15 chunks · 15 episodes
...d. If you have a Jello mold to prevent dangerous outcomes, then you can let the slime mold go wherever it wants to go within those boundaries. The power of top-down constraints and bottom-up emergence.
Patient emergent systems will explore every nook and cranny of a space. The slime mold will fill every bit of the container it's put in. So give it the right jello mold to give it the right shape!
Steering and learning are distinct. A slime mold can learn but not steer. Steering comes from a brain. Steering requires a centralized component with leverage.
.... If you point out that organizations are fundamentally emergent uncontrollable slime molds, no one person feels strongly offended. Except founders in founder mode who want to believe the whole organization is a pure manifestation of their ...
...won't need to have any coherent plan to execute. It could just take over like a slime mold.
A slime mold is extremely hard to kill. As long as one cell survives the mold survives. This property also means they're very hard to control; there is no single ...
...nt. This is the exact same inescapable coordination tragedy[abs] covered in the slime mold deck.
...e shape of the jello mold; the swarming exploratory competitive behavior is the slime mold that grows into the mold's shape, filling every niche. Sometimes the answer to find new breakthroughs is to operate within different constraints. If ...
...ould emerge out of that compost heap? Like an ecosystem of friendly bacteria, a slime mold. At places like Google it's impossible to do this because although they have your data[akt], they would have to build, not grow, software. When you b...
...ur strategy is almost certainly influences what your strategy actually is. In a slime mold of an organization, a strategy that sounds plausible (based on a savvy external analysis) is one that everyone knows everyone else has read, and it c...
... a swarm is better at finding the use cases than coordinating as consensus in a slime mold of a company. The single company is a consensus machine. It gets more bland over time. The Tyranny of the Marginal User. A swarm is an anti-consensus...
One of the best ways to influence a slime mold is external pressures. Slime molds can't coordinate internally; they're just an internal roiling cacophony. They have no internal privileged position...
...ucture that sets the laws of physics, that creates a cage, a jello mold for the slime mold to expand into. An LLM is like jello. LLMs are inherently, fundamentally gullible. You cannot rely on them for the structure of any part of your secu...
... same kinds of decisions. We feel like a coherent entity, but we're closer to a slime mold than we think! This is not too dissimilar from how plain-old-code works, either. The code is executed, and looks in its protected storage partition a...
...a rainforest. As some rando on the internet once said, a company is more like a slime mold than an elephant. Sometimes where an entity is on the spectrum can swap somewhat suddenly. An example is that before the Civil War, "United States" w...