Hello!

I spent the last few weeks getting out of a mental rabbit hole. Being full-time on research, with a fortunate degree of freedom, it's easy to spin out into "Well what if this thing means this, and what if this implies that..." Which is fun, but quickly becomes overwhelming.

What finally helped silence the noise, on a particularly frustrating day, was to open a Google doc and write down all the things I currently believe that, in my view, aren't widely understood. Then I organized those insights by high-medium-low epistemic status (i.e. my confidence levels), which left me with three categories of knowledge.

I realized a few things. One, I'd been spending too much time spinning in circles on vague insights with lower epistemic status. And two, there was a coherent body of knowledge at higher epistemic status that I hadn't yet captured in public. Oddly, I'd been discounting that section because, well, I'd already figured it out (for myself, anyway). The insights seemed overly obvious to me, and therefore not that interesting.

Anyways, my takeaway from that was: it's time to tie a bow on that body of knowledge. So I'm planning on spending Q4 in longform writing mode. Thematically, it'll cover the economic behavior of production vs. consumption of digital goods, contributor incentives, and optimal org models for distributed work. Maybe some other stuff.

I'm looking forward to deep writing time. It'll probably look like a report of Roads and Bridges length, but if you have other formats you'd be into, just reply to this email!

Writing

Posts I've written this month.

Decentralized funding? An analysis of three programs: I wanted to understand how open source projects spend money when they have it, so I did a deep dive into three community grant programs (Zcash, Monero, Dash). Data included for your own analysis!
Equity for third-party developers: Given Twitter's announcement that they're deprecating third-party API use cases, I considered what it’d look like if platforms offered equity to third-party developers.

Digging into user-to-user support systems this month, a topic I've been dying to tackle. Hopefully won't get in over my head with it!

Notes

Notes from this past month have been updated. A few highlights:

“Data as labor” is a concept that makes me vaguely uncomfortable, despite good intentions. Labor for whom? Why not labor for ourselves? Labor is a contract with someone else. I’d rather focus on enabling people to do more things for themselves, instead of for companies (link)
Is there a danger in relying so heavily on economic game theory when scale isn’t factored in? Meaning, we have different behavior/psychology when 3 people are involved vs. 3 million, so looking at “games” might oversimplify the outcome. Relatedly: it’s funny that a common critique of Ostrom is “but does it scale”, and yet I don’t hear that critique of Hardin? Ostrom used fisheries, Hardin used cattle herders. Kinda the same thing? (link)
New social networks (like Mastodon) should use the auction property tax concept to encourage namespace squatters to post content. If you don’t post content regularly, you lose your namespace (link)
Erowid, but for our daily subjective reality. Ex. how do different people process audio or visual cues (link)
Giving someone your phone number or last name IRL these days feels like giving someone your social security number. They can unlock so much about your online identity with that information. I kind of hate how de-anonymizing it is, but it’s also this reminder of how much the tables have turned in the last 20 years. My online behavior is both the most public thing about me (in a literal sense), but also the thing I want to keep most private in my one-off, in-person interactions. (link)
What's the rationale for a wealthy person spending their time "arranging money" for projects vs. financing it themselves? I think a few reasons. One, if others are willing to fund it, it's good social proof. Two, it leverages your dollars better. But mostly I think it points to the fact that true wealth is about influence, your ability to unlock doors for others. Money helps somewhat with this, but it's not the best measure of wealth. This is actually a nice thought, I think: that "proof of wealth" is not zero-sum (as it's often derided), but by definition, the extent to which you can move and amplify others (link)
Progress on a global civilization level is hampered by the fact that every individual (per-human) instance needs to progress through its own journey from scratch (starting from birth to death). I guess that’s sad, but I actually find it to be a sort of lovely, amusing, existential tragicomedy. For all the progress we make together, our limiting reagent will always be what we call “people problems”, which are really just problems experienced at the local (not global) level. People keep thinking we can cheat this somehow, but I think it’s very hard to accelerate. Bc that kind of wisdom is only stored “locally” and isn’t transferable between people after they die. You can’t read or be told something that changes you (it only changes you if you’re ready to see it!), you have to actually go through a set of experiences to obtain that wisdom. (Side note: if people were to live forever, or even for much longer, it would probably greatly accelerate human progress for this reason. Maybe it already has!) (link)

Links

Useful articles I’ve read this past month.

Liberal Radicalism: Formal Rules for a Society Neutral Among Communities (Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig, Glen Weyl). This paper proposes a funding model for public goods, based on quadratic voting. I genuinely struggled with it, both on a comprehension and significance level. It doesn't seem to address the biggest problem with public goods (chronic underfunding - who pays?), only optimizing funds once they are available. But. I'm still mulling on it. If you read it, I'd love to get your thoughts.
Life as a bug bounty hunter (Erin Winick): Thoroughly enjoyable read about people who make a living off of bug bounties (and part of a bigger series).
Sustainability of open source software – Bots to the rescue (Jordi Cabot): I'm interested in the role that bots and automation can play in reducing the cost of software maintenance. I haven't seen much research on this topic yet, so I'm glad to see Jordi kick off the conversation. (Following a trail of links, I also stumbled upon this story about a man whose bot helped him write 2.4M Wikipedia articles.)
Beyond distributed and decentralized: what is a federated network? (Institute of Network Cultures): Useful breakdown of federated vs. decentralized vs. distributed networks, and how the terms are evolving
Independent Mentorship (Steve Krouse): Steve reflects on his experience doing independent research, and in particular, the value of mentorship, which he's exploring in a mentor-mentee relationship with Jonathan Edwards. I like the "research recap" format overall; I generally think podcasts are underutilized as a casual format

Books

Relevant books that I’ve read this month. This month kinda looks more like a bestseller list. Sorry ;)

Radical Markets (Eric Posner, Glen Weyl): I read this because I'm eager for more vocabulary to describe our political and economic climate today, which I did get here. I'm skeptical about many of the ideas proposed, which are useful thought experiments, but framed as practical panaceas to extremely complicated problems. It's worth reading a summary version of the book, I think.
Inadequate Equilibria (Eliezer Yudkowsky): Attempts to address the question of why we get stuck in systems that function efficiently, but are subpar (ex. healthcare in the US). He also tackles the question of "How do I know when I've actually come across an unusual insight?" The writing style is a bit "well-actually", but if you look past that, it's worth a read. (Also, if you read this and Ostrom's Governing the Commons, then you can read "Inadequate Equilibria vs. Governing the Commons", Martin Sústrik's blog post analysis!)
The Meaning of It All (Richard Feynman): Feynman being Feynman. Transcript of three lectures he once gave about the role of science in our lives. I particularly liked his treatment of religion in here.