Dark, Gray, and Light Lore

Summary

Writer Venkatesh Rao asks whether lore – the shared know-how people draw on to “manage their psyches” – can be crafted on purpose. Dark lore seeds “a simple starter set of half-truths” and lets people reach a fixed end by “doing their own research”; gray lore is “usable bullshit”; light lore grows when you “encourage genuine variety in objectives”.

Rationale

Light lore names what we hope our informed hunches, tried out across many places, might add up to: shared know-how that grows through trial and error and resists monocultures.