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Oh! I get to talk about my favorite subject: the egregore.

When a company forms it is useful, if not entirely accurate, to describe it as an intelligent agent. This entity does not physically exist, the soul of Disney is not in it's avatar micky mouse, or it's CEO, it's in the (collection of) minds of everyone that sees Disney as an entity. Santa Clause does not exist outside your imagination, yet parents act as the egregore's hands giving out presents. To a real extent, Santa Clause is the cause of acts of good will, and even though Santa doesn't physically exist, physical actions are taken in Santa's name. Same with any accolades of any religion. Or employee's of a company.

Its truth value is orthogonal to it's predictive value, and it is very predictive. See, there are two kinds of general groups within the egregore, the hands (creators, generators, those occupied with the 'mission' of the egregore) and the mouth (those occupied with feeding and sustaining an egregore, sales/marketing). The hands start off in charge and everything works, but eventually the mouth gets control and eats the hands, starving the egregore.

An egregore eats it's own hands and starves to death. This is exactly what happened with Boeing.

It could be modeled from an individual's mind, but some concepts take a village to execute, and some(times) things emerge when you put a bunch of smaller things together. A wave isn't the matter in which it materializes, it's something emergent from when you move some material in a certain way.

But yeah, Atheist here, this is about as esoteric as I get :)



Interesting. Sounds like this could turn into a long form essay or book.

> Its truth value is orthogonal to its predictive value

This seems to imply that the integrity of a company's information/communication functions (truth value) is unrelated to its ability to make accurate predictions about future events ... Why is this significant, or have I misunderstood?


I mean to say, modeling a company hyper accurately - down to personal psychology of the high level employees - has diminishing returns for predictive value, and also diminishing returns for generalizability. And a surprisingly useful toy model (the egregore and it's hand eating lifecycle), describe better(or at least, good enough) what will happen with any particular company given it's current state according to the terms of that model.

To clarify the possible misunderstanding: 'its' is referring to the toy model of the egregore (not any particular company/egregor), My point is useful things are useful regardless of them being strictly true.




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