Draft #01 of the next social network prototype

Introduction of Ideas

So here is just a first draft of the next social network prototype. The alarming point here is that there is nothing new in here. Instead, it is more integrated, more holistic, for the same things we already have, just placed in a different way, with a different purpose. Instead looking things at the lens of how the mechanics of all things work, we see how a machine learning instance, such as the human being, gains a righteous character, one where its desires compliment with adding value to the big picture of our world.

Note that this prototype is just an idea and nothing else. They are all derived from mental symmetry and other books that have a similar paradigm like mental symmetry, such as the books Black Box Thinking, Executive Paradox, Clean Language, Feedback Revolution. That is my context of what I referenced along with my experiences. I think anybody else will have its own references where it brought to the same conclusions. Lets take note that these instances we create, like this social network I am promoting, is a derived product, is an effect, is not a cause. Those derived works may look like the greatest works of all time. I may be a little bit of bias, but it is hard to deny, that with the help of Christianity and with the bible, we created great works of philosophical work like those of Immanuel Kant that described the categorical imperative and John Locke on Personal Identity (although he didn’t got the “best conclusion”, he got it right that we should not judge people by their external actions only and instead focus on internal factors as well). Regardless of the nature of those works, they are still and still just effects and instead of tackling how those effects are flawed in some circumstances, we should instead focus on how those effects were derived from. Once we know where they are derived from, we can use our creativity to substitute to a more effective effect. From Thomas Kuhn notes on scientific revolutions, that seems the most effective way for people to have a dialogue on. It is okay to scrutinize an idea, but to put it completely away, as for the individual that idea represents the only log where the individual can still float in the water, if we don’t have a ship to substitute for that log, we are being negligent of the person and we only focus on our ideas.

Like our constitutions, if we don’t protect them, if we don’t hold of the main principles that they were derived from, the effect of those foundations become cheap and we don’t hold them anymore to their original form. I am afraid that incorporating this social network will bring bad benefits if people see this service in the lens of the old way of thinking instead of the lens in new ways of viewing the world. Information will be extracted not for improving the character of the person, information will be collected for the purposes of a specific domain to take competitive advantage, and so on. We must put a stop of those practices and instead for people to use this information differently.

I think its time to put some concrete examples as my blog will look insane without some of it. Hopefully, this will bring some inspiration how much tangible mental symmetry can be.

First idea: Lets Make it Concrete - The individual with no purpose (short term habit) and the individual with a purpose (long term habit)

So we have a lot of social networks and they are all great. But I have to tell you the truth, a lot of my colleagues and a lot of my past friends, they never use social networks at all. In a matter of fact, some completely abandon social networks or the public internet for life because they see a very common element in those products: feeding and regulating people in short term habits. To me, I would say that the whole reason is not due to the producers of those products were sinister evils, but instead they followed what most customers wanted that brought the most engagement and the most time spent on those products. That metric is kind of flawed. We don’t measure first the quality of those engagements and we don’t output the added value we got over the time spent compared to other activities where we involve spending the same amount of time. Yes, for once and for all, I want to quantify, be rational, do scientific analysis, not for the product, but for you, whether you get something more or less out of it. Indirectly, these products regulate us in short term habits. By default, our nature is to do shortcuts and get instant satisfaction. We do that all the time, such as getting the shortest line on a supermarket store. However, some problems are not so straightforward, which they need the support of other individuals that have the right context, which you have to use abstractions in your head, which you may make decisions based on wrong information or you do decisions that are not appropriate because you didn’t read the full environment, and so on. In all of those aspects, the solution is not straight forward. Instead of solving these problems that makes us sad, we instead substitute our life with other things, other shortcuts, that can make us happy, such as entertainment or pretend it does not exist and focus on our existing domain that does not involve “me”, feeling we are doing the most value to our society. Those are all elements of escaping our life’s real problems and imagine that they do not exist. I think the biggest game to play instead is our real life and it is a waste to immense ourselves in other worlds all the time, abandoning this life because of the sensitivities of dealing with it.

I discussed that one of the topic for this social network to be effective is transparency. However, at this point, I think it will be at its limited form, as society in general does not respond to failures as a process, but instead as a dead end. Books like black box thinking describes this topic very well. So like I said before, the social network will be limited, but bellow is visualized if the social network was fully transparent.

We already regulate people and we regulate people with short term habits as I mentioned before. So if we are already regulated, why instead not regulate ourselves into long term habits that benefits us in the end?

So here, I present you the system of “allocation time”. Yes, allocation time. This really brings me memories as my previous job was working as a developer on an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution and allocation was a completely important thing to manage which products sell and which do not sell and adjust the quantity of purchases accordingly. I cannot tell you how much the level of sophistication allocation we put in those systems. If we put so much sophistication on objective things, why don’t we do for our own individuality as well? Quantifying how we spend our time puts us realistic expectations what we do, what we are, what we want to get out ahead of our life. You go to a social profile and you have no clue how each individual spends their life. I think every chat conversation people do is to know about the whereabouts of the activity of another person. In addition, that same person will give a different response to each individual for the same experiences.

So here are some main points of setting your actual timeline
1. We have “available 24 hours” per day
2. Some we “reserve” those hours and do not change at all. We are forced to them for some reason as consistent habits. Those are habits that they do not have any other to compete with, they are the kings of the whole world.
3. Some are “allocated”, they do not represent constant representations, they are a form of discovery. Those are habits that they compete with other habits. They always struggle with other habits, so they are not always mandatory, but more of as an option.
4. Some of our time is "available" still (unallocated), we didn’t specify a goal ahead of time and when we reach at that point of schedule, we use them up on something, most likely what we do is either arbitrary or a very secondary goal in our backlog that we wanted to complete.
5. A system that is easy to track your time. System can recommend what you are doing if you are at a specific time or in a specific location by GPS, the best recommended activity that you are planning to do based on past history will be told with a 5 second time limit to accept or reject that confirmation followed up by either expressing the new activity or swipe some of the recommended alternative common activities you do on that specific time or specific location.
6. A system that can predict based on the activities you do whether that activity is “available”, “reserved”, “allocated”, “unallocated”, awaiting confirmation like point #5 and specifying the rules why it assigned that activity to that category. There can be other rules that do the same for specifying the category type of that activity as well. All those rules can be configured by the user, but they must be transparent on his profile so others can understand how their time allocation is formed as.
7. Another important element is to add an expression of mood correlated with that activity. It is not that we always engage an activity without any distraction. It also expresses how healthy or not healthy is our timeline and whether we do something about it.
8. All those activities will need to be analyzed why in the first place they are reserved, allowed, unallocated. What the previous points does is determine “what is”, not really the “why is”.  (More explained on that later)

Your actual timeline is something in most part you cannot control, but your ideal timeline is set up mostly out of our own free will.

What is your ideal timeline activity? Make something that you really want, as well adding value to the general picture of the world. Once the timeline is drawn, we have to make the conclusions of:
1. How to get there as an end result? What activities we have to sacrifice already in order to give more free time to do this? What activities we are already doing to get that end result? Are we doing enough progress or little progress and why do we feel that way?
2. Why we want to go there? (We need to figure of how this timeline was created, the “why is”)
3. This may sound like a time management system, but it is just a part of it, and that part of it is more than just that. In here, it is to show an initiative or not of whether you need help from others or not, as well the context of stuff you are interested in:
A. Less generalizations, speculations, finding info about the individual.
B. Contact of communication will be in the context of what the individual wants to talk about. When interacting with others, it will not be of introductions, formalities, it will be about evaluating information by using clean language and giving feedback back, suggestions to contribute, suggestions to assist, whether inter-personally or as a group
C. That means there will be no friends contact list. How friends with others is not done through a contract by oral communication, but by how much interaction you do with others as part of a metric.
D. We are all learning machines, we all have the same level of opportunity to gain the same incremental slope potential to be better characters. The goal is to have individuals with better character. Not individuals to put more expectations than they can ought to take in their timeline. There will be more value indicated within the social network when somebody contributes to an individual that requests demand of help or some form of feedback that has requested for a long time.
E. Everybody will know what is involved with that person. This is probably the most important element of all. If all individuals know what the other person is doing, we would not imagine that individual has the time for us. There are a lot of people that are over saturated and a lot of others having a lot of free time. It is essential then to focus on people that are undervalued and under appreciated. Let me repeat, the goal of the social network is to make the rest of the individuals better character and if someone asks with a mentality that has a direction to put purpose in his life, then we should embrace it with open arms. Instead of distancing imagination and actual reality, our imagination will align with reality.

Second idea: Lets make it Abstract - Analyzing Problems with mental symmetry (“why is”)
The second problem is analyzing problems. It will be using mental symmetry and most likely this will be the most complex design within the social network, as there are a lot of attributes to take into consideration. I have no proper design yet and I will have to think about this and get ideas from others as well. But I am going to give you a demonstration what this is all about. This may sound that this is like a portal with Questions and Answers, but this is more than just that. First of all, unlike portals where the people ask questions and are completely anonymous, here we know mostly the full context of who they are as individuals. Second, the most important of all, is that we can see how that individual took some solutions and whether they were successful or failure to him. The question and answer platform we have these days is the same type as psychotherapists treat their patients. The psychotherapist gives him a message, the individual accepts the message and gets better, and we don’t follow up years later to see whether the individual is doing better or worse in terms of his character. So problems here have a history we can see through that individual to make any indications what worked for him and didn’t work for him, like a medical history.

So I think the first element to do is to identify our self. We have to find out why we spend our time as is based on the actual timeline, we have to figure out where it comes from. Mental symmetry gives the answer to all that and here I am just going to do a very brief summary. I have a complete example you can see on why I left my first job and explained the reason by using the concept of mental networks. In any case, lets start: First, we have beliefs or ideas which represent formulas that are believed to be right. Those we consider as theories and they live in the Teacher cognitive module. Our timeline is driven by that teacher cognitive module. The steps, the recipe, the actions we do, is generated by the server cognitive module. It is the output that we give to the world, and that outcome as well becomes the input that we get on our world, which we will either respond positively or negatively, which represents the mercy cognitive module. When the teacher cognitive module finds an exception to their belief and ideas, it generates pain, and it represents a sign that we have to fix the theory, in the same way a physical consistent pain means that we have to do something or need to go to the doctor. Otherwise, it feels getting rewarded with positive emotion, especially if it completed complicated stuff based on a theory that tested the grounds (i.e. launching a rocket successfully). In contrast, mercy is driven usually by its default nature by short term goals. For instance, the teacher may be creating a theory on how to lose weight, but the mercy is fighting between two different good experiences: Having good experiences daily with food or imagining to have a good fit body so they can wear clothes with smaller size. The latter must be focused stronger while the first part can be substituted with other experiences that have good emotional feelings, such as going to the cinema as less money spent on food, and so on.

Understanding all the cognitive modules will help us to understand what steps we need to do in order to get what we want. The ideal thing to do is to create long term good habits that makes us social responsible. The problem we have will shift usually in different cognitive modules. We can give feedback to that problem while it shifts into different modes of our cognitive model and we can see based on our feedback whether that person still solved that problem or the problem is still stuck in a specific part of a cognitive module. Feedback will be like each person indicating a person to focus on the existing cognitive module on what to do or focus on another cognitive module. It will be more like playing basketball and trying to pick which team mate to pass the ball to make a score on solving your problem. Like software has a software development life-cycle, so our individual problems also goes through different stages and need the help of different cognitive modules. This is more complicated than it sounds, as we have to take account the difference between the male and female sex emphasis of cognitive modules (male is more focused on perceiver and server while female in mercy and teacher cognitive modules), how children and teenagers will use this when they are still in Piaget development stages, how it will need to adjust with current society trends, such as people trying to hide information, such as the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed indicates and also people’s attitude that life is driven by nature by the theory of evolution.

I think I do not want to take this idea lightly into this matter as it is essential to get this right because the abstract part is the most difficult part to make sense out of it. It is part of our actions within our operating system which we do not see and there is no much evidence to know if we are in the wrong path except out of our own emotional reactions, which are indeed subjective, as we put forms of defending ourselves and putting a form of denial to hide our real feelings.

Also, I would also emphasize that mental symmetry discusses that each of us focus on one special cognitive module. I can’t deny that it exists, it is pretty evident, in some way. But focusing only on personality instead of how to use all types of personalities to get to our ultimate state to improve our character will not reach us long to get any value out of mental symmetry. It is the latter that is the most important, while the first one, it really beats me why this simulation was created that way, the same as to why male and female brain sex is different, and why we have to go to child development through Piaget development stages. It may be cause its too complicated for one individual to handle all of those things at once and it may not be so rich and clear to have all the cognitive styles into our mind compared to for some be really good at and only one being very proficient at.

For that reason, all the time I spent before when analyzing mental symmetry, it was all whether I could confirm it is the correct theory or not in the first place. Now it is more of trying to read the same material but in a different lens: how to apply the theory within our context of our world. Black box thinking, for instance, if you read the news related to that topic, it did it in some way a small win, and it brought a big impact with hospitals and other companies initiating to think in terms of “using the black box”. In a similar vein, the goal in here is how to make our abstract implicit thoughts explicit and how they can be communicated with others in an effective way. I really have to get inspiration from others as well reading material related to mental symmetry over the months to create something that is more sophisticated. But at its simplest form, just knowing the content of the cognitive styles and the purpose behind each one, will be more than enough, for people to communicate what are the blockers and how much progress a specific problem has gone so far to be closer to its solution.

Conclusion

And that is just my first draft of how this next social network will be at its bare bones. I think it will take me a long time before I start posting another draft design as I want to gather my thoughts. I really want to get the ball rolling and also to not just make all hype and no show. So that is that. The rest of my answers will come exploring with other people and as well the presentations, essays, and books related to mental symmetry.