Topic
TechStuff
A collection of 19 issues
Soul is Rational: Why we need SBTs
also published on mirror.xyz - but I think I'll keep a copy here all the same. some of the thoughts evolved from the previous "minddump" draft...
The dismal science, also known as Economics, describes behavior as "rational" if maximizes personal satisfaction. Markets are held up as a tool for maximizing everyone’s satisfaction, yet they they inherently anonymize the participants, limiting the “rational” values that can be modeled. Behaviors based on principles or relationships are disregarded - yet non-transactional values that cannot be "bought" are central drivers for behavior in most humans that I care to associate with. I prefer to deal with people I know and trust, to work on things I care about, to buy products that were made in fair working conditions. I strongly want never to buy things that murderers profited from, yet today I often do so. An anonymized marketplace does not allow me to easily act “rationally” based on my actual values. A richer ecosystem of information would provide much higher utility, than the current common model of anonymized transactions.
In math, the shape of the universe follows from the axioms chosen. An assumption of scalar rationality in which all values are transactional
...ideas, essays and frameworks
Sending these to a contact, made me want to pin them here as well:
A draft of an essay calling for more frameworks for stateless individuals: Citizen or Hostage
Started a framework for grassroots policy formation - Open Public Policy RFCs and wrote about it on medium - Taking Public Policy out of the Cathedral and into the Bazaar
Currently focusing on my WhatsCookin' startup, demonstrating a working model of work-weighted corporate governance, and decentralized tech.
One of the key things to decentralize is trust. I do think we will need a feed of reputation assertions, simple description here - Open Reputation Feed
...reputation and things
ok, just happy that Melvin Carvalho shared this with the W3C mailing list. Reputation space matters - I'm talking about human rights assertions here about bad things, how to verify and act on them - and I am really glad a few people might see this who can cause it to get implemented.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2021Jun/0002.html
Cause I don't have that leverage, not yet - may try to start something this Summer but my level of overcommitment now is even higher than usual, by several-fold.
...Sense and Cents
The power of making sense...
The positive side of capitalism is a free flowing distribution of efforts and resources
Downside is that it is subject to both parasites and cancers
The real thing is the flow of information, effort and fixed resources. And this flow is more interesting if one starts with information rather than an anonymized proxy for resources. So information about what efforts are going on, how one can contribute, and what the intended outcome will be, allows people to optimize their contributions. trust networks, transparency and long term voluntary relationships minimize parasitism and cancers.
This is sort of a draft, will polish this later...
...advising is fun because
if you give someone ideas, and they put in the work to bring them to life, it's like
...its not so much that the perfect is the enemy of the good, its that the ideal is the enemy of the real
Someone has replayed your snap! Instant gratification for the long term.
I am not the snapchat type. I prefer books, code, and UIs that let me drive, think about what I'm doing, and build things over time. But with two of my kids off to college and Snapchat their preferred method of communication, I'm snapchatting.
What strikes me about the app, is the emotional bang for the buck it provides. Low overhead - down in the tenth-of-a-second range - as well as nothing to organize later, nothing to store, and no definite expectation of response makes the 'cost' of using the app in terms of time, effort and responsibility almost zero. The gratification of getting a snap unexpectedly (usually they seem not to be part of an ongoing conversation) or of seeing that one of your friends or family has viewed or saved your snap is fairly high, especially when its a photo of a distant family member.
Spontaneity is another plus. Silliness is encouraged both by the app itself (filters, face swaps, etc) and by the sense of impermanence. One might hesitate to post a dog-whiskered, clown-nosed version of oneself to a online photo album, but the sense that this is like a voice conversation that will disappear, encourages fun
...area51
I've been using StackOverflow for years as a programmer, and never before scrolled to the bottom to see the whole community of sites. Not only is there stackoverflow for plumbers and scifi/fantasy buffs, but http://area51.stackexchange.com/ lets you join or start a community of experts for a new stackoverflow site.
Its interesting that its not just platform software anyone can use, but that the community/reputation/expert factor is an intrinsic part of the thing. Its not just the software, apparently.
...Learning Communities Online
Just found P2PU - Peer to Peer University - on a list at reddit of online learning resources
This looks really cool. The ones I'm most excited about so far are
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