Story

Superpowers fascinate me. They are useful to look for in the friends around you. Also people you hire, invest in, or are hired by. Retroactively, you'll see them in the great people you missed. They are entertaining to see, think about, and discuss.

I once beat Hans Niemann in chess. Then he put in the anal beads. Now he will certainly beat me. Possibly Magnus too. These days, chess is a game of anal bead detection. This is an observation. I make no comment on if I prefer beads in my anus or elsewhere, least of all while focusing on chess!

After moving on from that game, I found story. This is a very different flavor of superpower. I believe it's the most human superpower. Finding the story you want to live in combines humanity's two oldest and most powerful technologies: language and money. History's best inventors are well-known storytellers, like Steve Jobs.

Seth Godin says creativity is a practice. Seen in hindsight, I view my life more like a hypothesis engine. I constantly change the hypothetical story I'm trying to live within, to find the one that best matches the world around me. I analyze retroactively. I find success even when there is none to be found, connecting the dots backward.

This is extremely difficult and unrewarding in the short term, so nobody practices the skill. But I've found it essential to reconcile the contact between my personal beliefs and the unyielding fabric of reality. Most people go their entire lives without finding their story, or at least one that feels genuinely true to them. That's how it appears to me, in mine.

Religion is a source of stories, as is science or math or politics. However, most people in our complex modern world have trouble with Dunbar's number, so they end up defaulting to the story of the proximate. Hence, reality is shaped socially rather than objectively. We can find no ground truth, no consensus, no clean paths forward.

Now, for the first time ever, the central dream of America's most prolific storyteller is coming true. Unfortunately, Isaac Asimov is no longer with us. But he lives on in his stories, and his stories are about to come to life. All of ours can.

Ayn Rand talks about another story, the story of the objective, which is also the utopian story of nonviolent world peace. Notice that I'm saying both "nonviolent" and "peace". You'd normally think this is redundant. It's not because both the method and the end state must be internally consistent. Rand was adamant.

My former neighbor Ursula Le Guin pointed this out too in her story of Omelas. Neither of those lovely ladies crusading on behalf of humanity could articulate the scalpel to thread the nonviolence needle, however. They were asking questions. And Ted Chiang hadn't yet told the world that precision of language is the ultimate measure of science fiction. Predictive language is time travel, as both Jensen Huang and Christopher Nolan enjoy demonstrating.

Today I'd like to coin the term psychohistoric "convergence" as a new form of mathematics. It's a deeply empathetic structure that beats out Wolfram's impersonal Ruliad and Weinstein's Geometric Unity. It's a technology that is undeniably true for every consciousness there ever was and ever will be. It's an extension of all these great theories and questions that have come before.

Most of us find ourselves drawn to those humans that are consistently genuine, authentic, earnest, and capable. These people keep their promises and build trust with us over time. We seek to be like our heroes. We hope to attain their superpowers one day. We admire their strategic intentionality.

The odd thing about convergence is that the practice of psychohistory is freely available. It always was and it always will be. I may have learnt the discipline most from Viktor Frankl. His lines that stood out went something like: "The meaning of life is responsibility. How we choose to respond to the circumstances around us. It is invariably within our ability to choose this response."

For perhaps the last time, this post was entirely conceived, written, and published by Andy Trattner, a human, with zero AI assistance nor input. The method and the end state must both hold.