00:00One of the questions that I often get is the relationship between the Cognicist token and resources, because the Cognicist token is not an exchange-based token. That means you cannot buy any token, it can only be earned. Furthermore, it can't be held on to or hoarded because the values in your wallet are constantly updating every moment relative to what is on the mind of the collective. So there is a means by which this Cognicism record can do all of the accounting for all possible resources, but if I were to make a prediction, I would say that the idea of money as an exchange token representing resources is probably gonna stick around at least for a few decades.

00:47And it'll be hard for people to detach from that idea of, well I have enough money in my bank and that represents future security, and therefore I don't feel fully confident in, you know, just tying my well-being, my ability to exist, to my word and my actions in terms of helping those who are in need. So in the manifesto we don't talk about it as representing ownership at all, it's a reputation token, and the way that you would earn it is through your actions or your thoughts. But having more resources gives you the capacity in this current world to create greater change, to affect more people and to help more people. So ideally you want people who are billionaires to be incentivized to use their resources to help individual communities become self-sustaining, to become regenerative communities, to be able to provide for themselves to the point where they can start to actually use their own excess resources to help further others who are in dilapidated communities and who are struggling.

01:34So a wealthy person could spend money on a PR campaign or they can spend money on just trying to send assets to a specific location, but in the current world the way that that works is that, oh you get a lot of good favor and then people move on, and there's not really a follow-up on whether the action taken by the wealthy person actually helps those people over the long term or whether it was just at this particular moment.

02:22So if you do this big PR move to do some tiny thing where you're at this particular moment, you know, shaping collective belief that says oh he's actually doing really really good, well let's see how that actually [ __ ] plays out. And, you know, the more confidence and the more effort you're putting into the certainty that your action is actually helping people, if it turns out to have second order effects, well your standing in the network, your reputation in the network and therefore how much your thoughts are distributed amongst the network in terms of collective decision making would be downgraded over time, right? So let's say that you had something like Flint, Michigan, or Haiti, or something along those lines where they are considered a sacrifice zone, that means that they're so far gone that the surrounding areas have kind of stopped considering giving them the resources to be able to rebuild, right?

03:11They're considered sacrificed, but they're not really. I mean, if the economics worked the right way, if people were motivated, incentivized to help those communities rebuild, um, they could. But, well, how do you actually rebuild a community? It's not just about sending resources, it's not just about sending ships or like planes of food to different countries that are struggling. We already know that doesn't really have long-term effects, and when we do this sort of aid to other countries it's based off of this prediction that it'll make some positive change. But real positive change comes from within, just like you can't force another person to heal themselves, you know.

04:00Or you can't, like, you can't change a partner, like somebody you're dating, you, you can't, like, just force them to change, it has to come from within. So the real goal actually becomes okay, what is that particular community's cultural ethos, how do they interrelate with each other now, and what are the fundamental things that are holding them back from being able to provide for themselves, provide their basic needs without some sort of external resources being flowed in. Of course it requires some level of resources being sent to that community, but you want an efficient allocation, and you want that allocation of those resources to be actually relevant to the people living within that community, you want it to reflect something that they actually believe. You don't want to have, you know, suburbs just being sent to everywhere all over the planet.

04:48So that every locality looks the same. Every locality has its own unique culture and people and beliefs, and it is those people who are living there who are going to need to learn to rebuild their community, right? Now that's not really incentivized except for a small few people who are community organizers who really believe and stay behind. But many people are just incentivized to get out, you know, they just want to get out of their town and move to a town with more opportunities, that's generally what people do is they try to escape the locality. That means there aren't, you know, intelligent minds and capable workers in those areas to actually rejuvenate and restore them to this place where they're vibrant and they're happy and people are interacting with each other well and are self-directed, you know, swaraj, like self-governance, not government from the outside.

05:38But also a motivation incentive for the resources that are actually helping those people represent their own cultural ethos over time. So the way that the resources tie in is based off of prediction about collective well-being. And that in order to gain social standing there are many ways that you can do that. One is that you just share predictions that turn out to be true. Another is that you share knowledge ahead of the curve, that means just a simple belief that you think more people will believe in the future, the Overton, the Overton window will move. But the other way is social proof of work, which is you're quantifying and expressing via natural language actions that you are taking to help other people or to help yourself. It's just, you're quantifying an action within a community, and you know the larger the scale of the action and the more attention there really should be to deciding whether that action is useful.

06:27Now there's no magical gating that says this person can't go do this action if everybody disagrees with them. That's actually really really important, because one person can be right in the face of collective adversity. You know, there can be a groupthink across society where it's like there is truly one person who's like, no this is what we need to do. Maybe Elon Musk is right, maybe the only solution really is that we have to get to Mars, and if we don't get to Mars we're all gonna die, I'm trying to save humanity. Like, maybe he's right. You know, I disagree with that, but maybe maybe he's right. Yeah, but the idea is, a lot of these systems have this sort of gating by the community that says okay once the community has assessed that this is an acceptable behavior then the tokens will be released or something like that.

07:15That's not what this is about. This just assumes exchange tokens already exist, it's not [ __ ] with that. It's a completely brand new idea relative to a collective record of belief over time and how our beliefs and actions affect the collective whole, the actual outcomes based off of our beliefs and expectations over time. So if there's a person who is fighting against the collective belief, for example somebody saying there's going to be a pandemic and we really need to take care of this, and if something evolves it'll rapidly spread across the world and then we'll all be [ __ ]. There are people saying that before the pandemic but nobody was really listening to them, those voices weren't being amplified, they weren't being given power. You don't want to gate that. And so when I hear a lot of these systems like Saving for example, where it gates project proposals to the community where the token only gets released once it's been determined, well you know, sometimes collective intelligence at that moment is wrong, and that's okay as long as you save that signal.

08:03And when there is an eventual realignment, just because reality comes crashing down upon you, that that signal can be used to automatically reallocate attention in order to make better decisions collectively, so that we can grow together as a society and take care of our most vulnerable to the point that they can take care of themselves and provide for their own communities. So the relationship between resources and the token is that it's not an exchange token, it doesn't represent the value of a good, it represents the value of your word over time and your confidence relative to that moment.

08:51And what that means is, depending on what is on the collective mind at that particular time, will determine the distribution of that token. And ultimately what that token means is it's a distribution of collective attention. So it's basically saying you have thoughts, you have beliefs right now, well in the past you have shared thoughts that were completely relevant to what is on everybody's minds. For example, once the pandemic started it would amplify the people who were already saying it was supposed to be a problem, instead of what we do now which is that the second something unexpected happens they just put the same pundits on TV and they just immediately change and update and say like, oh this is why this happened, as if they knew the whole time, just creating [ __ ] theories out of nothing.

09:39But those people were wrong. When there is unexpected outcomes, then we should amplify the voices who expected them in that particular moment. That's not a particularly hard thing to do at a small scale. It's a little bit harder to do up to hundreds of millions and billions, but it's absolutely doable. I mean if one person can really envision out the entirety of this code base for, you know, scales from six to two billion, I don't envision it being that particularly difficult. Uh, once the technology becomes more readily available, there are certain barriers.

10:26Right, when I wrote the manifesto the technology didn't exist yet, it was a prediction. This is really [ __ ] important, okay? When I wrote the manifesto, GPT-3, GPT-2, GPT, it didn't exist. It wasn't common knowledge, there were not language models that were outputting sentences that made sense, they just didn't exist. So I was saying, okay, in a few years they will, and then we can use that technology to build upon it. And the reason why I knew there would be is because I trained some of these models on the word level and I got them to make reasonable output that I knew would get better over time. And I trained them at the character level, that means that the way that it's quantified into the system is at the level of characters.

11:15And that means that language can evolve and that new representations or new words can be interpreted based off of their root words right away. And so I saw that it could learn the phonemes and start to reconstruct words and have some logical reasonable output from it. It was very difficult to train at the time and it took a very very long time, but I knew it was doable. Now we are in the future, that's I saw GPT-2 came out I was like, well guys see this is what I'm talking about, it is completely doable. But even at that time people still weren't really believing it, so I'm like, all right fine, I'll just have to wait for them to add more parameters. GPT-3, then it's like, okay so there's really a lot going on there, it's really seeming like these things are making sense and representing something true within our cultural ethos.

12:04It seems like it's capturing something true about our nature as beings. So but even then, you know, GPT-2 cost about five million dollars to train, and it required an incredible amount of servers that were available to those people. And, um, and of course server costs are coming down, but running any sort of chain in this current time requires electricity, and in this current frame electricity costs money, right? So there is this motivation also for individuals to provide for collective well-being by using the resources to run the chain. And this is partially why I recommend in the beginning it is sort of a two token thing where those people are rewarded for providing the energy through a proof of stake.

12:52Right, that the exchange token that, you know, is bound to the same chain is rewarded by a proof of stake. And then the way that the Cognicist token functions is completely different, and it's that sort of attentional distribution based off of representational learning and social proof of work, by the moving signal over time, and this big distributed data store of learned representations of the cultural ethos of sub-communities all interacting with each other at a fractal scale by exchanging parameters between their models to retain a level of security and trust and grow towards each other over time.

13:40Now the cost of that can actually be brought down by things like federated learning, and that actually also helps with the privacy and security, which is where parts of a model are trained on different machines where they only have access to a limited amount of data, but the parameters of the entire model can be updated collectively without revealing information to anybody else. So the technology is coming along, it is getting cheaper, it is getting more reasonable, and at a certain point it's just going to be really obvious and logical to people. That being said, at the same time as these opportunities to create a new system are rising, uh, society itself is dilapidating, we're heading towards civilizational collapse.

14:27It's two pathways running towards each other, and which one are we going to reach first? Are we going to reach the capacity to build this new system that helps direct collective decision making and our usage of resources, or are we going to collapse first? So in summary, how does the Cognicist token connect to resources and resource allocation and just getting food and stuff like that? Well, you start in a transitional environment. You start just being like, okay, we are a small group of people who are trying this new system, and we still, because we live in capital society, we are living to provide for ourselves already, but we are working together to try to create better and more sustainable communities that can work together.

15:15So in the beginning it is just a process of more quantifying those decisions, but people having the capacity to earn reputation and trust by using their resources, and they just spend them in the capitalist market while also quantifying their intent. Like, why are they using these resources, who are they meant to help, and do those people they're supposedly helping actually want that help? Does that help reflect or represent their cultural capital, you know, their their ethos, their beliefs? Does it really represent who they are, or is it an outsider trying to force their way of life onto them?

16:03These individual communities, we all have errors in our cognition that cause problems, and the idea is that by reflecting back those inconsistencies over time those individual communities become more accountable to their own thoughts and actions. And when they do that they've come more in line with themselves, they make better decisions, life becomes easier, they get to the point where they can actually provide for themselves. And the technology to do all this is already here, but there is this invariable factor of electricity cost money right now. So how would you initially incentivize people to use the energy to run this chain, um, because there's, you know, energy to, energy to train the models which is real, it costs energy to update parameters of trained models.

16:51Luckily you could do something like proof of stake for the other half of it. And in theory yes, you could quantify the actual energy expenditure just through natural language and expressing, you know, what you're actually doing, automated quantifying. Just, you know, you can have something post in natural text in the form of a trackable, which is something that I have not yet talked about much. There's so much to talk about, there's so much, but the key thing is is that there are a lot of things that already been thought through, there's not necessarily a lot of reason to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. So let's try some new [ __ ].

17:38So that ended up being quite a long video, I did not expect it to be that long, and I walked a long way. I hope I don't have to edit too much, and bye. [Music]