(2021-12-01) Benn Culture Scenius

Jason Benn tweetstorm: What is culture? Culture is the ambient force that induces different ways of being into people. Similar to Alan Kay's "Perspective (Point of View) is worth 80 IQ points", I believe a powerfully good culture is worth, conservatively, 30 IQ points.

Some cultures, somehow, fascinatingly, produce geniuses. Florence in the 15th century had just 100k people... but included Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Botticelli, and several other all-time greats.

Imagine a place where the recurring events include Hamming Fridays (Richard Hamming), where you gather to opine on the big questions of your field. People will be more likely to work on important problems.

Here are some candidate dimensions of scenius. I built this list by "unit testing" them: each dimension had to be relevant to the success of each of these 6 scenes: Inklings, Impressionists, Homebrew Hacker Club, Xerox PARC, Steve Brodie's lab lineage, and Florence. (see Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress)

Here are the dimensions that passed:

• a creative frontier that is large, relative to the number of people involved (h/t Michael Nielsen)
• a contrarian oasis with common knowledge about the adjacent possible
• mostly dedicated people: geeks that can't stop creating
• peers that empower each other or expand each other's concept of the possible
• encouragement to experiment and take risks
• a social structure of squads and/or competitive duos
• intellectual safety in the innermost circle
• channels for going public with their work

And: A community that was organized around creating scenius isn't necessarily relevant throughout your life, but it would be extremely relevant in the gaps between chapters of your life, when you’re deciding what to work on. If this were the only basis on which you organized your community, then it might become irrelevant to you after you picked a direction and find a team. Indeed, even in great scenes of history, like Impressionism, creators did tend to individuate out of the scene once they reached a certain level of professional confidence....This environment would just be magnificent for raising kids. Imagine how stimulated and knowledgeable they'd be! It's also a project that kids could usefully contribute to, in a way that would really contribute to their education, and which would empower them to participate in the world. The whole project is to identify leverage points in the global complex system, so engaging in this as they're growing up would orient them towards real and big problems. Most educational institutions exist at least in part as a place to keep kids occupied so that their parents can get work done, and send the message that they can't do usefully to contribute to the world until they're older. What a contrast!

Apr27'2022: follow-up: here are some norms, events, and infrastructure that might contribute to scenius

• I noted the connection to Alexander Patterns