About • Malcolm Ocean

About Me

Pannellum 2.5.6

Pannellum 2.5.6

Some questions that organize my attention:

1. What if it were good tho?Almost nothing is actually designed. Even when a lot of design effort has gone into creating something, so many assumptions remain unquestioned that >90% of the design decisions were made by accident or copying other systems. I see design as beginning with the basic metaphors we use to construe the entire situation in which our design will be used.
2. Whose job is this?Blame is a confusion. But it matters to sort out exquisitely why exactly things went the way they did, so that we can bootstrap non-naive trust that we will be more capable of steering what matters to us going forward.
3. What needs to be said, even though it feels like it should go without saying? What’s obvious to one person is not obvious to another. Sometimes our best interpretations of what’s going on are overindexed on past threats, and we need a simple statement of the truth to make it obvious that those projections don’t fit the current reality.
4. Huh, it actually seems that way to you? A lot of conversations break down from people taking issue with each other’s words, rather than actually managing to imagine what the other person’s experience of the world is like, and then trying to figure out what the world-as-a-whole must be like in order for your experience and my experience to be true at the same time.
5. What does the larger whole want?

Active projects:

1. I’m working with Midjourney’s Collective Intelligence team to build systems that will help people have better conversations where they can get past otherwise-intractable stucknesses. Read the secret to co-gnosis for some broad gestures towards what we’re hoping to make possible.
2. I’m playing around with a project currently called simply “ AI Chat But Good Tho “, which came out of recognizing that the default interfaces that people use to chat to LLMs are boring and not even really chat-like. It’s been very fun to conceive of the LLM as being one of the users of the software, not just part of it. I have some plots for how to turn this into a startup.
3. Researching memetics and cultural evolution. Read this one-pager on the evolution of consciousness for more on this, or this thread about memetics by my close collaborator Michael Smith.
4. Articulating the nature of trust. I had some big insights in 2020 about how trust works, and anticipated at the time that sharing them with the world would be a huge part of my life’s work. The Midjourney work excites me in part because it’s a chance to do that at scale, but I’m also doing it in small conversations and in writing. Feel free to reach out to interview me on your podcast or youtube channel!

Inactive recent projects: