Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Intelligent Social Web, published by Valentine on the LessWrong. Epistemic status: Fake Framework When you walk into an improv scene, you usually have no idea what role you’re playing. All you have is some initial prompt — something like: “You three are in a garden. The scene has to involve a stuffed bear somehow. Go!” So now you’re looking to the other people there. Then someone jumps forward and adds to the scene: “Oh, there it is! I’m glad we finally found it!” Now you know a little bit about your character, and about the character of the person who spoke, but not enough to fully define anyone’s role. You can then expand the scene by adding something: “It’s about time! We’re almost late now.” Now you’ve specified more about what’s going on, who you are, and who the other players are. But it’s still the case that none of you knows what’s going on. In fact, if you think you know, you’ll often quickly be proven wrong. Maybe you imagine in that scene you’re an uptight punctual person. And then the third person in the scene says to you, “What do you care, Alex? You’re always late to everything anyway!” Surprise! Now you need to flush who you thought you were from your mind, accept the new frame, and run with it as part of your newly evolving identity. Otherwise the scene sort of crashes. It would go more smoothly if you didn’t hold any preconceptions about who you are or what’s going on. The scene tends to work better if you stay in the present moment and just jump in with the first thing that comes to mind (as long as it’s shaped by what has happened so far). Then the collection of interactions and emerging roles spontaneously guides your behavior, which in turn help guide others’ behavior, all of which recursively defines the “who” and “what” of the scene. Your job as a player isn’t to play a character; it’s to co-create a scene. We can sort of pretend that there’s a “director”: it’s the intelligence that emerges between the players via their interactions. It’s a distributed system that computes relationships and context by guiding each node in its network to act freely within constraints. From this vantage point, the network guides players, and the job of each player is to be guidable but not purely passive (since a passive node is just relaying information rather than aiding in the computation). As long as everyone involved is plugged into and responsive to this network, the scene will usually play out well. I suspect that improv works because we’re doing something a lot like it pretty much all the time. The web of social relationships we’re embedded in helps define our roles as it forms and includes us. And that same web, as the distributed “director” of the “scene”, guides us in what we do. A lot of (but not all) people get a strong hit of this when they go back to visit their family. If you move away and then make new friends and sort of become a new person (!), you might at first think this is just who you are now. But then you visit your parents. and suddenly you feel and act a lot like you did before you moved away. You might even try to hold onto this “new you” with them. and they might respond to what they see as strange behavior by trying to nudge you into acting “normal”: ignoring surprising things you say, changing the topic to something familiar, starting an old fight, etc. In most cases, I don’t think this is malice. It’s just that they need the scene to work. They don’t know how to interact with this “new you”, so they tug on their connection with you to pull you back into a role they recognize. If that fails, then they have to redefine who they are in relation to you — which often (but not always) happens eventually. I’m basically taking as an axiom of this framework that people need the “scene” to work — which is to say, they need to be able to ...