The art of building compelling worlds is: can you create a world that other people can step into, explore, and find challenges for themselves inside it?
Stare decisis is the legal principle which binds courts to follow precedent. The rationale is not that past courts were wiser, but jurisprudence constante: The legal system must be predictable so that people can implement contracts and behaviors knowing their implications. The purpose of law is not to make the world perfect, but to provide a predictable environment in which people can optimize their own futures. If an extremely powerful entity is choosing good futures on your behalf, that may leave little slack for you to navigate through your own strength. Describing how an AI can avoid stomping your self-determination is a structurally complicated problem. A simple (possibly not best) solution would be the gift of a world that works by improved rules, stable enough that the inhabitants could understand them and optimize their own futures together, but otherwise hands-off. Modern legal systems fail along this dimension; no one can possibly know all the laws, let alone obey them.
Immersion as enchantment and a foundation for action
Concluding, the problem of allocation is something that the smallest and largest institutions in society engage in on a daily basis. Managing the allocation of resources, and more importantly, labour, is fundamental to our existence as a complex civilisation. Successful states and communities are marked by their ability to allocate talent to the places where they’ll be most effective, to achieve buy-in through fairer distribution of resources, and to create virtuous cycles of competence. Unsuccessful states and communities are marked by poor systems of allocation where the few extract and consume the most resources, and where talent is left to languish in poverty and misaligned career paths while the undeserving sit in positions of power. Most conflict boils down to which system of allocation run by a particular group of people predominates over the other, and owing to the harsh existence of reality, this can often be fatal for the loser.
The good news is that we have the agency to build good systems of allocation. If we want to reform our organisations, communities, and societies, or even build new ones, we need to solve this problem because it acts as a constraint on our own scope of action (we need the right people and resources around us to execute on grand ideas), but also because if we can solve the problem of allocation in our sphere of action, we can create a virtuous cycle that continues the system long after we’ve retired or died. Competence breeds competence, and the last thing we want is a short period of success followed by stagnation. It’s good if you can build an institution; it’s better if you can keep it.
The full exploration of this idea happens later in the book under the ‘Enchanting the World’ section. But it requires some introduction here.
We all live in big complex systems called societies and live in slight smaller ones called cities or towns and work in others called companies, and participate in smaller ones called clubs, teams, or groups. You can think of them in concentric circles and in order to affect the big complex systems we must first tackle the small scale. How does one build worlds and why should we?
Personal World Building
The art of building compelling worlds is: can you create a world that other people can step into, explore, and find challenges for themselves inside it?
In fiction this is known as inferred world building. When the author provides enough detail about the various parts of a setting that readers can extrapolate on what is written to come to their own conclusions regarding specific details that weren’t provided. In the real world think of sports everyone knows the rules and so everyone can act in that world whether as players, fans, or commentators who can describe the nuance between the two. Think of any movement over the past few decades, there usually are no formal rules but general goals and trends that rally people together for or against something.
In a more formal sense, Robin Dunbar’s original calculation showed that the maximum human group size was around 150. But a typical size for a hunter-gatherer band would be 30-50, cohesive online groups peak at 50-60, and small task forces may peak in internal cohesiveness around 7. Social cooperation requires an imaginative capacity to see into the future. Relationships of trust and reciprocity work best when people know that the help they give to someone in the present will likely be returned at a future date, when they are in need themselves: Time is written into the social contract, it is woven into the very fabric of mutual aid.
Careening bundles of values do not a society make, must gather with others who share your values to form a tribe. Culture is what happens when behavior matches values.
These small-group levels of organization are increasingly missing. Church membership decreases, and no new cults spring up to take their place. Work, education, legal, and residential design patterns make it difficult for local groups to form and express themselves. Rituals increasingly tend toward the spectacle rather than small group participation. And without rituals to set their boundaries and energize them, small groups cannot thrive.
Generating a World
In fiction, the key task for science fiction and fantasy writers for world building is developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology. Often including the creation of maps, a lore, a flora, a fauna, different peoples their technology, including social customs and, in some cases, an invented language for the world.
Top down or the bottom up, or by a combination of these approaches “outside-in” and “inside-out”
Community generating - We need to learn to communicate with each other, build consensus, coordinate collective action. When you see a bully, don’t fight him 1v1. Don’t be a martyr. Coordinate with others! You aren’t alone. And don’t be quiet.
Community managing - Criticism, argument, discourse, etc inside the group People challenge and spar with each other in a generative(?) way. But, No matter how carefully you articulate your principles, when you meet new people, you’re going to see them violated them in all sorts of unexpected, unforeseen ways. This is because your principles are shaped from your experience, which contains assumptions you aren’t aware of.
Participation as a net positive to the group as a whole such as Visa’s creation of scenes, creating public facing works directed at each other
In fact, each of us maintains an entire city-like social space, with a variety of formal and tacit rules, gatekeeping processes, conversations flows, memory structures