1. The best way to promote more humane, decentralized, and empowering versions of civilization Is to define a metric (eg, The Generative Governance Index) to act as a status game for social architects
2. The easiest, most numerous, and most lucrative social systems to prototype this system is crypto communities
3. Decentralizing both the rating with and updating of the Index is a perfect use case for crypto ($GENRUS?)

References

1. Proof of Humanity
2. Open Source Initiative
3. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)
4. The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce (Wait But Why)
5. The Laboratory for Complex Problems (Not Boring)

Our conclusion is that "Corporate Datocracy" (as represented by ValPlan and Planguage) is a useful stepping stone.  In particular, it pushes us to clearly articulate the "Value Objectives" needed to enable a "Public Datocracy," such as:

• Open Format
• Public Content
• Ease of Adoption

Our belief is that iterating on this "Datocracy 0.1" exercise will both force and enable us to identify the requirements needed for a "Datocracy 1.0" platform, as well as a community to help us build it.

Searchable Index of Publications

1. Clear Communication: Logical Language Logistics for Replies and Phrases (Book)
2. Systems Enterprise Architecture (Book)
3. 12? (Twelve Tough Questions Booklet)
4. QUANTeer: The Art of quantifying your value ideas (Book) (Video)
5. PLanalysis (Booklet)
6. Specifying Quality Requirements With Planguage (ModernAnalyst.com)
7. PLanguage: A Software and Systems Engineering Language, for Evaluating Methods, and Managing Projects for Zero Failure, and Maximum ‘Value Efficiency’ (PDF)
8. Value Requirements (Book) (Video)
9. Governeering: Government Systems Engineering Planning (Book)
10. Knowledge Education Nurture (Book)
11. [UN] Sustainability Planning (Book) (YouTube)

Other References

1. ValPlan, the ValueFirst Tool (7-day free trial)
2. Abrahamic Unification (breaking bread together in the Middle East)
3. Intelligibility vs Readability/Understandability (PDF)
4. Deliberative Democracy (Wikipedia)
5. Arrow's Paradox / Condorcet Paradox (Wikipedia)
6. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (Jerry Pournelle)

Special thanks to Aneesh Karve of Quilt Data for joining the Ernests in this special mini-series on Datocracy. Tune in for our wrap-up next week to discover what happens next!

The Coherency Manifesto: Towards Communal Data Platforms
Draft 5 adds point #8: 

1. We will never do this perfectly, but the better we understand and document our decisions, learnings and failures, the more rapidly the next generation can improve on them

Human Intelligence Augmentation vs Artificial General Intelligence
Rational as a subset of the Real
The Legal System is the execution engine of Legal Code (cf US forking from English Common Law)
Trust is the irreducible element of systems

• Transparent History
• Transparent Incentives
• Voice vs Exit (“take my data and go home”) eg BATNA

Equal data power (despite unequal real power and resources)

Datocracy is agreement on the ‘mechanism’ (protocol?) of data, with the policies being subject to debate and forking.

Q: Datocracy Constitution as both concrete “protocol” agreements and aspirational “cultural” values?
cf The Coherency Manifesto

For next week:

1. Machine-assisted context reconciliation (cf reconciling schemas)
2. Constitution as syntax: what is the constitution of Datopolis?
3. cf RTFM: The Revolutionary Transparency Manifesto

An ordered list of Hard Things, for next week: 

1. Developing a shared semantic understanding within a local context
2. Encoding those semantics in a syntactic system that functions in that context
3. Scaling that to other contexts -- especially via bottom-up voluntary adoption
4. Honoring the original intent without becoming limited by it

• Substack
• Twitter

Automated Transcript

• Allan Nathanson
• Andrew Moon
• Andrew Stone
• Andy Belk
• Bertrand Serlet
• Blaine Garst
• Brett Halle
• Eric Hermanson
• Kevin Enderby
• Kevin Koym
• John James
• Mark Dadgar
• Paul Lambert
• Peter Graffagnino
• Ted Goldstein
• William Parkhurst

Prabhakar suggests that Bruces still faces the same challenges as in building a business, except instead of Product-Market fit he needs "Vision-Community" fit.  He also still needs to cross the chasm by offering something 5-10x better, even if it is competing on ideas rather than products.  For example, many of those dissatisfied with capitalism are already satisfied to Marxism, and therefore would not be early adopters of anything new.

Prabhakar challenged Bruce to write out his vision in full, then boil it down into something that at least person would like enough to share.  First make it compelling, then make it plausible. The best candidate Bruce came up with was "A World Without Bureaucracy."

We agreed to make this the final Episode of Season 2, with Season 3 being focused on actual documents (or other artifacts) as Bruce writes them.

References

• Automated Transcript

In fact, Prabhakar went further and claimed that the key problem with most non-market solutions is that they tend require political acts of consensus-building (monolithic "Cathedrals") rather than enabling bottom-up experimentation (decentralized Bazaars).  This isn't to glorify markets, but to point out different types of problems require different types of solutions.

In particular, any non-coercive solution (whether market or political) requires at least some use case that delivers 5-10x the benefit of existing alternatives in order for somebody to adopt it.  Prabhakar argued that Bruce hadn't identified any "early adopter" market that would benefit from his vision before it was already large-scale and cost-effective.

Bruce then pointed out that he wasn't interested in early markets or incremental progress. His dream was to bring people into a new kind of world, even if it took multiple generations.

At that point Prabhakar pointed out that we are no longer talking about entrepreneurship and technology, but about narratives and art.  Which doesn't require funding, or customers.  All it requires is the discipline to cultivate the craft of telling compelling stories.

Bruce conceded the point.  But if that is true, then where do we go from here?

References

• Automated Transcript
• Billionaires Build (Paul Graham)
• Facebook's Motivations (Stratechery)
• Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? (2-Bit History)
• Eric Raymond' The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Wikipedia)
• Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore)
• Moral Authority (Episode 15)
• The War of Art (Steven Pressfield)

In that vein, Bruce suggested homelessness is an urgent issue for his local community that would be worth addressing.  The biggest challenge is perhaps nobody really "owns" the problem, only specific solutions that are often unworkable for those most vulnerable.  Hopefully next week we can at least figure out how to think more clearly about the problem...

References

• Automated Transcript
• Nerd Brawn (Facebook, Twitter, Gust)
• Walmart Bans (New York, California)
• Effect of Wal-Mart on Rural America
• Understanding Homelessness in America (CityLab University)

This led to the question of what values Bruce would want to build his Phyle around. Bruce started with a commitment to avoid orphaning users.  Ernie conceded that is a noble goal, and is similar to the idea of companies serving customers rather than exploiting them. 

That said, the real challenge is actually building something that lives long enough to even have those concerns.  Perhaps next week we will find out what that might be...

References

• Automated Transcript
• Until the end of the Internet (Basecamp)
• Long-Term Stock Exchange: A Principle-Based Approach
• Public Benefit Corporation
• Benefit Corporation
• B Corporation (Certification)
• Thick versus Thin Moral Frameworks 
• Thick versus Thin Descriptions

More generally, this raises an issue Prabhakar has been wrestling with on his other podcast: the tension between wanting our viewpoint to be validating and serving a higher purpose.  In particular, we humans have evolved sophisticated (if imperfect) heuristics to identify whether people are truly willing to sacrifice their personal desires for the welfare of the group.

When Bruce proclaimed he would never want to be part of a society that forbade rape victims from getting abortions, Prabhakar warned him that he had to choose what kind of world he was seeking:

1. Universalist, where all cultures in a society abided by the same rules
2. Atomist, where every subculture was free to set their own rules (a la The Diamond Age)
3. Something New, which would then become the hard problem he had to solve

Bruce admitted he desires the ability to pursue large-scale collective action.  But Prabhakar cut him off before he went any further, so we can save that topic for next week.

References

• Automated Transcript
• Death to the King of the USA (Ernest Bruce)
• I Can Tolerate Anything but the Outgroup (Slate Star Codex)
• S5E5 Better Next Time (The Great Reset on YouTube)
• 24. Untying Loads (The Great Reset Podcast)
• Origin of Language (Wikipedia)
• Initiation (Wikipedia)
• The Diamond Age (Neil Stephenson)
• Female Genital Mutilation (Wikipedia)

• Universal Justice (versus Tribalism/Elitism): everyone should be subject to the same rules
• Accountable Authorities
• Healthy Trust (versus Blind Faith)
• Appropriate Consequences (neither Cruel nor Lax)
• The Truth (versus Privacy, at least for the Powerful)

While it may be difficult to make these value absolutes, we generally agreed the world would be better if there was more of this and less of their opposite.

Bruce then questioned how we would create "unit tests" for these values, which Prabhakar suggested would be an excellent question for next week. Stay tuned!

References

• Automated Transcript
• Core Beliefs (Positive Psychology)
• What the Hell are Values (Joe Edelman)
• The Sensation of Being Somebody (Maurice Wagner)
• The Tale of Killer Sally (NY Daily News)
• Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (Peer-to-Peer Foundation)

This highlights the fact that no individual fully expresses the values we aspire towards, so we must appeal to some kind of transcendence. As well as someone we all trust to speak on behalf of that transcedance. Examples include:

1. Ancestors (via Elders)
2. Animistic Spirits (via Shamans)
3. Pagan Deities (via Priests)
4. Monotheistic Gods (via Scriptural Scholars)
5. Dialectical Materialism (via the Dictatorship of the Proletariat)

Prabhakar then pointed out that America in the 1960s shifted moral authority from WASPs to the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Count.  Once that become our highest standard of morality, is it any surprise that politicians sacrifice all other values in order to influence that?

Bruce then attempted to propose a variety of principles, only to retract them when Prabhakar pointed out they conflicted with others of his values. Bruce initially criticized religion for relying on unprovable beliefs, until Prabhakar pointed out Bruce's core beliefs were equally unprovable.  In fact, Prabhakar claimed formal religion (for all its many flaws) at least made its core beliefs public where they could be analyzed and argued over.  Prabhakar then challenged Bruce to similarly write down his own principles, for us to discuss next week.

References

• Automated Transcript
• Strict Constructionism (Wikipedia)
• Scientific Method (Wikipedia)
• The Warren Court (ThoughtCo)
• Fetus Rights (Wikipedia)
• The San Jose Declaration: Ending the Abortion Wars (Radically Happy)

To avoid loaded terms like "science" and "religion", Prabhakar suggested the terms "good faith" and "bad faith" -- or "adaptive" vs "maladaptive" beliefs -- to reflect the core virtue of adapting our beliefs to address the data, rather than rejecting data that contradicts our beliefs. 

He also pushed Bruce to clarify how much of his anger against Trump was due to his quest for power, versus the values that Trump used that power for.  In particular, was he similarly disgusted by prior expansions of presidential power, or did he consider them justified because of the noble ends?

Bruce countered that what really angered him was that Trump didn't really believe any of the things he stood far. After, he hardly seems to do or believe any of the things that Christians are supposed to.  Prabhakar pointed out that:

1. Nobody knows what Trump really believes (probably not even him)
2. Since the moral majority, conservative Christians have found social engagement, identity, and even a kind of unity (e.g. with Catholics) by focusing on a small set of political issues
3. Trump has shown surprising devotion to those core issues, even when contrary to rational political calculation

We both agreed that there is nothing we despise more than people who talk loudly about certain principles, yet act in ways completely contrary to them.

Then Prabhakar asked Bruce why, despite his long-standing principled disdain for Facebook and its business model, he initially posted his article solely on Facebook.  Bruce explained that he just needed to get his message out as widely as possible, and Facebook was the only place to do that.

Then Prabhakar asked Bruce why he needed to that, and Bruce had no answer.

Which led to a discussion of grace. How all of us at times fall short of our principles for reasons we can' t explain. And this is a core part of the human experience we have to figure out, both as individuals and society, in order to succeed in truly making things better.

Welcome to Season 2 of Too Earnest: Two Ernests Forking Humanity.

References

• Automated Transcript
• M*th*r*f*ck*r (Ernest Bruce on Medium)
• M*th*r*f*ck*r definition (Urban Dictionary)
• Sexist rules for women on Arctic expedition (E&E News)
• Trump goes full dictator, vows to stay in office regardless of election results (Vanity Fair)
• Pseudo-science (Wikipedia)
• Drawing the line between science and pseudo-science (Scientific American)
• Adaptive behavior (Wikipedia)
• Power and the Presidency, From Kennedy to Obama (Smithsonian)
• Moral Majority (Wikipedia)
• Anti-Catholicism in the United States (Wikipedia)

The alternative is to apply the same sort of "hackability" to leadership as Bruce wanted for systems, by creating a status game around  adaptability to new information, and a willingness to publicize immutable records of past decisions. 

The interesting question for Bruce was whether we can apply this to non-religious communities. Come back next week to find out!

Resources

• Automated Transcript
• The Great Reset
• Ultrasociety

We identified four phases in the birth of a movement, using the American Revolution as a role model:

1. Artists: Original thinkers who introduce inspiring ideas (Montesquieu. Thomas Paine)
2. Men of Letters: Like-minded communities who build a shared vision of the future (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson)
3. Men of Action: Decisive leaders who make that vision a reality (George Washington)
4. Men of Systems: Organizers who build processes to ensure the vision's survival (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison)

Interestingly, the basis of moral authority shifts between phases:

1. Artists: Being true to their convictions
2. Letters: Generosity in helping the community build consensus
3. Action: Willingness to sacrifice and take great risks
4. Systems:  Pragmatic effectiveness in getting things done

This poses a conundrum for us as we are trying to shift from "Art" to "Letters", which requires us to focus on building bridges to others rather than merely being true to ourselves.  Can we cross that chasm? Stay tuned...

• Automated Transcript

References

• Automated Transcript
• Omni-Culturalism

This week Bruce builds on that to outline his vision of a "hackable and forkable" world, where everyone has the ability (at least in principle) to maintain and customize the essential systems they depend upon.  Bruce adds that people should be free to outsource production to others, especially where scale matters, but only if we can preserve transparency and autonomy.  The goal is to create a universal system of multi-dimensional reputation and reward that encourages cooperative, pro-social behavior.

Prabhakar describes this as abstracting away the mechanics of our systems, while still communicating the values.  He then argues that, if you squint really hard, global financial capitalism did in fact create a crude version of that reality; especially after the 1970s, when consumer activism created pressure for companies to embrace safety and environmental sustainability as part of their "brand."  This is not to excuse the many sins of capitalism, but to illustrate how humanity at scale requires compressive tools like "brand" and "price" to cope with information overload.

This highlighted a tension between enabling communities to become self-sustaining, without them becoming self-contained tyrannies. Prabhakar argued that required local ownership of critical infrastructure, but a global culture of shared learning.  Bruce argued that the key to preventing tyranny was mobility, so people could easily leave or fork a community that was failing to achieve its stated goals. Prabhakar countered that high barriers to exit are essential to encourage people to build long-term reputations. 

In the end, we agreed to table the discussion about loyalty versus mobility for next week. Hope you will join us then!

References

• Automated Transcript (Google Sheet)
• Hydrogen Economy (Wikipedia)
• Toward Abundant Systems (Seth Godin)
• The Price System as a Mechanism for Using Knowledge (Friedrich von Hayek)
• Why Omniculturalism, Not Multiculturalism, Is the Solution (Psychology Today) 

• The risk of losing status from critiquing the system
• Revolutions often fail
• Even successful revolutions rarely improve most people's situation
• Is the likely benefit greater than the likely cost, especially given great uncertainty?

How do we get people to view their selves and their group identity differently? Coercion? Argument? Persuasion?  And how do we guard against the risk of us accidentally making things worse?

• Automated Transcript (TBD)
• IGWET (www.igwet.com)
• Hope and Change for Humpty Dumpty (Gary Sweeten)
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
• Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Joseph Ellis)
• Industry and its Discontents (Seth Godin, Akimbo)
• Groupthink (Wikipedia)
• The Science of "Muddling Through" (Charles Lindblom) 

The original "nativist" caste system that harkens back to the Founding Fathers is alive and well.  That focus on race, religion, and riches has become the backbone of the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan.

However, he claims the Democratic Party is just as wedded to a second "cosmopolitan" caste system, which obsesses over redistributive economics, education, and elitism.  Democrats may sincerely believe they are helping the poor, but are blind to how their policies fragment families and funnel people into a zero-sum educational rigged in their favor.

Republicans value adherence to abstract principles over the welfare of real flesh-and-blood human beings.
Democrats value the welfare of idealized, hypothetical human beings over that of actual flesh-and-blood human beings.

Stay tuned for next week to hear Bruce's response!

• Automated Transcript
• The Legacies of Slavery and Serfdom — Two Personal Encounters (David Gleason)
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Amazon)
• It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System (NPR)
• Our reactions to odor reveal our political attitudes, survey suggests (Science Daily)
• Researchers find stench of sweat and rancid butter can influence our views (Daily Mail)

The IGWET EAQ

1. "communities seeking positive change"
   1. what is positive change?
   2. what is negative change?
   3. who decides?
2. "ad-hoc groups build up trust"
   1. how is trust built-up? in each persons mind?
   2. how does a community or an individual keep track of the trust it has on each trusted entity?
3. "relational practices" -> "open source spirituality"
   1. how do shared practices reflect spirituality?
   2. how do values and ideals translate into code-based practices?
4. "scaffold to demonstrate competence"
   1. so competence is a function of how many entities adopt the practices that an entity authors?
5. "networked communities have not been able to win against hierarchical institutions"
   1. hierarchical entities still have the advantage of resource accummulation and concentration; can IGWET help with that?
6. "IGWET provides a low-cost, easy-to-use platform designed to promote bottom-up innovation"
   1. "IGWET solution for the problems (slow information transfer from the bottom to the top, expensive and slow innovation) of top-down hierarchies?"
7. "community-curated practices"
   1. similar to Ethereums contracts?
   2. what is the language used to code this practices?

Automated Transcript

References

• Automated Transcript
• IGWET: Interconnecting Groups for Whole-Earth Transformation
• The End of Bureaucracy, Again?
• Freedom, Permissionless Innovation, and a Successful Internet
• Original Position (John Rawls)

He argues that we could apply that same thinking to create an open platform where groups gain status by documenting and living up to their values.  The atomic unit of this is a "relational practice", collections of which from a "code of conduct" that could be evolved and remixed by other groups, just like source code in a package manager. The hypothesis is that pro-social groups who are serious about living their values would welcome this scrutiny, enabling them to out-compete groups whose internal behavior diverges from their public claims.

• The Iron Law of Oligarchy (Wikipedia)
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Eric Raymond)
• "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." (The Lord Acton)
• "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." (Andrew Fletcher)

We have been wrestling with how to bootstrap scalable pro-social behavior (aka positive-sum status games) in the absence of a top-down authority to set and enforce standards (which often starts out well, but always ends up corrupted by self-interest, even if unconscious).

Prabhakar experienced the pain of this first hand when his 7/28 pitch to The Great Reset devolved into unproductive arguments over the term "system." On the one hand, he was elated that everyone was taking ownership of the meeting instead of deferring to him as an authority figure.  On the other hand, many of them expressed frustration that they weren't making any concrete progress.

The breakthrough came from replacing "system" with the more organic term "relational practices." Instead of setting up rules and authorities to enforce them, the objective is for the group as a whole to help each other identify and adapt practices that help them achieve their common mission.  In a very real sense, the goal is to make culture into 'hackable open source' where everyone has a fair shot and understanding and improving how we relate to each other.

This is not a panacea.  The best-case outcome is also the worst-case failure mode: where this process works so well that people end up trusting it too much, and stop being vigilant.  The most we can do is create a transparent enough ecosystem that a single well-meaning individual of average ability can rally others to stop a skillful player with malicious intent (but not vice versa).  But in the end, nothing can stop the heat death of the universe.

References

• Auto-generated transcript (Google Sheet)
• Systemic Redemption (The Great Reset, S3E4)
• Deliberate Practice (James Clear)
• Open Sourcing Culture (Wikipedia)

The best we can hope for is design interfaces and governance that make it easier to do things that help people, and harder to do things that harm them.  In particular, it requires striking a balance between, e.g.:

1. Anonymity vs Consequences
2. Historical vs Current contributions
3. Transparency vs Privacy
4. Freedom to leave vs a Responsibility to stay
5. Staying informed vs Information overload

Bruce made the critical point that trust and reputation (what Prabhakar calls "cred") depends on the person.  Prabhakar sketched out a system where cred accumulates on different scales of time (immediate, seasonal, lifetime) and place (individual, community, server).  He also proposed a tricameral system of cooperative governance between members (one person one vote), communities (one customer one vote) and servers (one administrator one vote), where money was transparently tracked and acknowledged but not directly given a place at the table.

References

• Auto-generated transcript (Google Sheet)
• Human Systems Development (The Swan Factory)
• Why do competitive multiplayer games have seasons? (Reddit)
• Recommendation system based on content, not creator (TikTok)
• The Internet of Teams (The Great Reset, S3E4 unused Draft)

In particular,  every revolution starts with a small group of people inspired to work together for a better future.  Prabhakar outlines four  possible paths to take -- Politics, Art, Religion, Commerce (PARC) -- as well as the downsides associated with each. He also invited Bruce to a Design Review with his religious collaborators next Tuesday, July 21st, where Prabhakar will outline his plan for bootstrapping a revolution. Stay tuned next week to get Bruce's reaction!

References

• Auto-generated transcript (Google Sheet)
• Political: A Radical Centrist Manifesto (Ground Rules of Civil Society)
• Artistic: Ten Years into the Analog Revolution (QuantOps 2030)
• Religious: The Great Reset (Designing the Future of Christianity)
• Commercial: The Swan Factory (Bringing Humanity to Technology)

In this episode Bruce articulates his vision of how technology should serve users -- not just creators; and Prabhakar discusses his startup that attempted to do just that.

References

• Free Software Foundation
• The Swan Factory (Prabhakar's startup)
• Homoiconic C
• Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences

The best we can hope for is for a culture that rewards the creation, recognition, and normalization of the most positive-sum games over neutral or negative ones.
https://radicalcentrism.org/manifesto/