If SP can preserve a society’s state and history, what mechanism allows that society to turn its accumulated history into knowledge that improves future decisions?
i think there’s an important distinction between preserving history and learning from it.
a society could have a perfectly synchronized record of its Events, decisions, interactions, and outcomes, yet still repeat the same institutional mistakes. the record tells us what happened; institutional memory should help the society understand what it learned from what happened.
that raises a few questions for SP:
Could knowledge derived from past outcomes become part of a society’s evolving state?
How should old decisions and their consequences influence future governance or Value Functions without making the system overly dependent on its past?
and perhaps most importantly: who, or what mechanism, determines what the society actually “learned” from its history?
recording history ≠ learning from history
a synchronized state can preserve the past. I’m curious about what turns that past into usable collective intelligence.
This feels like a step 2…how to synthesize all that public data from the Timeline in various ways.
That’s a whole other exciting step, but first I’m just trying to produce the Timeline.
and perhaps most importantly: who, or what mechanism, determines what the society actually “learned” from its history?
I’d say this is the job of Governance, (whatever framework they incorporate to take the data from the past and incorporate it into good decisions), …I’m sure powerful frameworks will arise to automate the process a bit…but there’s going to be a lot of subjectivity about all of this…and ultimately every collective will draw different conclusions/evolution trees.
Before I discover SP I had the same issue. I wanted an algorithmic method to turn “noise into signal”. And this was an interested of mine because I was really into Digital Democracy from a social movement that started in Argentina during the 2016. Those guys wanted to replace the entire Congress with Digital Democracy. Instead of political representatives, everyone should be able to vote and represent themselves.
But the key question was always, how do we manage the input from millions of people into a coherent proposal… that proved to be their impossible challenge. Plus, the couldn’t figure out a decentralized way to do identity…
With LLM’s now being able to ingest massive amounts of data. Solving decentralized identity became my absolute priority. That’s when I found SP that solved decentralized identity.
I believe data sorting is not trivial but it’s certainly an open space to explore. Turning noise into signal. I remember Jamie Joyce was exploring the space. (And looks she is running for Congress in the US. hahaha)
That distinction between producing the Timeline first and synthesizing it later makes sense.
The subjectivity part is especially interesting to me two collectives could share the exact same historical state and still derive completely different lessons from it.
So maybe institutional memory isn’t just about preserving history, but about how Governance interprets that history over time.
Definitely something I’d like to explore further as that second layer develops.
