Comment by patcon

Love that link. Thank you. It's helpful to find others thinking this way :)

I work in collective intelligence, and been thinking about what surprise is, and why the ability to sense it is baked into each and every one of us. It's a feeling that moves our attention

I've been riffing on the idea of "mapping" collective surprise by gathering information on which statements give us the feeling. The feeling of something being dropped just beyond the "boundary of our knowing", which I think of as a shell we are each building through our models, like something pushed out into semantic space. I'm saying it funny, but it's really just about collecting data on what surprises people.

And in aggregate, maybe you could have a collective map of this shifting thing (really a map of the education system in the sweeping life-long sense), of the whole human cultural swarm. Surprise is the what we each feel as we cross a threshold that we can't easily return over. We forget today what surprised us yesterday. But maybe it's possible to learn something about the structure we build together (in knowledge), if we gather little radar blips on when we are passing over such moments.

Like if a collective over the course of a week, all has a moment of surprise as they learn a specific thing. If you could see that happening to your group, we could all know that we've all integrated (or at least encountered) something that can be built on.

This framework feels part of talking about it: https://openresearchinstitute.org/onboarding/A_B_U.html

Anyhow, just sharing in case it lines up with anything you think about :)