

Gaps in perception are potential energy

Discoveries liberate the energy trapped by ignorance. For a caveman, electricity was God’s wrath. For modern humans, it is a natural power that connects us instantly to the world. The different is that one lived in darkness and the other has an iphone in their hand.

In the human social sphere, every set of divergent beliefs provide an opportunity to harvest some of this fuel. It’s not about converting one set of views to the other, it’s about mastering the process of comparing results and arriving at unified understandings that allow us to do new things.

Agile cultural systems require new tools

Once the prevailing tool for human “alignment” was the sword: “Do what we say or die.”

While that model still exists, we’ve made a lot of progress. Democracy, credit, global trade allow for freedom and collaboration at previously unimaginable scales.

Our systems are coming along, and, there is an urgent need for new progress, and it’s not a matter of spontaneously generating better people. We need systems that facilitate new ways of operating, accruing cultural memory around the most productive and replicable of our discoveries.

Power = Alignment

True power is not a thing that one possesses. The universe is not ‘powerful’ for maintaining the laws of physics, it just works in certain ways. It is our ability to witness and build things that align with that reality that make us “powerful”.

This is meaningful in the human sphere because as we graduate from the concept of power as domination we can begin to reveal our true potential. We want to prosper. We want dynamic technology and thriving ecology. There is a ‘power’ that we can love and pursue with open hearts, that works to make our world whole.

Culture can be a game

The trick you figured out last year was an insight. The tools everybody uses are technology. Culture is the set of ideas and practices whose origins have sunk into myth. Just the way things work.

But also, culture represents character; how it feels to be and work in a place.

I want to unify these. The seeking, experimenting, spreading insights, creating lasting meaning, a conscious relationship seeking to understand who we want to be and how we want things to feel.

This site is my pitch for how we might do that. Step 1: take a social insight and turn it into an activity. (think twitter polls) Step 2: make is easy to modify, share Step 3: make its data open so everyone has equal stakes Step 4: create a platform where tools can be compared discussed & evolved. Step 5: Let human creativity take off.