Kernel Learn Track - Module 1

Last updated Aug 15, 2023

See Atlas/Maps/Kernel MOC

#crypto #technology #philosophy

[Bitcoin] represents an incredibly important moment in the movement towards money as a protocol, the development of new means to create or describe value, and new media by which we can relate that to and with one another in an agreeable fashion. However, it is not the whole story: only its beginning. ==Genesis is a wonderful book, but the real work of setting people free occurs elsewhere.==

So, this week, we’ll begin trying to understand what happens when you combine a ==peer-to-peer architecture for the internet of money - and its immense intrinsic utility - with a Turing-complete programming language.== That is, we’ll begin studying Ethereum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDzKPhk_ooA&t=635s https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=112&v=Km3O7Vzr-Kk&feature=emb_title

“When the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning and, for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.” V for Vendetta

• The fight for liberty is not conducted with natural language in the form of political rhetoric: it is hashed out in technical protocols. ==What matters most is not what you say, but what function(s) you can get your language to execute.==
• Cryptography is so powerful, it is considered to be a ==munition== by many governments.
  • This is because it ==executes speech freely==, without the need for legal or political protection, and therefore outside the realm of legal or political control.

• Profound shift in meaning-making
  • Caused by widely-deployed cryptography used to ==secure our ability to speak freely about what we find to be valuable==, without the need to trust corruptible institutions.
• The functions our language executes produce deterministic outputs which are globally agreed upon.
• Vitalik in Understanding Ethereum: ==contracts (code)== and ==externally owned accounts (people)== are both first class citizens on Ethereum

“It’s doubtful that programs will develop the desire to connect for the sake of it (like we do), unless we program them to do it. However, ==the benefits of knowing that a computation was verifiably done is like inventing religion for programs== […] with verifiable computing protocols, a program will know the minds of other programs. Except, unlike biology, where it is imperfect, it will know exactly the state and processing capability. There’s no longer this idea of servers of data and logic connected disparately through the network.” - Simon de la Rouviere

• The octahedron is the third of the five solids postulated by Plato to make up all the elements - earth, water, fire, air and aether.
• The octahedron is the middle solid, and therefore associated in more modern metaphysics with the ==heart; love; compassion; forgiveness; and healing.== It has 8 faces, similar in a sense to the Noble Eightfold Path. As is the case with all Platonic solids, it is symmetric and so its reflection remains the same.
• ==Such shapes remind us that we are all just mirrors for each other.==
• More practically, space frames are a commonly used architectural design, extended into octagonal trusses by Buckminster Fuller in his work on geodesic domes. Fuller is often quoted in crypto circles, with this being the go-to choice for many of his intellectual descendants:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. ==To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.==”

“==To know is to possess==, and any fact is possessed by everyone who knows it, whereas ==those who feel truth are possessed==, not possessors.” - ee cummings

Expatation and Psychotechnologies

• What is value? Based on complementary opposites, we can ask “What destroys value?”
  • Some suggestions include: disagreement, fear, deception, violence, anger, envy, and inefficiency.
  • In the same way that building trustless protocols means defining clearly what it means to cheat; we can come to understand far more about value by considering first what it is not.
• If it is not disagreement, fear, deception and envy, then it seems like trust in clearly shared truths lies at the core of ==how we might generate valuable interactions between people.==

• So, how do we create shared truth? The simple answer is: through fiction.
  • People tend to look down on fiction, even though it is really ==just the lie which reveals truth.==
  • What matters most in terms of true value generation is the ==efficiency of the language you employ to tell your fiction.==
• The legal fiction of the firm resulted in orders of magnitude improvement in our ability to generate value based on new kinds of transactions.
  • It has also ended up being extractive and corrupt, because legal text must be parsed and interpreted by humans, who are error-prone and easy to manipulate; and because legal text is - in fact - enforced by the threat of violence which relies on the asymmetric power of a nation state.
• **Blockchains implement a new kind of mathematical consensus fiction. **
  • The core question remains: ==how many people can reliably share in the truth your fiction reveals, for this defines the constraints of what kinds of value can be generated with it.==

#society #sociology

• The development of human narratives
  • Tribal narratives allowed truth to be shared between ~150 people.
  • These evolved into religious myths around the time of the agricultural revolution.
  • It’s no coincidence that, concomitant with the spread of the first major religious myths, came the development of writing; the primary use of which was tracking debt.
  • Myth alone is not enough to hold societies larger than your average tribe together: ==it needs to be paired with a shared record, built around succinct and significant symbols.==
• Our ability to create value has always been tied to the ways in which we tell stories about, and with, our shared records.
  • However, prior to the feedback loop outlined in trust, the record was maintained by someone, which gives them enormous power and means everyone else is incentivized to try and manipulate them.
• ==There is a whole new “trust space” we can explore==, searching for more valuable kinds of transactions impossible within merely legal fictions.
  • Because blockchains allow us to define succinctly our shared truths
  • and because the record itself is shared across all participants,
• Question: As opposed to the legal fiction of the firm, what is the fiction that reveals the truth underlying the value generated by blockchains?
  • Mathematical consensus (extra points if you said “cryptographically secure”).

#personaldevelopment #life Joyfully Subvert the Status Quo - May Li Khoe What does it actually mean?

1. Where meaning stems from
2. How we can design our own perceptions of the world to generate more meaning
3. How we can create value both for ourselves and the communities of which we are a part

May Li begins by speaking about her mixed ancestry and the effect this has had on her approach to, and understanding of, value and meaning.

“Instead of thinking of life as a series of checks which I need to tick off - something which can be displayed on a graph that climbs ever up and to the right - ==I like to think of my life as a canvas which I can paint with whatever weird artwork I feel like== […] Here is my mandatory Venn diagram: ==the status quo needs to change, and life is short.== When we put these two together, we can see that we need to subvert the status quo and have as much fun as possible along the way!”

The point of meditation is not to get “good” at sitting around, thinking about nothing: ==it is to turn your life into a meditative one. Every act itself a meditation.== May Li talks about it in terms of turning the living of life into an artwork. The question is, what is the primary means we have a making art of our lives? This course will contend that it is designing dialogue.

In an empire of lies, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. In a fearful society; ==love and trust are the primary tools of resistance.==

==Play allows us to create and share ownership of spaces in ways which competition cannot.== This is why we have unicorns and dancing developers and silly memes: it’s not something incidental. It is a fundamental part of what borderless, global history-writing based on consensus is about. The revolution is not being televised because it’s not about hate or anger or violence or anything else that grabs the headlines of a media operating with skewed incentives. It’s ==heart to heart==, here in the prison yards where we’re using matching funds to build playgrounds where we can love again.

TL;DR: True play allows us to… subvert the status quo. Have as much fun as possible along the way. Turn life into a canvas, rather than a graph with checkpoints. Welcome everyone. Eat great food. Enjoy dominoes again.

==“When you do these little, joyful subversions remember that they can be really small. They don’t have to be these grandiose events with hundreds or thousands of people.== When face-tracking came out, I managed to sneak little pink hearts into your Mac. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of pink happening at all [laughs] It makes me happy to think I got Steve Jobs to approve this while pink hearts were coming out his head. Another example is the Technics 1200 turntables as your avatar - iconic in hip hop - and some other Easter eggs which are still in MacOS.”

May Li goes on to talk about Scribble Together and her approach to presentation. One of the examples she uses is the ability to “stamp multiple unicorns”. ==Everything is connected.==

“Another thing you can do is experiment with format […] For instance, using this traditional talk format to instead make everyone dance […] Another one is subverting technology. This one is pretty profound. We talk a lot about the epidemic of loneliness […] somehow, we have accepted the fact that computation has to be locked behind these little rectangles […] ==How many years are we into the journey of computers and yet we still accept that we can get locked into things like this!?== What would happen if we turned computers inside out? There’s an organization called DynamicLand which does exactly this. ==It’s like cooking or scrapbooking; except it’s all software and we’re building things together."==

It’s worth knowing a little bit about Bret Victor and the work him and people like him are doing on computation as a concept and practice, rather than just writing more software in a linear, boxed-in kind of way. Stay with this until May Li makes it rain purple across everyone’s prototypes with a Prince override.

“Creating a space for change does not necessarily mean you’re doing it yourself; ==you’re just making it possible for others.==”

I once had a friend who told me, “I’m not all that interested in Jesus, you know. I’m much more interested in what on earth was going on with that water he walked on!” ==By which he meant that real miracles occur when you provide the environment for others to achieve seemingly miraculous things.==

“When you think about dominant narrative and the status quo, symbolism is a big part of that, because ==a lot of how we relate to each other is through symbols and stories.==”

“I think change is rarely straightforward and, unlike the covers of magazines tend to show, it doesn’t happen with one person on their own. ==We have a lot of room to build on history, to build on all the tremendous work of people before us who have striven for a better world.== One group of people who did something that was pretty important were the Black Panthers. One thing people don’t realise about them is that they instituted a free breakfast program for children. We talk a lot about education and all the different statistics and projects there, but if people come to class hungry they cannot learn […] This free breakfast program actually ended up being the blueprint for the Federal free breakfast program which happens today.”

May Li uses this example to discuss the People’s Kitchen Collective.

“These are recipes of resilience. ==The strength of our communities is, at its heart, based on the meals we share together.==”

TL;DR: What are the five ways in which we can joyfully suvert the status quo?

1. Do small things.
2. Experiment with format.
3. Create space (not products!).
4. Mind symbolism.
5. Build on history.

#edtech #work #culture #design

Three keys to shifting the nature of work:

“I spent many years in conference rooms and, at some point in time after being at Apple for a little while, I felt like I wanted to do something a little different and I wound up joining Khan Academy. There were a couple of reasons I was attracted to it: one of them was that they are a not-for-profit which is building software, and that’s pretty rare. I thought, ‘hmmm, what would happen if our incentive structures were a little different?’ I wanted to democratize learning too, so the mission was really profound for me. And the last thing was about the culture, because I felt that the organization was really open to some experimentation with cultural shifts.

“We wanted to shift educational software from assessing students and just asking ‘Do you get it yet?’ to letting them explore magical worlds themselves where, for instance, understanding the mathematics would give you powers […] And all kinds of interesting stuff fell out of it: visual and interactive properties of prime numbers and so on.

“People tend to have a very vivid imagination when they work in design: you actually, literally, have the tools and you’re constantly drawing possible futures. ==When you are iterating, you are literally drawing multiple possible futures.== So, if you take a second and think about something that you want to change, and you look around you - there are so many potential co-conspirators here! - this is really an invitation to you to make some friends and start some shit and joyfully subvert the status quo!”