• 9Oct 2025

[Written August 2022. Published now because editing is hard and sometimes calling it how you see it is too scary to share with everybody at first.]

Framing on this write-up:

“guys I’m really confused, this weird thing keeps happening and it seems really good so I try to make it happen more but like WHAT is even going ON!? …anyway, here’s a decadesworth of trip report”

I’ve recently read an obscure book called Synergetics, which was written in 1976 and is a fascinating book. It talks about a few different modes of human consciousness, which in order of increasing complexity & functionality are Identic Mode, Reactive Mode, Uniordinal Mode, Multiordinal Mode, Synergic Mode.

They describe the Synergic Mode as follows:

There is available to every human mind a state of advanced consciousness and well-being that is exciting, vigorous and incredibly beautiful. It is characterized by an expansion of awareness, by an enhancement of rationality and by a remarkable phenomenon called think-feel synergy. This state is called the synergic mode of function.

The word “synergy” means, literally, “working together.” In medicine, it has long been used to denote the working together of two or more drugs, or of two or more muscles acting about a joint. Applied to the human mind, “synergy” denotes the working together of the enormous variety of functions that comprise the mind, producing a new whole that is greater than the mere sum of its parts.

When the synergic mode turns on, the mind lights up. Perceptions grow more vivid and acute, with “flash-grasp” of complex situations a not infrequent occurrence. Thinking becomes faster, more accurate and remarkably clear. Often thought-trains race along several tracks at once. Actions become more apt and multipurposed, with a high gain-to-effort ratio. Emotional tone ranges from cheerfulness to enthusiasm, with a harmonious blending of thought and emotion that is highly exhilarating. Abilities long dormant or even unsuspected are activated as the wave of synergy surges into the hidden depths of the mind.

I have a couple critiques of the articulation, but I’m very confident that whatever the hell they’re pointing at is something I have experienced numerous times, on my own and with others, and that it’s not just any old flow state.

I am utterly baffled as to what the implications are of this. It’s clearly hugely significant. The potential of this mode of being is what motivates most of the work I do, and is the context for much of my writing.

The Synergetics folks had an interesting and inspiring model for how to “stabilize” your system into this mode, but it’s clearly incomplete or they would have gotten a lot further in the half-century since the book was written (as it is, their scene basically vanished with no trace except this Synergetics book). The scene I was part of in Waterloo 2012-2020 also had a model of what this is and how to stabilize it (using different language) and it was also clearly incomplete or we wouldn’t have experienced the kinds of oscillations and going-in-circles we did (described below).

In mid 2020, I figured out one piece of what we were missing (which I call NNTD, the “non-naive trust dance”—here’s the story of that differentiation) but I have no idea whether that’s approximately an adequate patch or whether there’s another missing piece—or a dozen!

One thing that makes it hard to investigate is that I don’t have access to what was working in Waterloo. I’ve got a lot of pieces but I’m pretty sure there are still wisdoms I’m missing, and I’m working on finding and integrating those.

In this post, I intend to ramble about what I know and don’t know about this Synergic Mode, as an experience I’ve had. I’m basically thinking out loud here. I’m saying the obvious (including just the obvious unknowns from my vantage point).

This is a long post, structured as follows:

• Backstory

• My introduction to group synergy (the story of my 20s)

• Synergy via… compartmentalization?? (a sketch of a model of how we were doing unsustainable synergy)

• Breaking the cycle (reflections on how I could tell we were confused and how I got out)

• How do I know if I’m experiencing the synergic mode? (four aspects I’ve observed)

• Perfection & post-regret

• Exaptation & the upward spiral

• Talkaboutability

• Knowing looks

• Other open questions & provisional answers

• How to play upward spiral games without being exploitable by downward spiral ones?

• In what sense was the thing real if it wasn’t integrated? In what sense was it not a kind of naive collaborative mindset?

• What’s the relationship between synergic mode as a momentary group/solo experience, and collaborative culture as an ongoing stable attractor?

• Have I been conflating “sense of we” and synergy?

• Why am I not discouraged and disillusioned following the NNTD insight in 2020?

• Closing thoughts, 2025

Backstory

My introduction to group synergy

In mid-2012, I met some people in Waterloo who were on a mission to create a new kind of culture they described as “collaborative”, a word which also means “working together”. I was immediately very into it, and joined the weekly meetings of 8-15 people. The meetings would often get off to a slow and even tedious start, but then most weeks, by about 90 minutes into the 2h meeting, we had cultivated some collective space that matches the description of the synergic mode above—obviously very compelling! We would often connect in smaller groups for an hour or two after the meetings, still feeling that glow and openness.

The group had observed that it was fairly straightforward to get people into this new mode in the context of a weekend event (by the time I got involved, they’d run many such events) so they were turning their attention to a deeper question was “how do we get people embodying this other mode ongoingly (self-stabilizingly, antifragile-ly), as a self-aware collaborative culture?” It turned out this was way harder than the temporary version.

In mid-2013, I moved into the house where people were aiming to embody this new kind of culture 24/7, where I lived until I moved out in 2020. In mid-2016, the house shifted from being {people who had other major projects but insofar as they lived together were seeking to do so with the new kind of culture}, to being a place where all 5-6 of the people living there had the cultural platform shift as their main project. This was partially at my instigation, as I was seeing ways in which our work might be critical for existential risk and/or AI alignment and wanted us to step up our game, although there were other convergent factors at that time. We started having more like daily meetings and many other spontaneous conversations, started recording almost all of our conversations, and while we had more total hours spent in some sort of synergic flow each week, we also had a lot more challenges and active oscillation.

Throughout most of this time, I primarily experienced this kind of synergy in the context of conversation, with the caveat that “conversation” is quite loose, and includes:

• the movements of the kitchen dance, of 5 cooks simultaneously using a narrow kitchen without literally or figuratively stepping on each others’ toes
• a sense I might have while writing or listening to a recording, of participating in the “larger conversation” of a group or maybe even the cosmos

Or maybe I did experience versions of it on my own, but didn’t see it as the same thing? It’s hard to say. Note that while the Synergetics book was on our shelves, we mostly weren’t using the term “synergic flow” at the time. We talked of “co-flow” and “collaborative mindset” and “awakened conversation” and many other terms. I’m using the term in this post as a way to loosen my thinking about it by shifting frames.

In any case: at the time, unless I could bring my solo flow into flowing contact with group flow, I assumed it was somehow not as real as the group flow. I now think that there’s a hint of truth to that, but it’s the same non-realness as the fact that the group flow didn’t persist either. That is, in both cases the flow was contingent on some perspective being excluded, and when that perspective came in contact with the flow it would disrupt it.

Wtf was going on there?

Synergy via… compartmentalization??

Over the past few years, I’ve started to try to make sense of the magic and limitations of what was happening in Waterloo. Here’s a sketch of one of the models I’ve come up with to understand it. The model in my head is definitely oversimplified, and surely missing key elements, and the one written below is only a rough approximation of that. With that disclaimer, here’s what I think might have been going on:

• one way to define the synergic mode is that everything that wants to be talked about can be talked about effectively—it can be welcomed, and held, and integrated with everything else into the upward spiral

• (and, magically, this somehow happens with an astonishingly satisfying degree of sensitive balance of constraints and tensions and opportunity costs, such that each thing gets the time and attention it needs, given the time and attention that’s available)

• if in ordinary society, 30% of what’s present can be noticed and talked about (this might be generous) we had created an environment where something like 90% could, or 95%—even when we weren’t in total flow together, few things were off the table, from the profane to the mundane, the systematic and the sacred

• the experience of revealing certain thoughts and having those welcomed regularly created profound transformational experiences for newcomers and longtime participants

• however we were aiming for full synergy together, so we were holding a standard of 100% talkaboutability

• we sometimes said this explicitly, but I want to be clear that ostensibly we weren’t treating “be able to talk about everything” as the thing to aim for directly today—it was supposed to be an emergent property of this mode shift. in a blog post in 2015, I specifically noted our culture’s approach to transparency/openness as an example of a lag measure.

• to some extent though, it seems to me now that our actions/intents may not have matched that model—that we were trying to make everything talkaboutable immediately, and had trouble accepting when it wasn’t.

• a better aim would have been something more like “include/welcome everything”, which both unfixates on talking (although the meaning-making dimension is/was very central!) and also offers something more on the quality of aboutness, not just “it’s on the table”

• as of the point when there were some conflicts in the group, that we were struggling to see eye to eye on or even acknowledge spaciously, there were certain things we couldn’t talk about, that may have represented differences in values that we weren’t prepared to grapple with

• we were aiming to experience synergic flow in basically every conversation (or even tiny interactions in the kitchen).

• this is an ambitious aim but if it sounds impossible or stupid then you’re thinking of something else— it’s not about doing any particular thing or spending any particular amount of time but about a way of orienting to the world and each other

• this way of orienting is compatible with virtually any aim or intention, at least on some level of abstraction

• insofar as “culture” is an appropriate thing to call this, embodying it 24/7 is an entirely appropriate measurement, since in general people are embodying their cultures constantly

• one analogy would be “speak in French in every conversation” although this breaks down for reasons I’ll discuss later.

• a slightly better one might be that it’s totally possible for someone to inhabit their ethics and/or religious faith in every conversation

• we had a variety of experiences when we would come into conversation

• sometimes we basically started in flow, which was hugely encouraging

• other times we were able to get there pretty smoothly

• a lot of the time it was an intense high-pressure challenge, where the stakes felt high about whether we experienced it. we were emotionally invested in that in a way I now see as counterproductive

• for myself, and some others, when we encountered the high-pressure situation, the only way some of us knew how to reach that standard of 100% talkaboutability today was to compartmentalize away the things we felt we couldn’t talk about

• having done so, we *genuinely felt like everything was talkaboutable, *because anything that wasn’t was no longer in awareness

• this created powerful group flow… until something happened (minutes/hours/days/weeks later) that reactivated something that had been pushed away

• and then this old concern would reappear and we would again fail to integrate it

Here’s a simple story to illustrate:

I come into the kitchen to get a piece of chocolate, and I want to continue working on something in my room. I may be in a solo flow state, or I may be feeling frustrated or something, but in either case in that moment my awareness is collapsed and I’m fixated on getting my snack, so I sort of brush past someone without regard to their experience. Then they get my attention and point out that I wasn’t tracking them—unusual feedback to give in most contexts, but not that weird for our scene.

Ideally at this point I would expand my awareness to see their perspective, and I would probably just acknowledge that I hadn’t been tracking them then indicate spaciously that I wanted to return to my work and was happy to debrief further later if they wanted. And this happened sometimes.

But in practice I would often stay in a narrowed state and become defensive of my focus, and then increasingly frustrated as I felt like my intent to work was being thwarted. Because of the high-stakesness of getting into flow together, I would negate my other intention. Then, somehow I would shift my awareness onto group flow, and somehow in the process I would disconnect from that intention altogether, and from whatever parts were frustrated about the whole experience, and then I’d experience a state of perfection and post-regret (more on this below) that would cause me to feel like of course the way that everything had gone was for the best because it had fed into the present learning and flow. But we’d neglect to go back and recognize and honor the various parts that had gotten sidelined in the process—by contrast, they were sort of treated as an obstacle that had finally been overcome! So when the incident would happen again, those same parts would grasp even harder to fight away the pressure that they—accurately—anticipated would undermine them.

What I would now do, with my new understandings, if I found myself in the role of the other (untracked) person in the kitchen would be to say “hey, you seem to be getting agitated. are you needing to shift gears and go back to what you were doing? we don’t have to talk about this right now.” This would have helped welcome those other parts into synergic flow. Instead our awareness collapsed around solving the social tension now active. In general, inviting the person themselves to ungrasp by holding a sense of larger spaciousness AND speaking to whatever the graspiness is trying to care for. Then I’d be speaking FROM a larger co-consciousness that holds my cares and theirs, and inviting the other person not to drop the thing they’re grasping but to hold it within a larger space of awareness. Otherwise it’s very easy to interpret the invitation to expand as an invitation to drop the thing, which functionally it may be, so this is appropriately kind of threatening to the part that’s holding it.

“the revolution begins at the kitchen sink”

Breaking the cycle

In retrospect, it strikes me as odd that we didn’t manage to get outside of this cycle for so many years. In some sense it’s a natural part of the learning process, and in another sense it was a sign something wasn’t working. I feel like we got each of these senses backwards:

• day by day and week by week, we got frustrated that people weren’t staying in synergic flow, and put pressure on ourselves and each other to try harder or commit more (which wasn’t respecting that falling out of synergic flow is part of learning where the stuck points still are, and that the pressure to change made guarded parts feel unwelcome, which made them more guarded)
• month by month and year by year, we didn’t recognize that while we were finding deeper flow and new insights about the nature of that flow, we were also kind of going in circles and failing to make progress on our actual bottleneck, like a business losing money manufacturing ever more widgets while failing to get sales for the ones already sitting in the warehouse

I say “we”, here, but a part of me wants some credit: those descriptions match what we were doing as a collective, but actually over the years one of the very parts of me that was a major dissenting voice—and thus a source of these oscillations—was trying to raise exactly those two points. And since we didn’t know how to welcome and listen to that voice (and the voice didn’t know how to express itself in a way that we could have listened to) the cycle continued and expressed itself in relation to that.

Having said all that, I can describe what happened for me in mid-2020 in a new way: I learned how to integrate that dissenting perspective with the perspective from which we were doing something obviously brilliant and sane and perfect. I started trying to convey that to people involved in the project, and made a very tiny but encouraging amount of headway before I moved out at the end of the year (more on that story in my 2020 yearly review). Perhaps “tiny but encouraging” is misleading, actually—the tininess of the headway was part of what was encouraging. Part of my whole realization was that bringing certain perspectives into dialogue with each other can be really difficult, and if you’ve been trying and failing for years, then an apparent immediate huge success is far more likely to be more compartmentalization, not real progress.

Since moving out, I’ve mostly been taking some space from that scene, but many of my blog posts have been aimed in part at conveying my new understandings to anyone involved who’s interested. That’s been a bit of a puzzle to do on my public blog though since most people don’t have a readily-available concept of “synergic mode” or “collaborative mindset” which I can just then say things about. I think that puzzle has served me over the last few years as a creating writing constraint (eg in this post I borrow Dave Chapman’s “complete stance” instead) but when I wrote the Non-Naive Trust Dance Q&A earlier in August I started to realize that **if I want to really talk about what the NNTD is good for, I need to talk about the synergic mode, whatever I decide to call it. **Because while it has insights that can be helpful for almost anybody navigating challenges in their relationships or communications, the original problem it was conceived of to solve is not a common or quotidian problem, but one that only shows up for a group that’s already deep in the synergic magic and encountering these compartmentalization issues.

When I first started blogging about this stuff—when I was first living at the culture incubator house—I danced around the edges of this magic, afraid that people wouldn’t understand and they’d write it off (particularly my rationalist friends) so I was quite indirect and talked around the very phenomenon at the center of my work. What changed:

1. it’s not as weird as it used to be

• lots of my [in some cases formerly-] rationalist friends are increasingly into this stuff
• I have lots of friends outside of the rationality meta-scene who are also into this

1. I’m more confident there’s something here and am prepared to stand for it even when people don’t get it
2. I feel like I understand the limits of my own understanding better, and thus I can write a post titled “wtf is this thing” rather than needing to seem like I know what I’m talking about

In some ways, this is a microcosm of how increased self-trust makes it easier for people to allow each other to have their own perspectives. Previously, I would somewhat doubt myself if someone doubted me, so I’d feel a need to convince them or dismiss them. Now I have more capacity to go,* “Oh, they can’t trust what I’m saying about group flow? Well, okay, of course they can’t, given everything they’ve experienced. That doesn’t mean my experiences aren’t real (though it may mean I’ve overgeneralized something!)”*

Having said that, I did recently notice that I’ve been muting some voices that have doubt about whether this whole synergy project is viable, and so I’m gently turning towards those as well.

And perhaps that’s making it easier to write this post where I boggle at the whole thing.

How do I know if I’m experiencing the synergic mode?

I can’t speak for you, and I don’t intend to—this question is not about advice but about revealing my experience, though perhaps it’ll help others identify their experiences of this mode as well. Bear in mind also that I’m surely conflating things and perhaps there’s something that would well be called “the synergic mode” that doesn’t have one or more of the elements below.

One which note, one initial caveat is that there’s a lot of connection between flow and synergy, and I suspect sometimes people and groups get into a kind of synergic state that is domain-limited, eg a sports team or a work brainstorm or a Navy SEAL squad. These local synergies would involve *intentional *ignoring of irrelevant factors—the players aren’t thinking about their marital conflicts or unpaid bills or side-hustle ideas while they’re on the field, etc, and that is as it should be. That’s necessary and appropriate.

These flow states or domain-limited synergies are valuable, and will locally have some of the elements below, but they’re different from the thing I’m aiming for which is a sort of vast synergy where people are able to consider at minimum their entire lives and all of the choices they might make individually and with their families & teams… upwards to considering the entire planet and orienting towards bootstrapping more global synergy. And even when I’ve had some aspects of my experience compartmentalized off, I’ve usually experienced a kind of vastness in relation to everything else internal and external. Everything I am aware of is integrated smoothly.

Perfection & post-regret

The strongest clearest most unmistakable element for me so far has been a vast feeling of perfect imperfection; a deep acceptance of things as they are, and a sense that all beautiful futures we can reach from here pass through this moment. There are a few ways I could point at this. My transcending regrets, problems, and mistakes post is one such attempt. One of the principles of the scene in Waterloo was to “see everything that happens here as part of a learning experience” and that’s a huge part of it (and dovetails with what the Synergetics book says about how one way to convert dysergy to synergy is to relate to the dysergy as a source of information to learn from). Easier said than done! NNTD helps.

I’ve also entered into naive versions of this feeling, because as I mentioned above the only way to let go of regret was to diminish the thing that I was frustrated with. My new stance on this embraces a paradox: it can be simultaneously the case that since the beginning of the universe not a single thing has ever gone wrong or will ever go wrong, and also I kinda fucked up yesterday. That somehow not a single person has ever done anything wrong, and yet also something I did wronged you. Being able to see both of those is even more synergic than pure perfection.

Exaptation & the upward spiral

This is closely linked with perfection, but worth separating out, in part because one form of perfection would sort of be a kind of naive eternalistic surrender that says “everything is already perfect, it’ll just take care of itself” and while this is in some sense true, it takes care of itself in large part via our creativity, intention, and taste. And from the vantage point of the synergic mode, nothing is ever wasted. Nothing is lost. There are no dead ends. Everything is fodder for learning.

(In some other sense, waste obviously exists, to be clear. There’s a naive version of this too.)

There’s a perception of the upward spiral of conscious evolution adapting everything it can get its hands on in service of everything it cares about. Currently its hands are very small, since we don’t have many people or groups experiencing domain-general synergy consistently. Though everything that’s happening now will also not be wasted!

Jordan Hall and I talk about the learning mindset & exaptation here. “The learning mindset” is approximately another name for the synergic mode.

Talkaboutability

Interpersonal synergy, as I’ve said, involves a sense of being able to talk about anything that needs or wants to be talked about. It also involves effective filtering—not engaging the group’s consciousness with that which doesn’t need to be brought to collective attention—but this can be subtle, to some extent, as it’s not always remotely obvious in advance which individual concerns may be worth centering. But when synergy is happening, calibration around those very questions is smooth and satisfying and direct:

• “I didn’t need to know that btw”

• ↳ “ah true, you didn’t”

• or

• ↳ “no actually you did, because I needed to make sure xyz”

• “Btw you could have just done that, without asking me first”

• ↳ “cool, I wasn’t actually sure but I know that now”

• or

• ↳ “oh, huh, I notice I don’t actually trust that still, quite, but I’ll factor that in…”

…instead of janky and defensive and tangled:

• “I didn’t need to know that btw”

• ↳ “well I thought—”

• “You could have just done that, without asking me first”

• ↳ “are you kidding? I know you’d be mad if you weren’t consulted”

(These examples could be improved and fleshed out. I could even have a whole piece about how at each moment in a conversation there’s an opportunity to turn towards! That would be a very cool piece.)

When we refer to talking about things, one easy confusion is that just because things are brought up and received, that they’re talkaboutable. But unless they can be talked about in such a way that mutually satisfying understanding and clarity is achieved, it doesn’t really amount to much. Not all questions will be answered on a given day, for lots of reasons, but overall if things are working then there won’t be a build-up of frustration of an active experience of something not making sense to someone. And ideally in such a case there’s at least meta-level clarity and samepagedness around the reality that we’re still not seeing things together. And space for boundaries or perceptions that can’t yet verbalize themselves.

One vital implication of this is that it becomes dramatically more workable to “give feedback”, ie to share with people your experiences of interacting with them, and have that usefully received. Outside of synergic flows, it’s very common for such conversations to veer into shame & defensiveness.

However, if the feedback is trying to point at some blindspot or whatever that has been compartmentalized out of the synergic welcoming, then this will produce jangles and all sorts of messes… and either the group loses its synergy or it ejects the person or viewpoint that seems to be disturbing its synergy. My NNTD framework was largely created to deal with this precise issue.

Knowing looks

This one without the above doesn’t mean much, but it’s an interesting clue. The one main rationale I have for there being something intrinsic here is something like… since synergic mode has wider awareness and tracking than other ways of being, in a group of people at various levels, people who are in more expanded modes are more likely to be able to unfixate from the central point of shared attention and notice what else is happening, including tracking each others’ attention.

I recently had an experience of mutual recognition of synergy at an event I was at, where in a larger group convo me and another participant co-created a kind of flow that had the perfection & exaptation vibes and substantial talkaboutability, and I could tell that he was also feeling those vibes by a few glances, some comments he made, and by the way he was nudging the conversation.

But note that just because two people are on a similar wavelength, doesn’t mean they share any particular frames or assumptions about the implications of this. Three people drink ayahuasca and have a profound insight about peace that looks similar on a brain scan, but…

• one of them sees the Virgin Mary and becomes a devout Catholic
• the second finally releases their adolescent terror of being sent to hell for caring about what they can tell for themselves and relaxes into the view of scientific materialism atheism that has been their main worldview for decades…
• and the third experiences a chakra unblocking and gets serious about yoga and meditation, without any sense of belief or faith being relevant at all.

Not also that just because someone is currently in synergic mode doesn’t tell you where they’ll be in an hour or a week. So while there is a common inclination to trust someone based on such a knowing look, it’s naive to expand that trust very far without getting more of a sense of how someone is over time. We are vast; we contain multitudes; we don’t step in the same river twice.

Other open questions and provisional answers

How to play upward spiral games without being exploitable by downward spiral ones?

An animating question of my explorations, then and now, is: is there a way of relating that:

1. creates win-win dynamics with others who know how to create win-win dynamics
2. but isn’t extra exploitable by people (or corporations) who are engaged in coercive strategies
3. and meanwhile is able to do some amount of conveying to other people how to learn that way of relating, without getting rejected as a rather suspicious invitation into the naive collaborative mode that would then be exploitable?

And as far as I can tell, the answer to this question is yes. We were doing it at times to some degree in Waterloo—a proof of concept perhaps kind of like the Wright Brothers’ first very-short flight. But somehow, again with the compartmentalization! Like it was externally functional (sometimes) but not coming from an integrated place. I can’t speak for others as much as myself, but at least for some of us it was as if we had found an internal plurality vote in favor of “collaborative”, and attempted to shut down any parts of ourselves that refused to participate.

To be clear: it’s good that we kept thieves and squatters out. On an interpersonal level, having a container where people can prototype a new weird mode of culture (without being dominated by people who aren’t bought in) is a vital element. An organism that will eventually be autonomous still starts in an eggshell or a womb. But it turns out that you can’t keep parts of yourself out—they reassert themselves vehemently.

They reassert themselves because they have some sort of need or want that isn’t getting satisfied, and the need or want isn’t getting satisfied because that part isn’t getting incorporated into the overall collaborative flow, it’s getting repressed. Sometimes we had an approach of “revealing coercive patterns”, and when this worked it worked well, because it was sort of like another more collaborative part inviting the coercive part into the room and saying “hey, what do you need? let’s look at it.” Sometimes we didn’t know how to do this, and instead we had an approach of “choosing the collaborative mindset instead of the coercive” or trying to “starve the coercive pattern”, and these sometimes seemed to work in the short-term but we kept getting oscillations and rebounds.

It turns out that this phenomenon is well-explained by the emotional coherence framework, which says that any time you try to replace a neurotic strategy with some new habit, it’s inevitably effortful and doesn’t stick. They call this approach “counteractive”, and what’s bizarre is that it’s functionally basically equivalent to the coercive game. So we were trying to coerce ourselves to be collaborative? It’s frankly surprising that this worked as well as it did. It’s also not that simple—we were aware of that as a common failure mode that showed up in newcomers trying to learn the new mindset (“oh shit, I said should. I shouldn’t say should. wait 😅” or more disturbingly, participants pressuring friends or lovers to also “embody the new mindset”)

**Part of what made the Waterloo results impressive or at least noteworthy is the sense in which the system was both profoundly open to collaboration when that seemed available and remarkably unable to be manipulated by that openness. **However, the mechanism of remaining un-manipulable involved refusing to empathize or perspective-take whatsoever with any perspective that seemed coercive, which created a strong bifurcation: two attractors. And oscillations theretwixt.

Oh! If it’s all about perspective-taking, the sense of threat (and fear of corruption) in relation to coercive patterns made people unwilling to also empathize with a perspective tagged as coercive, whether internal or interpersonal!! Hence the breakdown. And the belief/frame was basically that it was just impossible to do so, ish (which let people off the hook from trying, and implied the only answer was some form of rejecting).

Ah and then yeah, the core insight/innovation of the NNTD was essentially to say “no, coercive perspectives can be safely taken as well by reframing them as ‘I can’t trust that X [therefore I can’t safely orient towards a win-win solution with you] [therefore I must pursue another way to get this need met that guards itself from you and potentially even tries to control you]’”. This is still difficult, and requires skillful differentiation to recognize that somebody else not trusting you shouldn’t simply override your trust in yourself, but should somehow still be treated as genuine information not just about them but about you. (as Kipling put it—to “trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too”).

There’s a Q here which is like “what does the “I can’t trust that X” framing offer above and beyond a general coherence empathy frame?” My first thought is not actually much, but that can’t be right since I’ve seen it be a really useful scaffold.

Ah!! One thing “distrust” does is it hoists ownership of a part’s perspective up to the whole of the person. Coherence empathy requires saying “part of me thinks/says/sees X” It’s not true per se that “I think X” because other parts of me might think not-X. But it is true that I can’t trust that not-X, since some part of me doesn’t trust that. And I may be able to resolve that via internal dialogue, if I get clear enough about what the thing is and what it means to me and where it comes from. But I also might not!

To spell it out a little further: trust has “AND” nature. I take this to be true by definition at this point, but I want to be clear that my definition was created to match most peoples’ intuitions: if I trust Bob and you don’t trust Bob, would we say “we trust Bob”? Of course not. A little less obviously, it’s actually even stronger than AND, but instead requires common knowledge: if I trust Bob and you trust Bob, but I don’t trust that you trust Bob… or we each trust Bob but you don’t trust that I trust that you trust Bob, then we still don’t say “we trust Bob”. And it doesn’t have to be a perfect infinite regress, but it has to be sufficiently accounted for.

It’s a bit complex though, like, is it about the presence of trust or the absence of distrust? Because there can also simply be a kind of neutrality, a lack of perceived relevance. The subsystems in me that track whether my automatic debits are set up properly simply do not have any involvement in the question of whether a stranger on the street is safe to ask for help or not.

In a sense, “I can’t trust that X” is saying “according to my organism’s personal skin-in-the-game, it’s not safe to treat X as true” (where again “safe” isn’t necessarily about physical safety from violence, but about one’s ability to make sense of things, manage slack, etc.). This is thus a MUCH stronger type of statement than “I don’t think X” or “I don’t believe X”. And much more in touch with gnosis / “I can tell for myself”.

[COMMENT 2025: my recent reading of Stafford Beer and thinking about fractal coalitions has me wanting to note that at the point when a seriously new entity (not just a plurality of entities) has emerged, then it can trust things the parts distrust, at least again as far as our intuitions are concerned. eg insofar as corporations trust, they can kind of trust things that many of their employees distrust. But then, for most corporations of which this is true, I would hazard that the employees do not entirely trust the corporation!]

In what sense was the thing real if it wasn’t integrated? In what sense was it not a kind of naive collaborative mindset?

I guess I would say that it was in some ways naive, but it was naively defensive rather than naively vulnerable, and so in that sense was semi-stable and non-exploitable (and has now persisted for decades!). People would detect coercive patterns and guard against them and not try to collaborate with them, and then would detect collaborative openness and open to it and collaborate with it.

However, while guarding against coercive patterns is a huge improvement over to succumbing to manipulation from them, it’s not adequate to integrate them. To integrate something, it must somehow be welcomed (while still not being manipulated by it). This stance is different from guarding! And this is the thing that I’ve now in principle solved (though I’m still learning how to actually do it in all situations).

See thinking that rejects other thinking for some thoughts on this.

What’s the relationship between synergic mode as a momentary group/solo experience, and collaborative culture as an ongoing stable attractor?

In my thinking, particularly years ago, I’ve sometimes equivocated between “collaborative mindset” as a thing that one could pop in and out of near-instantaneously in either direction, and a “collaborative culture” as a thing that had to be gradually achieved over years of stabilizing something (and, in order to exist at larger-than-Dunbar scales, would require structural changes to society). The latter also goes by names like Game B.

In Waterloo, we talked about how we weren’t yet in collaborative culture, we were in a “learning community” oriented towards collaborative culture. And we recognized that learning communities have yet different system dynamics than either the old way or the new way. But we didn’t really map out the implications of this, I don’t think.

My rough sense is that “collaborative culture”, on a given scale, is pretty similar to stabilized synergic mode. Like when I tap my sense of these things…

• if a bunch of people who were all consistently experiencing synergic mode were together, collaborative culture would emerge as a result
• if someone were thoroughly enculturated into a collaborative culture (as an immigrant or because they grew up in it) they would regularly be in synergic mode (this one is less obvious, and I think would be particularly non-obvious to people coming to “Game B” from an angle that’s more about society-scale incentives and less about psychotechnologies and consciousness)

I have the sense that a stable collaborative culture of more than 30 or so people could onboard new people remarkably quickly, as navigating the trust-field would be made dramatically easier via commonalities between previous trust-navigations that the group was already familiar with. There would still be limits to how fast people could learn it though, without it turning into naive trust (and demands for naive trust) on the edges. I talk about how I imagine this going in How we get there.

Have I been conflating “sense of we” and synergy?

Because I’ve been coming at the synergy thing from a group flow perspective, I recently realized that perhaps I’ve been kind of conflating “sense of we” and synergy. But it seems really obvious on reflection that if an individual can be in a pretty functional state with plenty of self-hood and little synergy, then so can a group. Although an individual has more (and different stuff) holding it together than a group does; in some sense a group without at least a bit of synergy doesn’t have any will or agency at all.

One aspect of “we-ness” would be the extent to which someone feels like they have to check in with someone else (virtually or enactually) before making a particular decision, because it needs to be made jointly or on behalf of the whole. And then synergy is more the question of whether that checking in feels good (also whether people trust that it’ll reliably feel good or whether someone feels anxious about checking in because they fear the conversation breaking down, and they wish they felt more sense of autonomy or something).

And this highlights that you could still have strong collaborative we-ness in the context of one person making a unilateral move on behalf of both people. Quoth @nosilverv:

If you’re synced then “what you want” is what you both want. Different wants, that need explicit negotiation, are not the cause of the problem but a symptom of the problem: lack of sync

And no explicit deliberation isn’t the only way to get sync. Literally do things together, let your bodies communicate, the bandwidth is so much higher

I’d say that lack of sync is an issue internally for people too, and is likewise characterized by explicit inner negotiation rather than a sense of high-bandwidth. Although you can also have sync where one part/system is completely in charge but the other is tracking it carefully and aligning (whether by force or by willing followership such as a supporting musician) and this has some of the qualities of sync but not necessarily the omnidirectional synergy?

This is an area where I’m actively confused; I expect there to be an untwisting here that will clarify things but I haven’t found it yet.

Part of my confusion is the question of what it even means to cultivate the synergic mode or the collaborative mindset as a solo endeavour. That’s actually more where the Synergetics folks started, but since I’m coming at the whole thing from a group perspective and most of my experiences have been in groups, I feel like I’m still learning what the solo feedback loop looks like. That’s actually part of why as of this writing I’m alone in a cabin in southeast asia—I’m taking some time to get a better sense of how a 1-person system works.

[UPDATE 2025: that was a good experiment but the main result was simply that I wasn’t ready to enter into a 1-person synergic attractor. I had a good time and got stuff done, but I failed to even manage to stay oriented to attempting to do this, let alone achieve it.] [OTHER UPDATE 2025: Also I feel less confused about this now than I did in 2022! Read The Parable of the Canoe Sandwich for some developments on these ideas.]

Why am I not discouraged and disillusioned following the NNTD insight in 2020?

It hasn’t ever really occurred to me to be discouraged by this, but a couple of friends have asked me about this, so it seemed like a question worth exploring.

Another way to frame it would be “insofar as we were in some sense kinda faking it in Waterloo, how do I know there’s a real thing that is viable?”

…and to be fair, I don’t actually know how viable it is!

It’s worth noting though that actually rather than being discouraged, I was stoked following the NNTD insight, and broadly have continued to be. It had the immediate feeling of a scientific breakthrough—an answer to a question I’d been asking for years, that would pragmatically unlock a bunch of new possibilities. It did cause me to realize that in some sense we were further off than I thought, but simultaneously it made me more confident that we could in fact ever get there (subject to xrisk etc) and gave me a sense of what the path looked like (How we get there).

It made it much more vividly clear that the co-flow we were experiencing regularly, despite having the flavor of utter perfection, was incomplete, and that simply aiming to do more of it wouldn’t get us where we were trying to go.

I’ve seen a path. The path is not clear—it is, in some sense, entirely made of obstacles—but as Marcus Aurelius put it: the obstacle is the way.

I still have open questions about how hard the path will be to walk. Will our enthusiasm sustain without the promise that we’re almost there? Will we forget what that flow even tastes like if we refuse to entertain temporary versions of it? I’m not worried about either of these, although I do feel that the whole thing is still quite precarious in a sense. I don’t have the same powers Jean [who led the project in Waterloo] has, to invite people into that mode temporarily. I have my own moves, but ultimately NNTD is like a gearshift or a rearview mirror, not the whole car. A patch, not the system.

I suspect that the pathway there will still involve tons of temporary tastes—the difference is that we’ll have a different kind of humility and awareness that there are probably still perspectives (within us and beyond us) that we don’t know how to integrate, that will sooner or later bust us out of flow, and that that’s fine. That’s part of how we’ll figure out what the missing perspectives even are.

Closing thoughts, 2025

I’ve made some recent very-encouraging progress towards being able to invite myself AND other people into some sense of synergic mode. More to come on that—it relates to a project I’ve had for the last 1.5 years that’s about grokking the nature of faith as well as I grok trust. But that’s another story. It’s coming though!

I barely touched on most of what the Synergetics book actually says, but one thing that is notably absent from the above discussion, because it’s so bold I feared it would distract from everything else, is this paragraph which follows immediately after the description quoted at the beginnin