itch.io

Big fan of epistemic humility and looking to nature to deliver the right solution!
Based on your approach it sounds worthwhile. Good luck!

I don't have enough technical ability to understand the underlying work but keep a broad enough diet of voices to suspect that you are on to a solid approach. I make comparisons of AI to the law, and liken this to legislation that interacts with complex systems in ways that you cannot foresee all its future interactions when you write it. This seems to be like a prepass judicial review BEFORE the law goes into effect. Which, if functioning properly, would be exactly how an adversarial legislature OUGHT to work. Love people who see the value of adversarial thinking popping up in different domains!

Using your frame I can't really fault any of your criticisms, and really appreciate you engaging, as I know from twitter you are no slouch!

I readily admit to Orthodox and Catholic theology and structure being the weakest wheels in my wheelhouse, but their general historical social functions informed my meanderings greatly. Their advantages and disadvantages helped me understand better the value of centralized structure and doctrine as emergent properties, NOT centrally planned top-down. Some humans along the civilizational and spiritual growth timeline will always need more structured, centralized forms of sense-making. For me, this is perfectly fine.

I also want to be very clear that I personally do not hold myself above practitioners of these "brands" spiritually and certainly not intellectually. I have the highest respect for the Orthodox and Catholic mystics that we, the Scripture Fiends, so frequently have to find in the restricted section of the church library. Without my own mentors blazing that trail and guiding me into a deeper understanding of the faith, I would surely be lost.

I am spiritually and politically Protestant in my mentality. But over the past year, I have found myself loudly criticizing American evangelical churches for being lazy, disorganized, thoughtless, judgmental, lovers of money and comfort, and wasteful of what they have been blessed with. They're my tribe... I will always criticize them the most harshly! When Charlie Kirk got assassinated, my second response was, "ohhhh nooooo... SO many people are going to get hurt and led astray when they rush back into the local Prot church." Likely less so with the more mature structures, to the credit of your traditions. 

The name...uhh... I wouldn't be surprised if it bothers you, some casual, cribbing your identity and using it wrong on purpose. In this regard I hope you forgive me.

I chose the name and acronym precisely because it tickled my "pisses off so many different people all at once" bone. I guess I wanted it to attract and repel the right kind of attention. 

I intend to read through the Calvinism doc, and think about your specific questions with some care, before responding again. No easy answers here, folks.

Humbly,

Steve

> My only concern is...how the powers that be tend to react to the existence of such communities
I have thought about this at great length! I have enough bandwidth for one simple example.

Elites, Executive branch, and especially hoighty-toighty law and court nerds: "GAwwwd Congress is so fucking dumb...those idiots (MTG, AOC, pick your favorite pleb) If only Congress would just do their JOB!

Also Elites: "Oh my god, can you imagine not getting into an Ivy and having to relocate to the West Coast and go to Berkeley? My life is over... I'll never be in a position of power and prestige, god I hate the Federalist Society." me: "you could run for congress or senate in your home town." them: "Oh my god eww"

We, as members of the unwashed, impure, messy, underclass, will solemnly swear that we will fix Congress and only Congress... All y'all Catholics and Jews and Mormons can KEEP your Supreme Court (Gorsuch still counts, Episcopalian) and Executive Branch and Administrative bureaucracy. We don't WANT it, just look at our dumb, capped church sizes... hurdeehur...we're so dumb

We do not intend to replace any hierarchies, and we do not signal a posture of anti-Americanism (a little pro-USA wouldn't go amiss). We're just providing an alternate game, one that actually has an egalitarian and credible social contract. 

> I would recommend that you first find a community that is already living in the way you describe
Way ahead of you chief. MANY people even in healthy protestant churches are... quite baffled by this idea. They cannot see the forest for the trees, I do not view them as a threat. (trad-Evangelicals will ALWAYS fail to see the value of the addicts, the heretics, the failures, the criminals, in their midst. These are the people who see the structure of society as it is, not as the political and religious elites would have us believe. They are best positioned to be EXCELLENT controllers in a cybernetic sense, as they have the requisite variety. 
ALSO... Calvary Chapel, unbeknownst to me, has a similar guiding philosophy while still falling squarely in the main. I am a member of one where I live.
However, to your point, even getting people into the proper frame to see the idea as useful and not heretical/threatening is a tall order, many of my associations are just far too comfortable and well-sorted into suburban middle-class churches to even sense the cancer in their midst.

I have found exactly one so far: a libertarian-minded director of a world missions organization who has since retired. Global perspective, no vested interest in the current models, lover of decentralization and good ole American independence.

Massive, but yes... building a parallel structure might be attractive to downwardly mobile elites... their contributions and expertise can be affirmed and leveraged just as they have been fairly or unfairly shut out of status hierarchies. Where will all the lawyers go? Hmm... Maybe a new laboratory-of-democracy? Where you start with all the best stuff from the founders and then decide what you want  to keep/toss? Growing to the point where bipartisan super-majorities, but without party identifiers, could help us untie the Gordian knot? You may begin to see why over the past year I have vacillated with a wild deluded/inspired amplitude.

Thanks very much for the feedback! I can totally see why "is this thing political or religious" is a tension. It's sort of intentional - one of my foundational observations of the degree to which religious folk and secular political religionists aren't actually aware of how they rank order their loyalties (or catastrophic fears that actually drive their behavior). We've got a whole lot of people unaware they're carrying quite a bit of Politics in their Religion Bucket and vice versa. My aim is to attract the weary unchurched and politically homeless folk who have been or wish to be unaffiliated with the "Bucket Mix-up Cohort."

> There are many bibles, "standards", and competing political visions for the future of the country.
 - There is no body of work that is more persistently debated in the public domain (across centuries) than mainstream Christian scripture and theology. It will get very hard for a 'bad actor' or 'charismatic charlatans' to maintain a monopoly extreme scriptural interpretations and cult-like practices, for very long. All of the denominational and motivated forks in this "civilizational blockchain" have been exposed. The harmful forks will die without physical or status coercion, and the neutral ones will compete in a marketplace of as-frictionless-as-possible nodes to the point of resembling Ford vs. Chevy rivalry. (Not even as dangerous as Catholics and Protestants!)

I don't really intend this model to change the culture of the country, in many ways it is designed contra to that goal. It's an extension of the principles of the founding, applying federalism to what I think *would* make a healthier structure for a sense-making institution. American culture is extraordinarily robust, I think in part to some of the decentralized mediating structures that allow us to absorb and assimilate and grow more and more mature as a nation. I expect this to continue; the pace will accelerate as it has with every technology, and our current "sense-making containers" are just not structured to handle the pace without potential co-opting or infiltration (exactly the failure mode we see rampant in all of our current institutions). My model? Not perfect. Neither was the founding. But better than what had been tried up until then. 

To the Capital point: very fair, under the current paradigm, perhaps no, but I am not setting out to create a new religion or cult. If I were, I would have a far more prescriptive opinion on what I want to see happen. Instead, I envision emergent solutions from a field of iteration and experimentation. Yes, I lean heavily on this, but arrived here through a process of deleting anything I could "red team" in my head, with the full suite of evidence from my own experiences with churches and other institutions. With luck, the people who are power hungry won't notice it until it's too late, kind of like they failed to kill Bitcoin: "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard; it can't possibly be a real threat, it's not "shaped" like threatening stuff." (I have more to say about this too but it's nebulous)

I see a potential future of societal instability where our current sense-making institutions actually serve to further destabilize society that harms the economy. We may reach an inflection point of sensible religious and secular folks alike choosing to participate in my framework out of pure self-interest, and the structural features make it a far more accountable place to put capital than any of the available explicitly non-profit frameworks we have. A slow sorting of people in unhealthy structures into healthy ones is ideal... the old models burn through their credibility at the rate at which my model stabilizes at a local level. People already ditch structures that centralize power in a harmful, non-emergent, fragile way, such as a megachurch that unwittingly grows to the size of inevitable scandal or parishioner anonymity - but the healthier options are hard to find, and don't stand out as examples of our notion of "success." They're all thoughtless mirrors of very outdated structures. 

>I completely agree that people need the freedom to organize amongst themselves and develop safe cultures, to be protected within their own spaces and act as cells of a larger organism
 - The distributed, weak nature of the structure also serves to limit the spread of noxious ideologies, and YES they will show up, but here's the kicker: In our system, you don't have start as a Congressperson to get a job in the administrative state or another unaccountable agency, even the judiciary - you can leverage your financial, cognitive, or status resources to bypass that messy ground level entrance. In my system, there is no way to reach higher levels of representative leadership other than starting and remaining part of a cell at the bottom. I had this vague shape in my head before I knew what a fractal was, and even had trouble modeling it in my head before I had my intuition confirmed by Brain of the Firm (thanks @thrialectics) that this is indeed a viable model for a non-territory bound structure, unlike the traditional nation state. 

I think part of the pushback in this aspect is precisely because we have almost zero examples of completely uncorrupted hierarchies in our world, to the point we have resigned ourselves to the idea that nothing else exists. Thankfully Nature and biology can still teach us to hope, and work hard.

K so that's what my actual writing is like :P
a little scattered

Ohhh I think I understand this. I'm sure you have more use cases in mind but for some reason it made me think of a geocache log. Like, while you're still looking for the cache but you're close by enough that you're getting the previous cache finder's thoughts in your feed? 
(Went back and read the description again) YEAH THIS COULD BE COOL