I’ve solved the math for EA!
No kidding!
My apologies to anyone who feels the title is arrogant or presumptuous. Sometimes very simple things are the result of years-long effort, and nothing written here is trivial to me, just so you know.
All of the hardcore number crunching and statistical theory is about delivery.
Who is delivering to whom? And what makes that relationship legitimate?
I’d posit that anything ‘given’ supports only half of the reciprocal flow that every human requires. I feel the idea that some can ‘give’ and that ‘others’ receive is dangerous.
I’m not saying this lightly, it’s the result of deep effort. There is only one investment to be made now for the kind of emergent patterns you seek. Bucky Fuller called it a ‘trim tab’ - or the precise location to put least effort for maximal effect.
sovereignty
Providing sovereignty for every human extrapolates to benefits in real world interactions, political experience, digital reality, and personal spiritual life.
A protocol, or cryptographic communication platform, that presumes and protects human sovereignty, completely alters the human relationship to power of every kind.
In terms of resiliency, a system based on the unit of one, can start with that seed and grow in any situation. The first and second survivors of an event become a network. A localized network that participates in the give and take of what they Have and Need is regionally appropriate by default.
Everything required to live fits into Haves and Needs, then from there, it’s just matching.
Matching can be language and literacy agnostic as the items being matched are locally relevant and likely input in similar formats. Voice, photo, app interaction, are all equally valid.
All interactions would be controlled by the individual and the system is built to only deal with exchange of value. Being currency agnostic is crucial to this concept.
Hypothetical? Centralized? No way. Holochain allows an interactive set of unique records, I’ll call a ‘receipt chain’, to contain everything you Have or Need.
The only criteria is being a living breathing human.
A few layers of privacy are for different kinds of interactions. ‘Civic’ interactions involve a certain level of privacy i.e. the City knows your address and last name, and in exchange for your taxes, they provide safety and services. Nobody outside that relationship needs to know though, so the idea of selling personal profile information is anathema to healthy human interaction.
Similarly, allowing your doctor temporary access to your medical record to update a test result doesn’t force their office to maintain HIPAA compliance. Anything that’s needed would be requested and approved by the medical record owner, you.
Same goes for any other interaction. Two parties agree and the event is recorded in each ‘receipt chain’ with a token from the other party. Now their two chains are connected by this value exchange. Terms are in the metadata and smart contracts would have room to act out their code too, within that container.
IN this way, every completed exchange and the descriptive metadata surrounding it, become a de facto ‘relevancy’ score for anything. No more derived or speculative “reputation”. It either happened or it didn’t. Lying is easily discovered (because the ‘truth’ exists on chain in the collective set of interactions) and definitely not worthwhile (because falsehood would result in becoming ‘known’ for that, which would be very difficult to recover from within a system of peers in your own community). A “short” or “new” chain would require explanation as to why… IF you could get anyone to transact with you in the first place. Charities and social service organizations would be looking out for those short chains however, as the owner is likely going to have some difficulty getting by in a cooperative setting.
Vetting anyone is accomplished automatically by randomly traversing their interactions and hopping from chain to chain until a sufficient number of random hops were verified. When the chain/person is trusted and the exchange verified, their ‘relevance for being honest and a verified human’ is weighted, thereby affecting how their data is projected. Everything you’d be looking for is compared against the resources available, but “bag of beans” is as equally ‘valid’ as guitar lessons or job training. Matching doesn’t have to decide priority (another typical design mistake).
Private details don’t need to be divulged for basic interactions in real life. There are details people want to share though. Publishing a public layer of transaction metadata serves useful purposes, just as a resume does. Of course it is up to the individual how much to divulge, but they benefit by being matched, and all interactions are in the control of the individual. Agreeing to meet for exchange, or using a trusted third party, are all normal steps to an unknown situation that can be easily accommodated by technology.
All this ‘accountability’ is not on the individual alone, it goes both ways. With this system, citizen requests form a ‘to-do’ list for local governance to respond to, or not. Only, as a system of citizen controlled data, the ‘responsiveness rate’ of those elected or appointed leaders will be available at voting time outside of the governance structure.
This same ease of interaction changes the dynamic in Aid situations as well. The only true solution to any desperate moment is self-efficacy and community network reinforcement, but the Aid paradigm is inherently disempowering. Big Aid needs data, and they cannot afford to get all of it. Up until recently, owning the data and means of collection was important. Financial reality and the donor’s demand for metrics has created a situation where a steady stream of pristine data is worth its hard drive’s weight in gold.
Who better to provide precise details of what’s needed for a sustainable outcome than the people affected? Why doesn’t Big Aid trust humans? Trust me, they don’t, and it starts all the way at the top. I say “trust me” because on the inside of these orgs, there is no shame in treating whole population groups as thieving children based on a few poor examples, halfhearted attempts to ‘listen’ to community, or most often a deeply ingrained idea that civilization is “better”. Now we can satisfy those concerns and guarantee each input is verified in a trustable manner, but through s system that is not controlled by any Aid org—yet is more trustworthy and accurate than anything they have or that they can devise.
The solution? A list of wants and resources, with an expectation of responsiveness, is the beginning of a healthy relationship between populations and the power structures they live under.
In a user-owned environment, commerce changes quickly. Marketing changes into a bazaar model. Vendors lay their wares out and anonymous customers walk by. Incentives for sharing personal details and preferences would exist, but the real driver is personal customer need. What you need and want should be shared freely with your own bot to find better matches and learn over time. This bot would negotiate the best price for your user data, and find those things you seek. Discovering novel and exciting items is equally possible as now, just without the invisible psychosocial profiling and back-room data merchants that make money off of you instead of paying you for your humanity.
In a sovereignty protecting system, any user data found without a reference to the transaction—including purpose and time of use, would make the holder criminally liable.
All this from a group of personal blockchains? Yes. Equitable governance, simplified disaster logistics, self-efficacy, reinforced community networks, political accountability, resiliency, privacy, the ability to be digitally forgotten if necessary, ad-hoc secure networks among friends, and a store of every output, post, blog, or missive that you can allow a site to display, all may derive from your own protected store of data. With personal control as the One Rule, the rest of the system basically designs itself.
With a human to human network that grows and changes based on communities of consensus, the typical bureaucratic structures are irrelevant. By placing every human in the flow of giving and receiving and making everyone’s priorities equal, in an environment with transparency and self protected interests, making it easy to combine needs and resources is the final piece to using human selfish drives for prosocial ends.
In this equalized setting, dignity has a chance.
Consider a group of forced migrants able to scan a QR code at the edge of town and me matched with specific resources the town has. No wandering through the streets lost and causing suspicion. Almost more importantly, those with professional skills or even a kind heart can be matched to community needs one for one. Providing benefit is the quickest way to overcome prejudice. This kind of system can ensure the security of all parties, giving them the room to recognize human value in the ‘other’.
I’ll leave this by saying ‘giving then evaluating’ is NOT the path to healthy futures.
Simple scaleable and regionally appropriate solutions can be designed now that bypass all the layers that keep us small and isolated.
I think there are some good ideas in here, but the reason it’s been downvoted so much is probably mostly down to the provocative and arrogant sounding title (which I imagine led most to not engage). Perhaps “Personal sovereignty via blockchains could lead to much better resource allocation” would’ve been better. You could also do with referencing things you refer to and acknowledging potential pitfalls or difficulty with the proposed solution. And I note that you don’t address huge swathes of EA such as X-Risk and Animal Welfare when claiming to “solve the math for EA”.
Regarding personal sovereignty via blockchain—how do we get from here to there? Proof of Human seems like a key issue. How dow we solve that? Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project is one attempt that doesn’t seem to be going too well. Maybe Elon Musk’s talk of making Twitter open source, and an everything app, and not being in it for the money but for maintaining it as a town square, along with his interest in crypto, could be promising.
Goodharting seems like it might be a big difficulty—what’s to stop people gaming the system to get people to give them stuff that they don’t need as much as other people i.e. it would be quite easy to hide wealth off the blockchain, unless it becomes ubiquitous. You say ” Lying is easily discovered and definitely not worthwhile.” but how about omissions of the truth (ie. hiding resources)?
(Note I actually upvoted because I don’t think the Karma total should be so low.)
I can think of a few more reasons for downvotes. Before writing those, I’d like to say that it’s generally a good thing IMO to post novel things on the forum, even if one doesn’t yet know the right form, and even if people then have a bunch of complaints in the comments.
What does sovereignty for an individual even mean? I suspect that once explained, it becomes a much more complicated and controversial concept than it appears.
It’s very unclear how the mentioned Blockchain technology would bring about those “individual sovereignty”, or even what that technology is.
The view itself seems like a very extreme form of libertarianism—something that has to be supported better if you want it to be convincing, given that only a minority of people here are libertarians.
Quotes like:
I actually agree with the spirit of this quote! But the argument is not supported or explained in any way, but rather deferred to “trust me!”.
I genuinely appreciate the comments and also the notion that this proposal is naive. To many, it likely seems just too simplistic and too vast.
Is Facebook given the same ‘short shrift’ when they ‘offer’ internet to the masses ? We all know that partaking in Facebook’s version of the internet is not going to lead to an empowered populace. Yet, the ability of a protocol, in the form of a Wallet app is not only valid now, but within the hands of individual developers.
Holochain, Cardano, and Polkadot represent a sea-change in friction-free human interaction.
The presence of colonialist attitudes in the UN and the Big Aid organizations that vie for attention, is not a new idea. To quickly witness this, review the training philosophies of institutions where these ‘decision makers’ were educated. If you attend the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative practice camps you will receive ridicule if you bring up the idea that citizens with phones are much more likely to know what they want and need. The ‘logic’ you are faced with, is that “humans can’t be trusted”.
It does have a certain kind of logic, from an entitled perspective. These same organizations conduct follow-up ’studies’ to see why their interventions didn’t work. Over and over. Meanwhile these same organizations recognize that resiliency and self-efficacy are intertwined. They call it a conundrum.. how will humans in need remain compliant with the decisions dropped from on-high? How can people remain dependent but be prosocial and self-motivated? It can’t happen.
Now that “verifiably unique” (blockchain) technology is easily available, the logical conclusion of self-efficacy is now able to be realized. Personal sovereignty is the only real answer to the global problem of how to 1. Understand what people want and have to offer, at-scale. 2. Make decisions as a community for their own reasons and 3. Connect the things people need and have to share.
Telling people what they need does not work long-term. Not asking people to participate in their own recovery is a sure recipe for dependency and it forces trust in governance structures that are not made for the protection and security of the individual. It is an inherently unbalanced and de-humanizing power relationship. When communities are easily able to combine needs and resources, the ‘selfish’ drive to have something encourages shared reporting because group needs are more likely to obtain response in a crisis. After crisis, everyone’s needs ARE different.
The Aid perspective is that ‘we can’t manage everyone’s needs’ let alone trying to deal with resources every human provides. Who will track and connect intangibles like ‘friendship’ or ‘minor’ things like pet-sitting?
We now have the ability to ensure that every input came from an individual.
This same environment would detect patterns related to trying to ‘game the system’ and the result of participating in a lie (easily verified on-chain) would attribute that user a “high relevancy for lying” on-chain—which is sure to be one of the top filters used to exclude having any interaction with that person. This ‘slashing’ respects the human aspect of community interactions. These are people interacting in a physical location. It is very different than being a ‘transaction ID’ in a banking app. But it is critical to examine who will store and manage all these details. As soon as a centralized location is chosen, every participant loses their ability for “self-control” and is subject to the policies and data-use decided by the centralized “service” whether it’s Oxfam or UNOCHA.
The only equitable way to track everything a person does is to let them track themselves. When the individual is able to control what aspects of their life are public, it creates a hugely unsettled feeling for some. Giving up control over the ‘less fortunate’ exposes the shortcomings of our scarcity economy that has given rise to all sorts of mistaken assumptions about human nature.
When anyone says “You can’t do that” isn’t it really because they haven’t imagined a way for it to work yet?
I can leave it at the statistic of how many aid workers with clipboards can collect a representative sample -vs- how many people on earth have a mobile phone, or can get to one within an hour’s walk. My hypothesis is that the mass of humanity is better able to describe what they need and have to offer, than an army of underfunded charities, whose real forte is logistics. This fact is colliding with outdated bureaucratic systems that ~somehow~ keep resulting in citizen disempowerment proportional to the wealth of leadership.
My proposal to this group is that nothing will ever work as well as asking people what they need and assisting their impulse to share talent, skill, and aspirations , to reinforce the actual networks required for thriving in any situation.
For Bona fides, I can describe the settings like HHI where I’ve witnessed the problems being born, I can describe my experiences around the world that specifically expose the disconnect between digital capability and the global aid organizational structure. I have also watched closely from ‘inside the castle’ (IBM) how the lifeblood of human existence is squeezed digitally by an industry that has no care for ‘human’ qualities.
The title is provocative, but certainly not arrogant in its intent. In my opinion, it is arrogant to say that the current socioeconomic paradigm is the best we can do as a species.
Thank you for the Upvote!
What’s the scenario where someone is able to ‘immorally’ hoard? In a connected system, aid org sends a truck full of beans to a known destination with a specific ETA. Each of the individual requests comprising the ‘community request’ would expect to be satisfied, increasing relevance for the aid org (as a provider of beans) and for the community (as a trusted source of requests). Truck doesn’t arrive, and you now have people on both ends of the route working toward the middle. There would be a gap in the accounting if one person absconded. Now, an expected level of loss is included in the shipment often. A well dressed and well connected individual comes along and promises a certain amount of cooperation in exchange for the job of distributing resources. All this ignores the presence of mobile phones and the ability of a connected citizenry to get what they need—when given the chance. So, out of fear of theft, the entire society is impacted by ‘paternal’ suspicion.
When the evidence is clear that empowerment is the solution, there is no other conversation than “How do we do it?” I mean, you could ask how long it will take, and where do we start? But those are secondary and the when, is obviously disaster. Massive need, reduces restrictions and amount of ‘convincing’. Incremental ‘authorized’ progress will never allow everyone to be free.
While baby steps may sound like good advice, what are we really talking about? Would you settle for not being told when supplies are en-route because an aid worker ‘didn’t want to get your hopes up’ ? There is no ‘provisional respect’ equivalent to sovereignty.
“Not getting hopes up” is standard operating procedure that would infuriate most people if they were actually in the room where that decision was made. It would cause emotional harm if that were part of one’s entire life. Not knowing where resources are going, and being trained to not expect accountability, is like putting a lid on a pressure cooker. Eventually every human does yearn to be free.
I am proposing a system that creates democratization by default, provides resource maps as a designed ‘side effect’, and completely transforms the last-mile logistics question. I ask that control over data be given up, in exchange for far richer and more detailed information that opens possibilities and improved situational perception. As another designed side-effect, peer support is acknowledged and facilitated because that’s where the vast majority of recovery happens.
For every hole poked into this plan, self-sovereign interaction still leads to the desired state.
Just to be clear, the only mechanism at work isn’t self reporting. Governance would have ample supply of things to investigate based on the absence of data. e.g. If a steady supply of beans is requested and then suddenly stops, it’s worth a look. If an individual is requesting 10x what their neighbors are, it is worth a look.
If the populace does not send requests to their own governance, that is worth a look by the international community! Undoubtedly, there will be a connection between low ‘responsiveness scores’ of governance and overall citizen trust.
Something else crisis creates that cannot be predicted is emergent leaders. Community in crisis pushes certain people to the foreground and they are rarely best at self promotion. See the pattern? Those with self promotion skills often get the contract but are often least likely to make it happen. In a facts-only based system, the person who waits in the rain for the truck and shares it without community complaint becomes highly relevant for community leadership.
Similarly in political life, the soap box grandstander who does not satisfy the To-Do list provided by community needs will quickly lose out to the humble public servants who work hard in every political system, but often languish invisibly.
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Giving humans a means to use the technology in their palm for personal freedom, prosocial rewards, and an expectation of accountability, shouldn’t be a revolutionary idea, but apparently it is.
Many of us have been conditioned carefully to believe that the extant structures are the ‘best we’ve got’ and the result of long evolutionary processes. This is just untrue; especially in the human context. Nowhere is more humanizing than surviving a traumatic crisis event.
This project began as a way to prolong the period of benevolence that’s universally present post-event. As the line of inquiry self-unfolded, the singular question wasn’t if, but how, and which layer to target.
Refining a system to only be about what one Has and Needs, with open ended and unstructured categorization, puts the tasks in the appropriate places. By that I mean humans are excellent at deciding what’s similar with really ambiguous inputs. What they choose as a match for a need can be considered as a ‘provisional synonym’ that is reinforced with repetition. Compute is excellent at remembering and disseminating information along a ruleset.
When humans in any locality express themselves through exchange it will include subjective equivalencies. If shopping patterns matter, people will happily spend time leafing through resources, choosing what suits them best. It’s perfect. People choose, compute repeats, with weights for various kinds of ‘relevancy’ and physical proximity.
Dissimilar groups that interact will have a means of exchange they define and no system architect can predict; so ‘why try it?’ was my reasoning. Allowing humans to interact means they will find a way, as we have always done. I don’t believe a well designed system needs to restrict behavior, just the ability to affect someone else. Putting each individual in control of their value exchange creates a localized social ruleset—or digital representation of culture. Fortunately, human interaction isn’t wildly random. There’s only a certain number of things on the planet that we use, and only in a few ways each.
This task is easily within the realm of tech to interface with the community a person contacts directly. The secret is to not overmanage the inputs, which traps you into design choices that are not appropriate to purpose. Another secret is not designing a physical social tool like an abstract ‘digital pool’. I am not proposing a means to share details with anonymous masses or to adhere to a certain currency. There are means for each that exist separately from one’s ‘real life’. I’m proposing a system for encapsulating a value exchange with rules to make the best choice possible. By only dealing in ‘exchanges’ creates an expectation that one’s selfhood is valuable even in a digital realm. This is revolutionary in the current paradigm and takes some adjusting to get used to, thanks to the prolific and persistent efforts of corporate entities keeping you unaware of your own digital value.
Sorry, but I’m getting some uncanny valley vibes, like this might’ve been written by an AI? (Same with your reply to Guy Raveh’s comment, and maybe even the OP now come to think of it.) It’s pretty rambling and doesn’t really address most of what I say in my comment. (Very sorry if not an AI!)