Session today …
HeadOn: Closing the Meta-Perspectival Gap w/ Adam Boaz Becker. November 19 @ 12 pm Eastern. RSVP here.
HeadOn is a moonshot project using AI to transform online conflict into connection, rebuilding the internet’s social fabric amid growing division and institutional decline.
Philosopher-builder Adam Boaz Becker, founder of HeadOn, a moonshot project using AI to transform online conflict into connection and rebuild the internet’s social fabric amid growing division and institutional decline, will visit The Stoa to seek guidance from its collective wisdom to help close the “meta-perspectival gap.”
Closing the meta-perspectival gap means learning to see how our viewpoints interact and limit understanding. By recognizing and integrating multiple perspectives, individuals can reduce polarization and foster empathy.
Adam will present this hard problem better than I can, but one way to look at it is through Kegan’s developmental stages:
Even if you disagree with the framing of this model, sense into the truth of the core idea: people have different perspectives on what is and what ought to be, along with different capacities to take on (or “try on”) alternative perspectives.
How do we have good-faith dialogue about contentious topics when this gap exists?
Join us today at 12 p.m. Eastern at The Stoa to help Adam out.
In my inquiry practice (“philosophy” meets life coaching / executive coaching), I find myself working with what the Cosmos Institute calls the “philosopher-builder”: a technologist with a clear moral and philosophical stance who weaves together deep inquiry and practical action.
Not an easy feat!
My role is to inquire with them in a way that helps them hold onto their practical concerns while maintaining philosophical integrity in what they do. This requires a dispositional stance in which one is open to the whole, and where one’s ideas can still be turned upside down.
I find the causal layered analysis useful here:
Basically:
Litany: Surface events, challenges, tasks, etc.
Systemic Causes: The systemic reasons behind the litany.
Worldview: The beliefs shaping the system. < a Worldview Studies is helpful for this!
Myth/Metaphor: Core presuppositional stories, symbols, and archetypes underneath it all.
For common individual support, founders have therapists and coaches (or “thera-coaches”), who help at the litany level with emotional and agentic support, and consultants who address the systemic aspects. But there is really no solid support for the worldview layer, or for sensing into the spirit driving it.
My role is primarily to reside at the worldview layer, which requires being attuned to the litany and the systemic causes beneath it, and, deeper still, to the bottom layer where the spiritual driver of the project resides.
The challenge, at the top litany layer, is that we have “Moloch” waiting for us, Scott Alexander’s metaphor for destructive coordination failures that bend the spirit of a venture, which we can simply describe as misaligned incentives that corrupt: VC pressures for rapid scaling, profit motives resulting in growth-at-any-cost, undue focus on engagement rather than real value, burnout cultures, and a multitude of shortcuts.
At the bottom is Source, the creative generator of the venture, which some may describe as spiritual. When one is in touch with it, internal alignment problems fade away in the deepest sense. It is the “why” beyond words, the impulse that started it all, and words rarely do it justice; putting language to it forces one to sound like a poet.
Moloch’s aim is to remove the founder from Source.
Philosopher-builders and their consultative allies aim to maintain integrity with it.
This requires not only the talent stack of a thera-coach and consultant, but also that of a philosopher and mystic.
While I think a new role is being developed, one that cultivates the diverse talent stack needed to meet the whole, only a fool would think that one person could be a thera-coach–consultant–philosopher–mystic.
Instead, something else is needed.
One philosopher-builder I am currently working with, the highly thoughtful and capable Chappy Asel, co-founder of The AI Collective, has the right idea: community. But not just any community, rather one that generates emergent insights toward our greatest challenges and leads to the full-stack alignment described above.
I always saw the “community” I steward, The Stoa, in this light.
Like the famed Buddhistic saying The next Buddha is the Sangha, we can say The next Sage is The Stoa, or perhaps The first Sage is The Stoa, since the Stoics were skeptical that a sage ever existed.
Put in more consulting terms: Stoa-as-a-Service, for philosopher-builders of the world to sense into what is existentially knotty for them while staying attuned to what matters most.
I like this.
First experiment happens today:
If you’re a philosopher-builder and would like to work with me, feel free to reach out. If the values are aligned, I am happy to work with a handful of founders pro bono who are in their ramen-noodle phase.
thestoa at protonmail dot com
Also starting today @ 7 pm …
More info here, sign up today …
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