We're trying to present all points of view and the arguments, claims, and evidence of each point of view in a way so that people get to choose the menu of options of belief, invest, and decide where do they want to invest their belief and take to be their own opinion and them just having this menu and given these options. And so there's all these decisions that we make as we curate this knowledge that we're concerned could inadvertently bias how people perceive things. And our knowledge policies, which are available on our website, are essentially a list of different wicked issues where we've been thinking about, OK, how do we not bias this situation? This is our current thinking.
This is the conceptualization of the problem. And we posted them as links to open Google Docs, so anyone can comment and tell us, oh, you're making a mistake here and you're thinking, or this is a better idea here, just hoping people will help us out and then also just being transparent about how we're currently thinking about things. Again, as we grow as an institution, we hope to test more of these things so we can actually have evidence and data about how people perceive things and use their testing and things like that. But for now, for some of the things that we haven't been able to test, just here's our best thinking on it.
Please give us your feedback. We're trying as hard as we possibly can to be as least biased as we can in making these curatorial decisions, because we really just want to serve the mission. Greetings, future fossils. This is my Garfield welcoming you to so 204.
The podcast that explores our place and time, which I think everyone at this point knows is getting weirder and weirder. And this is why the urgency of projects like Jamie Joyce, her Society of Library, Benjamin Franklin Society of Library, is so crucial to the work that we are doing here together. Collective Intelligence is the thing. As they put it, all of Society's points of view available, trying to make people able to have the tools to think and process together in the way that needs to be done.
I hold this work mightily. And they're having a matching grant right now, so if you feel about it the way I feel about it, support their work. Also, by the way, of course, I'll support my work. Thank you so much to everyone who has been helping me keep my kids clean, fed, and housed, including new supporters, Mark Corey, Andrew Plevins, Gregory Landua, Keith Singery, Fenn Lowitz, Neil Porter, and Tiffany.
And Peter Serato, I know there's some 80, 20-relate play and that a goose with a golden egg is gonna drop, but like all the little things help more than I can say. Thank you all. And in return, I have an enormous cash of new things to offer people. We just finished the second book club call for the Jurassic Park book club, which is more pertinent than you might imagine right now.
What with the Raptors having escaped the facility, but it's not all Hawks, it's also doves. And I just posted an AI music video for my ancient, delicious, highly polished single, You Don't Have to Move, featuring a juicy, recombinant mind wash of imagery, pulling you through psychedelic mushroom Christianity, daoism, and the joyousness of realizing that everything is done without you having to do it. You can check that out on YouTube or Instagram or anywhere, really. But yeah, please support the show on Patreon or on sub-stack until, as Andrew McLuhan put it, the mythical retainer client comes through, it is your contributions that are helping me stay aloft as I glide from one sky tower to the next.
But as I say in the song, angels appear when you don't have to prove them. So anyway, thank you all, angels, small and large, each and all of you, and enjoy this wonderful, and nobling, inspiring, activating conversation with Jamie Joyce of the Society of Library, whom I hope you will decide you must support as well. How are you? I'm very well.
Yeah, love's going on. How are you? Good. I made it through the last mile of this insane commission, I just had, to do music for Mark Nelson's retrospective on Biosphere 2 for the UC-India Art Museum.
Cool. So he was one of the people that lived in there for years inside this glass building in Arizona. Tell me more about this. This is what some kind of experiment, where they created a dome, and what tried to create sustainable living systems in there?
So they recreated seven different biomes in the most ambitious greenhouse of all time. They had a coral reef, they had a rainforest, they had a desert, they had a savannah, you kind of a thing. They grew all of their own food, and eight people lived off the food that they grew for two years. Wow.
Yeah, it's insane. I talked about it with them on future fossils, I think it was like 94. But the point is there's a bridge between his work and your work in the sense of getting the thing in the thing, right? Encapsulating something.
Yes, let me hold this, let me see it for what it is. Then Mark talks about how if you unscrewed a jar of glue in Biosphere 2, it would set off the atmosphere readers, like something would be off, because the closed ecological loops are so small. Fascinating. So this is the test bed for what kind of behaviors should we bring to the world?
Like what are we doing to our planet on the outside? It might take a lot longer for your Yelp to echo, but it's going to echo. So this is a way for them to figure out how to anticipate these kind of run-offs. Anyway.
That's an incredible thing. Jamie Joyce. You have your own amazing project. Let's talk about that.
OK. Let's talk about you. I want to start talking about first, how did this come into being? How did it come about?
Sure. So I have been interested in humanity's relationship to information for a very long time. And I would say probably my origin story that created this interesting relationship started when I was very young. When I was a small child, I got this impression through media and television and shows and things like that, in order to be someone who's smart, somebody who's intelligent, I would need to wear glasses.
That's because all of the smarty pants characters on television always wore glasses. And I really aspire to be intelligent. I found it to be a value that I went to aspire to. And so I always thought I need glasses in order to be considered a smart person.
And one day I was walking home, and I found a broken pair of glasses on the side of the road. And I put them on my face. By the time I got home, I'm wearing these broken glasses. My mother says, take those off right now, or you're going to ruin your eyes.
And then you'll really need glasses. And I was like, OK, I was trying to figure it out in my head. And essentially, I put together an invalid and not sound logical deduction that if I ruined my eyes, then I would need glasses, and then I would get glasses, and I'd be a smarter person. And so I walked outside, and I stared into the sun, and destroyed my eyes, and now I'm legally blind.
And I got glasses. Because in school, they noticed, oh, she can't tell time. She's, we had these clock tests. We had to look at clocks on the wall, and right now what time it was, we had these clock quizzes.
I was failing them, which was unlike me. And so the teacher said, OK, she's probably just blind. She needs glasses. So I got glasses, and I noticed nothing changed, but my grades got worse.
And so it was like this crazy epipitous moment where I realized, oh, wow, like information is so inherently powerful. Because if we believe in it and it's inaccurate information, we can take actions on that information, and it can damage us for our entire lives. This is before I knew about LASIK or anything. And so it was, it just that moment seized me so strongly.
And then ever since that moment, I became hyper-aware of people's relationship to information. I would notice when someone would receive information, and they would later pair that information as if it were their own. They'd be really emotionally invested in the opinion. And I was like, wow, there's really a power to information.
And so I became hypersensitive to stereotypes and socialization. And I really developed this belief that we should create an information system where we're able to peruse possible beliefs and ideas, and more willfully choose which ones we make a part of our identity or which ones we act on. And so that was just always a part of my observation about the nature of life. And then when I was in college, I read, I was on this kick of reading British literature.
And while this is not British literature, Google Books just recommended the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. And in it, he talked about the system that he devised called Ahunto, where essentially he would curate 12 intellectual acquaintances. They would write essays on some social moral philosophical issue or political observation they were making. They would adhere to very specific rules of deliberation.
And then from that process, there was also social club. But from that process, sometimes they came up with institutional solutions to local problems, like they created first public lending library, fire stations, that sort of thing. And when I encountered that idea, I go, well, so many people, hundreds of thousands at least, are writing scholarly papers, writing books, doing podcasts, where they're expressing arguments and observations about social moral philosophical political issues. Instead of trying to get people to adhere to rules of deliberation, because that can be really tricky.
Why don't we just extract the arguments, claims, and evidence from those media artifacts and organize the data itself as a deliberation. And so the Society Library, which our full legal name is actually the Benjamin Franklin Society Library, is an effort to digitize and scale that Hunto method of enabling the deliberation from different points of views in order to solve social problems. And essentially, the ontological structure of the data itself is a deliberation. That is gorgeous.
It's awesome. We'll linger on the eye damage of these. Because just a few episodes ago, I had a similar thing as an adult, where I told David Krakow at the Santa Fe Institute that he was one of those Odin situations where you had traded your eye for cosmic knowledge. And I had developed a cataract at 38 and had to go in for cataract surgery and being embroiled into machinery of everything.
Did that help open up things for you in some way? No. Good question. I think what we have here are two questing people who are intensely curious, just going to want to know about each other.
So I hope that people listening find this enjoyable in as much as, OK, I was looking at your Society Library website. You had a few things that I wanted to touch on. Let's do it. I was just joined.
So one of them was talking about evolving text on the web, a web-based conceptual portmanteau. That's right. And OK, so I had Anixa Shanti on. I don't know if Anixa's like this black Detroit maker wizard.
I love this. He created a suit out of 3D printed pieces that he could use to dance music. That's neat. OK, I'm not sure I know exactly what that means.
Create a suit to dance music. He created this whole envelope for himself to take gesture into computation. It's like someone lit son raw on fire. But the point being that there's a theme in this show that is we're digital.
And how do we make sense of being embedded in digital media? And I'd love to hear you speak to portmanteau. The opera, the way the opera came together in the modern era, to combine all of these different media to create a new form of presentation that then was able to launch Wagner and whomever else. Here's hoping we have a similar success story with this concept.
So web-based conceptual portmanteau, the first thing I'll say is I don't think I have a good track record for naming things well. But I did speak with a linguist friend of mine. And he said he couldn't think of a better way of expressing this concept. So I was like, OK, we'll stick with it.
And so basically, when we think about the future of knowledge, it seems as though when the internet came about, we just directly digitized a bunch of things. So we took books and we directly digitized them. There's digital books. Sometimes they actually look like a book and you flip digital pages.
So it's like a direct digitization, still text in paragraphs. It seems as though we did something similar with television. We got YouTube. It looks very similar to television, except the dashboard's a little bit different.
You have different features. Same with newspapers. It's just text in paragraph format. And when we think about the future of knowledge, one thing that we tried to reimagine is knowledge can be some multidimensional and also multimedia.
And there are many different directions people want to take if they're exploring knowledge. And so why should we be limited by direct digitization when we're representing knowledge artifacts? So web-based conceptual apartment toe is essentially when the society library is creating nodes of knowledge in a knowledge graph. Every single node is actually a combination of different media aspects.
And then also a claim is represented in different linguistic register. There's references. There's different phrases for these things. So it's like all these different directions you could go.
If you want to start with a node of knowledge, a specific claim, you could head in the direction of seeing claims that are linked to it, that either support or refute that the claim is true. You can see arguments that support or refute that this claim is relevant in the context of the knowledge graph. You can see this claim represented as an infographic if we found it linked it. You could see this claim expressed in audio from a podcast clip that we're linking to.
You could see this claim represented in a video format. You could see the claim put in the context of an explainer and you can see this claim represented multiple linguistic register, which means essentially at different reading levels. So you can opt into a claim being expressed at a fourth grade reading level or including technical jargon. And so essentially this node concept we have in the society library is that there's a number of different buttons and drop downs and ways of unpacking the node so that you can interact with this piece of knowledge in whatever way you want.
Our ultimate goal is to get to a point where you can opt into a consistent cohesive version. So if you want to view the library through video clips or audio clips or technical version or fourth grade reading level version, you'll be able to do that. We're looking to find ways to automate this process because it could be very time consuming to link these knowledge artifacts together. But essentially, Portmanteau is the combination of things.
It's the combination of words. The way that we have these capabilities for people to explore a claim in multiple media formats is because of web-based capabilities. And then conceptual in that we're not just limiting the claim to only versions of the claim itself, but the claim in context, the claim being described. So it's more like the concept itself being represented through different media facets.
So that's what that concept is. It exists, it's live. That's the way our Knowledge Graph is set up. Each one of these nodes has all of these features.
We have different ways in which we visualize the Knowledge Graph. So we've got something called papers. If you go to Society Library and you look at a collection and you go to our map, that's when you can see all of the expressions of a node in web-based conceptual Portmanteau. But then we also have different versions of representation that only retain some features.
So a new visualization we created is called Society Library Papers, where essentially it looks just a document on a screen, where you can click on a word that opens up a category of argumentation. So for example, in our DIAB-Lokanian nuclear power plant database, which is a debate map, a deliberation map about the last room being nuclear power plant in California, there's a sentence in the paper that says, this nuclear power plant should close when the license expires because of economic reasons and environmental reasons and safety reasons and all that. And that's just one sentence. And what you can do is you can click on the word economic and it's going to unpack all of the argumentation in narrative format summarized.
These are all the economic considerations. So you've opened up this interactive piece of paper in this one particular dimension. So it's like you're traveling down the Knowledge Graph tree in a specific dimension. You can back out of that and you can unpack the word environmental.
Once you have the actual arguments, you can unpack the arguments themselves to see the pro-con argumentation. You can also explore a sentence in papers and it'll bring you to a brief Wikipedia page about the claim. These are the references. These are the videos.
These are what have you. So that's the gist of web-based conceptual portment tell. And one thing I'll just quickly add is something that we're really excited about is that because all we're really doing is creating a structured Knowledge Graph. And we've shown that there's at least one other way you can visualize upside the map format.
There's going to be, we hope in the future, way more flexible ways to represent Knowledge. So someone could just take our structured Knowledge Graph and render it in a VR format. All they have to do is preserve the relationship between these different artifacts and pieces of media and these nodes to each other. And so we're really excited creatively what could come out of this, especially as we grow as an institution we have more about it to experiment, to see what is going to be most salient to people.
What's going to make them actually have comprehension around the complexity and depth and actual content that we're modeling? Yes. So I got fire went up behind my eyes when I was hearing you talking about all this stuff. Because this is the way that I think people want to think, but it's not the way that information is organized for us.
And so that's another piece of this. There was here, and I love for the record that all of your knowledge policies are open Google documents that you're inviting people to comment on. I think this is absolutely wonderful. Yeah.
So for people who don't know, there's a lot of wicked challenges that need to be solved when you're talking about knowledge management and creating knowledge graphs on particularly political issues. Who gets to decide what to dog whistle and what's not a dog whistle? And what kind of nomenclature do we use? There are certain decisions that we make which could bias cognition, which we're trying our best to avoid.
Like we're trying to present all points of view and the arguments, claims, and evidence of each point of view in a way so that people get to choose the menu of options of belief, invest and decide where do they want to invest their belief and take to be their own opinion and them just having this menu and given these options. And so there's all these decisions that we make as we curate this knowledge that we're concerned could inadvertently bias how people perceive things. And our knowledge policies which are available on our website are essentially a list of different wicked issues where we've been thinking about, okay, how do we not bias this situation? This is our current thinking, this is the conceptualization of the problem.
And we posted them as links to open Google Docs so anyone can comment and tell us like, oh, you're making a mistake here and you're thinking or this is a better idea here, just hoping people will help us out and then also just being transparent about how we're currently thinking about things. Again, as we grow as an institution, we hope to have test more of these things so we can actually have evidence and data about how people perceive things, use their testing and things like that. But for now, for some of the things that we haven't been able to test, just here's our best thinking on it, please give us your feedback. We're trying as hard as they possibly can to be as least biased as we can in making these curatorial decisions because we really just want to serve the mission.
Yeah, with all of that, there was a special point of appreciation to you giving a line item to space time presentation of information. And like you say, ultimately, the Society of Libraries committed to inducing comprehension and understanding of ideas, ideologies, points of view, dot dot dot, but we understand that we will have to make trade-offs. It's interesting and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this about the information architecture and user interface and what it means. It seems like in a way, you're not talking about wet lab.
For this kind of new aspheric emergence. Let me, yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. So just like for like space time representation of knowledge, there's so many considerations. So first off, there's a bunch of cognitive biases that we have to think about, like the primacy bias, negativity bias.
So do we put cons first or do we put pro first or is it absolutely necessary that we create an interface where people state their existing belief and therefore their ordering of things shows up in a way that isn't going to like have them grounded in like the first thing that they see? How do we create architecture that opens people's minds? And then also, so the ordering of things matters, the representation of things matter. And ultimately, what we're doing in this curational process is we're doing a lot of compression.
Like our Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant knowledge base is over 5,000 artifacts that we derived arguments, claims, and evidence from. But we're not just handing people over a data set of 5,000 news articles and scholarly papers and economic impact assessments and tweets and things like that. We're curating this high level representation of these things and then giving people this reference database. So if they want to see the original artifact, they can click into it.
And we have this hierarchical layout. So we have the node, which is the claim itself. And then we have quote features. So people can see the paragraph context in which we derive the claim.
And then we link to references and have internet archive backed up permanent URLs of references. So it always exists online. So there's many layers where people can actually unpack the artifact and get to those primary sources. But we are like aggregating up and we are simplifying and we are compressing knowledge.
And so we try to think about that too. How much detail do we need to retain and offer people to have the information that they need? And what can we eliminate simply because we only have so much space? And we're trying to get people to see the broad debate and then they can click down into investigating what arguments and claims they either want to understand more or they disagree with or what have you.
So there's a lot of considerations there. And we're still exploring. One thing that we talk a lot about on this show is the intergenerational thing and knowledge transfer and a linear sense. And situating oneself as being an ancestor, right?
Knowing that you have them and that you are one and then you cast out from that. And so for that reason, I found it especially validating that you make a point on the statement on the age spectrum of ideas. And I'd love to hear you speak to the age spectrum of ideas and how the society library handles ideas in a chronological dimension. It's like acknowledging that the memetic ecology is full of old growth.
Yes. So there's a number of different things that we've been thinking about. So we have this tagging system. So the age spectrum of ideas taps into a few different things, which is like, how would different generations be able to conceive of something through memetics?
And then also, how do we update information that is antiquated and maybe has been corrected? We have a tagging system where essentially, and you can see this to this day, on society library papers embedded within the sentence structure. When we're providing an overview of argumentation, you'll see notes in parentheses. And some of those can be tags which say, this may be outdated.
And then you click on the word, this may be outdated, and it unpacks to explain what happens. There's been new evidence to suggest that this may no longer be true, even though it was true at one period of time. So essentially the landscape changed. The economics of the nuclear power plant weren't sound, but a piece of policy was passed, so now that there's stimulus.
And so we're still representing that that point of view existed because it was a point of view that maybe many people haven't been updated on. Some people still believe they're walking around to this day saying, the economics of this nuclear power plant aren't sound. And they haven't been updated. So we don't want to omit the information because it's a belief that people currently have.
They want to see it represented, but we have to caveat that and just give people a little note. So just tell people this information may be outdated, and then you can click on the sentence, unpack the sentence, and then you'll see why. You'll see the counter-argument that says, such and such policy was passed, and the stimulus was provided, therefore, the economics of the power plant without the stimulus are now irrelevant. And so that's one hack that we put together, but again, these are open Google Docs because we haven't solved everything, and so much of these issues are really wicked, and there's going to be so many educations that we have to think of.
But that is one way that we're thinking about the age spectrum of ideas. Where do you sit just personally on these kinds of things? It strikes me that having been introduced to you through this initiative, I get the sense that we live in an age where hyper-modernity is where people have become institutions. And in a way, really, the society library, you say it's the Benjamin Franklin Society Library, but this is your project, and you are such a clear point of person.
So Arudite, in the articulation of its, like, Arison D'Ettra, so how do you see yourself within this framing of deep time and what this project is actually doing in that broader kind of cathedral sense? The question that I'm thinking that maybe you're pointing to, and correct me if I'm wrong, is maybe what's my relationship to the mission and the institution? Who am I in relation to it? Is that one of the lines about you, I think?
Yeah. OK. So I really feel just like a part of the mission, and I feel like the mission itself, and the society library's goals and ideals, are truly ideals that are extraordinarily difficult to live up to. But it's important to have that north star, just to keep orienting towards this sincere inquiry after truth.
And so in developing the methodology, and having taught students at 32 universities this methodology, in order to create these knowledge bases, we deconstruct media into small logical units. And having done that so many times, and then teaching students that it really leads you with, one of my friends said, I have most deep epidemics they've ever encountered in a person. And I think what they meant is I just have extraordinarily volume of intellectual humility. So just in doing this work of taking knowledge artifacts, breaking up these logical units, and doing your best to steal man both the claims that you're finding, and then in bringing those and stealing maning those, and just mapping out the deliberation, and reaching these ends.
Like there's a certain point in your mapping, where depending upon where the argumentation is going, you've reached a limit of observational evidence that you're able to find. And so you just realize, oh, there is so much uncertainty. And even though my mind wants to generate heuristics, wants to develop certainty, wants to make an assumption, and wants to make a judgment. Like if I'm actually looking at the data, you can just see the spaces in between.
And you see how much left there is to do in terms of accounting for variables, and accounting for observations that are possible, but just may not be accessible now, in order to increase your certainty about something. And so it just leaves you very intellectually humble. And our students have a similar experience. My understanding with fact checkers is there's business issue that has occurred with fact checkers, where they'll experience disillusionment.
They'll do so much fact checking, and they do the work of trying to find evidence to prove or disprove something, and they'll see those spaces in between, those epistemic gaps between what we know in quote unquote, what we know in that we're able to find evidence or something, and what we don't actually know, because we don't see evidence for, but we just want to make this assumption. And it's very depressing and disillusioning, but at the society library, it's such a positive experience. Our many students across different universities have said it gives them a new site to do our exercises. The logical deconstruction of media, they say like, they have a new mind, a new site, a new vision for seeing knowledge and seeing the gaps in spaces of it because they're literally being asked to take these artifacts and deconstruct them and then put them in a map where it's easy to see the spaces and the depth of strings and things like that.
And so I feel really positive about this level of uncertainty, of course, I'm just a human with a mind and sometimes certain people pop up and I'll make a judgment about something, but in general, I'm deeply comfortable with not knowing. And sometimes I feel a little bit guilty for my epistemic stance on things, because there's so many people who care very passionately about a specific political or social domain, and there's an art to making them understand that you perceive what they're saying, and appreciate that it could be true, and sometimes this isn't always invited, but when it is invited to just offer, hey, there's things missing though in what you're arguing, and what's particularly offensive, I would say is when you're talking with experts and you're just pointing out the flaws in their reasoning, and it's in earnest to try and say, listen, we need these premises to be verified in order for this conclusion that you really want, we understand, and I know it's difficult because you've been in this field for so long and you haven't been trained in formalizing arguments, so you don't realize that your actual logic is not fully fleshed out, it's somewhat fallacious. It's a strange position to be in, because I'm deeply comfortable with uncertainty and yet sometimes deeply uncomfortable with trying to share that uncertainty with others. Yeah, it's funny because I harp on ad nauseam about this science fiction noveltte I wrote in 2017, called An Oral History of the End of Reality, about deep fakes and the loss of what York University philosopher Regina Rini, I later learned called the epistemic backstop of our confidence in recorded media.
Like we live in this world in which Micah Deagle coins this term, Synthography, I like that. So we've got, and then somebody else got the website and he was all chapped about it rightly, but yeah, we live in a world where, and this is, I've explored in the show a lot, I will be exploring a lot, I know in writings and conversations to come, but because it kind of spill over from the virtual into the real, and imagine that living in the Bay Area, it's substantially more palpable for you than it is for me here in Santa Fe, because I walked out of, like when I came out to the Perali Conference in January, the one that you were like, why wasn't I there? I hosted the unofficial after party, because my house was right there, right next door. Like how did I not hear about this?
And so I hosted the unofficial after party. You were there in spirit for sure, and it was amazing, it was a miracle that I got out of Santa Fe, like with the kids. But the robot arm making people's espressos in the airport terminal. And I was like, okay, we've reached, we're here.
Like we're down, like okay, fold your arms over your chest and go down the water slide, whatever shit talking, I was doing to Ray Kurtz-Wiehl for the last 12 years. The fact of it is that this thing has a momentum and agency, the technosphere of its own, and part of that agency appears to be a blurring of the boundaries between what we have physically sensed. It's the bedrock of the project of modernism, right? In the sense that like, if you're a rational, natural philosopher, scientist, you go out in nature, you use your five senses in quotes there, and you deduce things.
And yet here we are, and I wanna, have I talked to you about Stephanie Lepp? I'm not sure, but I know Stephanie Lepp. Yeah, like I really feel like the three of us would be great in conversation at some point. Stephanie's out there being like, okay, why don't we use deep fakes to push a narrative that everyone knows is fake, but we all wanna see happen.
We wanna see Brett Kavanaugh apologize. So like, why not just put it there, and then maybe he'll see it and get inspired to man up and do the actual thing. And I don't know, I guess what I'm getting at is that I just have immense respect for your position on epistemic humility, because I don't know how else we're gonna navigate what we're going through right now. And I would love to hear you speak to how you feel that the Society of Library is confronting this fact.
Yeah, so the world is moving forward, and it's moving forward with stories. And I think I'm not sure if this is the precise thesis of Noah Yewal Harari's sapiens, but we're strongly motivated and self-organizing through myths and stories and ideas. And so I think that today we're still experiencing that. There are still pieces of media that move us forward, myths that move us forward.
And I feel like the work of the Society of Library right now is extraordinarily slow in terms of keeping up with those myths and narratives that are propelling us forward. And so my goal currently is to make the Society of Library more fast, how can we create real-time libraries that map these different points of view? And just knowledge through artifacts as soon as they're published, that we're able to tap into the specific pulses that are generating valuable information and can yield interesting insights on subjects that we're covering and immediately incorporate that into a graph so people can see the competing hypotheses and how evidence is being produced and how it's being produced and argumentation about the methodology in more real-time. And I feel like that is an absolutely necessary development for us to be able to bring intellectual humility and epistemic humility to the conversation.
And I think that for some people, the level of uncertainty that we bring is provoking and probably will never be welcome. But we're hoping that over time, this relationship with information becomes inevitable, that with future generations, we just understand that sometimes there's a limit to what we know, we have a felt sense of what we're certain about, but we also have all these biases that help us forget when we've been incorrect and rewrite our memories in order to make things like cohesive and make sense. Just in general, our relationship with our minds, our relationship with the world and the information that they're generating internally and externally, we're going to have a more rational relationship with. Such that people are going to expect media to be this way and to a certain extent, like there is journalistic standards for showing different sides.
So if I'm not mistaken, like journalistic ethics would argue that when you're writing a piece, you should be not just propagandizing by sharing one point of view, you should be sharing this point of view and then you do a little bit of digging and here's a different point of view that someone has and here's an alternative position on that, just so people have a picture of the scope of a particular issue or problem. And for the Society Library, we're just taking that ridiculously seriously. We want to find all points of view, extract as many arguments, claims and evidence that are unique from as many artifacts as we possibly can, link those together and then show the relationship between those competing points of view and visualize that in a way and where it's inherently like the least bias thing it possibly could. And people get to peruse and choose, okay, this is more compelling to me because I find this kind of evidence from these types of institutions to be more compelling than these other institutions with other kinds of evidence.
And so I'm hoping that just over time, that's just a literacy that we have and it's just an expectation that we have. That media is this comprehensive, inescapably complex and we'll just demand that. And just even by virtue of how it looks in comparison to like a news article or even just a scholarly article, we're going to be able to know by aesthetics even alone that an article no longer satisfies our ability to understand a really complex problem and that if we want to form a strong opinion on something or vote about something, we probably have to go through this more rigorous process of seeing these points of view. So I think that the society library will always be doddling behind issues until we get to real-time libraries, which we're working on now, how do we very rapidly ingest and automatically map these things and eventually build a team of analysts and Databrarians to be able to be labeling and reviewing and fact checking and all of that closer to real-time.
So it's like a new media institution that needs to exist is essentially what we're arguing. And it's about living up to the fact that we're a big data society now and our issues are wickedly complex. And so the media institutions that need to exist need to have those big data capabilities and those technical and epistemic chops to be able to conceive of the complexity of things and then re-communicate that up to a public. So yeah, that's actually the, how is that talking about you and this project with my wife this morning and really stressing that I've felt that what you're doing is not, like everybody's got their, is it Borg?
And obviously you place great emphasis on the individual in your ethical statements, but that's not what I'm getting at really. What I'm getting at is that there's something about keeping people involved in the process here that seems really important. And again, I maybe we're just circling this question, like with every prompt I offer you, but it strikes me as a real challenge to know how to do this, even granted, like given enough people, right? You're still dealing with information or data even at a level that is incomprehensible to people, just innately.
And how are you using, or how do you hope to be using the other major cultural innovation that's going on right now? Like when I talked to Alison Gopnik on complexity podcasts about large language models in her case was that large language model, another Berkeley luminary, her case was that large language models are like libraries and that they are a cultural innovation. They're not an alien form of intelligence. They are made entirely out of human intelligence.
And then they are just a kind of weird synthesis of that. And so it's just this addition, it's a resource. And so I'm curious, like how you're thinking about the chimeric or centauric kind of approach with all of this, because this project is so deep tech, it can't be without this stuff. And yet, as I was saying a moment ago, it strikes me that the stuff that it's made out of is also like what seems to be eroding.
It's like, to be the cause of and solution to all of life's problems, it's to acknowledge technologies. It's like there's this- Giving all the rules, I'm producing the D for it. Yeah, like the last thing I'll say about it is Dan Simmons in Hyperion Cantos. I don't know if you read those science fiction novels, but he talks about the All Thing, which is like a riff on the oldest parliament, which was from Iceland.
But it's kind of ongoing democratic process in which a huge number of people in the Galactic Federation of are constantly involved in a democratic ongoing deal. But in his system, he was like, actually it was a dog and pony show. And there were still, like two things came out of that. One was that there were still a bunch of plutocratic decisions being made behind the curtain.
And then also people were really, had become subsumed in the processing of information to the point that they were almost ineffectual. So I'm curious how you see that kind of a challenge. Yeah, when I found out the Society of Library, I always thought it was going to be a institution that would serve future generations. Because the kinds of knowledge products that we would develop, we would see if it is conceivable by people alive today, but our hope was that future generations would just grow up with it and have that literacy and expectation.
The thing about large language models is, first of all, while they become so fantastic recently, and we use them. But for certain decisions, again, especially the ones where if we invest in belief in them, it could impact hundreds of millions of people's lives, much like the glasses decision. So we should probably be extraordinarily careful in auditing the reasoning and weighing the evidence for mass policy decisions. So for information retrieval or information reference on discrete things, and using it as a way of researching and then checking those references, I think it's a fantastic tool.
But even if these large language models, like we could reliably believe that, when we ask you a complex question about what we should do about climate change in US policy, we like even if we could believe, okay, it's consumed all the necessary relevant, contextual knowledge that exists in order to be able to answer this question. We probably should have the capability to audit, how it waited and sorted and organized knowledge in order to come to those kinds of decisions. So when it comes to what should we do about climate change, it could reference drawdown and say here are the top 10 things we should do. And then we ask it to say it's sources and we're like, okay, it's relying on drawdown.
But if we want to have a breakthrough, an epistemic breakthrough, and how we organize knowledge in order to make more informed decisions, which could be internal to the large language models or external in that we're like mapping and then modeling things, I think that largely these things should be auditable because oftentimes they're not gonna be testable until it's already implemented. You can't like necessarily implement a national scale policy decision in a small little test bed in one particular state because the nature of national and international scale decisions and coordination decisions are of that scale. And so I think large language models are super useful. We use them, we're hoping to rely on them more in order to automate the creation of our deliberation maps.
But I think at least for some sectors of society, whether it's policy makers or scientists or something, the actual layout, the epistemic layout, the different positions points of view, the evidence, the fact that the evidence has been verifiably linked to artifacts that do exist in our just hallucinated URLs is probably gonna be an important step in our collective knowledge stewardship. If we're going to be applying that knowledge to decisions that are gonna affect real people's lives and futures. So it's a prediction versus understanding kind of gambit. Yeah.
Yeah. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what you're doing with the internet archive. Oh sure, yes. In addition to being the executive director and founder of the society library, very recently I've also joined the internet archive and I run a department there.
The department is called Democracy's Library. And the mission of it is to collect as many municipal state and federal government documents, datasets, research, records and publications, both digital and not born digital in the United States. And so the reason why I said yes to this is not only because Brewster Cale is a hero of mine, and it is a pleasure to work and report directly to him. And we love, I've always, I love the internet archive for a very long time and at the society library, we back up our day with the internet archive, but also because the society library is perhaps absurdly sincere at being maximalist when it comes to context.
So if the society library has a specific focus on modeling social and political issues for the purpose of increasing informed decisions and informed policy and at the individual level and even potentially at the institutional level, then we wanna be maximalist with context. There is so much research, so many relevant records, so much web HTML that is going to be necessary in the conceptualization of social and political issues coming from different departments and agencies across the United States, federal government, state government, municipal government. And so what I'm positioned well to do is not only capture that data so that it can be mined and extracted and modeled and things like that, but also work internally to the archive to think about products and services so that other organizations that are working on these epistemic projects have access to this data also and can create different models and visualizations in order to improve societal scale governance. The society library has a very specific mission, we map the positions at different points of view, among other things that we do, but like the primary thing is to create these libraries.
But there are other institutions that are working on much more discrete tasks, like government transparency, government accountability, government modernization. And so just being able to be within that community and someone who can propel forward the ability for multiple organizations and their unique missions to use the same data set in order to accomplish their relative goals, that's just like an honor and a privilege. And yeah, we're just having an insane amount of fun. It's such an important role because there's so much valuable data that is underutilized in making our country better managed.
And what's really lovely is that United States government is at least at the federal level, seemingly very on board with modernizing government. I'm sure at an individual level and within Congress, like there's probably a lot of inertia and that's on like kind of person by person, agency by agency level. But there's been a number of initiatives and legislation that have been passed that has motivated the US government to make data more accessible, make it reduce public burden, specifically to accessing that data. So it's a very exciting time to be working on this project and we're just ridiculously excited that the internet archive has not only hired me, but also hired my CO at the society library, essentially they hired the executive team at the society library to run this department.
So it strikes me as it's a kind of, if you build it, they will come kind of thing. But I'm looking at the news and I'm like, are these people even listening? How do we, I guess what I'm asking is, oh, I said, I guess what I'm asking is, how you understand the terrain between the product y'all have created and the people that are actually making political decisions. And like, how are we getting these people to level up their epistemology and their media savviness?
And how do we get people to think like 21st century people when it strikes me that whenever I look at US political news, it doesn't even seem like 20th century. It seems like like 13th century or something. It's insane. People are saying things that you're just like, they've lost their minds.
Like everyone has lost touch with reality. So how are you hoping that this is gonna patch together? Yeah, I'm guessing this question is for the work of the Society of Library and Not the Internet Archive. Yes.
A number of things. What's really interesting is that us just standing in the mission and expressing as often as we can and through our actions that we have this sincere interest of representing all points of view on social and political issues and being the least biased, we possibly can. We have gone outreach from different organizations, different political bodies to help them make decisions. So for example, there was this one project that we did, a nonpartisan activist organization came to us and said, we have the right relationships in Congress and there's this demand to figure out how to harden the US electrical grid.
We've collected all the pieces of legislation that have passed failed and pending at the state and federal level and then all of these congressional recommendations through NERC and FERC, which are government bodies about what to do. And it's so much information and we don't know how to parse through all of it. And what it boiled down to is just the Society of Library using its methodology for mass media deconstruction to break all of these things up into logical units and then essentially fill in the legal code based on these recommendations. So we weren't asked to do any sense making our own, but just assume that these federal agencies and like all their documentation represent sound reasoning and suggestions, how do we fill in the legal code so we can implement a plan to harden the US electrical grid?
So we did that and then we rendered it in legislation format. And essentially it was like this plan to break up the Eastern connection into substations and provide this National Guard over scene program where in the event of a series of issues like an EMP attack or a cyber attack or kinetic attack, what are the components that are most likely to be like vulnerable or go down and it would have long lead times and we should just have these national storage facilities that have these things and the event of a blackout, the National Guard will be responsible for transporting out two select stations and things like that. So we've written legislation. And then we've also been reached out to at the local level, city council level, they heard about us and they heard, hey, you can help us make an unbiased decision.
Please help us. We've got this extraordinarily racially tense issue. We don't know how to vote on it. We don't know how to talk about it.
And when they presented the issue to us, it seemed like a binary decision. Yay or nay do this thing. And we deployed this to cyber methodology like light. We didn't do like a big knowledge graph, but we just deployed a light version of it and found that the decision that they were posed was broken up into 24 different dimensions.
And so we like collected arguments, claims and evidence from the different stakeholders, from activists and the mayor and newspapers and from the Supreme Court that had ruled on the issue and scholarly articles and statements from local academics. And then we modeled the arguments and claims, the relationship to each other across these 24 different dimensions. And we created this political decision making model where we just asked them to micro vote across each one of those dimensions. It could be weighted or unweighted.
And it was just phenomenal for the city council members that used it because some of them refused to because there's issues with them being on record for things. And that's a part of the existing inertia and hurdles that we have to overcome in terms of how our policy making system works. But again, with time, with nudging, there are things that could happen to the landscape to break where we're stuck, unstuck. Next plank says science proceeds one funeral at a time.
There you go, yeah. There you go. But for those who did participate, it had such an impact on their cognition. The activists said it was mindset breaking.
They were actually really excited to continue the conversation because they felt heard. And they wanted to hear the feedback to their ideas as opposed to being angry at the decision making process. City council members said that they thought they were a 50-50 split when they saw everything lay out before them. They were 18 out of 24 dimensions in agreement with the activists.
So there are certain ways in which our methodology has been deployed in different formats that have actually been executed by request of these entities. And so we're just going to continue making ourselves available to that. But in a way, the society libraries are research organizations. We're trying to see what is the new knowledge system that people are going to grow up with.
I grew up with Wikipedia, I grew up with the internet. But what does the new knowledge system it can be? We're trying to optimize for these ideals of making sure that we can accommodate the ways in which people learn by having these multimedia representations of every single node that people can opt into the version that fits them. We're trying to be maximally contextual, trying to be maximally rigorous, trying to be ridiculously comprehensive, at least possibly can.
So we're pushing for these ideals. But really, we're just figuring out how it's possible. And then people come to us saying, can you deploy, essentially it all comes down to methodology. Can you apply your methodology to our use case?
I've done that several times. And they've been ridiculously pleased with the results. So we're just going to keep doing that. And find the fertile ground where the methodology can take hold and where people are ready to receive a specific implementation of it while still pushing forth the standard of listen to really engage with a question about what we should do about something.
It's going to require this level of comprehensiveness. And that means we have to figure out how to visualize it, how to make it fast enough in real time. So it's relevant enough. We just have to still figure all those things out.
But we're just pushing for an epistemic paradigm shift in our standard for how we relate to information. Right on. And I guess really, just the last question I have for you then is another one where I feel like I have Stephanie sitting on my shoulder here. And I look forward to playing ball with the two of you on this at some future point, which is the developmental piece of it, right?
Because we know from psychological research that sometimes when people are presented with the facts, they actually entrench into their own bullshit. And it's a wicked thing because the more clever you happen to be, the more capable you are at politically motivated faults in reasoning. You're better at lying to yourself if you're smarter. So that's maybe one thing.
But then the other thing is just, yeah, the adult developmental psychological component of this strikes me that the world that you're pushing for is really raising the bar on what it means to be an adult far beyond what it meant for our parents to be adults. And I'm curious what you think about that and what you think about how there are ways that this can be something that can be made available to people as children, where there must be affordances to become native to these kinds of knowledge, objects, and processes. But it is definitely a developmental crucible to deal with maximal context, right? Because so much of the brain is actually about filtering stuff out.
And so much of what we do in society with each other is about mitigating the amount of information that we actually need to communicate to one another. So, yeah. Happy to make a bunch of comments on that. Let me just check on someone really quick who came in.
Sure. I want to make sure that they don't need to make noise. And then I will answer your question. Sure.
OK. So I want to unpack a few things that you said. First, you talked about cognitive biases and potential resistance and essentially how there may be counterintuitive reactions to us trying to represent these different points of you and Ernest and hoping to receive not necessarily an outcome in terms of what people end up believing, but an outcome in that people actually go through a process of considering these different points of you before they decide, OK, this is right. Choose to believe in after going through this process of open-minded consideration.
And I want to say that we are very aware of this. Maybe none of all the specific psychological factors that are occurring. But we know that there's different types of cognitive biases and forms of resistance that exist. And one thing that we decide to stand in is that we're going to work towards epistemic integrity as much as possible.
And we won't sacrifice our integrity. And that is in part because it is inherent to the organization. But also, if it is true that some people just will not participate in this process and need to be spoon-fed some information, they need to be conveyed confidently and with certainty and this is not whatever they prefer it even, then what informs what is ultimately delivered to these people should be developed through this process of earnest and high integrity inquiry. So if it comes down to Edward Bernays, who essentially said the propaganda is inherent to the functioning of democracy and there's no way you can get around it so you might as well get to the program, if propagandaizing a population is somehow inherently necessary for social coordination, then that propaganda should be informed by a process of rigorous, comprehensive representation of all points of you put into a formalized deliberation.
So every point of you has an opportunity to argue why theirs is right if we have to distill something towards one specific message. I'm hoping that through creating new media, we can develop the literacy where people are able to appreciate nuance and complexity. And I think that no matter what, even if certain parts of the population need to have a distilled, directed message, everyone else who wants to opt into the process of auditing the reasoning that led to that distillation should have the opportunity to do. So we're just gonna stand in pushing forward that standard.
So that's my question about that. And then when it comes to adulting essentially and the demands of engaging in knowledge in this way, yeah, one of the things that we do at the society library is offer educational programming. So we teach political science students how to create these decision making models once we like invented that. We now teach students how to do that.
We teach them how to do logical deconstruction. We teach them how to actually create knowledge graphs and maps. And so we believe that our educational programming should continue. And what we offer in college students has to be very different than what we offer in middle school students.
But we're even writing a book about epistemics, like epistemology for kids. It's like a children's story. It's a retelling of the parable of the elephant and the three blind men. Where the different blind men were like grabbing onto a piece of an elephant.
They were so certain because they were only holding onto one piece. So we're rewriting a story where a number of people who represent different mindsets encounter an elephant and they have varying levels of belief and certainty. And what happens is they actually just have a conversation with the elephant. So they have a conversation with the nature of truth itself.
And so we're even trying to figure out a number of different educational offerings at different levels to try and represent this ideal and make it accessible. Because a small child may not be able to go through a knowledge graph. An average small child may not be able to go to a knowledge graph. But maybe they'll be able to conceive of how you can perceive of something, be certain of it, because you're literally seeing it with your own eyes.
And then by just adding additional extra information, you find that maybe it's not true. Just because you saw it from a different angle, you got more information. That concept is still accessible. So in as many ways as we can for many different levels of development, we're trying to like impart that ideal and understanding.
That's Anacantavada from the Janus philosophy. My friend, Kimberly Dil, who's an environmental ecology professor at the University of California at Santa Clara, was on Future Falls' 193. We had a whole conversation about that. About that exact thing.
Nice. The elephant from multiple perspectives. So yeah, there are ways, I think, that you can do this. And I'm delighted to hear that all of this is going down.
I guess really the last thing I have for you is, I'm just fascinated. First of all, I would say, I know that you're, last time you spoke, you might be trying to hire a communicator. I was like, if I were you in charge of your organization, I would hire myself. Because you did it.
You passed the test. But, flatrioside, the thing that I want to know here, listening to you and understanding just how deep you go on all of these points is, how do you decide what to eat for breakfast? Easy, because I have a bunch of constraints. And so I have an incredibly serious health issue.
In fact, my life would be very different if I followed the medical advice I was given. I carved my own path. And so I went from chronic hospitalization and the risk of losing parts of my intestine to, I got to keep my intestines. And I haven't been in the hospital in a very long time if you're hearing to a very strict vegan diet.
And so there's constraints. If I eat a lot of vegan junk food with high carb, I will pack on pounds. And so what I eat for breakfast is a lot of tofu, because it is low carb and it is vegan and it's tasty. So just my virtue of constraints existing in life, sometimes it's easy to make decisions.
And for whatever reason, I happen to care very little about what I eat also. That's just a product of my attention span. Yeah, exactly. You're showing me a protein shake right now.
It's like easiest, nutritious, there you go. It's even worse than it's Soylent. There you go. But I've had in my cabinet for years.
And yesterday I was finally like, eh. So yeah. But yeah, OK. So it's easy on me.
I feel like life has been very kind in making certain choices. Very easy. But one thing I'll just also say for people listening is you can request the first chapter of our Epistemology for Kids book. It's on our education page.
You can see links to, we've also been contracted by the International Fact Checking Network to create an educational curriculum to teach the world's fact checkers, society library methodology. So on our education page, you can get a link to our different educational internships, a link to more information about this IFCN fact checking and working on our developing. And then also right there is the front cover of the book and you can click on a little button. I think we asked, can you contribute to this program and we'll send you the first chapter.
That is wonderful. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you. Oh, one final question.
This is the thing. This is the one that people get. If you were in conversation with your unborn distant descendants, what do you want to say and what do you want to hear? They're in the room with you now.
These people that are like, they did it. They're like, yes, there's like a marble bust of you somewhere in an orbital dock in this place to these people who are like swimming in glorious uncertainty and like handling things at levels of epistemic prowess that you and I can scarcely fathom. What's that conversation? Yeah, I think that I would just invite them to tell me whatever it is that they wanted to say and just listen, I think that would be pretty telling.
I would just say, hey, what's up? And whatever they say, I mean, it would be interesting because I think it would be potentially telling of their values, how they would think about me, what life is like there. And I'd probably appreciate having the opportunity to ask different questions if the conversation was trending towards something a little less interesting. But I think I would just rather just be ridiculously open to whatever it is that they want to say because life would be so different in the distant future.
I have no idea how much it would change. And I would want to risk a question that was totally irrelevant or biasing in some way. One of the things, it's actually relevant that you bring this up because at the society library, we've got this process called descriptive emergent structuring, where the questions that are the primary node in our knowledge graphs are actually the last thing that we create. Sometimes we'll create temporary questions that help us start building out structures, but what end up being the fundamental questions that create the logical parameters by which we organize and fit in knowledge have to be crafted last because questions themselves can be biasing to the logical reasoning itself has to stay in lanes of relevance.
And for all the stuff that we've mapped about climate change in our R&D phase, the last thing that we came up with was the six fundamental questions of climate change where every single claim that we found fit neatly into a knowledge graph parameter of these six questions. So asking question beyond what's up is probably the last thing I would do. And I would just want to hear what it is that they have to say and what they want to tell me. I'm sure they would communicate to you in portment-to.
That may take me a little time to parse. Right on. This has been awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Okay, of course. Thank you. Thanks again so much for listening. I dearly hope that you are doing well amidst all of this profuse and tumbling change.
And if you need any help, reach out at Michael Garfield, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, all the rest. Support the show, like, share, comment, review, all the things. And if you are in Denver this next week, you will find me at the Psychedelic Science Conference where I will be showing art and life painting again with the Tribe 13 Gallery. I will be playing music every day with O'Shawn and Nahn's Tea Temple.
God bless O'Shawn. For those of you who know, this man was one of the most unjust casualties at the drug war. And we're just all so glad to have him back. And I will be working with the crew of the conscious molecule, follow up to DMT, the spirit molecule, to promote and develop their documentary about 5MEO DMT, as well as SIMATIC, Somatics, an extraordinary new light and sound technology.
There's just so much going on. And I'm just very, very, very grateful to be in the hustle with everybody and helping people get their extraordinarily positive and useful and needed projects funded. So thank you. And I'll see you on the other side of that, with the conversation between me and Greg Thomas of Jazz Leadership and Stephanie Leop of Synthesis Media.
Be well and be good ancestors.