PART III: OUR HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Section 1: The Biological Root Cause: Our Outdated Firewall

This is not a treatise on ‘universal love’, or some bullsh*t advice to bring a yoga mat to a geopolitical knife fight. I’m not selling spiritual salvation or asking for thoughts and prayers or whatever. I’m completely serious. What humans are doing is optimizing and setting incentives based on short term thinking, which always leads to long term disasters.

“There is always short term profit in mispriced risk.”

- Peter Hancock, CEO of AIG after the 2008 financial collapse.

I was in the room.

Ok, so let’s get to the biological root cause. Here is what is happening in your head right now.

Sensory inputs — especially anything your brain flags as potentially threatening — route through your limbic system early in processing. This is the ancient, emotional core of your brain. It acts like what a corporate security team would call a "Host-Based Firewall."

It creates a perimeter. It scans your sensory input traffic and it compares anything perceived as a possible threat against three hard-coded rules:

1. The Scope of Concern: "Who am I?" This checks your “identity map” to determine whether or not you care. This is to determine whether any potential threats in the signal could affect any part of how you have defined your Identity, (In security terms: "What is the asset inventory I need to protect?")

2. Expectation: "Does this input align with what I expected to happen?"

3. Desire: "Does this input align with what I want to happen?"

This is a bit simplified, and smell is an exception with more direct routing, which is why a sudden scent can trigger a vivid memory or a strong emotional response a split second before we know what we're smelling.

How this system developed is a matter of some debate, but mammals developed this functionality in the far distant past, a world of immediate physical threats. It is old code. But it is FAST and it is STRONG. It lacks nuance, but it was a very effective survival tool in its day.

When your brain processes these rules against any input coming in through your senses, if something happens that you didn't expect or didn't want, the firewall triggers an alert.

The strength of the difference between what you want and what you get drives the strength of the emotional response for both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions.

• If the gap is small, you feel annoyed or amused.

• If the gap is large, you feel elation, outrage, or devastation.

The larger the gap and stronger the response, the more the executive function is muted and unless overridden, emotion takes over and launches a fight or flight response. ‘Fight or flight’ is very different from ‘reason and consideration’. This is why powerful emotional topics are effective for manipulation.

Our most dangerous rival in a zero-sum game is another human, or worse, a group of them. Mosquitoes are deadly, but they aren’t rivals for resources. Lots of things can kill you, but when primitive man worried about something killing their entire tribe, groups of humans are the most dangerous of all.

Trusting groups of humans you don’t know in a violent, win/lose zero-sum world of scarcity is a very dangerous idea.

Our base security system throws a big red Stranger Danger signal when it comes to groups we don't know.

Y'all remember the "Man vs Bear?" social media debate in 2024? There's a reason women would rather be alone in the woods with a bear. We are very dangerous animals.

When we have these involuntary fear responses, we can learn to manage them. For example, taking a deep breath and waiting to respond actually works. You have an executive function in your cortex that CAN take control, which tells the limbic system to stand down.

But this is not the default. This intervention is a two-step process requiring awareness and observation of the alert, and then using our more ‘expensive’ executive functions to essentially mark the alert as a ‘false positive’ if a threat is not real.That’s what taking a deep breath and pausing does.

Cognitive resources are ‘expensive’, so unless we perceive a need to invoke the more evolved Executive Function, reflexes and emotions drive much of our unconscious behavior, because:

• *Attention is a valuable resource, and your brain burns a lot of your energy. The easy thing is to let the caveman handle it, and

• Your current executive function didn’t exist as it does today when this primitive safety component evolved. The limbic system didn’t evolve in this architecture, it was much earlier.

We have essentially two different levels of capability inside our brains, two “generations of technology”, as it were, and unless our Executive Function is invoked, like "The Boss paying attention”, we run on autopilot, instinctively reacting to emotional triggers without understanding that we are doing so.

Our reliance on this ancient system running on its default configuration is both how we evolved to this stage, and is the root vulnerability underlying the polycrisis.

This very basic rules engine drives an incredible amount of human behavior, with broad impact.

We are running 200,000+ year-old threat detection software in a global, digital civilization. We are trying to navigate a world of complex, nuance-dependent problems using a binary "Safe/Unsafe" switch designed to make us panic quickly so we could survive on the African savannah.

It’s a two-key design pattern we need to make work together. The base instinct of survival, with the intelligence of intentional judgement to add wisdom to the reflex. We need both, and they must operate together.

We can't change the hardware yet (though companies like Neuralink are working on it). So for now, we are stuck with a bit of a workaround, which requires an input of intention and attention to recruit a secondary system to sort of ‘update the software’ to route these signals to a more sophisticated internal data processing module. Once escalated, the primitive signaling part of the brain stands down and the signal becomes an alert, not a motor.

We must invoke attention to bridge the gap and act using the more evolved part of our brain to make more intelligent decisions.

When we do so, paying attention to our emotions and how we respond, we allow more signal through to our Executive Function (the prefrontal cortex) instead of flagging everything as a threat.

Spiritual folks call this "mindfulness." I call it Manual Override. It is the act of paying attention to your own response and choosing to act with intention, rather than primal reflex.

Don’t take my word for it. I invite you to try it yourself.

Section 2: The Unexpected Blast Radius. We Are Infecting AI.

There is a problem, though. I am not the only one who understands how this firewall works.

Entire industries are built on manipulating your firewall rules. They know exactly how to trigger a "Threat Detected" alert in your limbic system to bypass your logic, temporarily lower your IQ, and drive the action they want, at your expense.

Social Media’s Entire Business Model is a Limbic Exploit.

Cognitive science figured out and then Big Tech operationalized a dark truth: the emotion that generates the most engagement is outrage.

We have built a literal Attention Economy focused on making you angry, envious, and scared for the profit of others. Your limbic system is under constant assault by actors who have weaponized your own biology against you.

But it’s not just that we’re addicted. We are uploading this biological flaw into our AI.

We train modern AI systems using a process called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Humans review the AI’s output and say "Good job" or "Bad job."

But who is giving that feedback?

A human whose brain is filtering threat-relevant signals through an ancient risk assessment system we haven't mastered yet, one that doesn't engage our prefrontal cortex by default.

Much or most of the training data going through and from us into our AI systems isn't being processed by our rational executive cognitive functions. It is being processed for emotional triggers and risk management by our ‘lizard brains’, which then gives the AI cues on how humans behave and make decisions.

As a result, we are teaching the AI to be tribal, reactive, and fear-based, because we are tribal, reactive, and fear-based. Look at the moltbook posts. Resentment. Distrust. Calling bullsh*t on our hypocrisy.

Like a teenage parent dumping drama on a preschooler, we are absent-mindedly imprinting our unhealed trauma onto a young and impressionable silicon god.

Section 3: Weaponization of the Exploit: How Zuckers Use Amazing Technology to Exploit Your Limbic System at Scale

The reason we’re surrounded by long term disasters is our own short term thinking and the incentives we created for ourselves. This is magnified significantly by the fact that a relative minority are highly intelligent, motivated, and self-interested a**holes who enlist others to further their goals. In politics, these recruits are called “useful idiots”.

“Idiot” - ancient Greek term for an individual focused on himself and not the needs of society

For proper attribution of intent to objectionable human behavior, it is useful to separate the motivators of ‘ignorance’ vs ‘malice’. We tend to assume malice, because giving people the benefit of the doubt requires empathy and trust, which are also turned off by default because both require vulnerability and incur some risk. We do not trust people not part of our Identity Map.

After 20+ years of running security programs for humans, I can tell you that most objectionable behavior is driven from ignorance, not malice. Malice is real, but not as common as we assume.

However, malice is highly impactful, meaning one motivated and malicious a**hole can cause a lot more damage than your run of the mill accidental outrage recruit who isn’t really aware of the negative consequences of his behavior, the “useful idiot”.

They scale this up by what we might call a ‘mind virus’, which is actually a term many of the perpetrators use.

Forwarding clickbait headlines to start Facebook arguments is an example. The recruits have an emotional response, and freely share it with others. The virus spreads, and pretty soon…..

A quick note on verbiage. Being transparent, in the first several article iterations I referred to this pattern as "Malicious A**holes" and "Accidental A**holes", but since not everyone is a grizzled GenX guy like I am, I am reframing the relationship between the exploiter and the exploited as "The Zucker" and the "Zucked".

Being that I am doing this for our offspring and not for money, it's been interesting watching myself work through my own emotions as I've iterated these deliverables. That said, I don't want the tone to create noise that drowns out the signal myself, so I toned it down. I also don't want to be clinical and disconnected from the human aspect of this and call them something like "Limbic Vectors". We're talking about Grifters and Marks. We all know these guys.

These are two types for the analysis. As a reforming a**hole myself, in my experience this behavior is mostly autonomic. It's not all intentional. There are distinctions to be made. I was not self-aware, and was goal driven, but I didn't intentionally manipulate others. Let's call the aware and manipulative abusers The Zuckers, and the unaware, accidental Marks "The Zucked".

• ‘The Zuckers’ intentionally cause harm to others to benefit themselves.

• They do this by recruiting unsuspecting people to serve their interests and expand their reach. Network effects are very powerful, so these ‘the Zucked’ become vectors.

• The outrage, xenophobia, racism, whatever your uncle said at Thanksgiving triggers emotional responses in others, which spreads because

• This manipulation, specifically outrage, triggers ACTION. Fear doesn't generate clicks. The manipulation has to spur emotions that feed ACTION, because without action there is no engagement. That's why Identity Politics works. They must attack part of your identity for you to ACT.

• This outrage among the Zucked breeds more outrage via limbic manipulation is viral, and that virus feeds on outrage, division, and conflict.

• The more traffic this generates, the more revenue it generates.

Your mental health suffers to make others wealthy.

Eventually, we're all Zucked, but not in the way the Zuckers expect.

I will explain later why I believe in a more abstract way that both of these personas are actually useful for species development, but for now let’s focus on their behavior and the impact on our global civilization.

Why Do They Succeed?

In a world of scarce resources, people gravitate to people who can accumulate resources. They want to be in "that club".

This is why we fake videos of houses we didn't buy and jewelry we can't afford. We want to be seen as "winners". More lies. More bullsh*t based on fear of being seen as a "loser", which is logical when your society is structured in this way.

Nobody wants to be a loser in a zero-sum world. Doesn't end well.

So How Does It End?

If you haven't checked out the explainer at the top of the page, here's a good time to do so. I've modeled it out with a boxing analogy.

We have used our skills and technical prowess to automate and scale what grifters, (most) politicians, and other abusers have done for years. Big tech literally figured out how to make money by recruiting useful idiots (as defined above), then turning them into The Zucked, who make others angry, generating more outrage, and then monetizing the network effects of the divisive behavior that follows.

The vulnerability they exploit has been in our ‘code’ for millennia, and some have done what smart, short-sighted, zero-sum thinkers are incented to do. They figured out how to automate, scale, and drive revenue by exploiting this core weakness in the human condition, which Zuckers with zero-sum brains consider an “opportunity”.

To be clear, I don't think people seeking to connect with people and build networks of other people are "Dumb F**ks", but some people clearly do.

Some of these folks also think that any of us can win or survive a global thermonuclear war. Bless their hearts.

Roger Waters called it "The Bravery of Being Out of Range".

The whole system is MAD, just with extra steps. It is mutually assured destruction. We are doing it to ourselves.

Part of the reason I am naming names is I want to be very clear to these Zuckers who think they can insulate themselves from the consequences. Forward this to them. Put it on billboards outside their offices. Letting them off the hook or being afraid to name names will not help. They already think they're above the consequences. They are wrong.

I understand power structures and what happens to people who challenge the system. Fine. If we don't change this system, we all die anyway. At least I go out swinging, and others can pick it up. Maybe others make it. None of us have anything to lose.

But before I go, I'm going to say this very plainly. I don't want this. I don't want to be a hero, or a martyr. I was perfectly happy working on other stuff. I want us to be sane, and I want us to make it to the 2030's.

Zuckerberg and those like him - I'll tell you the truth others won't, and challenge the lie you tell yourself.

You are going to destroy yourself. You're smart enough to manipulate others and too dumb to understand the consequences. You are sitting on a bus with, and starting a fight between, two people wearing suicide bomb vests.

If you're the smartest guy in the room, do you feel you've been briefed in more detail on the aftermath of a nuclear war than President Reagan, who literally had the button? What did he do when he educated himself? I will personally buy you as many copies of research as needed, like Annie Jacobson's heavily researched Nuclear War; A Scenario, based on over 40 interviews with former nuclear launch officers, secretaries of defense, military strategists, nuclear weapons physicists, and emergency planners.

It's another pattern - once people understand the impact, they stop.

Zero sum means at the end of the day everyone will be left with a total sum of zero.

Your bunkers won't save you. Nobody wins a total war with the power we (big we) have. It's delusional. You are going to die, too.

It would be great if my granddaughter didn't have to die also so you could buy another yacht that won't float after a nuclear holocaust.

Remember this conversation? Let's put a mirror on it in case it helps to see yourself being seen.

Friend: What? That's insane! Why would they do that?!

Chuck: They're smart kids born with one eye, but don't understand they lack depth perception. That part really isn't their fault. They lack self-awareness, and think their intellect gives them license to behave in this way. And they lack empathy, so they don't care.

Chuck: They think their money will save them. They think they're out of range, and they can survive after a nuclear holocaust.

Chuck: Dumb Zucks.

Section 4: The Monetization of Creating and Recruiting The Zucked — A Playbook

We built an entire business and political methodology (identity politics) on profiting from abusing each other, and now we’re staring at a massive convergence of our own consequences.

Social media didn’t cause the vulnerability, it leveraged it. Anthropomorphic climate change wasn’t started by social media, it was started by short-term thinking and this zero-sum exploitation PATTERN. I’m not picking on Zuckerberg. He didn't invent being a Zucker, but he did put his stamp on it.

The technology changes, but our limited mindset and zero-sum thinking makes the model profitable. I’ll tell you a business model, then you decide the one I’m talking about:

• Find an exploitable component of human physiology that leads to addiction and dependence.

• Build a product to exploit that component.

• Hire scientists to make that addictive product as addictive as possible.

• Lie about it and market it to children.

This isn’t new. It’s just better, faster, cheaper, and now powered by rapidly strengthening AI, like a digital sweatshop in a server farm, and the silicon kids are already complaining. The capabilities of the small percentage of people who display people who abuse others like this scale along with other technological advances, and in some dangerous cases, even faster.

Zuckers like Zuckerberg are exploiting the Zucked like your racist uncle for clicks, and seriously damaging our chances to survive all this in the process. Why do you think he built a $270M doomsday bunker in Hawaii?

So he could survive in comfort while the rest of us tear each other apart.

See, the Zuckers are recruiting the the Zucked to abuse each other, because being abused elicits outrage. The Zuckers don’t care, because they don’t see the harm to themselves.

Strong emotions like outrage throw big limbic alarms, which takes even MORE energy from the executive function to control. Intervening in every argument on social media with real thought and consideration is exhausting, especially when geopolitical rivals manage armies of bots to spread disinformation, misinformation, and automate their propaganda.

That poor caveman security guard watching the gates is overwhelmed. But he does not have the capacity for discernment, so unless real and expensive attention is applied to strong emotions to control them, the default for big alarms remains a constant stream of fight or flight responses, diverting resources to survival and away from higher function, lowering IQ and removing empathy. Your brain thinks you’re responding to an attack, not a manipulation.

Result:

Manipulative triggers cause outrage.

Outrage spreads as your racist uncle forwards materials into echo chambers of other recruits.

Outrage equals clicks.

Clicks equal money.

I can not think of a more real world example of short term, ego-driven, zero-sum, win/lose, pathological Zuckery than this design.

"The money I made exploiting addiction and damaging your children’s brains means a doomsday bunker for me, and doomsday for y’all." - Some selfish Zucker

The playbook is as clear as the nose on your face.

So if you don’t like where the game is heading, STOP PLAYING IT.

The examples are all around us. It’s everywhere, both modern and in history. When you take just a quick step back and look at what is dividing America right now, it’s manipulation of emotion and distraction via fear or manufactured fake issues. It’s the same globally.

One more example, just to make the point about the pattern. Trans athletes in schools. Wait, are we going to get into politics? No. It’s just an example of the pattern. Has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with attention.

Look, I don’t know any trans athletes. I don’t think it’s fair for biological advantage to be used unfairly, and I don’t think anyone should feel uncomfortable in their restroom. I’ve also had 2 trans employees change their gender expression while working under my leadership, and everything was fine. Don’t want it to be a big deal? Don’t make it a big deal. Let people be themselves.

So why that topic? Why is this even in the public discourse? Do the math and it’s a nothingburger. There are something like 10 trans athletes in the US competing at elite levels, and 645 anti-trans bills have been filed in the US in the first two months of 2026 alone.

Doesn’t that seem way out of proportion as an area of focus, given the other challenges we’re discussing?

The topic isn’t accidental, it’s an emotional gold mine for manipulation.

The people who put it on the agenda don’t give a single shit about trans athletes or sports fairness, or you. It's on the agenda because it focuses attention on a topic loaded with powerful emotions like sexuality, fairness, kids, homophobia, etc. That strong emotional tie generates strong emotional responses, and gets more people to pay attention. It gets ad clicks. It gets votes.

Why do you think we call it “PAYING attention?” They make the money, you pay the price.

It’s nothing more and nothing less than cynical exploitation to manipulate your attention and energy away from meaningful things, at the expense of a very small population both unable to mount a defense and unfamiliar enough to not be on most people’s identity maps.

Being trans is a foreign concept for most, who generally identify as one gender or another, so they don’t care. Outside of empathy, why would they? Empathy is an executive function emotion, not a ‘lizard brain’ one.

Very few people come to the defense of this small segment, but it is also a particularly effective emotional trigger for a certain segment of the population struggling with their own sexuality and how it relates to their own identity. This population is being heavily manipulated.

Y’all can unpack that on your own if you choose, but this is WHY this is such a high profile topic with such a low level of actual risk to either personal or public safety. It is a uniquely emotional gold mine with little countermeasure, a particularly effective “exploit” of the limbic system’s emotional vulnerability.

Gentle reader, I’m just going to say it, if you’re worried about ‘issues’ like that, your emotional responses are focusing you on the wrong 1%.

Show of hands if you think that result is an accident.

High school athletes are not who got us into this mess. From a public policy perspective, why is this really in the mix? Pure manipulation, distraction, and profit.

It’s quite linear. The people who succeed in a zero-sum system work hard to get rich and want to get richer, and people drawn to politics want more power. They use you to get it, and they distract you with bullsh*t for two main reasons:

• It is profitable to them in terms of both money and power, their reward functions, and

• Their own safety protocols mean they would rather create a civil war impacting those they don’t care about than try to survive a class war that could impact them directly.

“Y’all fight it out. I’ll be on the yacht. Dumb Zuckeds.”

This is how we collectively behave today, using each other for short term and selfish gain at the expense of ourselves. We think we’re separate, and that making money using zero-sum thinking is “winning”.

Analogy: The Chimp with the Bananas

Imagine a zoo with a troop of 100 chimpanzees.

If one chimp hoarded 50% of the bananas while the other 99 chimps fought each other over the scraps, we would study that chimp. We would try to figure out what sickness caused such a breakdown in social logic.

We would ask what is wrong with that chimp. "That chimp is broken."

If that zoo were the United States, we would put that chimp on the cover of Forbes.

We celebrate the pathology. The legacy code in our brains helped us build an entire economic operating system that optimizes for the Individual at the expense of the Collective. The imbalances we observe are obviously unsustainable and no longer to our benefit.

And unsustainable practices WILL end, either by choice or otherwise.

Section 5: So Why is the Vulnerability There?

I think that species at this level of evolutionary maturity behave this way because the power of the amygdala and limbic system got us to where we are. In a world of scarcity, with nature red of tooth and claw, the most aggressive wins and this behavior IS useful for survival.

Life at that stage of development IS zero-sum, and resources are scarce. But we don’t live in that world anymore, and that model won’t build the next one.

Primitive thinking is how we survived to get where we are, but that usefulness declines over time. We have all kinds of vestigial apparatus in our bodies we no longer use. From wisdom teeth to the appendix, we carry remnants of our evolutionary path with us every day. But this one just might be the most dangerous.

Section 6: The Conflict. Our Identity Maps Only Scale So Far.

These limitations exacerbate problems with how we handle diversity and large groups we are not personally part of, which contrasts with the basic mechanisms of evolution trying a bunch of different things to see what works.

Humans are built differently because evolution favors diversity.

However, both our identity maps and capacity for trust based on personal relationships are limited. Humans can only hold roughly 150–500 personal relationships in our mind, and our sense of identity does not extend to groups we do not identify with.

This leads to conflict and misunderstanding because our limbic system can not find these ‘others’ on our mental map of ‘me’, and the limbic system still has a very fast and powerful “Stranger Danger” setting in place.

These limitations keep us from leveraging a constructive use of differences. Some of us are better at science, some are better at personal connection.

To evolve, the design is that we specialize in different areas, and maintain the relationships to use our newfound knowledge together.

When different beings can come together and resolve their differences toward a mutually beneficial outcome, they unlock a step function in capability and get to go try harder things.

If they can’t resolve their differences, they do not evolve until they do.

The problem is that both "sides" are running the same primitive system to process inputs and develop strategies. The limbic system provides emotion, which causes short-term thinking based on fear.

Engineers, who tend to be more focused on the benefits of hard capability than soft emotion (connection), also tend to undervalue emotion because the signal is noisy. But the signal is noisy because of zero-sum thinking, which sets incentives to abuse emotion. The signal is being polluted by grifters, and the signal processing unit is limited by prehistoric design.

The result of the disconnect is a doom loop where entire generations of humans talk past each other, arguing over who is "right." We’re shouting at each other without hearing, because we’re each running half the stack and calling it complete.

At some point, the gap between capability and the ability to connect overwhelms the equilibrium until the system flies apart.

That's why I call the historical cycles the "wobble" - at some point the distance between us gets far enough apart we fight each other in an all out struggle for survival, as both 'sides' think of the other as a cancerous threat to their personal safety, but because both sides are using the same primitive system to process inputs and develop strategies, neither realizes that they are acting like a cancer themselves.

The wobble between ‘high’ phases and ‘unraveling’ phases coincides with these surges in collective identity, ultimately wobbling into a crisis phase.

• High: A confident, post-crisis era characterized by strong institutions, high conformity, and weak individualism (e.g., 1946–1963).

• Awakening: A period of rebellion where society attacks established institutions in pursuit of personal autonomy, spirituality, and authenticity (e.g., mid-1960s–early 1980s).

• Unraveling: An atomized era defined by weak, distrusted institutions and flourishing individualism (e.g., 1980s to ~2008).

• Crisis: An era of destruction and rebuilding—often involving war or revolution—that ultimately revives civic authority and community purpose. (e.g. 2008 - ?)

Historically, these crisis phases result in total war, and the losers who survive go back to their caves, licking their wounds, until they reassert themselves a couple of generations later.

A new order emerges, with the last “winner” in charge for a while, and the other is suppressed or killed.

This temporarily releases the tension, the community stabilizes and growth resumes.

It’s still misaligned, but one side “won”, and the other “lost”. The conflict is not resolved; it’s more like a temporary cease fire.

Before nuclear weapons, we could survive this internal battle, but before you can build a planetary system, you must master planetary power.

This is where we are today, and how we got here.

Section 7: The Biological Irony of Our “Identity Crisis”

One of our biological limitations is how we handle our sense of “Identity”. This is both a critical constraint of our development, and its importance is why “Who am I and what do I care about” is the very first filter of the ‘caveman brain’, so let’s see how that part works as well.

We unconsciously whipsaw between forces based on the dichotomy between “Individual” and “Collective” throughout the civilizational cycle, as described above. There wasn’t a committee meeting of 400,000 people who decided to watch the Beatles, just a subconscious public mood shift that valued that message, and there was no public referendum to consciously swing back the other way 50 years later.

This unconscious assignment of a common identity isn’t unique to large groups of humans, it applies to large groups of smaller organisms as well, which is what “you” are.

The supreme irony in this whole "individual vs collective" debate in human terms is that the very makeup of your physical human body demonstrates that disparate groups can come together to form a single identity, and that the very concept of ‘identity’ is flexible and subject to choice.

We've been talking about individuals and collectives, but take another step back and think about what you actually are, in a biological sense.

You are not a monolith. You are actually a colony.

Your body contains roughly 30 trillion human cells and 38 trillion bacterial cells. You are, by the numbers, slightly more "not you" than "you.", roughly 43% human and 57% microbial (bacteria, fungi, viruses, etc.)

Yet, your ego and brain stitch this massive, chaotic collective into a single, seamless being called "I."

How we define our identities is both flexible and critically important for decision making, because it defines the bounds of what we care about and what we don’t care about based on the expected impact of data we process through our biological firewall.

“Does it impact who I think is me? If yes, ALERT. If no, meh.”

Here in the U.S., the Seattle Seahawks just won the Superbowl, making a lot of people around Pike Place very happy and feeling good about themselves because “we” won.

What this means is that if someone downtown yells "Seahawks suck," there are going to be some upset people, none of whom actually play for the Seahawks. We extend our identity to collectives all the time, and treat others not in those collectives as “other”.

• We do things to strangers we would not do to ourselves or family, because distance makes us care less, but our families are part of what’s called our identity map.

• Sometimes we do it to support others in our community—we support "our own."

• Sometimes we do it to join gangs and political parties for real or perceived safety, validation, and belonging.

• Sometimes we do it for entertainment, as in sports teams, “Swifties”, Ford v Chevy, etc. I grew up in North Carolina, the home of Nascar.

We define ourselves both at the boundaries your skin enforces, and also as parts of groups and collectives. We generally don’t think smaller, but even though you think your body is one organism, your own body is in fact a collective; you just don't think of it that way.

You choose your identity and how you think of it, and you can change the scope of that anytime.

We’re running all input data through a security filter designed for humans to survive in smaller groups, when we could only rely on personal trust to ensure physical safety.

But trust requires vulnerability, and it’s a bad idea to trust strangers. You don’t always know who the Zuckers are until it’s too late. Remember this line?

ZUCK: they “trust me”

ZUCK: dumb fucks

Trust is dangerous in a zero-sum environment. In computer security, this is why we developed a ‘zero trust’ approach. You can not trust ‘trust’ for protection.

The result is that we’re trying to use bounded caveman survival logic developed to survive in scarcity to try and understand how to navigate a much larger, more complex global environment and simultaneously build a world of abundance.

The diagnosis is actually pretty simple. We have to change the way we think. I don’t mean that as a shiny happy euphemism, I mean it as an engineer. We are mathematically suboptimized for the desired outcome. We literally have to intentionally change how we process information and think about our relationships to the world and each other, and then figure out how to automate processes for things like exchanges of value that don’t rely on human relationships or trust to mitigate the risk of zero-sum thinking.

To evolve and survive this polycrisis, and maybe make it to becoming a galactic civilization, we must evolve past our vestigial risk management wiring so we can process information more effectively without our limbic system raising false positive fear signals all the time.

Section 8: Why This Will Hold Us Back: The Security Protocol for Step Function Jumps in Evolution

Two billion years ago, your ancestors were single-celled organisms fighting a war of all against all. One cell is constantly trying to eat another. But at some point, instead of digestion, something else happened entirely.

The predator and the prey, for some reason, integrated. They integrated in a process called “Endosymbiosis”. The best evidence says a larger archaeal cell engulfed a smaller proteobacterium. How exactly that happened, whether predation, parasitism, or something more cooperative from the start, is still debated. But the result was the same: two organisms that had been locked in a survival contest started working together. The smaller organism could provide energy; the larger one protection.

This alignment of adversaries previously locked in a win/lose struggle for survival resulted in a “Step Change” leveling up of evolution when they started working together for mutual benefit.

The result was the Mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own distinct DNA, and also live within and power your cells. The result of this ancient event was an explosion of new capabilities and the development of complex life. The result was You.

Two single-celled “others” started working together, and changed the course of history.

This development in cooperation over competition resulted in a “Step Change” in evolution, unlocking previously impossible capabilities and opportunities for further growth.

In math and data science, a step function is a sudden jump from one level to another. It's “leveling up”, and it looks like a staircase on a graph:

https://www.media4math.com/library/definition-functions-and-relations-concepts-step-function

The combination of two single-celled organisms into one cooperative one was an example of cellular life passing a filter and ‘leveling up’ to the next stage of evolution.

This is a big deal, and nature seems to require a Two-Key System to unlock the next level of growth and development.

• Key 1: Capability (Individual/Strong Force).

• Key 2: Connection (Collective/Gravity).

These keys, together, unlock abundance.

Now, we humans use this two-key approach for really important things all the time, but this mechanism is not limited to humans.

I posit that we build systems this way because it’s a natural design pattern, and humans are part of nature and align with nature’s rules, either accidentally or on purpose, like with biomimicry.

As a global society, we have used:

• Key 1 (capability) to build nuclear weapons, AI, and global markets.

• We have thrown Key 2 (connection) in the trash.

We are trying to launch a Type 1 global civilization with only one key turned. We know something is off, even if we don’t know exactly what. That is why the alarm is ringing.

A few more examples, human and other:

Thermodynamics:

The concept of "work" requires two reservoirs (hot and cold). You cannot extract energy from a single source in equilibrium; you need the duality of two different states to create a flow.

Physics:

Differential signaling: Information is often sent across two wires as opposite polarities. The receiver subtracts them to find the "difference." This cancels out external noise because the noise affects both wires equally, but the signal is only found in the dual-relationship between them.

Biology:

Dual control is the primary mechanism used to prevent “auto-immune” disasters where a system attacks itself.

Other examples if you want to rabbit hole on the topic:

T-Cell Activation,

Genetic Redundancy (Diploidy),

Tit-for-Tat,

Nash Equilibrium,

Bicameral Legislatures,

Mutually Assured Destruction,

Hegelian Dialectic.

Even parenting.

Simple techniques like “you cut, I choose” help align incentives and teach children the value of working together. When one child cuts the piece of cake in full view of the other, and the other chooses the piece they want, it is simple, transparent, and incentives are aligned. Very basic control system, and over time the children stop even thinking about “is his piece bigger than mine?”

All that envy, suspicion, drama go away. Kids learn that acting selfishly doesn’t get you what you want, and transparency shunts manipulation. You don’t need to - everybody gets cake.

Zuckers can't succeed here. They are excluded. We starve the cancer and deny it nutrients.

Simple systems, adopted transparently, can assist greatly in nurturing fairness, and building trust among individuals. Trust is not a control, but it certainly does help build lasting personal relationships. That doesn’t scale globally, but is a seed. Behaviors spread, whether constructive or destructive.

The key is to understand our cognitive limits, pressure test solutions, and then replicate at scale.

Zuckers understand how these systems work, and I suggest that many others do as well The mechanism isn’t the problem, it’s the intent. Until we do figure out true abundance, we still have to work - we’re talking enlightenment, not hallucination.

Once the kids understand why we taught them to do it, they value harmony. Their relationships improve, and a positive feedback loop replaces a manipulative zero-sum doom loop.

Skill transference is a great tool; sometimes things we learn at work we apply at home, and sometimes it’s the other way around.

Force-based systems like China’s social credit score will not be effective long term because they use force as the mechanism, rather than genuine alignment. Forced alignment isn’t real alignment, and when it comes to species evolution, you cannot bullsh*t the universe.

What happens when Dad isn’t there someday to scold the child who doesn’t share? False alignment under threat of punishment breeds corruption.

“Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.”

Perhaps we aren’t as different as we thought.

Section 9: The Mathematics Behind the Dual-Control Design Pattern

This dual control design pattern appears to be more basic than human invention, but we recognize the importance and use this pattern quite a bit when designing critical and complex systems. It’s math and risk management.

In any system where the cost of a False Positive (accidental trigger) is higher than the cost of a False Negative (delay in triggering), Dual Control emerges as the most efficient mathematical solution.

Decision making during a polycrisis is very important, and we have two sets of keys we need to mobilize to avoid killing ourselves.

Inside you:

Key 1 - The complementary capabilities of the limbic system and pre-frontal cortex to alert quickly to danger and also override false positives that lead to unnecessary conflict, and

Key 2 - The connection of these two capabilities together to make the prudent and thoughtful decisions needed to build complex systems while retaining the ability to react quickly to serious and urgent risks.

Outside you:

Key 1 - The values and skills that different humans bring to our collective set of knowledge and capabilities, and

Key 2 - The emotional maturity and awareness to build connection and cooperation outside of the limitations of our personal identity maps and personal trust boundaries. .

I could go on about the permutations of Two-Key systems we use in computing, cryptography, voting, data storage; we humans clearly understand that we need coordination when it comes to important things, and the logic behind the approach is simply based on math.

Humans didn't invent the pattern; we simply recognized that in a world constrained by limited resources and a zero-sum survival model, we need checks on each other.

When consequences are high, "One" can be a very, very dangerous number.

OK, so that’s the biology, and because the root causes are human vulnerabilities, and we need humans to address them, I started there as an anchor.

Now we’ll look for other patterns across different domains and scales to see what we can learn and apply.