@vgr

Many years ago, a senior exec was described to me as “She got put into a box and has worked very hard to get herself out of it.” There’s a deeper concept here that you can generalize to groups and ideas, and it’s an alternative mental model to the Overton window. I call it “Box Theory.” Lemme unpack it. The exec example is a common pattern in organizations big enough and stable enough to sustain true “careers” in the traditional sense (which you could define as: internal promotions and lateral moves outnumber job moves). People are constantly being put into boxes and trying and either succeeding/failing to get themselves out. It’s a less dramatic version of actors being typecast in roles. There’s almost a shadow org chart in people’s heads, made up of these shadow boxes. They have labels like “grinder but no imagination,” or “thinks he is technical but isn’t, and insecure about it.” The labels are rarely purely positive or negative. But they’re typically born of limiting self-perceptions held by the person themselves. Just in more cope-y, rationalizing terms. For example, in the two examples above the individuals might view themselves as “resourceful operator others don’t appreciate enough” and “big-picture tech visionary others don’t listen to enough.” The box is defined by rationalization, cope, and learned helplessness on the inside and a surprisingly accurate consensus crowdsourced psychological profiles on the outside. That’s why it’s so hard to break out of. Generally you need to deliver a fairly dramatic “proof of outside-my-box potential.” This is usually something that rhymes with a wholesome Disney child actor doing a risqué music video at 19 to break out of the wholesome box. It recently struck me that this box metaphor applies to major live ideas active in the world too. Live ideas are just boxes that contain certain event streams plus groups of people who identify strongly with the meanings of those event streams. The event streams have some predictability and the people exhibit certain behaviors consistent with inner and outer psych-profile labels. So the idea can be considered a pseudo-sentient entity/egregore. Major individual public figures are actually “idea boxes” too. Examples: MAGA: Patriotic real Americans (inner), racist, fascist hicks and billionaires (outer) Crypto: Revolutionary societal infrastructure (inner), grifty, scammy tech, solution looking for a problem (outer) Climate: Urgent crisis that needs coordinated global action now (inner), hopeless situation we just have to adapt to (outer) Taylor Swift: ?? (inner), banal music + extreme economic phenomenon (outer) Young ideas, like AI today, or the developing Venezuela situation, may not yet be in a box because the events haven’t become predictable and the people haven’t become profiled yet. These nascent boxes are the majority part of “news.” They are literally “new.” The minority part of “news” is ideas working themselves out of boxes. This is rare and usually negative. For example the idea of “Israel” recently worked itself out of the 75 year old box it was in (“tough besieged country with gray history” perhaps) into a much more open-ended and unlabeled but more negative perception. All real news is “unboxed” in this sense. Everything else is “beat” news that simply reinforces priors about boxed ideas, as Bayesians might say. Unboxed people and ideas are typically establishing new ontological bases for new priors to start accumulating histories. This box model, I find, is much more useful than that of the “Overton window” for analyzing the zeitgeist. There is unboxed stuff at the center dominating attention, surrounded by a bunch of boxed stuff with unique/branded labels. Some of the boxed stuff is creatively trying to break out, but most of it is just predictably whining about unfairly being stuck in a box. Some of the unboxed stuff is getting boxed and marginalized into “beatbox” news. And way out in peripheral vision there are large boxes with generic labels like “crazy science stuff,” or “crackpot conspiracy theories.” The adjacent possible realm of stuff that isn’t quite real yet and may never be. “News” happens when boxed stuff breaks out. New “news” is stuff breaking out from adjacent possible generic boxes for the first time and drawing real attention. Re-new news is stuff breaking out of existing branded boxes and “beat-box” levels of routine, priors-reinforcement attention.

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