Subjective Labs Orientation
Hello! This is a guide for people who are in my Discord community called “Subjective Labs”.
Post to the #start-here channel if you’re ever unsure how to use the space. That’s what that channel is there for.
I’ll try to make this doc mostly pithy. Just enough to get you engaged. I’m hoping this doc acts mostly as a reference rather than an in-depth manual.
General guideline: Engage!
You should engage with the space. Write your introduction, chat with people in the general discussion channel, and discuss topics that you think are relevant in the “shared lab”.
I have a particular vision in mind for this space. But it works best if you just try engaging. A thriving, healthy communication space will work much better for what I’m trying to do. So: err on the side of just doing things.
But do try to understand what the intent is, and generally steer in that direction.
What is Subjective Labs?
On the simplest level, Subjective Labs is a Discord server. It has some channels. You talk with people. That’s it.
I call it “Subjective Labs” because the aim is to do actual science on subjectivity there. It’s meant as a working/practice/play space. My hope is that we’re doing things, where theoretical discussion is with an eye toward experimentation.
What kind of experiments? Well, I need to give a little more context first.
The big vision
I think it’s obvious now that humanity is heading for some kind of big shift.
I think there’s a place we can collectively land that’s very good. Where the human race as a whole is sane, kind, and effective.
I’ve been aiming to steer our future in that direction for a long time. I’ve done quite a few projects with this goal in mind. I’ve learned some of what works well and what works poorly.
Subjective Labs is one of my next guesses about what might really help in this light. Ideally it makes things absolutely wonderful globally forever. And I tend toward idealism, so that seemingly absurd possibility is very alive for me. But more realistically, I kind of hope/expect we’ll do some interesting things and that many people will get good at something worthwhile.
The Subjective Labs strategy
The strategy, in “working backwards from the aim” order, is basically like so:
The goal is a particular viral attractor in psychological and social design.
We land on that attractor by creating it in ourselves. As individuals, in our relationships, and as a small loose-knit community.
We create it in ourselves by developing memetic literacy. Just as with reading literacy, memetic literacy is a permanent change in perception that comes from practice, rather than just being an idea.
Memetic literacy comes from practicing subjective science.
We practice subjective science by doing subjective experiments, following good scientific logic.
We do subjective experiments with good scientific logic by describing or doing them in a community of practitioners who are all helping one another design and run those experiments.
We get that community by (a) having a space designed for it, (b) engaging in it, and (c) learning the relevant parts of good scientific logic in parallel.
Subjective Labs is my attempt at the 7(a) part. I’m hoping to give enough pointers both here and in the Discord server for folk like you to find 7(c) easy.
But both 7(b) and 7(c) are mostly up to you.
A primer on theory
I’ll give two versions. The fast one (what you might be able to do in an hour or two), and the more in-depth one. Then I’ll give a few key terms that neither set reliably covers, and answer a common question.
In general, the home for discussion about these topics is the framework channel.
Short version
Four steps.
Step 1: Start by reading my intro article on subjective science:
Step 2: Read my article on one subjective scientific method of doing experiments:
Step 3: Watch this 6-minute video by CGP Grey. It’s the fastest introduction to the idea of memetic evolution that I know of. He uses the term “thought germs” instead of “memes”, and he’s looking at a special case, but the type of thinking he’s using is central to what we’re doing.
Step 4: Watch this 17-minute TED Talk by David Deutsch. It’s the best short intro I know of for good scientific logic.
Longer version
In addition to the above, read the series “Valentine’s Logos”:
Valentine's Logos
Back in mid 2024 I wrote a kind of treatise giving an overview of my vision for humanity at the time.
That series spells out the background theory behind everything here.
With that as background, you should also work through a few other key resources (in whatever order calls to you):
Some of David Deutsch’s writings:
“The Evolution of Culture” (blog post, later edited into a less spicy version and turned into a chapter of “The Beginning of Infinity”). This is the article that first got me to think in terms of evolutionary memetics. It’s one of the best overviews of the topic I know of.
“The Fabric of Reality” (book). It’s David’s examination of what I call “deep laws” in Valentine’s Logos. It’s also a nice way to sort of mentally practice good scientific logic.
(“The Beginning of Infinity” is a more common recommendation, and is maybe very worthwhile. I just haven’t read it myself. The first chapter goes over what makes a scientific explanation “good”, basically an expansion of the TED Talk I linked to in the “short version”.)
Some of Malcolm Ocean’s work:
The Non-Naïve Trust Dance (NNTD). NNTD is a not-commonly-known example of what I call a “deep law”: something necessarily true in our context but that we often implicitly treat as false. This particular deep law relates to how we learn and transform, and how relationships unfold. Tasshin (the author of the article I just linked to) interviewed both me and Malcolm over many months to write that series because he believes in NNTD’s profound importance and wanted to make it accessible. (If you want to start with a much shorter but possibly too dense introduction, you might try my Twitter thread on NNTD.)
3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue (3SED). This is a useful bit of psychotechnology that Malcolm derived from NNTD. There are lots of relational tools out there, but this is one of the very few I know that are derived from a deep law. It’s a short post and a simple idea, complete with a graphic that I think summarizes it nicely.
The meta-protocol. I often want to say that Malcolm and I are working on “the same thing” and that NNTD is Malcolm’s version of “the same thing” I’m trying to say in Valentine’s Logos, particularly the meta-meme. “The meta-protocol” is how Malcolm refers to what that “same thing” is. People keep catching glimpses of this thing from different angles (Ken Wilbur’s “Integral Theory”, Robert Gilman’s “Planetary Era”, Jim Rutt’s “Game B”, etc.). Part of this thing is that every person will probably end up having their own angle on it. The meta-protocol implies both a skillset and a transformation of perspective. Hence “memetic literacy”, and what we’re working on in Subjective Labs.
“How We Get There” (short book). This was Malcolm’s attempt to spell out how we create a world of global flourishing from where we are today, based on NNTD and the general idea of the meta-protocol (and a lot of his own personal experience and experimentation with communities and trust-dancing).
These articles on strategic suffering & self-deception:
“The Hostile Telepaths Problem”. In the months after I wrote Valentine’s Logos, Malcolm and I did experiments exploring the nature of “Original Spin”. Surprisingly to us at the time, some people would fight back against dissolving shame, often for reasons that seemed incoherent at first glance. I combined that observation with the idea of social anti-gnosis to deduce the existence of the “hostile telepath” problem, which has since survived somewhat crucial experimentation. (See below for what “crucial” means here.) It’s a good example of the kind of work I hope we do in Subjective Labs, and it’s also often helpful on its own.
“Social Control Disorders” by Paola Baca. The article covers strategic suffering in a way that’s not really about self-deception per se. Like with hostile telepathy, the model is a good hypothesis that has so far stood up well to somewhat crucial experimentation.
John Vervaeke’s series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”. It’s an engaging series by a sharp cognitive scientist on the history and structure of meaning-making, mostly focusing on the West. I suggest just watching the first two episodes (each 1h long) to see whether you get hooked.
Ofermöd by David Chapman. It’s a lengthy article, most of which is behind a paywall, but I think it’s worth a little money to read. It’s one of the better explanations of how we transitioned from modernism to postmodernism in the United States and the West in general, and some of the consequences of it. That might seem off-topic but it really isn’t. Seen through the lens of memetic literacy, it tells a story of how the Western memeplex became so powerful but also why it’s in decay. Like Vervaeke’s series, it gives some critical context for what problem we’re solving (both globally and in each of our psyches), why some common solutions cannot work, and therefore what an actual solution even can look like.
Some key distinctions & terms
In the space of theory, there are a few key things that aren’t clearly written anywhere but are helpful to be aware of:
There’s a difference between exploratory experiments and crucial experiments. Both are good, and it’s possible for an experiment to end up being both at once. But it’s important to notice which kind you’re trying to do (and thus whether your experimental design even can work).
Exploratory experiments are for playing around, getting familiar with the domain, and generating hypotheses.
Crucial experiments give reality a chance to kill hypotheses if (and only if) they’re false. Cruciality is kind of a continuum: an experiment can be very crucial, or somewhat crucial, or just a tiny bit crucial.
I make a distinction between science and engineering. I might use these terms somewhat unusually (but I think quite consistently).
Science is a particular way of coming to understand how things work. Advancing science might or might not result in solving problems. You make scientific progress by developing better explanations and submitting them to crucial experiments. (In particular, science as I mean it is not a matter of engaging in agreed-upon scientific processes or frameworks. That’s a social practice that might sometimes be what I’m calling “science” but in many cases is not.)
Engineering is about solving problems. E.g. medicine is a kind of engineering. Engineering might or might not involve better understanding the problem.
Scientific engineering is an approach to problem-solving based on understanding the problem scientifically.
Pre-scientific engineering is an approach to problem-solving where the claims about how the problem works aren’t subject to a scientific process. Pre-scientific engineering can work and be very good; it’s just that we generally don’t know why it works, and often we’ll falsely think we do know why (because there will be some explanation, even if it’s not a scientifically good one).
Subjectivity will mostly go undefined for now. I’ll probably write an article on what exactly I mean at some point. Loosely speaking, I’m talking about the fact that there’s a kind of space of experience that you have but others cannot directly access. That obviously includes things like your thoughts and emotions, but it also includes your interoception (i.e. your ability to feel the interior of your body). I talk about subjectivities as things, and subjective science as the study of how those things work.
With that language in place I can more simply say:
The point of Subjective Labs is to be a place for doing subjective science. It’s fine and even good if that involves or results in subjective engineering too, so long as we’re doing scientific engineering instead of pre-scientific. Which means that our priority generally will be on developing good explanations for subjective phenomena and checking that they aren’t wrong.
“But isn’t this just Buddhism/therapy/[my favorite theory]?”
No.
Nearly all of those things are pre-scientific subjective engineering. Which isn’t to say they’re useless. But it is to say that they’re vastly weaker and slower than what I’m aiming for.
Some of them do have elements of what I’d call real science woven into them. But they’re almost always just elements, and usually peppered inside pre-scientific frameworks.
And a lot of places cargo-cult science. Like doing data-gathering and statistics, or citing MRI brain scans or whatever, and then calling what they conclude from that stuff “science”.
I’m absolutely fine with people bringing in these topics and their ideas as inspiration for hypotheses. But we’re doing something very particular, and honestly I just haven’t seen this particular thing done elsewhere.
And sure, maybe what I’m talking about truly is what the Buddha/Jesus/Laozi/etc. was saying all along. But if so, it’s not easy to tell, and it’s not the standard thing people converge on from reading their stuff.
So, no.
A tour of the Discord server
You should have a welcome checklist. Do that! It should have you introducing yourself and posting in the #general channel.
Once you’re oriented, here’s the basic use set I expect:
Stuff on understanding theory and working out methodology should happen in the framework channel.
Experiments that you’re totally happy to do in a shared space, where anyone can see and contribute, should happen in the shared lab.
If you want to explore things in a space you own, including controlling who can and can’t see it, you should make your own lab. I’ll explain that part below.
If you want to chat about or share things in a shared space but it’s not clear where it goes, or if it’s off topic but seems like it belongs in this community anyway, it goes in the general discussion channel.
If you need admin help with something or are confused about how to use the space, you can post your question in the “start here” channel. (Or you can DM me!)
Your personal labs
I’m loosely following the idea of personal feeds here.
A “lab” is a Discord channel where subjective science (or scientific subjective engineering) happens.
Your personal labs are channels you define and control, including who can see it or interact with it.
(…except for me. As admin, I have access to everyone’s labs. Please keep that in mind! If you want to do something that needs to be beyond my sight, consider doing a group DM.)
If you type /lab basically anywhere in the Discord server, you’ll get a list of commands you can use. They summon the Lab Warden (a bot) who will follow your commands to control your personal labs as you see fit.
You can always type /lab help to get the list of commands along with brief descriptions of each.
Most of your commands will apply to the lab you’re in. E.g. if you want to rename it, /lab rename will act on the lab you’re in (assuming you own it).
If you’re in some lab and you want to know whose it is, you can type /lab owner.
For technical reasons, there’s a cap of ten personal labs per person. I can tweak that cap if needed, but that’s where we are right now.
By default, only you can see your personal labs. You have to invite people into it, or display or open the lab, in order to let anyone else see it.
Any questions?
Post in the #start-here channel, or DM me.