The Dark Forest
NOTES / Where +Wicked Problems are found.

Contents

High level overview

  • The Dark Forest is a mental realm created by the absence of connection to our intuition, objective evidence about the world, and social agreements. 
  • This mental realm is filled with is small problems that are missed by our blind spots and necessary prioritization of problems. 
  • You could also call it the collective shadow of civilization. 
  • These small problems eventually turn into bigger problems. Some of these bigger problems are +Dragons (problems that can be solved by archetypes like the +Hero with 100 Arms) and some of them are +Wicked Problems (problems we can’t solve and that we can’t ignore). 
  • We can personify the Dark Forest with the archetype of the +Chaos Monkey — which is the agent that seems to throw wrenches into everything we do, no matter how much we try to prevent it. Alan Watts calls it the element of irreducible rascality… which gives it a bit of an endearing quality. 

Notes by date

May 29, 2020 
  • Caption: At all costs we must continue doing nothing! - via smbc-comics.com