A better version of social media that fixes its flaws. Causing less outrage but fostering constructive collaboration. Paul Graham repeatedly hints at this e.g. here and here (these are not the best quotes but those I could find quickly). Maybe something with a distributed trust or social credit system like Advogato aimed at. You will feel safe there while getting valuable input and feedback with a balance of confirmation and relevant new information.
Schoocial Media (name suggested by my son). A combination of the good ideas from
social media (getting in contact with the people that let you grow most),
Lambda School (incentives aligned between educator and educatee),
Dragon Box (teaching elementary education in a fun a natural way).
I’m not sure how this would actually look like but my son seems to have some ideas. One is that memes can summarize actual core scientific insights in a memorable way and can lead to exploration of what is behind it—e.g. on Khan Academy. He has shown me quite a few cool ones e.g. about relativity.
General Public Contract—A growing cooperative society—by some called a cult—that applies a positive-sum mechanism to build a better society on top of—or embedded in the existing society at large. It does so by using a valid legal contract among all parties. A contract like the “General Public Virus”, that requires participants to contribute to it to gain its benefits. One extreme example would be a contract that requires you to effectively give up your private property except for your immediate belongings in exchange for access to the net utility of the property managed under the contract.
Bad Ones
Real Social Engineering. Technology that models motivation and communication of large numbers of humans accurately enough to predict the impact of communication acts or to select the most promising communication scheme for some target metric. Today’s click optimization will look like child’s play against this. Most likely it will not be capable of predicting global trends like Asimov’s Psychohistory but good enough that everybody not having access to this will be the future Third World. Among those having it, it will be zero-sum of course—and tricky, because fixed-point algorithms will need to be developed. I once read a short story about something like this but can’t find it. Any takers?
A Caricature of Science. One of the very bad things that could happen is that significant parts of science could lose public trust by not delivering or even worse by falling prey to partisanship (esp. beyond a single country). I fear a religion-like science cult where results are more influenced by group expectations than by the experimental method and hard statistics. I think some people would say that we are not that far away from that but I think it could be much worse.
Fake Solutions—I expect a lot of structures that promise to solve real or imagined flaws of society and/or that fight the good solutions that are resistant to exploitation (like the GPC above). Organizations, companies, NGOs that appeal to moral values but don’t deliver. Mostly because of the mechanisms outlined by Robin Hanson e.g. here and here. Or by SSC here.
To foster the good ones and counter the bad ones, the Long View would suggest starting early at finding and categorizing and creating transparency about them.
Re: general public contract, I found parts of Legal Systems Very Different From Ours interesting for exactly this topic. Religious legal systems, for example, are mostly implemented on top of more general legal systems in today’s first world.
Among those having it, it will be zero-sum of course—and tricky, because fixed-point algorithms will need to be developed.
I had in mind it being used to compete for limited resources. But I like the idea that it could be used for improved collaboration. What did you have in mind?
Tools allowing a group to intentionally choose their memes sound like they could be useful in much the same way as genetic engineering. Like genetic engineering of group culture. I imagine it would be especially useful as group size increases, potentially making large group cooperation less inherently unstable.
Real Social Engineering. That’s already been happening! Foucault describes the development from sovereign power to disciplinary power to governmentality. I expect the trend to continue.
Good Ones
A better version of social media that fixes its flaws. Causing less outrage but fostering constructive collaboration. Paul Graham repeatedly hints at this e.g. here and here (these are not the best quotes but those I could find quickly). Maybe something with a distributed trust or social credit system like Advogato aimed at. You will feel safe there while getting valuable input and feedback with a balance of confirmation and relevant new information.
Schoocial Media (name suggested by my son). A combination of the good ideas from
social media (getting in contact with the people that let you grow most),
Lambda School (incentives aligned between educator and educatee),
Khan Academy (free high-quality lessons), and
Dragon Box (teaching elementary education in a fun a natural way).
I’m not sure how this would actually look like but my son seems to have some ideas. One is that memes can summarize actual core scientific insights in a memorable way and can lead to exploration of what is behind it—e.g. on Khan Academy. He has shown me quite a few cool ones e.g. about relativity.
General Public Contract—A growing cooperative society—by some called a cult—that applies a positive-sum mechanism to build a better society on top of—or embedded in the existing society at large. It does so by using a valid legal contract among all parties. A contract like the “General Public Virus”, that requires participants to contribute to it to gain its benefits. One extreme example would be a contract that requires you to effectively give up your private property except for your immediate belongings in exchange for access to the net utility of the property managed under the contract.
Bad Ones
Real Social Engineering. Technology that models motivation and communication of large numbers of humans accurately enough to predict the impact of communication acts or to select the most promising communication scheme for some target metric. Today’s click optimization will look like child’s play against this. Most likely it will not be capable of predicting global trends like Asimov’s Psychohistory but good enough that everybody not having access to this will be the future Third World. Among those having it, it will be zero-sum of course—and tricky, because fixed-point algorithms will need to be developed. I once read a short story about something like this but can’t find it. Any takers?
A Caricature of Science. One of the very bad things that could happen is that significant parts of science could lose public trust by not delivering or even worse by falling prey to partisanship (esp. beyond a single country). I fear a religion-like science cult where results are more influenced by group expectations than by the experimental method and hard statistics. I think some people would say that we are not that far away from that but I think it could be much worse.
Fake Solutions—I expect a lot of structures that promise to solve real or imagined flaws of society and/or that fight the good solutions that are resistant to exploitation (like the GPC above). Organizations, companies, NGOs that appeal to moral values but don’t deliver. Mostly because of the mechanisms outlined by Robin Hanson e.g. here and here. Or by SSC here.
To foster the good ones and counter the bad ones, the Long View would suggest starting early at finding and categorizing and creating transparency about them.
Re: general public contract, I found parts of Legal Systems Very Different From Ours interesting for exactly this topic. Religious legal systems, for example, are mostly implemented on top of more general legal systems in today’s first world.
Why would this necessarily be zero sum?
I had in mind it being used to compete for limited resources. But I like the idea that it could be used for improved collaboration. What did you have in mind?
Tools allowing a group to intentionally choose their memes sound like they could be useful in much the same way as genetic engineering. Like genetic engineering of group culture. I imagine it would be especially useful as group size increases, potentially making large group cooperation less inherently unstable.
Real Social Engineering. That’s already been happening! Foucault describes the development from sovereign power to disciplinary power to governmentality. I expect the trend to continue.
Kind of. I have not seen anything that you could validly call engineering. More like tinkering. There is not enough hard science/math behind it.