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From A B U
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Official: The “B floor” is a minimum set of beliefs / knowledge you share with someone.
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(I also see it as, minimum personal prerequisite knowledge to understand something. “Oh, I don’t get x, I don’t have the B floor”. “Oh, I can’t get myself to meditate regularly from a place of genuine desire, guess I don’t have the B floor”)
From 2026-01-31 Why A B U is so useful for me:
- I like this a lot because it gives clear language for the thing of - I live in a community with people with very different world-views to me, and they can feel hard to talk to, and like my whole thing (post-rationalism, Buddhism-type stuff) is illegible to them (often AI Safety people).
- So I’ve used the word “illegible” a lot when thinking about this, but I much prefer “B floor” because it feels much more empowering
- We’re not illegible to each other (which sounds very Fixed, like we’ll never be able to talk), we just don’t have a shared B Floor yet. But actually, yes we do, in other domains, like, we don’t just have to talk about Buddhism-vs-AI-safety and realise we have nothing in common. “Where do we actually have a shared B Floor?“. This is so good, so empowering!!
- Again, I’m brand new to this, so we’re yet to see how this plays out, but I’ve already had one 10 minute conversation IRL with someone who I had been avoiding for weeks because “well, we’re illegible to each other”, and as I was talking to him I mentally noted the As that I was gaining (e.g., more stuff about him, adding resolution to my very low resolution model of him). And it felt so good! “Holy shit, look at me getting As from this guy who I had previously completely written off”. So this could legitimately have implications for how I show up and connect in this in-person community