What does the P2P Foundation do (or rather: aims to do)? Read the excerpt from Tom McCabe’s below in order to understand our approach better.

– we collect Level 1 direct actions, try to connect with other actors involved in Level 2 indirect actions, while also attempting to achieve Level 3 (or 4, see below) “meta-meta” effects, through our P2P Theory and strategizing about social change. Read the following to understand that important distinction.

Tom McCabe:

“One of the most useful concepts I have learned recently is the distinction between actions which directly improve the world, and actions which indirectly improve the world.

Suppose that you go onto Mechanical Turk, open an account, and spend a hundred hours transcribing audio. At current market rates, you’d get paid around $100 for your labor. By taking this action, you have made yourself $100 wealthier. This is an example of what I’d call a Level 1 or object-level action: something that directly moves the world from a less desirable state into a more desirable state.

On the other hand, suppose you take a typing class, which teaches you to type twice as fast. On the object level, this doesn’t move the world into a better state- nothing about the world has changed, other than you. However, the typing class can still be very useful, because every Level 1 project you tackle later which involves typing will go better- you’ll be able to do it more efficiently, and you’ll get a higher return on your time. This is what I’d call a Level 2 or meta-level action, because it doesn’t make the world better directly – it makes the world better indirectly, by improving the effectiveness of Level 1 actions. There are also Level 3 (meta-meta-level) actions, Level 4 (meta-meta-meta-level actions), and so on.

The most important difference between Level 1 and Level 2 actions is that Level 1 actions tend to be additive, while Level 2 actions tend to be multiplicative. If you do ten hours of work at McDonald’s, you’ll get paid ten times as much as if you did one hour; the benefits of the hours add together. However, if you take ten typing classes, each one of which improves your ability by 20%, you’ll be 1.2^10 = 6.2 times better at the end than at the beginning: the benefits of the classes multiply (assuming independence).

One result is that spending time on Level 2 actions can have a much greater return than spending time on Level 1 actions. If your labor is worth $20 an hour, and you can’t change that, then the amount of money you can earn in a year has a fairly hard upper bound- no matter how you slice it, there are only 168 hours in a week. If you spend that year trying to increase the value of your labor, on the other hand, the upper bound on your performance is both a lot higher (because you can then make more money every year for the next three decades), and a lot more fuzzy. It’s a lot more fuzzy because, while everyone has the same number of hours in a week, how effective Level 2 actions are depends a lot on your intelligence, what methods you use, and lots of other stuff. Most Americans spend too little time on higher-level actions, like being strategic – doing a quick analysis of what your goals are, and which Level 1 or Level 2 actions would best accomplish those goals. Witness the hordes of lawyers who spend thirty years on the Level 1 action of working at a law firm, three years on the Level 2 action of getting a law degree, and three minutes on the Level 3 action of deciding what to do after college. (Being strategic is one level up from whichever actions you’re being strategic about.)

It is also possible to have the opposite problem, of under-valuing Level 1, and I suspect that quite a few people in the nerdier communities do. People sometimes fall into the trap of noticing that the higher levels are (when applied properly) far more useful on the margin than Level 1, and then reacting by giving blind praise to the meta level at the expense of the object level. One cultural example is the ancient Greeks- who, though they were good thinkers for their day, didn’t invent science. Science involved actually going out and looking at the world, and that was manual labor and manual labor was for slaves. The ultimate extreme of this is Aristotle, who got philosophy off to an unfortunate beginning by starting his Metaphysics with the assumption that the most noble knowledge would be the most useless.

The problem there is that, because Level 2 actions are multiplicative and not additive, you still need at least some Level 1 actions to multiply by. It doesn’t matter how high the value of one’s labor is, if one never actually goes out and does labor. A very large number, multiplied by zero, is still zero. If one just does Level 2 actions, without any Level 1 actions, it is a failure to do something instead of nothing. Taking only meta-level actions accomplishes less, in the end, than the ten-year-old who just mowed the neighbor’s lawn for a dollar.

On a societal level, one can run into this problem even more easily, because having a large society allows one to build up more meta-levels. For the most part, people’s day-to-day labor is made up of Level 1 actions- the stuff that directly improves the world. Engineering technology that helps improve people’s productivity is then a Level 2 action. Doing science that helps with engineering is then a Level 3 action (meta-meta), and doing math that helps with science is a Level 4 action (meta-meta-meta). In order for working on Level 4 to be effective, there have to be three steps chaining back to Level 1: in this example, from math to science, from science to engineering, and from engineering to productivity. If any one of these steps fails – if the math isn’t useful for science, if the science is in a different field than the engineering, or if the engineered devices aren’t used effectively – then working on Level 4 won’t accomplish anything.

Going meta can be very powerful, for the reasons outlined above- each action taken on Level N + 1 makes it easier to do lots of things on Level N. “