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Unpacking the word “obviously” to make a meta-point

Greetings, subscribers! I got inspired recently and wrote the below, focusing on the topics of virtue (through specific relevant skills) & mechanism design (indirectly: venture, economics) from the slug for this as-yet unused newsletter. The below won’t be for everyone, so if topics like “meta” and “abstraction” and “distributions” sound exciting then please read and enjoy, otherwise hit archive and stay tuned!

I’m aiming to make a charter-cities related post in the next couple weeks with links to some awesome events. I have specific lists for readers in my space, whereas this is meant for more general content like personal growth, a major topic that I’ve been exploring in personal convos in recent years but rarely writing up as it doesn’t fit my existing channels, and I’m excited to start playing with it with y’all! To quickly register for the charter city/zones/network state-specific lists, fill out this quick survey if that’s mainly why you are here.

Back in my livejournal blogging days in the 2000s, I built up an amazing community that included everything from IRL friends, to the guy who connected me to Peter Thiel for seasteading, to one of the top current substack writers on topics relevant to my audience, and really just way too many other awesome people to list. Twitter/FB where I mainly posted in the last decade just haven’t been the same feel, not sure if it’s possible to replicate what I had before in this media environment but I’m down to give it a try & hope that sharing my particular paradigms and thought models across diverse topics again appeals to some fascinating folks.

No plans yet for paid content at this point, but hey if you want to donate, go ahead and do so here, knowing it will result in more free content as (perils of an entrepreneur) I’m for once quite illiquid this year (maybe this is overly personal to some, but hey that’s always been the Patri community vibe!) If you aren’t currently a free subscriber, you can do so below:

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Is it obvious what “obvious” means?

Communication is not obvious. Let’s use a generic example so you can easily relate it to yourself. If you think the person you’re talking to is missing “X” in their analysis of a situation, instead of saying “but what about X?” you could say “obviously also consider X?”. Is it obvious what "obvious means here?

Obviously you meant that X is extremely unlikely but shouldn’t be ignored because this particular X is dangerous in the dark. Obviously not, because you obviously meant that particular X was a silver lining to the dark cloud of the rest of the analysis. But “obviously” it could be either of those, because you were just asking them to “also consider X”, so clearly you were mainly signaling they could freely take any position with any plausible justification (the truth, for example, though that’s surprisingly often not obvious to the interlocutor).

So, obviously, the use of the word obvious is itself not obvious, as it has different meanings in different frames of interpretation. Like most words, which often leads to what describes as “two movies on one screen”.

So, please reread the first 2 paragraphs twice, once with the obvious meaning of saying “obvious” as signaling that the X is clear as crystal, and once with the “obvious” meaning that if you have to point out that something is obvious, it can’t be fully obvious or you wouldn’t have pointed it out. (This point mostly generalizes, reply with your generalizations if you want to compare our thought structures).

And then, to be truly obviously “obvious”, reread one more time, holding both meanings simultaneously so you can internalize both the felt sense of multiple simultaneous interpretations, and the discordance which may result, and maybe even ways to make it more or less discordant to communicate the specific degree that you want. While making use of this tool can be amazing when done deliberately, it is often bad when it happens via happenstance (which it usually does, as few people think this way). The practice in this paragraph & the quiz exercises below are a great way to build this rare but valuable skill & convert it into some mysterious type of Patri connection bonus points:

Quiz-in-postscript: test your understanding of this concept whatever you conceive it to be

Hope that was fun and you learned something, but also the interactive game with all the best rewards are in the following postscripts which test your degree of skill at using this tool:

1. An advanced move would be for the listener to interpret “maybe consider X” as “watch out for Z”. If that makes sense to you, congrats! You are in the advanced track. Reply here to DM me your inference chain for the interpretation if you want to chat on these topics.

2. Hidden secret move: there is one extraneous “point” (interpret this label via non-linear thinking to a hiddenly obvious meaning), hidden as an easter egg in the first paragraph of the post, reply to DM me for some bonus points.

3. Ultra hidden secret move: tell me why this post is like the card game “Mao” and we will become instant besties with those sweet bonus points. “Like, for realz”.

4. Super ultra hidden move: tell me your best guess at the meaning the label “obvious” in this post points to, and if you are close to my intention and we aren’t already good friends and chat buddies we will give that a try, and if we already have the blessing of a friendship I’ll feel closer to you & hang out more, yay!

5. One “obvious” interpretation of this post is I want more chat friends who like to pack and shape extra meaning into their words like me. So for even more bonus points reply with your best guess at the most meta version of the concept this point is trying to point to (or hell even answers to the whole quiz to test for the maximum possible bonus points). This will show me the degree to which I succeeded, highly valuable for future writing, so thanks in advance if you give this a try.

   I’ll be so impressed if you are close to my most meta intended concept for “obvious”, and excited to learn something new if you aren’t, so please guess without any fear of wrongness!!! Three exclamations means I definitely literally really mean it, nothing hidden there, I will be happy to get any considered response.

Ok, maybe I’m weird to use this list partly to find new chat frenz, but hey my old Livejournal community was exactly that so maybe it’s not so weird after all? Maybe it’s even a quite natural thing to do for a guy like me in today’s media environment? I guess we will find out, so hit subscribe if you aren’t on the free list and stay tuned for more posts on different topics. If you are a writer and this feels good for promo/cross-promo then please do that, or if you’d like to coordinate just ping me here with a reply, otherwise:

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Signing off for now, your new Substack author & founder of seasteading, ephemerisle, and Pronomos Capital (& previously an amazing blogging community), Patri Friedman