The world could be on track.
There are many beautiful and awesome possibilities for people, for our politics and culture, technology and our institutions. Couldn’t these naturally blossom?
And our huge problems, couldn’t we just naturally approach and solve them?
But the world doesn’t seem on track, nor really getting on track. We suffer from a kind of pathological waiting.
Clever and skilled people work hard to improve the world, but seem to struggle to get real traction, and the big problems remain. The most hopeful seem the most impotent, and the most effective have gaping blindspots.
Even cool and well intentioned world improvement communities are not really sure what to do. And when they do, their efforts seem poorly matched to the size of the problem.
We can sense all this about ourselves and we’re still stuck. We’re all knotted up.
We are disoriented. We are going, somehow, against the grain of reality.
But whatever problems we have,
Whatever situation we’re in,
We can respond properly.
Let us strive to grasp our situation, and respond properly.
Imagine how different things would be if world improvers were adept at perceiving their situation.
But of course grasping your situation at a given level can be quite hard. The current challenge is figuring out how to mass produce orientation.
As an individual, what will serve as your orientation engines?
As a culture, some activities are viable the way startups, laboratory research and blogging are culturally viable activities. What viable activities can be our public orientation engines?
Work in progress (June 2022)
My current work is around the idea that individuals can get much more personally oriented by building skill at generating “good takes” on things that matter to them. And I have a working theory I’m calling ‘wholesome impact analysis’ for how to do that.