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Navigating the Discovery Map

One of our subscribers pointed out that the Discovery Map can be a bit daunting – so many articles, so many nodes. Fair enough! So he (and we) thought it would be helpful to provide you with some of the best starting points to give you a push on your own self-sovereign discovery of self-sovereign discovery.

I think that there are probably two ways to go about this, and it may just depend on your mood. Here are our top three ideas for each of these two paths of discovery. If you want to know where you can click on the map to get started, the image below highlights the location of the Rabbit Hole pieces by numbers in yellow text, and the Bridge pieces in green text.

  • The Rabbit Holes: Navigating the neighbors of these articles will give you our deepest explorations of certain topics. They are the most connected to one another, and as such, the most influential on the overall structure of the Narrative map. Here are the deepest rabbit holes:
    1. Things Fall Apart, Pt. 3 (Politics): Connected to a range of concepts and a series in itself, this is among the most connected notes to the widest range of Epsilon Theory concepts.
    2. Whom Fortune Favors: The first note in a series covering some overarching views on what matters and does not matter to portfolio management. This is, despite not being explicitly narrative-focused, is actually the most connected note of the entire map.
    3. Surely You Can’t Be Serious: A short and sweet note from 2014 which shows you how the Golden Age of the Central Banker launched Epsilon Theory – and acts as a present reminder of how the Narrative of Central Bank Omnipotence behaves when it holds sway.
  • The Bridges: Perhaps just as interestingly, you might start your journey with the articles that stand out not for how similar they are to a great many articles, but for their cross-cluster connectivity. If you want to see how Epsilon Theory content connects across different topics, and how it all fits together, this is where you might start.
    1. The Wages of Fear: The most centrally connected of all notes, The Wages of Fear reaches across topical central bank omnipotence threads, individual sovereignty threads, discussions of missionaries and Common Knowledge, and even our discussions of civics and the Widening Gyre.
    2. Flatland: One of the most direct notes relating central banking communication policy to game theoretic and information theory concepts, it is a classic note to start exploring these intersections.
    3. My Passion is PuppetryA central note connecting the tools of the widening gyre and financial abstraction in a practical investment context. One of my all-time favorites.
Source: Epsilon Theory, Quid

Settle in and find one of those nodes below to begin your exploration.

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Comments

  1. Every time you read these, it gets better with time…my process was first to read the entire archive of Ben and Rusty, then as the content comes out along with the maps…it is just anchored more deeply but be careful with tools…

    “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”

    The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each level, paints the wrong picture. That view is natural to the Information Age which has been all about filtering noise, reducing the flow to what is clean, clear and manageable. Knowledge is more creative, messier, harder won, and far more discontinuous. —Weinberger

    What Quid does not do is ID emergent narratives which is the most interesting (similar to tools that find very early narratives in social networking) since surprise moves markets more than existing narratives. The most interesting thing to me is how political disruption has obscured/blocked traditional narratives from emerging. i.e. anti-tariff, etc.

    Always learning…thanks!

  2. Avatar for fvc fvc says:

    Rusty - it might also be worth having a few primer links for jargon / terminology, even if the articles are not deeply connected. They help get the jargon down. For example, Ben’s farm series piece about raccoons and coyotes (https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/). I could not find it on the map by hovering. Another might be when you first explain the Quid diagrams, or the first game theory one on what missionaries are.

    P.S. Tip for others: You can zoom into the map with a mouse scroll button which is nice.

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