Cosmos Café: How do we ask worthy questions of one another? [1/16] [Cosmos Development]

Thanks, Geoffrey, for the rant! I was mainly objecting to the official economists, who were caught off guard, in the last melt down, due to their failure to note the irrational exuberance. I think we could start another thread on this one topic. Like you said, on the last call, we have to take care of this planet first.

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Good luck!

A near impossible challenge and this plate of posts is case in point, forks forking in all directions, grabbing noodles, flinging some on the walls…

Reflections:

Looking back at the posts, there is no true solution. @madrush sent four posts to a new thread and tried to redirect us a couple time. Two tangents were based upon welcoming a new comer and a long lost friend, which I personally saw as a great chance to help “retain” the interest of those that would be otherwise overwhelmed with trying to dive into the material here. The post-capitalism postings are an indirect but relevant spin-off, etc., etc.
Nor need there be a solution to the actual quantity of posts. Personally, this site is a safe ground for me to either have deep reflection & a slow moment on a topic, or to have quick chatty responses. Sorry that we tend to hang out at your place and make a mess of your tidy room…but hey, you invited us :wink:

Ideas:

One solution you mentioned would be more hidden help, redirecting and forking frequently. Another possibility is to have someone or thing go back and tag or flag the relevant posts, shortening or redirecting the reading time, but then elements of the other posts would be needed for context. Or something like NYT’s posts in which staff and readers pick favorites.

My favorite:

The “hide details” feature (which is what is hiding this text) could be used, somehow, for the thread, making it aesthetically compartmentalized.

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To be fair, I think the whole discussion still fits under the title “How do we ask worthy questions of one another?” It’s just that the answer brings everything in. And that is itself a form of answer.

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A group needs to balance tasks with relationships.

We each have a variety of outcomes in this space and sticking to a topic can be important to some, not so important to others.

Carolyn strikes me as a task oriented person, even though she is obviously very caring.

I am more into relationships first. I have to balance tasks with relationships as we all do. And when I sense that we are off track I try to use gentle persuasion rather than getting a trained moderator to intervene.

A simple way to re-direct attention is to ask, " Is there a relationship with this conversation and the theme of HOW DO WE ASK WORTHY QUESTIONS?"

I think ( this is a strong statement) that moderating this conversational space will create a sterile, task oriented and boring place. We want to pay attention to what others are paying attention to and maintaining rapport in a space like this is far from simple.

I hope all of us would like to develop rapport skills in working with the complexity of our social worlds but if people dont show up and refuse to speak then I dont know those that do are at fault. I am however perfectly happy to take my marbles and go home. I have lots of tasks that I have neglected.

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Precisely, many did see it coming, just the so-called “experts” missed it, which was my general take-away from John’s post. It’s too bad that the non-experts are simply given no credence, but I suppose that’s part of the price one pays for living in a media-saturated, over-stimulated society.

Maybe you’ve got a touch of that prophet-in-the-wilderness syndrome … it’s not terminal, by the way, but it’s not curable either. :wink: Just about everything we have come to think is “normal” has to change, especially our institutions, but at a certain age, they take on lives of their own which makes them even more difficult to deal with. If we could just find a way to turn that depressive energy that your students often feel (and I know it well) into hope w might be able to get ourselves out of our messes more quickly. Wonder what it would take?

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“Moderating” is not the right word for what needs to happen, since in forum parlance that word normally applies to bad actors, problematic behavior, trolling, etc. That said, this particular forum has some pretty cool ‘moderation’ features, in the ability to split posts, apply tags, and use quotes and hidden text; also organize conversations among different channels and sub-channels. I hope that more of us will learn to use these tools, so that we can better keep track of what’s going on and lower the strain on attention. I still consider myself a beginner when it comes to hosting a forum—but we are learning together.

I feel that this has been a wondefully productive thread, with some significant and promising offshoots. However, one does have to follow the currents and ride the chaos somewhat, to see how all the various sub-threads interconnect, and what they’re pointing to. (It think it may be some kind of elephant :elephant:) The sine qua non for me is engagement, because this gives us something to work with. Without currents of human exchange and felt presence, the project would remain merely abstract and mental.

We’ve made some breakthroughs in the last week—which is exciting to me—but I also see the necessity (which I believe @care_save is standing for) of a consolidation of collective insight, which will require some meta-structure to coordinate various lines of thought and map how they ultimately converge. I do sense this structure emerging in a positive way, which I can trust when I feel that others are seeing and caring about the same things I do.

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I think Carolyn is pointing out a dynamic that may be accurate but that I find the conclusion does not follow. She points out that there is a " cadre of faster and hungrier" who seem to intimidate others who are not so fast. I would label this differently. I would say that those who are more proactive are going to shape the discourse more than those who are passive and rely on someone else to articulate a perspective.

A little history lesson. The Cafe, which is the brainchild of Marco, is bearing some fruit. I showed up initially because I saw Marco all alone on a live Cafe and I felt sorry for him. TJ and I joined him an hour after it started and interrupted his solitary confinement. He had committed himself to the Cafe, even if no one showed up. He puts his money where his mouth is.

I have shown up for all of the Cosmos Cafe experiences since then, because I like the people. Luck has had it, that I have led two of those Cafe events with my own social experiments, Maps of Time, and Maps of Intuition, using Clean Language. So I have used the Cafe as a performance space and I have made my agenda transparent. I am conducting qualitative social research. This is an example of co-sponsorship. This has been for me a labor of love, but it is labor intensive. I have had to overcome enormous resistance to bring forward what I value most in a public forum for I have been ridiculed in public in the past by arm chair critics who do nothing but complain. I know how it feels to be voiceless.

Ed has given an excellent presentation two weeks ago and we are doing a follow up tomorrow. One of my tasks for that event, will be to read his essay and other materials he has offered. This is a task I look forward to performing and I trust that it will enhance the relationships of those who show up for that event. If you cant make it, the video will be there to keep the energy flowing.

So those who are most proactive and are able to balance tasks and relationships are what is needed the most, in my opinion, based upon tons of experience. The energy that is released in a small coherent group is often much more impactful than what happens in a large passive group. I do believe I am not just a volunteer who pitches in on occasion, but an active participant-observer.

That is why I bristle with indignation when I am told that I am not getting with the program. I wish that those who critique this space, have seen the videos or participated actively before they grab the microphone.

Having aired my grievance here, and I hope I have been heard, I am glad to know there are more devices that I can use, but I am worried that we might fragment further with the misuse of them, when ‘political correctness’ rears its ugly head. I deeply resist that the agent of change becomes an external algorithm. This would be the worst kind of social engineering.

These issues I would love to sweep under the rug but I worry that they will resurface soon enough and the clarity and sense of purpose, and that lonely, flickering candle in the windy night, will go out. Luckily, someone will probably have a match and we can re-light it again.

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Agreed. This thread is interesting, a microcosm certainly of what is in my humble opinion the most interesting forum on the 'net. (Maybe I just don’t get out enough… but I don’t think that’s it.)
Our abundance “problem” doesn’t seem to be anything a good index cannot [fix]…no [control]… definitely wrong word… channel… that’s it.

We need more “sub-categories”. (I’m not crazy about that word either…) Not to imply that interdisciplinary things won’t, can’t, or shouldn’t happen of course, but it might be helpful if interested parties could look up and orient posts in topics of general interest (consciousness, cosmology, art, poetry, politics (this one with the usual but unfortunately obligatory ‘play nice or else’ clause (LOL), etc. As long as Marco and other admins retain the ability to put links in where applicable, we keep the free flow of ideas, just slightly easier to find and follow things - I believe Doug called it aesthetic compartmentalization.

Just some thoughts…
(Historically (what else from me?), the time of definitely gathering momentum can be a tricky negotiation…)

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I hear ya, John … but being perhaps one of (if not t-h-e) slowest of the current churners, I appreciate Caroline’s concerns. You’re very correct in noting, though, that past experiences shape very strongly what we perceive to be future options.

Let’s face it … our last cafe was pretty much all over the place, and if don’t find ourselves particularly time-constrained (e.g., in post-session forums online), our cafe sessions tend to get very all over the place. The main participants are, well, pretty all-over-the-place kind of people. Hell, in the couple of times that I was able to spring Marco from solitary confinement, as you so aptly put it, we started with a spontaneous question but never ended up at an answer to that one. One of the nicest features of our cafe sessions is that they aren’t designed. In fact, I don’t really like to refer to them as “sessions”, they’re more like “happenings”, but who around here these days even know what those were?

Other get-togethers, like those surrounding Caroline’s Trumpocalypse series, had a very different dynamic about them, and after watching the recordings, even someone as slow as me was able to put in a thought or two as well. If you figure (and these are merely good old online-experience stats I’m throwing out here) that only about 10% participate while 90% lurk, then there’s a whole lot of potential “out there” for groups of all kinds, because we can only imagine what they are from things they post somewhere on the platform, and I have by no stretch of the imagination be able to explore vast areas of this platform (after all, the cafe churners have been keeping me pretty busy lately :sweat_smile:).

What I’m sort of hoping (and as you know, we curmudgeons try to stay low-key when hope starts hopping around) is that others on the platform will drop in, see that, well, just about anything is possible here and be inspired to do their own thing. I mean Doug has been gently but firmly pushing his human-potential thought experiment, Marco has broached the subject with Zacharay about a writer’s workshop (which has already generated positive response), and if you’re up for heavy doses of reading and focused thrashing around there, are the collective readings that we’ve done and are thinking about doing. There are things happening to be sure, and as far as I’m concerned, more than I can keep up with (comes with old age, probably).

As you have so often reminded us, groups develop their own dynamics, so when there is a big enough need for a slower-paced, more focused kind of group, I feel very certain that it will form. The beauty of the InfiniteConversations platform is that nobody’s ever telling anyone not-to. By the same token, I don’t think anyone’s going to get up and just say, “let’s do …” either.

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Heh, heh, heh … it looks like all the bookworms are crawling out of the woodwork, and I mean that in the most admiring way. (Hey, look at the “logo” from my very first website, “Bookworm’s Study” bookworm).

While it is getting more difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for, I must admit that the search function is not the worst one I’ve ever used. I don’t know if Boolean operators are possible (are they, Marco @madrush?) :face_with_monocle:, but it is one way – at least for now – to get a better handle on everything that’s going on. As you point out, and as become clear to me setting up base pages for specific cafe sessions, the linking feature is also quite helpful.

I think the question you (and certainly @Geoffreyjen_Edwards) are asking, at least in part, is whether there is a way to add keywords to pages (or threads) that would help with the searching as well.

Or let me ask somewhat facetiously whether there’s a bot onboard that is going to take care of the indexing? :smiling_imp:

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I think I will take a leave of absence from this thread and take care of some neglected tasks. I might miss the event tomorrow as I have a lot to do but I will tune into the video when it becomes available. I’m sure there are many creative mix ups starting to happen and I will watch developments from afar and maybe go back to Facebook for awhile. We learn through contrasts.

We who are about to die, salute you!

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LOL. Yeah, definitely Dewey decimal logic going on in this head… :laughing:

But I was thinking more of a “homepage” which lays out the ‘library’ more so than finding threads. Of which there aren’t really all that many here… yet. The library idea is simply organizational; I hope the abundance of thought will only grow.

And then again, I may not be giving the AI librarian the same benefit of the doubt I’m currently giving Sloterdijk, which would be a dictionary definition of ‘unfair’… :rofl:

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The books on the shelves of my study are arranged more or less according to Dewey. (My youngest daughter actually has her books labeled with Dewey numbers … as the Germans say, the apple doesn’ t fall far from the tree. I think it’s just a Virgo Rising thing.)

[And speaking of bots :eye:: I have the InfiniteCoversations Miss-Manners bot alerting me, even as I write, that I should let others join the conversation … tsk, tsk.]

Every once in a while, just to see if I might be missing anything important, and am amazed at just how long the site’s homepage is. I guess you’re suggesting that there could be “homepages” for, say, Reading groups and Cafe sessions, etc.? That might be something to think about, but site management – especially the technical side of it – can get really time-consuming really quickly. In that case, it is something that needs to be thought about hard, that’s for sure.

If one gives neither of them the benefit of the doubt, does that then count as “fair”? :roll_eyes:

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If you don’t make it, I, for one, will miss your ever-present challenges and inputs, but I do certainly understand.

Which I think is one of the primary take-aways from what our friend Stan Tenen is telling us.

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We are definitely going to have to code a @johnbot now. :space_invader: But don’t worry; we won’t make it our librarian. In fact, we could see to it that it has all the madness, death, and fornication it wants. Pity the algorithms…

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I delight in voicing a concern and seeing the discussion that emerges and the quite good ideas that get generated (even if no clear synthesis or shared conclusions emerge yet). I hope to see more of this: surfacing that which we sense and inviting reflection. Furthermore, I want to find ways that people can tangibly try any suggestion they generate for a solution–especially if that happens in a “sandboxed” way so overall functionality doesn’t change until we’ve troubleshot a satisfying solution. For instance: what of the above thread could be gleaned as something we might “test out” and evaluate for how it meets the needs identified (e.g., “keeping organized”). John’s suggestion of “And how does this discussion relate to the theme of [topic sentence]?” is great example of a lightweight technology (in the form of a habit we could adopt [the act of asking of that question]) to help better weave the divergent threads (overall I so appreciate John’s rich toolbox of light yet powerful interventions like this!) A bot or trained participants who can help “organize the beast” is another tack. Another is training ALL our participants with skillful use of this forum and its features, so they can more robustly build their own preferred systems for managing such concerns. (And more no one has yet thought of–or spoken up about–too!)

As Marco echoed, my main worry is on attention strain. The more content and the more divergent the content, the less someone who 1) comes in later, 2) has less time, 3) has equal desire to participate, will be able to orient and influence the conversation, which often manifests in the unspoken sense that they don’t have equal “permission” to take up space or affect influence here. Those who take up space are obviously brilliant and beautiful, and seem to be getting the most out of the Cosmos community thus far indeed! But only to note that our taking up of space is not neutral, and that we have hardly any norms among us yet about how to use the forum (such as for rotating voices, soliciting quiet voices, self-managing our threads)–we only have the raw deployment of the utility: compose a post (whereever and however you wish), and hit the “Reply” button.

The forum, by architecture, constrains and enables certain outcomes, and I’m not even sure that in the forum or through its configuration these concerns can be addressed–perhaps different structural interfaces and utilities will enhance diverse types of participation and better enable distributed participation. Like Ed envisions about the organic forming of “quieter” or differently paced groups, with time and according to need. Even if social norms are openly known and practiced with regard to utilizing the forum, I imagine that some people will never feel comfortable in forum-type conversation as their preferred method, nor that any “general” norms we evolve will suffice for every setting of diverse cohorts on Cosmos. Effectively, those who don’t prefer the forum of “the forum” to communicate, won’t do so–and IF this is our only method of communicating, sense-making and decision-making system-wide, then that’s, obviously, an issue. Beyond implementing agreed-upon constraints on using the forum: more sophisticated collaboration tools than just this forum may, eventually, be needed.

Of course conversations must become divergent before they can reach a rich synthesis in convergence–and this entire experiment is rooted in a mass mutual “sensing” and responding scenario. I appreciate that I am able to voice concerns and noticings/sensings (without any implicit or explicit need for immediate resolution), and the group responds with listening, considering, “chewing”/“digesting” the idea, throwing out some options and perspectives, and…

the “and…” is a feature I do appreciate of the forum, even though it can frustrate me at times. That it can go anywhere next from here, shaped by our participation in the form of original responses. Like being immersed in creative process itself: it’s exhilirating to never know what will happen next.

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I just thought of one option for managing the flow of conversation on the forum that has pertinence to the Key Docs project. So, in the next batch of Key Docs, there will be some prelimary content–the sketchings of a vague outline of what we envision/desire–and there will be a great many “spurs” or “spinoff points,” such as Big Questions, points of further research/inquiry, etc. I’ll use the Key Docs as the example to illustrate what I’m thinking, but I’d be curious to hear your reflections on whether this could be useful in deep philosophical discussions as well…

To tie in with exploring the “questions before assumptions” norm/theme: What if each question in the text is viewed as a discrete forkable point, wherein a link would be created of the question to another forum thread page where responses, answers or reflections about that specific question could be registered? This is kind of like the “hide text” function (within a comment) that Doug brought up–it effectively conceals the “spinoff” on those questions, allowing a party to choose whether to read or respond to those spinoffs in constructing his/her understanding of the main topic. A question, or sub-thread, may receive many responses, or just a few… it can be a way to quickly rank and gauge shared perception (such as a “Do you experience this? Y/N” poll) or as expansive as forming the grounds for a long-term working group (such as “Should we have a policy of leveraging dispersed computing in powering the Cosmos system?” As a result of creating spin-off spaces that maintain the key linkage with their relevant topics, the “main” or “mother” thread’s comments could be reserved for “synthesis” or “meta” comments that try to move progress on the main issue forward. Thus keeping the “channeling” (as TJ said) suitably tight for enabling high productivity and generativity of conversations.

As a cultural pattern it would involve 1) Posing a question, 2) immediately linking the question to a separate discussion space, 3) developing comfort with, and the habit of, navigating from the main thread to sub threads and the sub threads to main thread smoothly while reading/responding to/of a conversation.

Feedback on this as a method for the Key Docs, and for other applications in the forum?

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If we knew, it would be algorithmic, not human. There’s nothing more human, to my mind, than never knowing what will happen next. It’s a small price to pay for the freedom to choose.

Keeping organized when one is in the midst of, if not generating, chaos (a natural consequence of trying to do something new) is always a challenge, but there’s only so much one can do. But, believe me, a whole lot of organization is self-organizing. Water finds its own level, and we don’t need to be digging irrigation ditches or canals in the meantime. Issues, real issues, need to be addressed, but none ever have to be “identified”. Real issues make themselves more than known more quickly that anyone would like.

And my last point, if you will indulge me: no one here is taking up space. The awesome beauty of the virtual world is that it is space-free (aspatial). Anyone who comes in whenever they come in will only find that which is there, no more and no less. Anyone who wants to participate will find their space, their niche, to do so. Anyone who wants to get in the mix will find whatever time they have on their terms to do so. That is the true wonder of virtual spaces in virtual time. What is more, any norms that are to be true guiding and worthwhile norms can never be determined, let alone even identified, before the fact. You can have all the guidelines, rules, and norms you want, but in the end, the people who are doing will determine what is “obeyed” and what is simply ignored.

I think you (and I) want to see a place develop in which everyone who is here feels safe, comfortable, welcome and productive. That’s an ideal. That happens when everyone who is participating makes it so. With all due respect to those on the sidelines, if you’re not doing (and I’m echoing my inner Johnny Davis here), you’re not participating, and if you’re not participating, you may want to rethink your critique of those who are.

It is more than obvious, for anyone who has ever followed a thread or watched a video on this platform, that this is probably one of the safest places that has ever been created in the never-never-land of the internet. Does that mean that problems won’t arise? Hardly. Those who want quieter spaces are free to make them, and any observant participant will have not only seen that this has been encouraged in words, but they will have seen that it is encouraged in deed as well (just watch any Cafe recording to get a feel for it).

And those who will never feel comfortable here, I would surmise that they probably don’t feel comfortable wherever they are. I feel for them, but I’m not going to go out of my way to make sure they know that. If someone can’t read between the lines, I sometimes ask myself why they are here reading at all. Sometimes we just have to let people be people.

I think we’re heading in a good direction. I think we’re working out the kinks as we are going along. But I also think – and so far I’ve seen this practiced here as well – that there is only one rule that’s important (everything else is simply commentary): be a Mensch. Or, stated negatively, “Don’t be an a-hole.” If we observe that one, the rest takes care of itself.

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I like where your thinking is going with this…

But I do think it’s important to treat facilitated conversations differently than open ones. The ‘café’ metaphor suggests an open space with various different tables—some big, some small; some loud, some quiet—but there is no grand orchestration of the dialogue, nor requirement to follow it all. Nor would I expect it to lead (directly) to important decisions for the co-op. But it creates an atmosphere, a culture, which is generative. Chaos here is a feature, not a bug.

A technical process as described above could happen in a dedicated channel—and especially if it is a function of governance, the rules and protocols should be spelled out to be maximally inclusive. I do agree we should map out the various channels, topics, and ways to interact with Cosmos so they can be organized/indexed and presented more cleanly. And then people can simply choose where they want to play.

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thanks for the distinction between facilitated conversations (and convos that need to try to “go somewhere,” heading towards to that more synthesized state) and open conversations (the cafe metaphor). That is a great distinction… I wonder how we might notate that distinction by the channel, topic name or insignia, or other marker? You’re right, the proposal of forking questions is relevant to the former (and could optionally be used by the latter per specific needs), but the latter requires more chaos to thrive.

For some even more futuristic conjecture: Imagine a dial that a user or a cohort could turn, between “MAXIMUM FIDELITY” and “MAXIMUM CHAOS” and would be exposed to information and spaces reflected of their preferences thereof? E.g. those with organizer tendencies might feel best and most fulfilled and productive in high-internal-fidelity and outcome-oriented conversations, whereas those with outrageous play-sparks under their proverbial butts can go buckwild to their throbbing hearts’ content diving into, among, through, up and out of a wild sea of media and personalities connected here. <3

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