Actually, you can’t really separate cultural progress from civilizational progress. The modern world didn’t just come about because of the industrial revolution, but also because the set of new ideas about what it means to be an individual and live in society that liberalism promoted. In fact, it was this set ideas what catalyzed the industrial revolution, rather than material or technological factors like geography or access to capital.
And, our project is super focused on technological, scientific and institutional progress. We are very pro-tech and markets. But we think that the way to unlock this type of progress is through redesigning tech and institutions around meaning:
https://twitter.com/ellie__hain/status/1632823967734984706?s=20
In regards about culture and meaning being particular, that is also not quite the case. Liberalism itself is proof that you can have a dominant cultural system that is not affiliated to any particular way of life (and yes, it’s now failing, but it’s failing for another set of reasons).
In fact, most of the people engaging in our project have very different views of what it means to live a good life! In our core team of five, we have a very conservative orthodox jew living in Jerusalem, and a poly, queer, social justice political philosopher from the Bay Area — the rest of us are all somewhere in between.
And the people who are resonating with our message are also as equally varied! We have religious leaders and anarchists, rave organizers and hedge fund managers, radical environmentalists and tech accelerationists, midwives and alignment researchers. To be honest, even I have been surprised at the diversity of the people who have been writing us!
We never claimed, in any of our comms, that this movement is about a “concrete way to find meaning”. These are your terms, not ours.
In this particular thread, I don’t “suggest that we need to develop a new way of living and finding meaning”. I suggest we need to revaluate what our idea of progress is. It’s very clear in my writing.
“To find meaning, you recommend watching a video you made.” Eh… no? I suggest watching the video for my take on what the reframing of progress could be about (one that maximizes values alignment and meaning). Either you have extremely bad reading comprehension, or you’re intentionally badly mischaracterizating what I’m saying.
“You provide a few exercises about how to find this meaning for yourself, but the exercises tend to focus more on making the viewer feel a certain way rather than clear exercises that the viewer can build upon or share with others”. Yeah, because the video about explaining what meaning is, not a manual. We actually have a lot of techniques, even a course on it (!), but since the video isn’t about finding meaning, that’s not what I’m highlighting.
“It is a vibes-based way of thinking, not a structured one” — Look, it’s fine if you don’t the will or capacity to get through the 1.30h lecture, but then simply you don’t get to critizice that this is a “vibes based” way of thinking. The video you watched is the only “vibey” thing that we have, everything else is extremely robust.
“The website touts the variety of people in the movement (Successful hedge fund managers! Interesting and cool anarchists!”..… Eh, what? This is my response to a comment above about how our notion of meaning is broad, not particular. Again, either you have very limited comprehension, or there’s actually bad faith in your blunt mischarachterization.
The only thing you’re right is that yes, our website doesn’t have as much clear information as we’d like, but doing this well takes a lot of work, and we only launched a month and a half ago (!) (most startups have equally simple websites during their first year). So yes, we’re working on it, but we’re not quite there yet. My deepest apologies. If you want more information though, we have enough information to keep you busy for at least a week (even though, given you couldn’t get through the video lecture which is the summarized version of this, it’s unsure whether you’d be able to engage with this properly):
We have Design School that teaches how to get concrete around meaning and design for it https://www.sfsd.io/ . So far, we’ve trained over 300 students across 80 organizations (including Apple, Facebook, Khan Academy, etc). The lecture you didn’t watch is the best intro to our design method, and it’s extremely structured thinking. You can even apply for the course if you want to learn how to get concrete about meaning.
We also have a full, freely accessible textbook on values and meaning-centric design. There’s a lot of free exercises you can do yourself and share with your friends https://textbook.sfsd.io/
You can read about our academic background and bibliography here https://www.notion.so/humsys/Related-Academic-Work-c933408fd8fc44c3acd42d6ccb827461?pvs=4
You can read about our theory of change here https://www.notion.so/humsys/Theory-of-Change-FAQ-866c7b7cdd24420fabd8ca357f076d56?pvs=4
You can read about the research groups that we’re coordinating https://www.notion.so/humsys/Research-We-ll-Coordinate-2425704cfc354ed18af78e237f0f2e5d?pvs=4
You can read our paper on values and meaning (and how they differ from the economic notion of “preferences” https://github.com/jxe/vpm/blob/master/vpm.pdf)
Finally, this is much much more that we’re doing, but not all of it is public (like is the case with a lot of movements or companies). We have alignment researchers at major labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind etc) working with our notion of meaning. We have a working prototype of a GPT based chatbot that assists you get clear on your meaning (which will be launched later this year). We have a unique AI alignment strategy (some of it outlined in our ML research group). We have a dedicated working group working on meaning aligned economic policy (supported by some known names from the progress community too). Partnerships with highly strategic agents. Collaborations with acclaimed artists. Etc Etc.
We’ll slowly publicly announce more of this over the course of this year, so you can just stay tuned to see whether I’m bullshitting or not. Wanna bet ;)?