00:00Welcome to Listener John Ash. This is the show where we explore new systems. There are many flaws in our current systems and many people who are eager and willing to discuss the flaws in those systems. They see a hole in society and they think it should be filled with something. But there are far fewer people who are willing and ready to put their own skin in the game to propose new systems. So Robin Hanson is the ideator behind Futarchy, which is a new system that seems to fit the hole in society. And we are here to see whether Futarchy really fits.

00:49So to begin with, communication is this process of sending a message over a noisy channel. The message contains information in the form of meaning. But there is sort of this assumption that the packet of meaning that we have sent to the other person has fully been received. So there are processes of minimizing the error in that communication. One is a form where you just go back and forth saying what the previous person said, which is a little bit slow for conversation. But we explore a couple of ways of grounding the conversation before we start.

01:38I think one of the most important things to do is to work through our definitions of certain words. Because often when there's a lot of conflict when people are communicating, if they actually dig a little deeper, it's just because they're slightly defining things. And so they're not really receiving the actual meaning that the person is sending. And it creates this sort of anger because how dare the person say such a thing when they're not actually saying it. So I'm just going to go through a list of words that I think are relevant to this conversation and have Robin give a quick explanation of what those mean to him personally. So number one is Futarchy. Futarchy is a colorful name.

02:24The archy is intended to show form of government and then the future is the root there. So I'm trying to evoke the idea of a future form of government, which, of course, is not terribly informative about what particular kind it would be. But it's intended to refer to decision markets as a mechanism of governance. Our proposal is to have a decision markets, i.e. markets in some outcome conditional on decisions, and that we would recommend the decision which the market estimates to have the highest outcome given that decision. So for this sort of mechanism, we'll need a set of discrete decision options that we are considering between. And then we'll need this outcome measure, which represents the overall value to us of the outcome we're going to get.

03:10Truth, you know, snow is white, "snow is white" is true. If snow is white, it's just what we mean by saying something is that we are saying it's true. Perfect. Uncertainty. When there are various possibilities and your degree of belief is not concentrated on one of them, then you are uncertain. You are unsure which of the possibilities is true. I really like that definition. Knowing for most practical purposes is when you are completely confident and justifiably so that something is true. Speculation that has two meanings, perhaps in our context. One is when you have low confidence in a claim, but you think that it's still interesting and worth discussing.

03:56Another is this process of betting or trading where we call speculative markets, where basically there's the same thing and you could buy it on Monday and sell it on Tuesday and walk away with cash if the price goes up. We call that speculation. Transaction. Trade. Purchase. Agreement. Deal. Contract. It's where somebody buys something, the other person sells something usually, but it can be a lot more complicated. Bet. A bet is implicitly a purchase or sale of a conditional asset. That is, you're making a transfer conditional on a state or a claim or an outcome or a verification of some outcome. If we bet on a game and my team wins, I get money from you.

04:44Your team wins, you get money from me. That's a bet. This one is the one that I feel like nobody actually agrees on, but it's such a behemoth. Capitalism. By practice, it just means the world we live in. One invokes the word to indicate that one would like a different world and that one doesn't want to be very specific about how the alternative will be constructed or achieved or anything like that. If you had more specific proposals, then you'd name something more specific. Simply by weighing against capitalism, you're basically saying, I don't like the way things are. I want things to be different. Exactly. Market. What is a market? That's intended to indicate sort of a larger social institution or context where trade is common.

05:32Skin in the game. A vivid term for incentives, i.e. where what happens matters to you. That is, you have consequences regarding something, and so you care in a more direct, fundamental way. Trust. That's when you might rely on someone and they might not be reliable, and you're relying on them anyway. Regulation. That's usually intended to mean a government stepping in and limiting options or requiring choices in some area, but you can have many other sources of regulations. For example, a church could regulate some area of exchange that they oversaw. A supermarket regulates the products that are offered within it, etc.

06:21Wisdom of the crowd. That's intended to be a yay-raw thing for mechanisms by which crowds would be more influential. Intended to say that they are wise and you should let crowds have more influence. Sacred. I think it's more of an atomic thing that we kind of have an immediate sense of what we mean by that, but we don't define it very well. There's a degree of reverence, respect, wanting to support and promote concepts of awe, being involved in something larger than yourself. Those are all related concepts, but I don't have a definition. Yes. The original reason I was like, oh, I have to interview you was you wrote this piece on the only thing that you can imagine that was sacred because somebody said that you didn't really hold anything sacred.

07:16And you said something along the lines that truth-seeking was sacred in some form. And I had at the time also had this sort of distaste for the word sacred. But when you said that, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. I agree with that as being sort of a sacred thing. And I just wrote something where I said the future will not have truth-seeking as its one main goal. And associates were telling me, but I thought you held truth-seeking to be sacred. I mean, we will talk about just singularly oriented goals that like where you're like, oh, there's nothing outside of this possibility. Everybody has to be on this path. So ownership. That's referring to a person in the property relationship.

08:04So a concept of property is that a person has some legal control over some asset or some choices. And so they have a property right in that. And it's distinguished from liability and legal remedies in the sense that with property, somebody is taking the control that you properly own. You can just sue them for a property right violation. And it doesn't really matter why they're doing it or what the consequences are. You can just say, stop taking my property. Whereas instead, liability is a way in which if they are doing something that's hurting you, you can say you are hurting me through liability. And that's an alternative way to deal with various kinds of legal problems. And it might be the very same thing. But for example, an intellectual property with a patent, we could enforce patents through a property right.

08:51In which case you could just say, hey, you're using my patent and that you don't need any other justification to make them stop. But with a liability rule, you have to show that they're actually hurting you through using your patent. And otherwise, you don't have a complaint. And then finally, fact. What is a fact? Well, it's closely related to the idea of a truth. But in some usages, fact would be distinguished from values. So in decision theory, you have both facts and values that go into your choices. In that case, fact would just be something about your probability distribution over reality. In other contexts, people use fact to refer to something that should be easier to judge and easier to agree on.

09:36And so you have opinions, which are sort of more indirect, constructed. And then facts are more the direct basis on which you would form opinions. OK, so the next section is another form of conflict, especially online, is that our natural language tends to sort of hyperbolize or it lends some sort of sensation of certainty to it. When in reality, our beliefs change very frequently and often without us really knowing about it. And so when people get sort of angry online, it's like they're reading something as it being this absolute truth. And they're having the sensation, oh, this doesn't feel true. This doesn't feel true. I need to correct this person and know them that it's not the one true truth.

10:24When in reality, that person probably, you know, does not place that at the very top of their hierarchy of things that matter to them. It's just some random bullshit that they're saying that day. So, and of course, because we're talking about futarchy, we're going to go through a number of predictions. But we're also going to talk about the claims about the past and claims about just facts or present or opinions. And what I will have Robin do is respond to each claim from zero to 100, with zero meaning he's completely sure that it's false. 100 meaning that he's completely sure that it's true. And 50 being complete uncertainty. And that complete uncertainty can either just be like, one, he understands the claim, but he doesn't know.

11:14But the other could be that the language is, the framing of the thought is too unclear for him to interpret it. Meaning that not to respond to each one being like, I don't know about the framing of that. But if you're uncertain about the interpretation within this particular system, that is leaning more towards the uncertainty. So you're saying you want me to collapse the concepts of, you know, reluctance to embrace the framing plus uncertainty into a single number. That sentence didn't quite make sense in my mind. Could you say another? Well, there's two dimensions in which I could respond to something. One is I could completely accept the question and just not be sure of the answer.

12:00And the other is I could not really be sure or reject the framing of the question. It sounds like you're suggesting I find a single number between zero and 100 that represents both of those two dimensions and distinctions. Collapsing two distinctions into one. It is a process of collapse, definitely a process of collapsing. So first, Futarchy will be implemented at the nation state scale within the next 50 years. I'm going to interpret these as probabilities. Well, yeah. And so that, you know, I have 20 percent. OK. A cryptocurrency will gain greater market value than the U.S. dollar within the next 30 years.

12:53Five percent. Humanity will produce automated systems that can provide for the basic needs of all living people within the next 50 years. Five percent. UBI will be implemented in the U.S. within the next 25 years. So that depends enormously on, like, how much. So, you know, a big or a tiny one. I think it's pretty likely that they'll have a tiny thing and call it that. But something big enough that you could actually live on it, that's a whole different game. So I will interpret this as something substantially big enough that you could actually, you know, use it to live on and say, you know, less than five percent. Aliens of a similar or greater capacity to manipulate reality through tool creation will actively seek to make connection with our civilization within 75 years.

13:43Less than one percent. Well, on this last one, I guess I should know maybe more like five percent. I guess I'm thinking of different scenarios that hadn't occurred to me. So the general focus of America will shift away from maximizing GDP within 40 years. I mean, 100 percent, because we're not already not doing that. China's social credit system will inspire other top-down authoritarian implementations of the idea. 20 percent. Prediction markets will become increasingly popular over the next five years. 50 percent. Give it that sort of 50-50. It could go up, could go down. I mean, I can't tell. China and or the U.S. will switch to a non-state controlled cryptocurrency within 25 years.

14:28Less than one percent. Inflation will continue to rise over the coming year. Quite likely, sure. 70 percent. The United States federal government will fracture into sub-governments over the next 60 years. 20 percent. That's interesting. Bitcoin will still exist in 80 years. That's, you know, 90 percent. Interesting. That's an interesting one. Automation. economies are relevant? Ever. There's no time on that one. No. You know, less than five percent. Okay. New systems will emerge to challenge the collective decision making of government regulated markets. I mean, that's already true, so a hundred percent. Yay. We will experience large-scale planetary collapse due to climate change. If you mean primarily climate change as part of the mix, those would be two very different things. I see a planetary collapse as a substantial possibility. I don't see climate change as the main cause. So, you know, primarily due to climate change, I'll give you five percent or less, but it could certainly be part of the mix that contributed. So here's another one then. We will experience large-scale planetary collapse within the next 50 years. Collapse of the economy, presumably we're talking here. Just however you interpret it. Okay. You know, 15 percent. Okay. Humans will become multi-planetary within the next 40 years. If you just mean people living on another planet, but just any people living there. I don't know, 20 percent. Okay. And futarchy will continue to inspire new social operating systems. It already is. So I guess that's a hundred percent. Yeah.

16:29And then we sort of go into the past. There's sort of this assumption that the past is fixed, but obviously our understanding of history evolves and changes because we can't really encapsulate the entirety of the past. So we have to create narratives and stories. And if you look through any multi-issue history book, you'll see that it gradually sort of evolves. And so this idea that we have of this certainty of knowing the past is sort of misplaced, especially knowing things like false memories can exist. So we also go through this process of validating certainty about claims about the past. So first is futarchy spread further than you initially predicted it would? Sure. I mean, you know, I just have a wide range of sort of ideas I generate, and it's been one of the most successful. So that has to mean I wouldn't have predicted that. I didn't distinguish it very much from all the others. So yes, it's more successful than I would see.

17:33I for a long time thought of my general work in prediction markets as my most important work, but futarchy is sort of more about decision markets in particular. And I had less reason than I to think that was especially important. So what would you say from zero to 100 if that is an accurately accurate statement? The statement that, which is the statement? Futarchy spread faster than you initially predicted it would. You know, 80. Okay. And then your concept of futarchy has evolved since you originally published Shall We Vote on Values but Bet on Beliefs? 20. Okay. Your predictions have gotten more accurate as you've aged.

18:2280. That's good. I like that. Debt preceded the existence of money. 60. That's interesting. Have you read Debt? The First 5,000 Years? Yes. Okay. So that's where I'm taking that from. Capitalism was not designed but rather emergently evolved. Since capitalism, as we just said previously, is just our world, then it's asking whether our world was designed and then of course not. Yeah. So if you're asking what was our world design, I'd say 5%. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing because it's like there's no true capitalist manifesto. I mean, there's the wealth of nations which sort of defines the way a lot of things work, but it's not like communism where somebody's like, I have this manifesto of this vision and I am designing it and everybody should take this idea unto themselves. It's kind of been just like this is the way things have become everywhere.

19:28A high tax rate contributed to the success of the country after World War II. 30. Okay. You've gotten better at taking in new information that is contrary to your current beliefs as you've aged. 50, I guess. It's hard to tell. The Reagan tax cuts have overall had a concentrating effect on the distribution of wealth in the US. 50. Okay. The 2008 financial crisis was primarily caused by poor decisions by the Federal Reserve. There's a difference between whether an initial thing was caused by it or whether the sort of size of it was caused by it. So I guess I will throw in 50 as sort of a general uncertainty or rejecting of the framing, I guess.

20:18Mm-hmm. You're definitely much more conservative in your evaluations than others, which makes sense because you've gone through the process of actively doing this and learning over time. Well, I mean, is this just my tummy feeling really confident or is this reality? So that's great. The Reagan tax cuts reinvigorated the US economy in terms of overall growth. 50 again. I just don't know. Communism has failed in the past because it lacks the incentives to make production more efficient. Oh, I guess 70. Okay. Yeah. That one, you're just going to say 100, but Futarchy has already inspired other social operating systems. I mean, that's 90 at least, I guess.

21:04Interesting. Then we're just going to go through some general claims. You don't view prediction markets as a subset of wisdom of the crowd because individual voices have greater weight in a prediction market. That second part after the because clause, I didn't understand the framing of that sentence very well. So if you had dropped the above clause, I could answer more directly. Okay. Let's just go with you don't view prediction markets as a subset of wisdom of the crowd. You know, 80%. Okay. What is your reason for that? We'll just interject a question right here. Well, it's just the prediction markets attract whatever reason is wherever it is. They don't just attract crowd reason.

21:51They would attract expert reason. They attract all sorts of reason. Okay. All sorts of wisdom, right? So, sorry. It's a general mechanism for extracting wisdom from wherever it is. Mm-hmm. A feature complete implementation of Futarchy currently exists in the crypto space. You know, 10. Yeah. You may not be certain about these implementations that claim to be Futarchy, but I'll ask anyways. Zeitgeist is a faithful implementation of Futarchy. Again, I just, I don't know about any more particular things. Okay. So it's just 50% because you don't know them. Yeah. Are you aware of Truthcoin? I'm aware of a concept of Truthcoin as opposed to the actual implementation of Truthcoin.

22:42But again, that has not very much to do with prediction market or... There's somebody who's trying to do an implementation of prediction markets in some convoluted way that gets around the concept of betting through a splitting of like the chain into different coins. There's people who want to settle bets through means other than just having a judge make the decision. That doesn't seem very important to me in general for the wider application of prediction markets. So I'm less tracking who's succeeding, how far at that. It just doesn't seem that interesting to me. Okay. This is sort of an abstract one, but markets have memory. Yes. I mean, a hundred percent. I think an essentialism to new systems is they have to have some sort of data store.

23:36They have to sort of have some memory or record of what is happening and just goodwill, something that doesn't require some sort of record of what has occurred, just devolves into a sort of chaos. So if humans have memory and markets, you know, for humans to participate, then markets have memory because they have the memory that the humans have. So I don't know if you've read Vitalik's paper, An Introduction to Futarchy? I probably, I mean, I'm pretty sure I did at one point, although I can't quote from it. Do you remember if it was an accurate representation? I remember that that was my impression at the time. Okay. So the statement is Vitalik accurately represents Futarchy in his article, An Introduction to Futarchy.

24:30Yeah. So I've heard his name being pronounced Vitalik. Oh, Vitalik. Yeah, I'm not sure. Yeah, I was reading it. I just read your paper and then I was reading that and I was, there was like little subtle things in it. Like you were saying that the elective representatives in your paper would be the ones who would be choosing the metrics of collective well-being. And he was saying actually that it's supposed to be the people themselves determining these metrics of collective well-being. And so I was like, oh, okay, that's interesting. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm presumably, I'm just, I was just focused on whether the basic idea was communicated well and then, you know, we're not making a judgment about each and every phrasing.

25:20Yeah. Strict determinability is essential in making predictions. That doesn't sound remotely right. So, you know, zero. Let me rephrase that question. Strict determinability is essential in making predictions useful. I mean, I'm not even sure what determinability here would be. I mean, what is it? Determination of what? It means like, okay, in a market you might say, you might say, okay, this will improve well-being specifically this much. And that is something that is determinable. It's going above a certain thing. It's some strict number that you're saying, okay, we either go above or we go below it, but it's not like a fuzzy feeling thing. It's that it needs to be tied to some form of certainty. There's just lots of ways to do lots of things. So again, this doesn't sound right. Okay. I mean, I agree. I don't think strict determinability is essential at all.

26:17I think it can be very fuzzy and you can get a lot out of prediction. Markets require a centralized government to regulate them to ensure human rights are maintained. You know, zero. It is possible to fully transmit a complex idea like futarchy from one mind to another. 50. I mean, all depends on what you mean by fully here. Yeah. I would personally say that it's not really possible to, to transfer what it's quite possible to transfer like very precise mathematically expressed ideas. Yeah. But the question is whether an idea like futarchy is thought to be a sort of mathematically expressible version or the other sorts of versions. Yeah. Markets aggregate information about the future.

27:05Um, a hundred percent. A hundred. Yes. Okay. The market is efficient. I mean, that's just too vague. So I'll have to give you 50. Yeah. It's just sort of a thing that people say, like specifically that sentence, meaning that, like they, in typical context, it might be expressing an important wisdom, but that's not the way you're asking me these questions. The GDP is partially correlated with collective wellbeing. You know, a hundred. The, okay, this is, this is more abstract. The future is emergent and the past is fixed. Uh, it doesn't matter. 20. Interesting. Um, the universe is non-deterministic.

27:52I'm gonna have to go with 50 because I don't think it's well-posed. Okay. Markets are non-deterministic. Again, not well-posed. So 50. Okay. The majority of aliens with space travel capabilities would use a system we would recognize as similar to capitalism. Again, it's, it's, uh, not at all clear in the sense that, uh, they, they probably would have used it at some point in the past, but by the time we would meet them, they could have been in long sense evolved to some other different, very stable mode. That is aliens would, would last a very long time. So you do think there is sort of gone through a great many other things later where they would just have very different systems. So do you think we will evolve out of, so again, you know, if, if by capitalism would just mean our world, if that's roughly what we mean by it, then the world's going to change. So you would, you might say, well, they use markets or trade. I mean, that would be much more robust, but if you say, you might define it simply as the majority of people saying, well, we're not in a capitalist society anymore. That the collective belief that we are not.

29:02Again, if capitalism just fundamentally means the world we live in, even if we make radical changes to it, if we make them incrementally and slowly, people may still decide to call it capitalism. Maybe. I mean, I don't necessarily think that it is equivalent with the status quo. I think there are specific things that it's associated with, though I do think it's very poorly defined. And I think it generally is people saying, I don't like the status quo. I want things to change. So I'm going to refer to this. Right. I would more think that there are times in history when people want to celebrate or acknowledge or recognize that a change has happened. And that would be the sort of opportunity they would introduce a new word. It's not particularly correlated with like many features, the way we live in though. So. Futarchy can function at small scales, meaning Dunbar's number. One hundred, sure. Oh, OK. And finally, ledgers are a form of collective memory. A hundred, I guess. OK.

30:00So what makes Futarchy real? Oh, well, it's a real possibility. So if you ask, is it really happening, then I have to say no. If you say, could it happen, is it a real option, then I'm going to say yes. So let's compare it, say, to socialism, or something like that. So socialism might be framed as something that's more aspirational. It's not very well defined and people don't really know if they have it when they see it. And so in that sense, it's less real. It's more of a sort of word to describe that you want something to be different and you wish things would be different. You're not really sure what exactly would count or how much you really want it. But compared to that, Futarchy is a more concrete proposal in that it has specific details, and if you implement those specific details, then you could say, okay, here it is, we have it. Yeah, in the same way, I'd say we could switch to approval voting, and approval voting is real. Not because we have it a lot, but because you'd know what it was when you had it. Do you think some people have a very flawed interpretation of what you were trying to communicate, what Futarchy is, that is maybe negative? I mean, I don't know specifically that that's true. But given ordinary human behavior, that's extremely common, so I would expect it's true of pretty much everything. Yeah. You know, look, people just generally misunderstand almost everything. Mm-hmm. Honestly. And then they have sort of positive and negative valences for misunderstanding things. So I'm pretty sure a large fraction of people would presumably have a negative valence for a misunderstanding of this, just like anything else. Yeah, yeah. So why is truth-seeking sacred?

31:48Well, I would say it's sacred to me. So it's just like, even with art or other many important things. You know, the word sacred is the sort of thing that's invoking concepts and associations that I'm not very expert in or familiar with how to argue for, so I tend to avoid, you know, including it in arguments that I would make. But I have to recognize it. You know, I have feelings and attitudes, and I have some things that for me feel more sacred, and so I feel like I should admit that and acknowledge it. It's a real thing. And truth-seeking would be for me sort of a close label to describe what that is. That's sort of just an admission that I also hold something sacred, but trying to justify why it should be held sacred is vastly harder. So I will more just say that's how I was brought up, or that's how, among the things I could hold sacred now, that has the most appeal to me. Yeah. Are you the only person who can say that futarchy has been successfully implemented?

32:56I don't know, I mean, it's an idea of, like, people out there who try things, and they don't necessarily all tell me. So there's a big world of people who could be doing things and not telling me. Well, there's a difference in ways to trying to bring something into the world, trying to bring a new institution into the world. One, you know, ways that you could, like, I'm going to create a company and it has this name and there is some ownership over that name. The other is that you're trying to say, well, I would like to see many different potential implementations of the system. So I'm not necessarily owning this idea, and I am embracing the idea that it is meant to exist outside of myself, and other people will relate to it in their own way. But of course, it's like, you had a particular vision in the beginning that you're laying out, this is the way it is. But as soon as you put that into the world, you know, people take their own interpretation of it. And so, we talked in our last conversation, and you know, you said in that conversation that you didn't think that there were actual implementations currently of the full breadth and scope of the idea. So that's where that comes from, me asking, is it you that has, well, I don't know of any implementations is what I mean to say, and so my guess is there probably aren't, but I don't know. But you know, so there are many kinds of ideas where it's ambiguous what's in or out of the idea, and in which case then you wouldn't be sure whether people had sort of changed some key things that were even in it, right, especially if it has lots of parts. Yeah, so but this idea is a relatively sharp, simple thing, doesn't have very many parts to it. So it's actually kind of hard to sort of do something and call it a futarchy without just having these parts. Yeah, I mean, so in that case it's unlikely that somebody else sort of has a different concept of it. They might have a different, like, way it should be, idea of how it should be applied, or yeah, where it would be useful. But the thing itself is pretty simple enough that they either have, they're going to agree on whether it's the core thing at least. It's simple now, but, like, when I was trying to talk to people about it like five years ago, it just, there wasn't a good amount of compression of the concept where I really readily had a way to just say, this is what it is. Now I think it's probably one of the simpler ones, and, like you say, it is easier to explain, and which is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you, because there's a lot of new crazy off-the-wall ideas out there in the crypto space of how we could do things. But the idea of, like, hey, you know, science for example is founded upon prediction. Like, there is great value in integrating collective wisdom about the future for making decisions that affect us all. And that's not that hard for people to grasp, and it's a very good, I think, foundation for people to build out from. Because once you understand, you think, hey, maybe we should be tracking our predictions. You start thinking, well, what are all the ways that we could do this, and what are the best ways that we could do it?

36:11So would you say that the future is knowable, in the sense that most everything is knowable and that almost every topic you could think of is something where if you put work into it, you can learn more than you started, and you can have some degree of confidence that you're not just having random guesses for things? Yeah, by knowable do you mean absolutely sure? There's almost nothing we can be absolutely sure of, and that's yeah, this is I think the key. Most things, this is the key distinction, because I do think that there is some degree of, you can get better in your degree of certainty about what is going to come. But I've definitely spoken to people where I've tried, or when I'm disagreeing online, I'm trying to encourage them to, like, basically put their skin in the game for their belief. They're trying to say, like, make a prediction about what you're saying, because if you're right then you should have a good vision of the future. And then it devolves to this point where they're saying like, they can know the truth, but they cannot know the future. Like, and that framing I think is not a healthy way to interrelate with the world. So this is important, actually. Basically the most common way for people to become educated in our world is to learn particular methods that they are trained in in particular areas. And so what people learn if they become a chemist or a biologist or a car repair person or whatever, they learn a particular set of ways to draw conclusions on a particular topic. And then one of the important things they learn and they assimilate is this idea that I am different and better than other people because I know this method, and in particular, I know that I need the method and I know the limits of the method. And that's all part of their professional image and projection, that is who they are as someone who has mastered a method. And so it's very important to them to be able to say, you know, our standard method that I've learned and I am an expert in does not address the particular question you've asked, and to sort of push it away of saying, that's not what we do. And that's part of affirming that you are an expert in a particular area, is to affirm the limits that you've been taught of that method. That is, you know, if you ask me, you know, what color should the ashtray be, the car repair guy will say, that's not me, we car repair people don't address the color of the ashtray, you know, that's somebody else's job, etc. So, and all the people who have learned many different things, like they might have taken introductory chemistry class or introductory sociology class or whatever it is, even if they're, you know, specializing in car repair, they still have the sense for each of these areas, what its claim is, what its scope is, what kind of things could it say?

39:04And what kind of things can't it say. And for many people, you know, they've heard that the future is explicitly not in the methods they are being taught and being given. Yeah, and so they've learned this thing of, the future is not something I can say via the methods I've learned. And so some people sort of learn general, very general methods, like say statisticians or philosophers or something, and then for them most every topic is in some sense within their scope of something they ought to be able to think about and have an opinion on. But most people aren't like that. Most people have learned sort of a set of limited sort of methods and areas, that is a set of tools, with an explicit set of rules and boundaries about where it's to be used and where it's not to be used. Yeah, you know, I mean, I remember just the sudden realization, I mean I was much younger, that not only were some people explicitly better at prediction, that that was sort of measurable and knowable and there was sort of some useful or interesting signal in that. And then, you know, I started trying to find as many books as I possibly could on that concept, and try to find, have people done this before, have people tried to find ways to evaluate this. And then it's like you get into things like Brier scores, and you know, prediction markets, and you know, Metaculus which is another prediction tracking service. And it's, it's definitely not something that automatically is taught in any way. Like, we understand that prediction is a part of science, but beyond that it's not something that we commonly engage with. I mentioned my last, my last call that, you know, I sort of scanned Twitter and, sorry, what's up? So there's, you know, there is a set of literatures on, you know, how to score predictions and what data we can see on the scoring of predictions. And that data might like talk about whether old people or young people or high IQ people etc are better at predictions, or groups or individuals. But I think sort of that literature has a relatively small effect compared to sort of the just the general literature that, you know, who can be an expert on what. So, you know, you might say, will a new chemical have what reactivity?

41:29Most people will think, well, a chemist could make that sort of prediction, but I couldn't. And so again, people have the various topics on which they think people can speak, and many of those authorize predictions of certain sorts for the people who have those specialties. But I think most people aren't just willing to authorize just anybody to predict about anything, in their mind of, you know, what an educated person thinks about who should talk about what. Well, we're also in a position in society where there's sort of a rejection of the expert and institutions, and the sensation of like, I cannot trust these individuals. There's something inherent in the idea of being an expert that is two-faced, about, I mean people will often say that but in fact society's, you know, vastly organized around different people with different jobs, and they are by default the experts of those jobs. So our society functions on a vast division of labor. And so in practice, we do have different people responsible for predicting different things. We definitely had, you know, four years that was embracing this notion of like not following the experts, right, of just kind of following intuition or how somebody feels, and a lot of people like Political Twitter or whatever conversations, but that's sort of disconnected from the vast, the rest of society. Okay, so I would ask, do the facts exist? Sure, because I'm liberal with what exists. Yeah, you know, I don't mind something existing, I'm not gonna hold it to a very high bar. It just needs to exist in any sort of sense for me to say it exists. So fine, sure, they exist. Well, it was, you know, I think a lot of people were very confused in 2016 by the idea of alternative facts, it like, it somehow broke their perception of the brain, and as sort of evolving in this place that like, our relationship to language. Well, when I say a sentence it can't possibly create the same meaning in every single person's mind who reads it, and therefore the idea of this fact being this absolutely true thing that will create the same thing that feels true to every single person was sort of an illusion. Okay, well then that thing doesn't exist. Yeah, but the word fact has other uses than that particular connotation. I mean, the idea that you can say something everybody else will mean the same thing by reliably, that, you know, just is much more context dependent. You need a lot more resources to make something that reliably understood. How far into the future do markets integrate information? Is there a time limit?

44:16Well again markets just integrate what people think yes relevant to their choices So when people don't think about a distant future, then the markets won't think about that distant future Yeah, and certainly, you know markets may induce someone to think about a future so one of the basic features of markets is they have a discount rate that is they have a rate at which things in the future are valued less than stuff now and so When things are enormously discounted then the incentives for people to think about them are enormously discounted as well So for example, you know, let's say a 5% discount rate Means that very quickly the future hardly matters So, you know, for example, you know typical discount rates might have the future 15 years from now matters only half as much as now, while now a future 150 years from now matters 10 to the minus 2 as much as now, i.e. a factor of 1,000 less.

45:23People think about the future in other ways than thinking about the value of assets they could buy or sell at a certain interest rate, and so those end up making them think a bit more about the future. But again, in our world, markets think because people think, so markets will only think about something people think about, and if you can't get people to think about it, you don't get markets to think about it, therefore they don't think about it. I think, from my perception, I think this is actually sort of the major flaw of markets at scale is this very nature. But it's also a flaw of pretty much any other institution, because they pretty much all require people to do their thinking. We don't really have much in the way of non-people thinking institutions. I do think that there are probably ways, if there is some sort of distributed data store that is immutable, to create long-term intergenerational dependencies of expectations about the future.

46:21There are probably new institutions that can be built that solve this problem. There could just be new institutions that make people think about the future more than they do now, so people are capable of thinking about the future, so it's possible to induce them to. In some sense, the problem is you need somebody to care about the distant future in order for some institution to allow them to transmit that interest to somebody else to get somebody else to think about something. So I would say there needs to be some sort of incentivization to actively think about the future and have those thoughts have weight. Pretty much all social institutions we've ever seen have had very little thinking about the future. It's less about claiming markets or anything, and just saying, why don't people care about the future, and who could we find that cares, and how could we spread that interest?

47:12One of the reasons that we know that there perhaps is something to worry about the future that the markets aren't taking into account is this other institution of science, because there are people in that field who are making those long-term predictions, but it seems like to a lot of people that the markets are not taking into account that information, so we're just barreling ahead. They're saying, okay, we need to avoid this to avoid a cataclysmic event, and then there are certain people in the market who are just like, well, people will move away from the coastlines. That's just the way it's going to be. We want to distinguish an institution that makes choices regarding the future, so that we can see that the future matters to it via the choices, and then maybe an institution that just mentions the future.

47:57For example, a lot of science fiction includes depictions of a distant future. That doesn't mean the science fiction authors or viewers care much about the future. Often they use a future as a metaphor to talk indirectly about today, or they're just interested in exotic entertainment, so they're not very interested about the future, but they might mention the future in the guise of that. Similarly, in science, if you look at the actual practical choices most scientists make, they're really pretty current focused in terms of their next grants or getting tenure, publications they just submitted, so pretty much all concrete scientific actions are pretty near-term focused. They might mention or talk about the future, but they don't actually make choices that pay off in the distant future. It's embedded in this nature to seek science where you need to have assets, you need to have capital to be able to create your experiment.

48:50You can't just do any action in the society that we live in without having some sort of money or something. That sort of complicates a lot of specific institutions or areas. Even with the other assets they have that wouldn't be money, they're still very short-term focused. Think of publications or jobs or respect or conference contacts or just all the different other things people have. Again, academics are in practice very short-term focused. Would you say then that prediction markets stretch the length of time that markets can integrate information about the future? I would just say prediction markets are capable of letting you ask about the future and letting the questions be answered.

49:37Just like most other institutions, there are a few people who bother or would want to ask. For most other institutions, I might say, what's your mechanism by which you think you'll get a reliable answer about the future? I would say prediction markets will give you a more solid answer about why you should trust the answers you'll get. Mostly you're going to be asked to be hopeful about other things. You're going to say, well, if they're good scientists, then they will give you good answers about the long-term future regardless of whether their career, et cetera, incentives have anything to do with the long-term future. What would you say is the best way to incentivize action that will positively impact the long-term future?

50:23What is the best way to incentivize new actions that benefit the long-term future? As you know, but perhaps our listeners don't know because we haven't actually said what futarchy is in this conversation. Futarchy is a colorful name. The archy is intended to show form of government, and then the future is the root there, so I'm trying to evoke the idea of a future form of government, which of course is not terribly informative about what particular kind it would be, but it's intended to refer to decision markets as a mechanism of governance. Our proposal is to have decision markets, i.e. markets in some outcome, conditional on decisions, and that we would recommend the decision which the market estimates to have the highest outcome given that decision.

51:12For this sort of mechanism, we'll need a set of discrete decision options that we are considering between. Strict determinability is essential in making predictions. That doesn't sound remotely right, so zero. Then we'll need this outcome measure, which represents the overall value to us of the outcome we're going to get. In that language, the most straightforward way to make people think about the long-term future is to have the outcome weigh heavily on the long-term future.

51:59The more this outcome measure is primarily influenced by long-term future events, then the more that they will be focused in their analysis on that long-term future. That's completely feasible to do in creating an outcome measure, but few people today are interested in requesting decision advice with respect to such long-term outcomes. I wanted to interject a little bit of commentary here relative to the confusion that he had about my question about determinability and what he's referring to as discreteness here, and in particular to draw some parallels and differences, similarities and differences, between decision markets and how they aggregate information about the future, and how the information aggregation models, the representational generative text models that are used in Cognicism differ, because they both integrate information from many collective voices into one.

53:05They both have incentives for skin in the game, so it's not a pure voting system. They're both allowing some voices to matter more, and for those voices to be rewarded more. But there's this very key and important distinction between how they are collecting information. Because all I really view either as, being a machine learning engineer, is sort of a multi-source aggregative model that's trying to compress or integrate the information that is coming in somehow. Now, in Futarchy, you need or require discrete decision options. Now those discrete decision options are decided by somebody, and they are written by somebody.

53:51That is a PowerPoint. I talk about that in the manifesto, that when you have somebody who is the decider of the choices, you have an inherent and immediate flaw with your system, because that's what we have in democracy now. Somebody decides what you are allowed to choose, and then based off of that choice that you make from this pre-decided set of choices that you're allowed to make, the information is aggregated. These knowledge aggregation models that I'm talking about, there is no limitation on what you can say into the system. There's no limitation on who can say it and when. You just simply say it in natural language. You say your predictions, you say your reflections about the past, you say your current beliefs, and it is in real time aggregating that information and distributing or amplifying voices that over time have shown to be more reliable.

54:50But it's not as if people reach a certain point and they can hoard their reputation in this. It's either their voice is relevant in this moment to the decisions being made, and therefore their voice is being amplified because there is some sort of collective decision that people need to make, and there needs to be some aggregation of our collective sense making. That's the way that Cognicism is doing it. But in the decision market, they're just basically saying, okay, here are two discrete options that we could choose between. Those discrete options are written in natural language one way so that they can be misinterpreted by every single different person. And then it's closed out.

55:36It's like some decision is specifically made. And I view that as a fundamental failing of markets. There also is this whole other aspect that I'm talking about, which is the tokenization, the quantum of ownership idea that I think creates unhealthy interconnected patterns in our neocortexes. They cause our ontologies, our connectomes to over interconnect with specific memes, the meme being whatever token thing is being tokenized. Because you realize that, well, if I just earn enough of this thing or just acquire enough of this thing, it translates to any other decision that I want to make in this world.

56:26So when I talk about determinability and discreteness, well, these Cognicism models don't really have that. It's not like you are specifically deciding or some piece of information has been ultimately determined. There is no ultimate determinability in Cognicism. There is just what the collective is focused on right now. And the models are distributing attention relative to all the things that people have said in the past and what has come to pass. So you have these expectations about the future. You are sharing your expectations about the future, and then the future comes to pass. And in each particular moment, there needs to be information distributed to all people trying to make sense of the world together to make better decisions.

57:13Here's a choice that you can make. We're formalizing it into some schematized decision, like two paths. That is not Cognicism at all. There is no, you can go this path or you can go this way. It's simply, you are an independent being in this world. You have independent expectations about the future. You can have independent actions that you can take to affect that future. You can make commentary about anybody making any single action. You can take technically really any action, like maybe the state will try to stop you from doing something, but we're all autonomous beings. That's the way that society has worked forever. So it's just all people individually making sense of the world and taking action to make the world better. And you have these models trying to integrate a representation of that that helps move us forward through time towards collectively thriving.

58:09And that has a very high resolution because you have people simply saying whatever the fuck they want to say. So back to the interview. You know, I asked you a while back about why you hadn't been talking about futarchy as much anymore. And you said something along the lines of that you had spoken about it so much that you felt like there was a clear representation. So there were a lot of other things that are interesting to you. So I didn't want to just have you rehash like explaining all the minutiae and just wanted to pose you with some more abstract questions about it. Okay, so who should be defining these measures of collective well-being and how do we get people to agree upon what those measures are?

58:58So again, futarchy is a way that an individual or a group can ask a question, which choices will best achieve this outcome? And it's a decision advice mechanism available to anybody who's seeking decision advice. So that question is somewhat orthogonal to the question of which people get together how to make decisions together. So we face many difficult decisions in choosing how much to coordinate on what. So you know, as you know, in general, it's relatively easy to make individual decisions and that you don't have to coordinate much with other people and ask them for advice and agree on things and enforce things, etc.

59:46But when we make individual decisions, we often fail to coordinate and have what's called coordination failures, market failures, ways in which we're all worse off because we fail to coordinate. So that's a reason why we would want to and do try to coordinate together to form groups. We form families, we form firms, we form cities, nations, churches, etc., professional communities, all for the purpose of gaining from coordination, from doing better because we can work together to come to some common decisions about what to do, but at a substantial cost. Coordination is expensive and often fails. So there's a basic tradeoff between just doing your own thing and at least getting that right and trying to come together to coordinate when it's expensive, slow, and awkward and has long delays and screws up often.

1:00:38So the most basic fact is that we should coordinate more when we can figure out cheaper ways to coordinate, when we can overcome some of the costs and disadvantages of coordination, and of course when the stakes are higher, when it's more important to coordinate. So for example, if aliens were to appear in the sky and seem threatening, suddenly the world might find it worth its interest to coordinate more on a global scale and overcome many of their current reasonable reluctance to do so. At the moment, the major reason why we haven't solved global warming is not because people don't understand the problem. It's just because when we try to have a global conference where we say, "Okay, let's make a deal," typically the poorer countries say, "Well, we're willing to make a deal except you need to pay us because we're not willing to contribute too much to solving this problem." And then that's where it fails because the richer countries say, "No, we're not willing to pay you that much," and they fail on the coordination over how much to pay.

1:01:37But again, aliens in the sky, they would make a deal because they would feel more scared. So prediction markets and futarchy are a way to coordinate. They are arguably a way that we might find it easier to coordinate, and then if we find that we can coordinate easier, then we would, of course, use coordination more. But at the moment, it's a very untried, speculative mechanism, so people are not going to be very moved at the moment by its existence because they don't really trust it because they haven't been shown that it works. I agree that there's sort of this fundamental problem of coordination, how do we collectively make decisions? I also see that there is this desire in people to have a form of collective decision-making, but hierarchies are extraordinarily emergent.

1:02:29And when people try to form even small groups where they're engaging in some form of democracy or there is no particular leader, it tends to just emerge towards hierarchy. Do you think there are essentially forms of collective decision-making at scale that will just outperform hierarchy? It cannot compete. I think that's just obvious in many areas. For example, markets are a form of collective decision-making which beat hierarchies in many contexts. Yes. In fact, they work so well, people don't notice that they are a form of collective decision-making. Yes.

1:03:14I mean, you get to vote essentially with your dollar, but you get to earn more votes depending on how accurate your understanding is of the future. By future, you're providing goods and you're creating an establishment so that in the future you can continue to provide for people. I do think there are flaws with it, but I do get frustrated when people are just attacking that concept and not understanding the fundamental reality of how it is integrating all of our perceptions in real time. Because people just want to kind of throw it out. I'm like, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. There's fundamental things about how we are living together today that have brought about an incredible standard of living for all of people despite the fact that we have these predictions which may or may not come to pass of collapse or some sort of destruction based off of the mechanism of the market.

1:04:16Many specialists know a lot about many specialist kinds of mechanisms and their various potentials and there's a lot of interesting things to explore. But if we're looking at sort of the ordinary person's reactions to the world, mostly they just live in the world and function okay, but when they're inclined to be scared or afraid or to blame things, then it's relatively easy to put them in a mode where they say, well, these systems look untrustworthy like social media, politics or whatever, and they say, somebody needs to fix this stuff. In that mode, they're surprisingly romantically inclined toward hierarchy and bureaucracy, really. A great many people want to create a new agency or to empower agencies more where there are people at the top in various office buildings and they sit at desks and they have meetings and somebody's in charge of the org chart and you get these jobs by applying to schools and getting degrees and being accepted into their meetings and they issue reports and they have rules and a lot of people just really seem to love that.

1:05:19It just makes their heart go pitter-patter. It almost brings tears to their eyes. They want to see a world ruled by bureaucracies. There's a balance. That is what the system that has emerged essentially is, is that you have this one massive institution that is supposed to mint some token that all of these smaller institutions are supposed to compete for and that is supposed to provide for the public good. I think what we're seeing emerge right now in the crypto space, this concept of a DAO is essentially going to evolve into smaller, what we would call public institutions, basically things that are trying to provide for the commons or the collective people, but there is some form through which they are competing to do that so that you don't have a behemoth centralized government.

1:06:10You rather have private institutions, which are corporations that are existing within some sort of market, and then you have these other sorts of institutions that are competing to solve problems that the markets don't necessarily solve well. For example, I would not say that the distribution of free speech in real time should be managed by the profit incentive because then it has to, they have to have some sort of business model and what has evolved is advertising and therefore they get into this thing of like time and sight and then we see all this anger emerging, right? So it's really easy to look at things in the world and compare them to some ideal metric and say, well, that's not ideal. Something should be done. The question is, well, what else do you have in mind to do and again, the striking thing is that when people look at any diverse, complicated world including nuclear energy or airplanes or social media and they're inclined to be a bit scared and afraid or concerned that things might be going wrong in it, their first reaction is to think a bureaucracy should be formed.

1:07:14An agency should be authorized with a budget and powers to control things and it should have meetings and issue reports and regulations and have desks and a building and people who would get jobs there based on their degrees and that's exactly what people want to have happen to fix those problems. But of course, as we know, a lot of things go wrong in those worlds too and the real question is, well, what are the things that will go wrong with this new thing you're going to invoke to fix the old problems compared to the old problem? Yeah. I mean, I would love to exist in this world where we are constantly communicating our expectations about the future and that there's some sort of accountability or skin in the game to that because we have a lot of fears that we're putting into the world like, oh, this is going to happen and somebody has to do something and it's like, well, if we are in constant communication about like, I have this expectation of taking this action, I'm going to do this because I think that it will transform the world.

1:08:15Of course, I mean, all our institutions do that to some degree. That is, in a complicated bureaucracy, everybody's thinking and talking and gossiping over lunch and issuing reports and making memos and reading each other's memos and talking to each other and so there is a complicated process by which people think about the future and write it down and form new thoughts and aggregate it. In other institutions, it also happens, including in betting markets, even just on Twitter. People are talking and listening and forming expectations. The question is the relative quality of these institutions for producing quality estimates on particular topics. That's the point at which I will talk about incentives and the data, et cetera, and then you might say, well, yes, but isn't this betting market thing you want to do, isn't it imperfect?

1:09:02Can't you imagine cases where it won't give the right answer? I'll say, sure, but let's look at these other things and let's look at the actual data for how they've compared in particular cases in the past. If we get to those cases, I feel a very strong case. I can say in pretty much all the head-to-head comparisons we've made with similar resources, then the markets have done about the same or much better. Similarly, if you look at the incentives, you can see that the incentives of people in the markets are just much better than the incentives of people in bureaucracies or randomly arguing on Twitter. I do think there is, like you say, in all of these institutions, there is this natural integration of information just through conversation.

1:09:49I think you see at a tribal scale people integrating without the need for any sort of system because everybody can kind of know each other. Gossip. I mean, humans just gossip. They gossip when they lived in small-scale society and they gossip in large-scale society, so gossip is just going to robustly continue no matter what scale we are. There's a problem, though, of the scaling where it's like when you get an institution large enough, it starts to violate the beings within it, like their human rights. It's hard, I think, to scale a pattern where we can collectively work together in a hierarchy without somebody who's just up there abusing that power and then the system becoming really inefficient. Even in a corporation, a lot of the tech corporations were very positively regarded in the beginning and then there was this sort of change where it's like, okay, you guys, you actually have to make profit.

1:10:40You can't just be getting investment. As soon as they started having to change to focus directly on profit, there was this shift in public opinion of them as being sort of like, oh, these are actually, don't be evil, Google. You seem pretty evil to me right now. Of course, you can have sort of smaller-scale institutions also be corrupted, but there seems to be a relationship between the scale and our ability to actually collectively integrate, but we still have to and we still are because we already exist in a global-scale community. It's definitely true that it's just harder to coordinate on larger scales so that we just have to – larger-scale organizations, for example, they need more layers of management.

1:11:28They need more rules. They need more procedures to check for various things that could go wrong or cheating and stealing, etc. So it's just harder to manage larger organizations in general than smaller ones, but for many kinds of things that need to happen in the world, the larger-scale organizations are also better at delivering various kinds of products and services by coordinating over a larger scale, and so that's why we have large organizations of various sorts. But I do think individual people are more suspicious of larger organizations independent of the fact that it's harder to coordinate on larger scales. So people are just more suspicious of larger churches, larger clubs, larger firms, larger neighborhood organizations, etc., all the way down the line, and they should therefore also be more suspicious of larger government bureaucracies, and I think that's where they don't become suspicious as fast.

1:12:25So people are just very suspicious of a large company, a large church, again, a large media empire, and they're just not as suspicious of a large government agency. And so that's why when things get big and they get suspicious, they turn and want this big bureaucracy. So my interpretation of the slogan vote on values, bet on beliefs, is that you have these established values of collective well-being, and certain policies are being evaluated to say whether or not it will increase that particular value, but it has this, you're just saying, some value of collective well-being.

1:13:11I'm not specifically saying what exactly it is, but it's some value. So what personally do you think are good measures of collective well-being? Well, I'm a professional economist, and so our standard metric of well-being is economic welfare, which is basically a weighted average of how much each person would be willing to pay for whatever things they're getting that they like, and of course pay to avoid the things they don't like. And so our standard measure of economic welfare is a coordination point in the sense that it's what we all use so we can compare ourselves using the same metric, and it's also actually a reasonable thing to think in terms of as it's a good proxy for what deals we might be willing to make.

1:14:00That is, whatever maximizes economic welfare is also plausibly what we would agree on if we were sitting around the table negotiating trying to choose something, because in general we would try to choose something on what's called the Pareto frontier, a set of all things that nobody can be better off without making somebody worse off from their point of view. So for the purposes of sort of immediate policy, I as a professional economist think in terms of economic welfare, and that's what I recommend when I see policies that increase welfare. I recommend those policies, and if I had somebody consulting with me that represented some group that was trying to figure out what deals to make, that's the kind of thing I would recommend, and so it's also what I would recommend to a nation trying to make deals. That is, if you're trying to decide how to handle transportation policy or social media, whatever else it is, I'd say, well, you want to look at this Pareto frontier, the set of all best deals, and you want to pick something on that, and these economic welfare analyses will tell you where that frontier is, which policies would be best, what would be true on the frontier.

1:15:00Now, that's different than what you might think of in the very long run as other sorts of criteria. So I do futurist work and I think about the very long run, and it can very well be that a world could be satisfying itself economically and then decaying and going away in some other way. That is, empires decline and collapse and die. And as they collapse and die, they may well still be achieving some sort of economic efficiency in terms of getting what they want. So at that level, I might critique what people want. But critiquing what people want isn't sort of usually the way to get them to sort of accept you as a decision advisor, because usually you want an advisor who will take what they want as given and help them figure out how to get more of it.

1:15:56Do you think that wealth distribution is correlated with collective well-being? Meaning that you can't simply increase the amount that everybody has, that human nature is sort of to compare, and if we view ourselves as very lesser to somebody in terms of the amount of resources, that even though we have enough, we're still going to experience some sort of negativity? All else equal, you can certainly see some negative effects of inequality of wealth. That is, you can see that, say, on the margin, a dollar would be more valuable and useful to someone who has less money than someone who has more. You can also see the envy you describe, although it has to be countered against the pride on the other side.

1:16:44When A is envious of B, then B is proud to be better than A. That has to count too. I mean, it's interesting because there could reach this point where everybody is provided for their basic needs, like food, shelter, healthcare. We could get there, and we could still see a lot of unhappiness because they're seeing, okay, well, this individual person has so much say over the power and money. Most people actually don't really understand why billionaires don't pay taxes or what it really means to have your money in stock versus cash. Billionaires do pay taxes on average, and they do, on average, pay more taxes than other people, but they don't pay all of their money in taxes, and that can still bug people. There's a book called The Great Leveler, which I heavily recommend.

1:17:32It came out in the last decade by a Stanford history professor. He makes the plausible argument that the basic fact about inequality is that inequality just tends to increase in times of peace and prosperity, and the main times it ever goes down is where you have wars and pandemics and civil wars and other big collapses. History is basically right after a big collapse or disaster, inequality is low, and then during times of peace and prosperity, it slowly increases until another big disaster brings it down. If that's the major reason why inequality is high, then you kind of have to wish for high inequality because you want to be living in a time after a long period of peace and prosperity. You don't want big wars and disasters, even though they bring down inequality.

1:18:21I'm not certain about that because I think that when there are collapses, there has been recently a sort of wealth transfer in each of those. There's mostly a wealth destruction, so for example, during the world wars, there's a lot of wealth destroyed, but they did tax rich people more than poor people to pay for the wars, but they were paying for destruction. It wasn't increased overall value, and similarly, in other kinds of disasters, again, they tend to hurt the rich more than they hurt the poor, but they're not because they're helping the poor. They're just more stuff gets destroyed. Here's an example. In COVID, there was a pretty big change in wealth distribution, and many billionaires actually got richer.

1:19:07There's two frames there. One is that, well, okay, Amazon actually provided a service and they were prepared to provide a service that needed to be filled, but all of these other stores could not provide for people in that way like Amazon could, and so everybody actively chose to spend their own money through Amazon to get all of the resources that they need, and so there's this frustration I think by people who see that and say, well, should Amazon really have more and more and more power when whatever reason for their list of why they don't think there is, but it's like, well, the crowd had to. They decided to buy all the resources through there. If our main topic here is futarchy, I mainly want to just point out that futarchy can have outcome measures that include inequality, so when you assign futarchy to recommend decisions, then you can decide how much inequality matters to you in making those recommendations.

1:20:06Under the national futarchy scenario, a nation would vote on its measure of national welfare and it would decide how much various things counted including inequality, and if it cares a lot about inequality, it could say put a large negative weight on inequality in the decisions and then speculators would take that into account and they would say, well, I guess this policy might improve prosperity and wealth, but hey, I guess it will also improve inequality, so they would discount it and not rate it as highly and they might be more willing to take chances of big disasters because hey, big disasters kills lots of people and destroys things, but it does reduce inequality and they would say, okay, I guess that counts, so you'd have to decide that. I think of futarchy as being somewhat independent of those choices, but here's the main way that futarchy intersects with these things is that futarchy makes it harder to be hypocritical, so in ordinary political systems, we can all say we love trees and then we can elect politicians who say I love trees.

1:21:05If you elect me, I will promote trees and then the politician can kind of know that you didn't really mean it. It was sort of a symbolic thing to sort of bring us all together, but they know that they don't really want us to sacrifice too many jobs or everything else to get more trees and so they won't actually do it even though we say we want more trees, but with futarchy, if you have a weight on the number of trees in the national election function and you say I want to elect a politician who will raise that weight and they get elected and they raise that weight, well, you know what? You're going to get more trees and it will come at the expense of whatever trees come at the expense of and you'll just get what you ask for more directly and this is in common with a number of other sort of more direct ways to manage policy, which is they generally require that you say more explicitly what you want and then they'll give it to you and if you're inclined to lie about what you want, then that can go wrong.

1:22:03I think that markets actually do miss a bit of information for people like myself. I actually make very, very good predictions, but it is hard for me to commit to putting money behind something because in my mind, money, even that basic money just represents the security of not having to sell my labor to anybody. So there's this like, well, I could either live for this many more years without having to worry about things or I could put this behind there and if my prediction is wrong, you know, I'll lose all that and it will change my future, but even though I'm like I'm writing down my predictions constantly and I'm sort of accurate, so I think there's a large proportion of people who don't really know how to or don't feel comfortable integrating their knowledge into a market in the way that you know.

1:22:57So an important thing to realize is that markets can include many actors and processes other than just individuals trading directly in the market. So for example, most familiar financial institutions like stock markets and commodity markets, the people who are setting the prices there are not mostly individual traders who just have a personal thought and are expressing their opinions. They are professional hedge funds and for-profit organizations which organize in terms of a division of labor. They have different people in those organizations with different specialties and some of those people specialize in calling up other people and getting a feel on what they think. So you don't have to necessarily directly trade in the market for the market to get the information out of you as long as somebody knows you and trusts you and believes that you know things and is willing to put their money on you.

1:23:49You don't necessarily have to put your money on you and of course, more generally, there are rarely pieces of information that only one person knows. Typically what markets are trying to get is pieces of information that many people could obtain if they bothered and the problem is just to get somebody to bother to get that information. So we don't need everybody to be participating all the time on every little thought they have. What we need is organizations who can figure out what the important questions are, the important pieces of information that might be needed and then to go out and find those and to find somebody either that they trust through some other relationship or track record to listen to them or pay them directly to go get the information or something and that's what markets do and that seems to work pretty well. So the final question is that both prediction markets or markets in general and social networks integrate information in different ways and we're seeing these two forms of information aggregation kind of get a little fuzzy now with all of these meme stocks that there is a lot of people communicating in an emergent way.

1:25:02There's no particular person saying this is exactly what we're all going to do. It's more like somebody posts a meme like that's hilarious, we should do that because we just all react naturally. So I wanted you just to talk about the interrelation between these sort of meme stocks. I guess you would say that those social networks are a subset of markets interacting but I want you to talk about them as sort of different ways of integrating information and why they may be changing the value of certain stocks or assets in a way that most people would view as illogical or disconnected from reality. So betting markets will settle on events that are true or false and if the markets can't influence those events, they could still trick some people into betting some way and then losing their money later.

1:25:57So familiar financial markets and speculative markets do have available to them many fools who can be fooled in a variety of systematic known ways and they often do. But the people who consistently lose and go away are not mostly setting the prices although they are a source of revenue for the other people. Prices are mostly set by people who know what they're doing and are wise enough not to get fooled and they make extra money off the fools who are there. If we go away from a betting market or just betting on an event that can't be influenced, we can often think about the interaction between predictions and actions in the world.

1:26:44In that context, there are many potential self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies and generically, there's an interaction between prediction and action. So for example, if people predict that everybody will like a certain hamburger and then they go out and do like that hamburger because that was predicted because it becomes in fashion and then the people who made that hamburger make a lot of money, that's the sort of thing that happens in a market and if you have a prediction institution and if that's what happens, that's what it will predict. Then people may be gaining advantage from their special ability to predict or their special ability to sort of induce what other people expect to happen. So fashion is a big part of that. Some people benefit by causing fashions and other people follow the fashions and fashions may or may not be socially beneficial, but if your job is to predict and you see fashions that actually happen, then you should predict that fashions will happen because that's what happens.

1:27:39It might be that a better prediction mechanism will make fashion stronger because people really want to follow the fashions they predict will be the most popular ones and maybe they're not usually sure, but if your prediction mechanisms can make them more sure what the popular fashions will be, well then they're more interested in doing that. So at the highest level, we have prediction institutions and mechanisms and then we have a world and a lot of interesting complicated feedbacks between actions and predictions. It's not always true that predictions are socially valuable. Sometimes predictions are not socially valuable. It depends on what you're predicting. Then we look within a prediction institution and you could also have various participants who are fools or systematically make certain mistakes and then other people within that institution could take advantage of it and those people should be advised to stay out unless they seem to actually be successfully predicting and gaining rewards from that and people need to learn whether they're successful or not within a prediction institution.

1:28:44Prediction markets are an institution which have good overall incentives and when people are wrong and mistaken, they should hopefully get fast feedback to show that they're wrong and mistaken and get pushed out and that would be, say, in contrast with institutions where it takes people a long time to figure out that they're bad or that it's not working very well or just the overall institution is making poor predictions. So for example, I'm a professor and professors like me are often interviewed by reporters who write articles quoting these professors and the professors are often quoted on various kinds of predictions about what's going to happen in the world and they don't actually have much of an incentive to make accurate predictions. They have an incentive to sort of make authoritative predictions of the sort that you might think a professor would make and then people who read those predictions in the newspaper, they're not sure what to believe and they often get misled by the misleading, you know, inaccurate predictions but of course sometimes even if a newspaper gives you an accurate prediction about something, then that just feeds into this interaction process between predictions and actions in the world and sometimes that's a, you know, mistaken or lamentable process.

1:29:50Yeah. Would you say that perhaps the emergence of meme stocks can be best viewed as... It's like a form of financial protest, you know, essentially something akin to what Occupy Wall Street was, but this sort of like, fuck these financial institutions, we can collaborate in a way that can fuck them over. And therefore that is the justification of why the money is flowing in that direction. I mean, I don't think people who are buying up GameStop on average in the long run are actually gonna win. They will actually lose on average in the long run.

1:30:36Now, initially before people expected them to be doing what they were doing, they could entice people to bet against them and then they could win against those people because other people didn't expect that they would actually do what they did for as long as they did, as strongly as they did. So just in general, when people have expectations and they're willing to bet on them, if you can find a way to violate their expectations, you could make some temporary profits there. But I think at the moment, enough people, you see that what people are willing to do there and how, that they're not gonna make money that way. You know, if anytime you take a thing and you just push its price up high, well, you know, it can stay high for a while, as long as enough of you are willing to push it up high. The people who initially bought it low and are able to sell it high, they profit, but the other people who bought it high, they could lose because it's eventually gonna come down.

1:31:29So collectively, if you look at all the people who invest in these sorts of things, just pushing up a price because you can, you know, on average, they're gonna lose. And so, and it's just a matter of how long it'll take. So, but usually, when people are willing to put a price on something, they're willing to put a price on it So, but you shouldn't bet it'll come down fast unless you know it'll come down fast. So if people push up the price and you say, that price is too high, and you bet it'll come down by Tuesday, come down by 2025 or whatever day you do, and then it doesn't, well, then you lose because you bet that they would, you know, lose the resolve by a certain date and they didn't, right? So the general phenomena here is, look, just don't make bets unless you actually think you know best about those bets.

1:32:17Everybody else should just be investing in index funds, just making general overall investments in the market without betting on particular things. And it's only people who think they actually know nearly the best about a particular topic who should be making bets on those topics. And then if they're wrong, then they lose. But it's about, are you the best? So if GameStop is high or low, you shouldn't be betting on GameStop unless you know it's gonna come down fast. And if you actually know better than other people that, it's gonna go up or down on whatever you're betting. Yeah. Well, thanks for doing this. I really enjoyed this conversation. I found a number of moments you were just particularly lucid in connecting the ideas behind Futarchy to aggregation of information about the future, which is, you know, the parts where I was sort of veering off into general discussion of that was just trying to frame the different ways that we can integrate information about the future.

1:33:25But I thought your point of, well, you can introduce any number of arbitrary variables into what you're trying to optimize through this market. And if you have a concern that wealth distribution is a problem, that you can include those as a metric in addition to whatever primary metric, and they can be weighted in different ways. It could be a sum of weighted terms as what you're trying to optimize. I thought that was particularly lucid. So again, this is Robin Hanson, and we were talking about Futarchy, and thanks for chatting. Thanks for having me, and I hope you actually get your file. So as I'm editing this video, I'm realizing that I want to have a commentary on it to include some reflection on the concept of Futarchy and the conversation as a whole, and how Robin is viewing the world and the path that I think he's on in promoting the idea.

1:34:38And I think the statement that I would put out is one of dissonance. And feeling like while the idea of Futarchy is a good framing for people who exist within the current way of doing things and want to imagine what the fundamental problems are with a society, and how we could take a step outside of it, that's great. For one, I was surprised that he put this idea of Futarchy into the world, but wasn't tracking or following people making potential implementations. That felt really reckless to me, because you can fairly easily predict like what occurs by putting new systems into the world.

1:35:31It usually does not go that well, and usually people get hurt. So if you're not really following the potential implementations, and sending back a signal to those creators, like yes, you are in alignment with his vision, or no, you are not, it feels reckless, definitely sort of a reckless thing. Originally, I wasn't sure whether I was going to talk to him, because obviously from my other videos, I have this general distaste for tokenized exchange markets, which is where you place value into something or place value into some specific representation, and that is one quanta of ownership. I think that the way that that relates with memetics and how ideas are encoded into our neocortexes, and therefore there are these structures in the brain that lead to anti-social behaviors.

1:36:32But I'm in here, and I'm talking about a tokenized exchange market, trying to do something similar to what I'm saying is necessary. I think of the conversation, we actually did get to the heart of it when he was talking about the discount rate on markets, essentially that they have a lesser, and lesser, and lesser consideration. The further into the future you go, and I'm essentially saying, yeah, that's essentially the problem, that if you don't have intergenerational dependencies, other than just how people are feeling, you're not really incentivizing good, healthy behavior, and incentivizing behavior that makes people experience just good feelings or short-term joy, without consideration for how the actions now are affecting the future, and especially without consideration to how those actions are affecting the commons, things that no single person can own.

1:37:27I definitely got the taste from what he was communicating that he really believed in the idea of hierarchies of experts, which I think the word expert is sort of problematic because when do you become an expert? Why is there some distinction in learning between amateur and an expert, and why is it that once they reach this expert point, they're enshrined in some hierarchical institution when obviously all the changes all the time, it is evolving all the time, and it's very easy for people to get out of sync with the rhythmic flows of the cultural landscape of information. You become very dated very fast, but now you're enshrined in this position of decision-making, this position of collective decision-making.

1:38:21So definitely I could tell his heart kept going towards this idea of the reverence of the concept of the expert, and that the expert was educated through institutions. There was no joy or heart for the individually educated, and there was no joy or heart for the emergent collective intelligence. In fact, he recently posted a paper talking about what he calls group minds, and more often than not, is referring to them as mobs, like this very heavily negatively coded word for the idea of just, okay, there's something emergent from this collective voice. Now, yes, there are a lot of chaotic emergent collective voices right now with no particular direction.

1:39:08And at the end, he acknowledges that prediction markets are a form of those group minds. But again, he refers to the concept of hierarchy as a necessary good thing. So I had considered talking to Robin for a long time, obviously before I wrote the Cognicist Manifesto, I was researching different ways of aggregating information about the future, and so therefore Futarchy came up, and I studied it and I referenced it in the manifesto. That being said, I obviously did not end up on this idea that this tokenized exchange market can properly aggregate information about the long-term future in a way that can, one, avoid second-order effects of our individual actions, and really just in general avoid unwanted futures that we can predict through other institutions and means, but the market refuses to integrate information about because the market is more integrating information about the short-term future when we tell that discount rate, and that is just this fundamental flaw in the market mentality.

1:40:23I also would say that he views the concept of market as somewhat sacred. You know, in the conversation, he mentioned, I think, multiple times that people who weren't experts shouldn't espouse their opinions on things. I'm like, say it, speak whatever the fuck you want to say. I'm not gonna limit anybody, but your filter, your information aggregation system should be good enough that it can handle everybody speaking their truth and does not make it such that only certain small individual people are badged or decided that they are experts and that they are allowed or it is okay for them to speak on it, right?

1:41:12The system should allow any voices on any topic. There should be no limitation, and the system should also filter and distribute information in a way that benefits the collective and the collective intelligence that is emergent. Again, I noticed that he had this sort of distaste for the crowd or distaste for the concept of wisdom of the crowd or like common people, or he had this taste for most people that was just like most people don't think about the future or most people aren't society or something that I would bring up as some fundamental emergent thing in society, right? Well, that's like not most society. It's like, well, they're existent. They're real. All of these voices matter. Every voice matters, especially if it's growing because you're like, well, why is that voice rising into the collective now?

1:42:03What is it that is fueling it? And what isn't being met? Even if it is dark and scary, there are roots to it. And it's very easy to just demonize people and say, that's the person that we are supposed to attack or they're not good or whatever like that. But if your system is just like, we are holding out those who are bad and creating some line, I'm not seeing the long-term appeal of that. It felt like he put too much meaning into the word market as if it was some sort of foundational aspect of reality and not just a frame or model for interaction, which obviously is something that economists do. They sort of view the models as if some sort of predictive magic or like psychology or the fundamental nature of all things being.

1:42:52And I've even heard of this concept of where people refer to profit itself as some sort of, it's physics, right? Like as if it is the very nature of things because they're imagining cells in a Petri dish trying to acquire resources and this sort of competition to exist because there's limited space. And so I get that those sort of models feel resonant in your mind as being the same thing. But you have to also understand that our patterns of behavior are emergent from the structures encoded in our neocortex, texas, collective neocortex, and that the ideas and beliefs that we have encoded into ourself generate our general behavior as well.

1:43:44There is some sort of evolutionary built in things, but there is also an emergent nature to our behavior, which of course is why I asked him in there, try to get a little bit more abstract and say, do you think markets are non-deterministic? Do you think that the universe is non-deterministic? Do you think that the past is fixed and the future is emergent? I felt like those were general philosophical questions for how you're understanding and interacting with the world. Let's talk about some good things about Futarchy and why I chose to talk to him. It's like one, again, it is integrating more information about the future into present decision-making and it is amplifying those who have a better understanding of the future.

1:44:39It's taking the same principles behind science, which is prediction, and applying it to groups of many, many voices. And him essentially saying that the variable of collective well-being that you're optimizing for can be a weighted sum of terms and one of those terms can be the distribution of wealth. It's like, well, yes, and that's great, but that's also a feature of all optimizers, right? You know, I have experience, I mean, the bulk of my experience is in machine learning. That's how I got to where I am right now. And what he's talking about, the idea that you can have a model that is optimizing for some variable, and that variable can be a weighted sum of terms, like the loss function in a model being optimized can be a weighted sum of terms. It's like, of course, of course it can. Anybody who works in reinforcement learning knows this because you actually have to design your reward function. It's just that, you know, in many types of machine learning, you have a more abstract sort of loss that you're optimizing for. But this idea that you have that somehow prediction markets, which are, you know, aggregating information from many voices through the form of exchange tokens, is the best model, the best optimization model when we are literally currently discovering all of these deep models that can represent the meaning that we hold to ourselves in sort of a singular representation that can output representations of that knowledge that make sense to us, and also can bring us together. Like, to me, that is so much more advanced and complex and has so much more dimensionality to represent what it is that we as beings trying to interact together really want and really makes us thrive, while not throwing out the sort of concepts that made markets work so well, traditional, you know, exchange markets work so well, you know, so long through human history. I think the internet is here to stay. So, these emergent collective intelligences, or as I think he would view it, emergent collective mobs, like the GameStop thing, they're going to keep emerging, and they're going to become more and more and more ordered, you know, on the other side of that sort of mean thing, just buying stocks together, which I think really is a form of financial protest, a big fuck you to these hierarchical institutions and the way that they are using their power to enshrine their power, rather than to help, you know, lift up people from their suffering, right? It's a form of fuck you protest. And on the other side, you have DAOs, right, which are trying to have some sort of structured structure to this emergence of collective intelligence, it's decentralized, autonomous organizations. So, there's like, there's some binding there, there's some oneness, but it's intended to be non-hierarchical, and it's intended to be decentralized in some form.

1:47:57Now, I've said a lot that the idea of DAO is completely ill-defined, just like Game B right now, because nobody has had a clear explanation of what it could be. I've tried to say that I think that these decentralized institutions should use these collective intelligence models that I'm suggesting, that are aggregating different beliefs over time, and sort of writing what it has learned of our collective ethos to the blockchain as it goes, and using that immutable reference in the future to sort of update its parameters relative to, okay, these people were claiming this in the past, and now they're very certain of something else, but they won't admit that they said that before, right? But it's there, it's written, it's immutable, right? I think that method of collective intelligence has so much more potential than just slightly updating the notion of traditional token exchange markets, tokenized exchange markets. And I understand that Robin thinks that tokenized exchange markets are reality, that they are some fundamental layer or substrate to reality, and they're not just a model that has embedded itself into our neocortexes and structured society over time, and that there are ways to do prediction about where that those structures are leading us. Obviously, I think that he's a very intelligent person, and I think that Futarchy is very explainable. Like, if you just say, well, you had these measures of collective well-being, then you have policies, then you say that people will buy in a market saying whether that policy will increase the measure of collective well-being or not, that's very straightforward, right? And because people already understand money, people already understand economics, at least in some gut-root way, then that starts getting them to think about, well, oh, okay, so we can aggregate information about the future towards our decisions now. That's interesting. Is our prediction markets really the end-all, be-all way to do it? I would say no, but I would also still predict that over the next five, ten years, there's going to be a bunch of people who try to do them, and they're going to see that while they take off a little bit, there's, oh, there's a bigger one. There's a number of bigger prediction markets that I didn't even reference to him. I just referenced things that I thought or I remembered as directly referencing futarchy, meaning they felt like they were some sort of implementation of it. Because there was a video from Zeitgeist, something along the lines of why Zeitgeist is an implementation of futarchy. And in both of our conversations, Robin is explicitly saying, no, there are no implementations of futarchy. And then in his paper, shall we vote on values but bet on beliefs or whatever it's called, he says that what he wants is for multiple people to try to create implementations and institutions. And then he's also saying that his views about futarchy haven't changed over time. And I'm like, well, I'm reading things and hearing things from you that are not consistent with what I just read. So there's sort of this amazement that he's not really willing to engage with the notion that his perceptions have changed over time. Like Cognicism, of course my perception has changed over time because the structure of my neocortex has changed. The way that it's been encoded has changed over time. I kept a snapshot in the form of that manifesto and there's a lot that is clear there, but I am sure that if I went and I read through it, I would find little pieces and I'm like, that's not quite right. Or just the way that I'm thinking about the meaning of words when I read that now doesn't create some sense of consonance in my, or resonance in my current state of being.

1:52:10So futarchy prediction markets, they're obviously interesting. Does Speaker John Ash think that they are the right path to follow? No. I think you should learn what they are and I think that if somebody tries to sell you a prediction market, you be prepared to explain why that is not the ideal solution for society. And when you tell people why, your explanation should not be because John Ash said, or because Schmachtenberger said, or Jordan Hall said. It should be because you've truly taken the time to understand how prediction market works and how the, sort of, I don't even know what to call the models because I haven't given a name.

1:53:05Capslap referenced this concept of guardians, which was this emergent artificial intelligence that was designed to aid and help people. I thought that was a nice term. At one point, I called them Prophet models. I didn't want to call them Oracles because Oracle is, you know, evil corporation or whatever. But obviously, whatever that collective representation of meaning model, you know, whatever you want to name it is, I view that as having such a greater resolution and sort of accountability to the collective whole and just a much better integration of collective implementation. I do not think markets are really that efficient. I think they leave out a lot of information. But, you know, Robin says, well, just people just talking are part of the market. I'm like, no, everything is not the market. Obviously, by that statement of saying that everything, the market encompasses everything and everything outside of it, we're seeing the hierarchy of his ontology of reality. The being that at the top, market controls and holds in everything. The same way that somebody might say that God is at the top of their hierarchy and encompasses everything. This is why I wanted to talk about sacred and what is sacred to people because I think almost everybody has something sacred and it's basically just some neural structure that is sort of a load-bearing belief that if you take it out, everything falls apart. So I think that there's some sort of identity and past history encoded with the word market for him and it might be preventing him from seeing the world as clearly as he possibly could. I generally think that's my attitude about people who have concepts that are sacred. You don't put too much sacredness into any one concept. And, you know, for example, even with me, I try not to have Cognicism itself be sacred and like parody it, make fun of it all the time because it's just an idea and ultimately nobody can fully absorb what is in my brain because what is in my brain is a structure of interconnected neurons and also my own unique biochemistry of like how those neurons would be activated as I move to life and also my environmental context. You know, all of that is in there. You know, often I'll post on Twitter, I'll just joke and say, you know, Cognicism bad because it is in a way singular memes, right?

1:55:44Creating a centralized organization out of any one meme, I think, is pretty unhealthy, right? You don't want to be too tightly bound to your belief structure. You want to be able to float on top of it so that you can see the world through many different lenses, right? Which is why I suggest as sort of the Cognicist future that it's like you have many different people trying to implement what they are receiving as the message, which can't possibly be the Cognicism that I'm trying to put into the world. And, you know, they gave it their own names and then those multiple seeds that are growing a new institution grow towards each other in a decentralized way. It's another reason why I'm not trying to control or build it myself because I truly believe that this should emerge in a decentralized way. But I also think that me as an individual node has been exposed to just the right type of information to sort of see a little bit further into the future about how we could make decisions in the future that will much better benefit like collective wellness without falling into these hyper-optimization of euphoria, you know, like us ending up in heroin VR pods. Because I think that's where tokenized exchange markets essentially take us is hooked into VR pods. And if we really want to thrive and live in this crazy world, oh my god it's 27 minutes and I have to edit all this.

1:57:17Anyways, this has been my review. There's a lot of thoughts here. I hope you liked or and or enjoyed them. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Robin. And Robin, if you're watching this, no distaste for you. I'm trying to help you get on a better path that is more in alignment with the collective well-being of humanity. I understand that you study that throughout your whole life and you've created some sense of expertise about it. And therefore you think that your understanding of how we should integrate information and how the world works is accurate because you make good predictions. But you have to remember that those are just models. Those are just frames. Those are just lenses. Just like Cognicism is a model or a frame or a lens. And in the Cognicist view, I generally assume that tokenized exchange markets are going to continue to exist.

1:58:08But you need some radically new form to essentially organize action that benefits the commons. Right. That which no singular person can own despite many attempts to. And that which we all need, such as the air to breathe, which of course we are being shown what exactly is the commons in this COVID world because I have polluted the commons. Right. And now that could hurt somebody else who exists. And therefore they have to take their own individual actions to prevent them. But what if there was a better way to coordinate action? Right. Where people felt that they were fully in autonomy and it aggregated the information from the experts more. Right. But not when they're wrong. You know that like there is no clear distinction between expert and non-expert. And sometimes, you know, non-experts can be ahead of the curve.

1:59:14They just can. They're just exposed to the information before anybody else. And because experts have gotten themselves too far into a narrow paradigm, they can't think outside the box. If somebody comes in from the edge, not an expert. No, everybody says they're not an expert. And for years were held back because the institution of the hierarchy of the experts is saying this is what is acceptable to believe. It's preventing, you know, the truth from actually getting in. And I know that you can explain and understand why all these institutions have actually moved us forward. And there's some of the greatest things that have more to move us forward through time. I don't argue that. I don't argue that all the institutions that you believe in have created a world of incredible well-being for all, and therefore your logical conclusion is sort of a regression to the mean to say, let's continue along this path, let's just slightly alter it. And you know, I mean, even the idea of having outcomes of decisions be determined by judges, by these individual people who are supposed to be these excellent expert decision-makers, it's like, obviously if you have representation by a lawyer and the better the lawyers exist in a market, then the people who can convince people more, those lawyers are going to get more money. And therefore it's whoever has the most money to get the most convincing lawyer can get off better. This is a very simple, simple concept. No matter how impartial that we think that judges may be, they are influenced greatly by context and the fact that they're just human beings living their life. They need to eat lunch, they need to take a shit, they're not focusing on the case at hand. And then I get, you're like, okay there's this hierarchy of judges as well, those who are higher in the hierarchy are supposed to be greater experts. Oh my god, I get it. I get that notion. I get what that has built out in this world. But the scientific institution has made many predictions about where the institution of the market is taking our environment, which is the substrate that we are embedded in and lived in, and we need that environment to live in. And so we're running against the clock. And yeah, you make good predictions about many things, make good predictions about many things, but like, as you say, will the scientists or the experts, are they not? And obviously science has flaws in it as well, and we talked about that in the manifesto as well. 32 minutes, why am I doing this to myself. Yeah, so, no, no, nothing against him as a person. I don't think that he's necessarily on the right path in terms of the way that he's promoting hierarchy and hierarchy of experts, right, as, and especially this idea of an expert is like, basically badge, you're an expert now, that's it. You can't become out of date or dated, or abuse your power, or the institution can't fail, or you know, people don't rise to the ranks for reasons other than expertise. Like, I guess he would reduce that to like, that's just the way things are, and if you have better, if you have better suggestions, suggest them. Well, I do, I do have better suggestions. So that's why I am talking to all of these voices about their systems, to try to see where they're not really thinking right, and also to get some places where I am not thinking, like, what gaps have I missed. That's why I want to talk to all of these people. Hopefully the next episode will be with Greg, Greg Landua, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, but he's something called the Regen, no, the Regen Network I think, and it involves some sort of logging of claims about improving the environment in some sort of trackable metrics and then some sort of reward for actively stewarding the environment. I think, I could be doing that wrong, but to me that sounds great. That sounds like something that I should explore, that we should explore, that we should learn more about, and where I should learn where maybe I have missed something. Because you know, they've actually created this implementation, so there should be some sort of, I think, confidence there, that what they're doing is gonna work and is not going to have a lot of second-order effects. So hopefully I'll get to talk to Greg soon, and I hope you enjoyed this talk and my review, which is very long, and I hope that the audio is good. I could use it.