It sounds like you want to allocate some resources you don’t have in furtherance of a goal you haven’t defined and don’t care about, and would like other people to be passionate enough about this to help you make a go of it.
I don’t care about the goal but I do care about the method that the goal is selected and how the people are encouraged to work towards the goal. A good metaphor would someone wanting to try an organisation controlled by voting, he couldn’t say what the organization will end up doing, because it would be dependent upon what the people who voted would make it do. If he had a firm goal that he just had to achieve, then he would probably would be better off without the organization. Voting is a method of combining diverse goals and knowledge into one organization; as are control markets.
If I can’t get people interested in the idea now, building a web app by myself won’t make any difference. I also understand my motivational structures well enough to know that working with other people helps a lot.
A good metaphor would someone wanting to try an organisation controlled by voting, he couldn’t say what the organization will end up doing, because it would be dependent upon what the people who voted would make it do. If he had a firm goal that he just had to achieve, then he would probably would be better off without the organization.
Well there’s your problem. People didn’t create democracy just to see if it would work. People created democracy to answer the question “how the heck are we going to run our nation?” There were firm goals. “Guard civilization against bandits, natives, and the French.” (Or “bandits, barbarians, and the Spartans,” depending on the era.) “Protect our liberty from the British.” “Make sure the government stays beholden to the people.”
If you want to build something, you need an actual, concrete thing to build. Locke didn’t create modern democracy. That took Jefferson and Hamilton and the rest.
If I can’t get people interested in the idea now, building a web app by myself won’t make any difference.
I agree. You don’t actually want a web app that badly, and frankly, neither do any of us. I see two solutions.
1) Apply this to a real problem whose mere existence causes you real emotional pain. (e.g., “open source software projects are shoddily run,” “the healthcare system is fucked up and bullshit,” “the technology to do this awesome thing I want doesn’t exist.”) Use the enthusiasm this generates to get others involved.
2) Follow Zaine’s advice. Build a toy example of your system that’s fun for its own sake. Use that to gather data.
Either way, I would suggest you learn to write better before you go ahead with any project that requires outside participation. Basic things like sentence structure and punctuation are still holding you back. Posts like your stuff here in Discussion are the best way to do that. Keep writing, keep getting feedback, and focus on specific techniques.
Heh. Part of the reason I posted here was that Lesswrong is associated wtih CFAR. So I thought people would be more amenable to meta-improvement organisations. If people are interested in raising the sanity water-line of individuals, why not the sanity waterline of organizations? I see I was miscalibrated.
Zaines advice would most likely end up being a webapp of some flavour anyway :P The game would need to be multiplayer, no download required. And I may as well make it so the control market software in the game has an api and can be easily extracted from the game if people decide they want to use it in anger.
I will try and write more. But limited time will make it probably slip off my agenda in favour of coding.
You might want to distinguish between the following two propositions.
“People here are not interested in raising the sanity waterline of organizations.”
“People here don’t see how your proposal for experimenting with ‘control markets’ is actually likely to do much to raise the sanity waterline of organizations.”
It seems to me that you’ve had evidence for #2 and have concluded #1.
I’ve been explicitly recommended to get a concrete outcome by villiam_bur and told to I need to focus on one by Modus Ponies. They got up voted. No one has said, “Hey I like your enthusiasm for trying a different organisational structure, would you be interested in helping me try out this type of system first?”. This would have been evidence of 2 for me. And I would have evaluated the system and may have decided to help it.
We probably won’t hit on the right one straight away, but we won’t get anywhere without fostering a culture of experimentation.
Edit:
I think most people are interested in improving organisations in the abstract, lots of people complain about governments etc. I’m looking for people that are actively looking for new organisational methods to try.
If I had an idea I was passionate about, and was looking for people to help make it work, my first instincts would be to find other people who are passionate about it as well, or people who have a demonstrated history of making ideas like mine work. Which one are you?
Technically this thread is evidence for both of those. If whpearson concluded #1, then that was probably because of bad priors (most likely, failing to consider #2 due to ugh fields and/or illusion of transparency), not because of misinterpreting evidence.
Almost everything is evidence either for or against almost everything else. I agree that this thread is some evidence for both #1 and #2, but I suggest it’s better evidence for #2 than for #1 -- and, as you suggest, #2 has higher prior probability than #1.
It sounds like you want to allocate some resources you don’t have in furtherance of a goal you haven’t defined and don’t care about, and would like other people to be passionate enough about this to help you make a go of it.
I don’t care about the goal but I do care about the method that the goal is selected and how the people are encouraged to work towards the goal. A good metaphor would someone wanting to try an organisation controlled by voting, he couldn’t say what the organization will end up doing, because it would be dependent upon what the people who voted would make it do. If he had a firm goal that he just had to achieve, then he would probably would be better off without the organization. Voting is a method of combining diverse goals and knowledge into one organization; as are control markets.
If I can’t get people interested in the idea now, building a web app by myself won’t make any difference. I also understand my motivational structures well enough to know that working with other people helps a lot.
Well there’s your problem. People didn’t create democracy just to see if it would work. People created democracy to answer the question “how the heck are we going to run our nation?” There were firm goals. “Guard civilization against bandits, natives, and the French.” (Or “bandits, barbarians, and the Spartans,” depending on the era.) “Protect our liberty from the British.” “Make sure the government stays beholden to the people.”
If you want to build something, you need an actual, concrete thing to build. Locke didn’t create modern democracy. That took Jefferson and Hamilton and the rest.
I agree. You don’t actually want a web app that badly, and frankly, neither do any of us. I see two solutions.
1) Apply this to a real problem whose mere existence causes you real emotional pain. (e.g., “open source software projects are shoddily run,” “the healthcare system is fucked up and bullshit,” “the technology to do this awesome thing I want doesn’t exist.”) Use the enthusiasm this generates to get others involved. 2) Follow Zaine’s advice. Build a toy example of your system that’s fun for its own sake. Use that to gather data.
Either way, I would suggest you learn to write better before you go ahead with any project that requires outside participation. Basic things like sentence structure and punctuation are still holding you back. Posts like your stuff here in Discussion are the best way to do that. Keep writing, keep getting feedback, and focus on specific techniques.
Heh. Part of the reason I posted here was that Lesswrong is associated wtih CFAR. So I thought people would be more amenable to meta-improvement organisations. If people are interested in raising the sanity water-line of individuals, why not the sanity waterline of organizations? I see I was miscalibrated.
Zaines advice would most likely end up being a webapp of some flavour anyway :P The game would need to be multiplayer, no download required. And I may as well make it so the control market software in the game has an api and can be easily extracted from the game if people decide they want to use it in anger.
I will try and write more. But limited time will make it probably slip off my agenda in favour of coding.
Thanks for the feedback.
You might want to distinguish between the following two propositions.
“People here are not interested in raising the sanity waterline of organizations.”
“People here don’t see how your proposal for experimenting with ‘control markets’ is actually likely to do much to raise the sanity waterline of organizations.”
It seems to me that you’ve had evidence for #2 and have concluded #1.
I’ve been explicitly recommended to get a concrete outcome by villiam_bur and told to I need to focus on one by Modus Ponies. They got up voted. No one has said, “Hey I like your enthusiasm for trying a different organisational structure, would you be interested in helping me try out this type of system first?”. This would have been evidence of 2 for me. And I would have evaluated the system and may have decided to help it.
We probably won’t hit on the right one straight away, but we won’t get anywhere without fostering a culture of experimentation.
Edit: I think most people are interested in improving organisations in the abstract, lots of people complain about governments etc. I’m looking for people that are actively looking for new organisational methods to try.
If I had an idea I was passionate about, and was looking for people to help make it work, my first instincts would be to find other people who are passionate about it as well, or people who have a demonstrated history of making ideas like mine work. Which one are you?
Technically this thread is evidence for both of those. If whpearson concluded #1, then that was probably because of bad priors (most likely, failing to consider #2 due to ugh fields and/or illusion of transparency), not because of misinterpreting evidence.
Almost everything is evidence either for or against almost everything else. I agree that this thread is some evidence for both #1 and #2, but I suggest it’s better evidence for #2 than for #1 -- and, as you suggest, #2 has higher prior probability than #1.