I’ve been a part of one unfinished whitepaper and one unsubmitted grant application on mechanisms and platforms in this space, in particular they were interventions aimed at creating distributed epistemics which is I think a very slightly more technical way of describing the value prop of “democracy” without being as much of an applause light.
The unfinished whitepaper was a slightly convoluted grantmaking system driven by asset prices on a project market, based on the hypothesis that alleviating (epistemic) pressure from elite grantmakers would be good. You kind of need to believe as a premise that wisdom of crowds beats expertise, at least in some weakened form, which I don’t think is justified, so I dropped it.
The unsubmitted grant application was a play at getting more cost effectiveness analysis written as well as streamlining the process by which CEAs are consumed and donation decisions are produced. This isn’t as much of a direct democratization play as most of what’s discussed in this post, but it’s in the genre of alleviating the cognitive bottleneck from an elite few analysts and grantmakers. Nuño pointed out to me that even if this product would be a boon for donors of 2-5 zeroes, the large institutions probably wouldn’t use this to drive decisionmaking, (without users inside large institutions, the overall cost in developer hours probably doesn’t break even, since large institutions are more important measured in dollars than donors of 2-5 zeroes).
Again, I think the crux is the premise around the wisdom of crowds. And even if you don’t buy that crowds beat silo’d experts even in weakened form, you can still think that the cognitive pressure on a small number of movement leaders is problematic.
I’d like to thank Nuño, Eli Lifland, Nathan Young, Ashley Lin, Hazelfire, and David Reinstein for advancing the discussion with me and giving me some of the ideas in this comment (half of them encouraged me and half of them discouraged me, but I won’t tell you which is which).
I’ve been a part of one unfinished whitepaper and one unsubmitted grant application on mechanisms and platforms in this space, in particular they were interventions aimed at creating distributed epistemics which is I think a very slightly more technical way of describing the value prop of “democracy” without being as much of an applause light.
The unfinished whitepaper was a slightly convoluted grantmaking system driven by asset prices on a project market, based on the hypothesis that alleviating (epistemic) pressure from elite grantmakers would be good. You kind of need to believe as a premise that wisdom of crowds beats expertise, at least in some weakened form, which I don’t think is justified, so I dropped it.
The unsubmitted grant application was a play at getting more cost effectiveness analysis written as well as streamlining the process by which CEAs are consumed and donation decisions are produced. This isn’t as much of a direct democratization play as most of what’s discussed in this post, but it’s in the genre of alleviating the cognitive bottleneck from an elite few analysts and grantmakers. Nuño pointed out to me that even if this product would be a boon for donors of 2-5 zeroes, the large institutions probably wouldn’t use this to drive decisionmaking, (without users inside large institutions, the overall cost in developer hours probably doesn’t break even, since large institutions are more important measured in dollars than donors of 2-5 zeroes).
Again, I think the crux is the premise around the wisdom of crowds. And even if you don’t buy that crowds beat silo’d experts even in weakened form, you can still think that the cognitive pressure on a small number of movement leaders is problematic.
I’d like to thank Nuño, Eli Lifland, Nathan Young, Ashley Lin, Hazelfire, and David Reinstein for advancing the discussion with me and giving me some of the ideas in this comment (half of them encouraged me and half of them discouraged me, but I won’t tell you which is which).