Mission
I want to work on projects that help people communicate with each other, and that help them to do so more clearly and more effectively.
This could be chat platforms, writing or publishing tools, GPT-enhanced communication tools, speech platforms, and more.
Communication should be:
Why
One of my core values is clarity (still trying to work out the exact phrasing).
But, the idea is that there is a minimum cost or effort to describe something effectively. Obviously, there is a theoretical minimum, a minimum information density in an extreme, quantum limit. But, more practically speaking, there is a common trade off negotiated between speaker and listener where they decide how much to speak and listen, and determine how much energy to expend in the transfer of understanding.5
On the other side of the spectrum is a sea of undifferentiated, meaningless noise for noise’s sake. Yikes! And, in the middle, is where most of us spend our time. Making meaning, but also making noise, and communicating more than what we intend, with every sloppily chosen word. Perfect is impossible, but with greater awareness, better tools, there should be a way to achieve more clarity, through accuracy and precision of thought and speech.
This is what I intend to help.
Humans are social creatures. Independence is an illusion. The truth is, we exist at the eternal behest and within the daily graces of each and every other, and our every need is another’s work. Think about it—you eat, sleep, poop, drive, work, play—on, in, with, through, from things made by, supported with, coordinated through others. Everything you do you do in the shadow of another’s existence, and theirs yours.
Some things you needn’t coordinate—they’re so basic, so simple, so innate, that rote procedure wrought by millions of years of biological evolution, or thousands of years of cultural evolution, manage to coordinate their efforts for us, unseen and unrealized. Smiling, shaking hands, laughter. Moving out of the way to avoid running into someone on the street.
Other things are so hopelessly artificial and complicated that even with the most intricate and detailed of documents, their successful execution is a hope; not assured. Y2K. Stock markets. Diplomacy. Presidential elections.
Data surrounds and envelops us, and we are all but hopeless to tell what is real and what is imagined. The knife of decision and the light of logic are the only reliable tools we have to help us survive the flurry. That, and communication and trust with our fellows, two behaviors which we mediate with those tools of decision and logic (or rationalization).6 Building up from first principles, and comparing and measuring, refining and resolving, we can move from darkness to light, from blurriness to clarity, from fudge to fine edge. Just as we improve our scientific precision with more and more experiments, using our new precision to erect new instruments with which to conduct new experiments, ad nauseous, driving ourselves further and further down the infinite road of precision, so too, can we work with thought, becoming more and more clear of who and what we are, and where we all stand in relation to each other.
Other actors
…
Ideas
- Better mechanisms for async interaction online. We don’t have a good mechanism to have meaningful async conversations online. Would like to build a “video twitter” where people communicate and then comment/interject at various points in the video. Comments stitched into video. Watch once, then watch with a rebuttal/response inline (ad nauseam). Also want integrated transcription and summaries
Footnotes
-
Cumulative communication means you can add to, enhance, and revise ideas and points. This is akin to commenting through text, responding via video, or back-and-forth thread hopping in speech. There are many modalities for revising and extending ideas, and long-term storage and effective retrieval and connection tools are critical to making this a more robust tool over time. ↩
-
One of the things I’ve wanted to build for some time is a multi-modal messaging platform. Send text and the other user can play the speech in your voice. Send speech and it’s transcribed for you. ↩
-
Discoverable means that when you’re communicating in a semi-public setting, other interested parties (of relevant group membership) can discover and connect their thoughts and communication with yours. It also means that you can revisit old thoughts and ideas and have adjacent things surfaced to you as you’re expanding and making your points. For example, a GPT-enabled system that finds and connects relevant points for you as you’re writing ↩
-
Communication is hard. It can be a whole-brain process. We often involve memory, language, feelings and emotions, complex cognition. That means it’s very easy to trip up, get lost, drop threads, and otherwise fail to effectively find and express our ideas as we’re wading through the twin lakes of expression and discussion. Good tools for fluency can make it easy to switch between modalities of communication to effectively mediate and structure the input. One particularly helpful avenue of tools would be more effective, non-linear dictation systems, which can untangle and clean up dictated thoughts and ideas. GPTs can do a halfway decent job of this for free. ↩
-
We could go further and ask how much understanding is there available to transfer in any given conversation? If a conversation veers into an over-specified bent, where one person (listener) is demanding a level of clarity that the other person (speaker) doesn’t have, what happens? Maybe speaker is provoked into pursuing that clarity for themselves—it then become a sort of three-way conversation in which the speaker is engaging with himself and with the other, working together to elicit the information. Or, perhaps it doesn’t become so collaborative—maybe the speaker is resistant, or maybe the listener is just trying to make work—so they end up bickering and talking past each other. Either way, the attention to detail and clarity in the communication can be thought of like “gain” from an audio perspective. If both parties are committed to moving slower and more coordinately together, they can extract and convey useful insight and detail. It is a slow-going and effortful process. If they are discordant, or if there is not a lot of detail to extract, they will work together to amplify the noise and make for a very unsatisfying conversation. ↩
-
Who can we trust? How much to trust them? There must be some no-trust or low-trust ways to establish trust and edge closer and closer to perfect trust. Surely we could never achieve perfect trust, but then again, we don’t need to! Closer than atoms is good enough for me. To speak plainly: When you meet someone new, how do you trust them? Well, you start with no trust. Be skeptical and discerning. You might have to open up a little, to kickstart it. But, as they show trustworthiness, you move them up the trust ladder. Never too far or too fast, though! A scoundrel and a fool could easily harm you all the same—the scoundrel because he senses vulnerability, the fool because he is blind to it. So, let them carefully, consistently work their way up the scale, so as to sus out the former from the herd, and acclimate the latter to the degree of power you’re granting to them with your trust. They have to demonstrate acuity at every level before moving up. ↩