Knock on Wood: A GovHack Journey from Coherent Indifference to Constructive JONMO

My project began not with a goal, but with a state of 'coherent indifference'. I was in a stable, low-energy balance with my environment.

Encountering the "Better Questions" challenge created an 'environment shock'. This was my decoherence event, the curious thing that led me to engagement.

I applied a quantum informational lens: The Ground State Configuration (GSC) Model, which suggests our universe selects for causal-effectiveness by scoring 'Informational Richness'.

For the 'Better Questions' challenge, I reframed the 'premortem.' Instead of asking why a project failed, I asked how it might 'decohere'. By becoming isolated in an informational 'void' or by being overwhelmed in a chaotic 'filament'.

Now I was having fun, so I expanded the project to tackle the 'Digital Confidence' challenge, aiming to construct a more coherent online reality rather than construct sheilds for online protection.

Drawing from prior work, my proposed solution supports the brittle form of 'trust' with the adaptive attributes of a Verifiable Honesty Construct (VHC). The VHC is a framework for online entities to act in good faith, but to not escape their fate should a reckoning of their good-faith claims be necessary.

The process I went through was always intended to become the project. I conducted an 'a priori-mortem' as part of introducing it's use, analyzing my own submission's potential to succeed or fail. This has influenced the distinct ways this project has been communicated, from this low vibe intro, to the full 'proof of work' and long form responses to each challenge. Oh - and the 'on ramp' website too, as a next step up from this explainer vid.

Our desire for meaningful and adaptive technologies is tied to the need to create meaningful and adaptive societies. Without a healthy society where we can be free to remain in coherent indifference to most people and most things, we wont maintain this JONMO freedom I've enjoyed over this weekend.

To hold us together in a state of largely coherent indifference, I propose the GSC Model as the universal selector for creating such meaningful change.