An epinet is a diagram.
It's a diagram that lets me figure out and map and keep track of what you're thinking,
what you're thinking I'm thinking, what other people in the room think about what I'm thinking
and what each thinks about what every other person in the room is thinking.
That sounds like a lot and that's why you need a diagram.
And it's a little bit different than your traditional social network diagram in that
you don't have only people that are connected by edges and lines, you also have various
beliefs.
So if I think that you think that today is Friday, then there's going to be an arch that
takes us from me to you to the proposition today is Friday.
If I think that you think that I think that today is Friday, there's an arch that takes
me from me to you back to me and back to the proposition today is Friday.
Why is this very helpful in the context of something like a meeting or a gathering of
any kind or an email exchange?
When we have a meeting there are a lot of unspoken suppositions and a lot of attributions
that I make.
I think about what other people think and what they think I think, and sometimes I have
conversations with somebody that are meant to be dramaturgical, so they're meant to be
a piece of theater that we play out for the benefit of other people in the audience.
So I might try to persuade you that it's a good thing for you to put your hat in the
ring for a presidential race or a decanal race, not because I think that's a good thing
but because I think somebody else thinks that I don't think that's a good thing.
I want to persuade that person that in fact I think highly of you.
So, what I've done in that case is I've used the topology of the beliefs that various people
have and the beliefs that they have about other people's belief in the room to create
a situation.
So you can think of an epinet first of all as a diagram, but then you can also think
about it as a design tool.
And it's a tool for the design of human interactions in context that are high-stakes, interpersonally
acute if you will because that's where we spend a lot of time obsessing about what everybody
thinks and what everybody thinks we think.
And complicated.
Even the very simple structures that I was telling you about have a very complex interactive
belief hierarchy.
There are things that I believe that you don't know about.
There are things that you believe that I don't know about.
There are conjectures that you have about what I think, which I am oblivious of because
I can't even imagine some of them.
And there are things that I can conjecture about you which you may be oblivious of.
And it's very important to not necessarily to obsess and to become neurotic about this,
but it's important to be precise.
And it is valuable to be precise.
And that is what a lot of the epinets work that we've done tends to show that more greater
precision, greater depth, so if I think more carefully about what you think and what you
think I think and what you think I think you think, then it makes me more likely to respond
to your concerns.
It makes me more likely to address problems, issues and complaints that you might have.
It makes us more likely to be able to coordinate our actions successfully.
It makes us more able to co-mobilize in order to do something that's important to both of
us.
And that comes from greater precision, it doesn't come necessarily from a catchall theory
like let's say game theory or interactive epistemology that go bonkers in terms of the
formalism, but they don't focus on the precise structure of the beliefs as they occur in
a human group interacting in real time.