Transcript by Otter
Artem:
Yeah, so my main question is, what is broken about sensemaking? My main hypothesis, or my assumption, or my bet, is that sensemaking is the the most underserved need in governance right now. I think that most of the startups have focused on voting, like Jokerace.
Grace:
Yeah, jokeRace is the only one who has any sense about at all. And you can tell like, as they call it, call it Jokerace, had the pleasure of spending a little time with David when we were in his temple. But yeah, voting is not how any organization decides on anything, until DAOs came along. It's not how decision is made, right? Like if somebody if you're in a group, and somebody says, let's vote on it, either they think that they have a majority or they don't really care, like, "oh, let's vote on it and go for lunch". Right? But if it's really important that, you know, it's just not how decisions are made in organizations. And something like decision tables make a lot more sense. decision tables are a very common thing that people using governance, if you know what decision tables are, it was one of those verses making matrix. A decision making matrix you might have multiple people fill it out. Can you imagine if we did that instead of voting, right, we had to decide who to fund let's say it was just a simple you know, the simple thing that you have to decide now which isn't, you know, where to give them money isn't important decision making thing, but it's not the one that really makes or breaks and one organization always. It's not about the culture or you know how people feel or whatever, it's just where to allocate funds. But even if you just took that, and you said, "Okay, you have to fill in a decision making matrix about the, you know, your trust in those people, how relevant it is to the organization's strategy"... Even three or four things, just four things instead of a vote... You'd have much better decision making than voting! And there is a tool that does not, it's called... I'll think of it at some point. But anyway, there is a tool that does, and it's not a web3 tool. It's a decision making tool. It's been around for a while.
05:48
Is it a decision making tool or a sense making tool?
05:52
No, it's a decision making tool. It's a it's a government's tools used? It's a Canadian company. I'll find it, I'll find it, I'll send you I'll send you a report from a couple years ago, a different digital democracy tools, like the whole thing of safe tech, safe tech exists before DAOs existed. And the people who did DAOs did zero time trying to study safe tech, and figure out how it works. So I don't want to go too deep down that rabbit hole, because you want to talk about deliberation and sensemaking. But one of the really key points is that popularity isn't the same as wisdom, like a popular choice is not the same as a smart choice.
06:44
That's the problem with delegates, right?
06:50
The problem with delegates is totally different than that. Right? Delegates is, is it's not? Because delegates is a popularity contest, right? And it's also contest and you start to think about delegates, and it's already you look at arbitrum, you know, or optimism or whatever, you know, Griff Green is pretty much at this point, somebody who's almost a professional politician at this point. His job a lot of the time is to be a delegate. And we all love him. And I'm not even saying he makes bad decisions or doesn't know what he's doing, or that he has a conflict of interest, none of that. All I'm saying is that he is now a professional politician. And there's others like that, I just happen to know him, right. And you see that some of the people who are in the bankless were to elect their people and we never intended that. But delegates, in some ways are professional politicians. And nobody wants professional politicians. And we've kind of reinvented the crappy form of democracy we already have. Exactly. Of course, I'm gonna say this, because it's the thing I would say is that a lot of the unpopular people, like a lot of times saying the truth is quite unpopular. I'm gonna say it that way. And I would know! I'm surprised at how popular I am in the web3 space, you know, people are actually willing to... they have some level of tolerance for somebody who just, you know, says things that are inconveniently true. I think this industry has a high tolerance for being able to put up with that, but not the highest tolerance for actually operating at that level. So people are respect my opinions. And they even often know they're true, but infrequently would implement them even I would infrequently. And so one of the problems with sensemaking has to do with lack of appropriate information to start with. So in some places, when you do, like, what do they do citizen assemblies. You give people a packet of information. And then with that packet of information, and everybody starting on a level playing field, or at least having some basic information, you can make decisions. Now, of course, then all the power is centralized in whoever makes that packet of information. So this is really the problem in sensemaking. And it's a huge problem today. It's bigger than it ever was, because so many people think that what they see on their computer screen is informative. And they think that what they see on their computer screen is more informative than what their gut feeling is telling them or what their body is telling them or whatever. And I often use the pandemic as an illustration, because you were locked down, you had your computer on, you were being told all kinds of stuff by various official authorities, and everybody was agreeing about it. And then you looked around, and... I'll talk about the vaccines, I think it's it's still controversial, the effectiveness of the vaccines, but the evidence is quite clear that they were ineffective. And they weren't vaccines, because in the world, the word vaccine means you get this shot, and you never will get that thing again. And so it's inaccurate. Yeah, like Polio, like, you know, yellow fever, like all of these things. I mean, with hepatitis, you might have to get it every 10 years or something, but not every six months, right. So it was a misnomer, at the very least for this particular medical intervention. And no, to this day, nobody is saying, Oh, well, that was a misnomer. Let's just say even that simple thing, right? Oh, it's not really a vaccine, it's a preventive treatment that we inject in you. And then nothing wrong with an injection, that's a preventive treatment. I waited before getting this intervention, and I did not get the intervention in the end. I think it was less than six months of the first interventions, I could see that some of my friends, my actual friends, people, I know who I could see with my eyes, who had gotten this intervention got COVID. And so I didn't get the intervention, because I I worked at home. So I was like, you know, I wasn't going out endangering anybody else. I wasn't, you know, doing my best to, you know, order food and not not disease anybody else, which also was pretty, right. Like, they were telling me, this is a vaccine, if you have a vaccine against polio, and the person next to you has polio, you won't get polio, which is another reason why I was like, There's something very suspicious about this misnomer that they're giving me because the people who had the vaccine more afraid of me, because I didn't have the vaccine. so this was a misnomer, which I could see with my eyes, it was a misnomer. I could see with my eyes, that people who got it, we're still getting sick. And you saw people not trusting their eyes, regardless of the dangers of this thing, or whether it was, you know, you could see it wasn't working to prevent human beings from getting COVID. And that's even not controversial. That was always you can see it on the CDC site, you can see it. And so that's what I mean about sensemaking. if you live in a world where people are willing to trust what's on their computer screen and what's on their tiktok, more than they're going to trust their own eyes, you're always going to have really bad sensemaking. Normally, when it's important to us, we trust our body. And what we see with our eyes, it's like a knot. But we we live in a society where we don't and in DAOs, it's even more so. And so you've got popularity contests that are a popularity contest of ideas or who gets the money, right? these aren't critical experiments that we're doing, it doesn't matter that you got the money for this study, rather than somebody got the money from Arbitrum for something else. And it's all good. Right? But that's the major problem with sensemaking. Is that is that popular and correct are not the same?
Artem:
I think what you're talking about is something like large scale sense making where we want to figure out what to do as soon as a country or as a large protocol DAO. But I think sensemaking can also be like, small scale, like in a team. So do you think that the dynamic of such small scale sensemaking is different? Or, do you think it has the same problem?
Grace:
Yes, it does have the same problem. It's always had the same problem. And this isn't new to DAOs. I remember in one of our, when I did my MBA, they were talking about this, they used to do this exercise with MBA students were, they like put you in a group dynamic like an organizational, they could call it organizational design. And they put you in a group. And they would they, they used to have an exercise, the guy who was teaching organizational design, they used to have an exercise, it was like a survival exercise. And you were going to be thrown in the desert. And you had to choose which of these items you are going to use in the desert. And he told the story of there was a guy who was integral, and this guy was an ex Navy SEAL. But he was, as many very powerful people are like, they were actually internally powerful, kind of like guiding guidance, big unless you had to speak. And they were starting to decide about this thing. And they were arguing about and he said, Listen, this is what we should take. And they didn't know his background, right? They didn't know his background. And they just kept arguing with him. And they didn't, you know, they didn't even sort of inquire into why he was making those suggestions. And like, Yeah, but I think this and I think that they didn't, they never got around to asking him whether he had been a Navy Seal or not. And eventually, because it was just an exercise, right? Like, if it had been real life, he wouldn't have done this. Eventually, that group picked the wrong things. And the teacher who knew that he wasn't Navy SEAL had said, How the hell did you do that? Like, you knew what the, you know, maybe they had, they had to submit their individual list. And then the group list, he's like, like, in this group, there's one guy who knew exactly what the right list was, which was very rare. There weren't any groups who knew that he was the only guy in the whole, but your group didn't choose the right thing. And he said that I'm dying in the desert, they wouldn't listen to me. He's like, I was gonna get those things. And they were gonna die in the desert. And I wasn't, you know, it's like that. So it does. And that's a small group in a, you know, just being assholes, right? Just being asshole MBA students who wouldn't listen to the guy who really knew what he was talking about. So, of course, that happens everywhere. Another thing about sensemaking, is we, we don't do a good job in our organizations right now of having organizational memory. And so we think we've got these immutable records of stuff, and but we don't, right. I mean, we do. But if you look at a very large, I'm not gonna say what percentage, but it's like extremely large percentage of proposals. Maybe all of them are made without a problem definition. And some are called solution definition, you know, measurements that would let us know that we had accomplished the goal, right? So you're going to submit a report now. And maybe or maybe not, it will be implemented by someone, maybe it'll be good. And maybe it'll be bad. And the reputation of you as having done that will be in somebody's head, whether you did a good job, and you did it on time, and whether you and whether this how to implement and where to implement those things like in which part of the DAO to implement what you learned, will be nowhere. And that's all right. And so one of the things you'd like to do in sensemaking in doubt, is experiments, and then have the results of that experiment, as compared to what you hoped would happen, right? Like let's say we want to have better decision making about how to run our funding rounds, and we're going to try We're gonna have more decentralized decision making about how to run the funding rounds. And we get to a point where more people are involved in that decision. And it's either better or worse, right? We either get better or worse decisions because of it. We don't like how do we know it was better? What is the measure to say, Okay, now we've got 10 people instead of 20 people or, you know, instead of five people involved in deciding what this rounds round is going to be about, because until now, it's like Disruption Joe makes all the decisions, right? Let's say, like, Okay, we don't want Disruption Joe, to make all the decisions, even though he's great. We want we want a council of five to do that. So like, we now can measure something called decentralization, or we can say five is more than one. That's a measure of decentralization five peoples that have one person? And then how do you know that what they did was a better quality? There is no
21:13
that's criteria.
21:15
Right, your success criteria. And, and so, and that's true of almost everything.
21:26
In a very different side. Yeah, I really appreciate you telling me this.
21:34
And so you could run multiple experiments on your grants round. People say this, we're going to have a council of 10 and a council of five, and we're going to have the, you know, or we're going to have it done using Polis, polis is going to decide. Definitely more decentralized if you use Polis, but then you don't know if the result was good or bad. You only know if more people were involved or not, because you don't know, I don't even know what this like I don't even know how to say.
22:10
And it might be something that's more long term, like, we are only going to assess that success of that grant round, after the money is allocated, and the things are delivered. So then we would compare the amount of delivered work in around managed by polis versus the amount of delivered work in around done by Disruption Joe, and see whether it was a better result or not. And we might see more work, right, retrospectively, right? Did did more work, get delivered? And did the work that got delivered, actually get integrated into the chain? I'm gonna say it.
22:49
But you'd want enough, right? You need some you need some. And I always compare these things to my body, right? My body has really great feedback loops.
23:07
And I'm sitting here and paying attention to you and what I'm saying and not noticing that my hip hurts. And I'm like, Oh, um, but if I as soon as I look, I'm like, oh, man, my foot is falling asleep. And I do this and like, okay, my foot feels better immediately. I don't have to, I get a really, it's the feedback loop is great. I mean, not on chocolate cake. On chocolate cake, the feedback loop is not really great. I get a very delayed negative consequences, not immediate negative consequences on that one. And that's fine. Right. So we are testing enough things in our sensemaking. And we aren't seeing enough things as tests.
24:09
And I think there's also there's, we don't talk about conflicts of interests nearly enough. So I'm on the Supervisory Council of the s net thing and singularity net. And I talk about it like people are sick of me talking about it. Because they, they allocated a certain budget to us. And a certain amount of the budget is our regular retainer. And a certain amount is like extra amount that we could allocate to hire other people to help us out. They have a task forest, and we could pay it to ourselves as some of us have more time than others. That's a conflict of interest. Right? I In charge of a budget, some of which I could allocate to myself. Now we were elected. And that budget was given to us as elected officials. And it was initially stated that we could pay it to ourselves. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. And we're only elected for six months, like it's very limited amount of corruption. But still, I say that I'm like, Look, I have some bandwidth, and I need some money this month. I'd like to do these things for the council. And I know that's a conflict of interest.
25:43
We've done a pretty good job of handling it. For example, we We recently hired somebody who hired Dr. Nick, we hired Dr. Nick to write the blueprint. Now, I'm perfectly qualified to write the blueprint. And I have the bandwidth that I'd like to do it and I'd like the money, but we decided to put out a request for proposals, like requests for people who can do that. And even I can't compete with Dr. Nick's qualifications, so we hired him.
26:16
And even just what I'm telling you right now, like who has kept a record that this Supervisory Council did something against, whatever, or Grace individually, I didn't have to, you know, I didn't have to make the suggestion, let's go open it up, I could have said I'll do it. Like, who has a record that the three of us as a Supervisory Council, have done things that clearly demonstrate that we're willing to not be corrupt with this small amount of money. So that maybe next round, you might give us a bigger amount of money because we gave them a small amount of money, and they behaved in a not corrupt way. There's no record of that either. This is our sensemaking is also really hindered by our knowledge management, which is pretty much what I've been talking about the whole time. It's about knowledge management.
27:14
Interesting. So do you think it can be tackled by better documentation or some kind of AI bots that can be used as interfaces to that collective knowledge? I think that's something that Rafa has been writing a lot about.
27:36
I certainly hope so.
27:44
think one of the reasons that we don't deal with it as much as is the lack of importance of anything that we're doing.
27:56
I don't think that any of the tools or I think that almost none of the tools that we have developed so far, in web three are of any use to anyone. And that fundamentally, what we've got is like a UBI program for smart people. Like, yeah, like, in some ways, web3 is a UBI program for the web3 community. And that's not I'm not such a common denominator isn't always the best solution. You know, I mean, like polis is a lowest common denominator solution. It's not going to really get you innovation. And you need lowest common denominator about a restaurant, like if there's a vegan person, you need something that has been options. That's lowest common denominator. But in complex problems, you really need a lot of innovative ideas and compromises. I don't think any of these tools help us very much with compromising, and collaborate and real collaboration. real collaboration would be something like three people put in, you know, competing. Proposals, let's get them in a room and see if they can work together. And let's see if we can take the best parts of each of those three proposals and put that together. I don't think any of these tools are looking at that.
29:42
Yeah, I'm just making notes right now. So I'm a bit
29:47
slow. So like, it's sort of like which which part of the proposal is really good and which part of the proposal needs improvement and, you know, which, even something simple like You I'm quite good at designing system specifications, but I can't program. And so you've got the best system designer can't apply in your DAO, because I'm not a programmer. And so you've also designed the sense making in the DAO's in this weird way where you have to be good at proposal writing, and good at programming. And that's not a usual, that's not the norm. And you don't have a way to bring the best people together, if you had a really good way to understand again, and I can do this right, you could have an organization in which I can identify the best programmers who deliver and I can identify the people who are the best at writing proposals and the most innovative, and reputation is really important. And I can identify, and then there's another part of that, like, I'm, like devil's advocate is part of sense making, right? And devil's advocate in a data, you have no way to compensate. You need them, right, you need the risk assessment person. And you need to, you know, like, you need the person who's, you know, what could possibly go wrong, and they write down a list of what could possibly go wrong. And then that gets implemented in your product, and then it doesn't go wrong. But that person a doubt doesn't have any way to, like that person is just in a doubt unpopular, and wastes a lot of time. And also in discussion forum. So you're talking about AI and LLM is reputation is key. Because somebody like myself, right. I like it would be beneficial to myself and to Arbitrum for me to participate. But I don't have time for politics. I'm busy. So if Artem says I'd like to talk to you and can you contribute to or you know, arbitrum DAO discussion? I'll be like, Yeah, but if you like, can you join the discord channel? Campaign for something, submit a proposal, blah, blah, blah, it's like, no, I can't. And then you can't get the most you can, it's not really a meritocracy. Because politics is such an important part of it. And that's why you have professional politicians, and then you have people like myself, who just can't be bothered. The best people are too busy. And then let's say you did get them into a discord channel. And you did get them to have this discussion. How does the Dow wait them? And right now how the Dow would wait, my discussion is that person is not in our community, and they're a pain in the ass, something that was nice to have listened to them. They came in as a guest speaker, but I'm not going to have any weight in the voting in the community. With delegates, right? I'm not a delegate, I don't hold any ARB. I would have to hold ARB in order to have any influence. And I don't want to hold our great if somebody gave me some arm, you know, said Please join or said listen, we're going to make sure you're gonna at least get some compensation for your time or, I mean, as you can see, I'm not it's not about compensation for my time, right? It's just the amount of time I would have to dedicate to arbitration in order to get to the part of the community to like, you don't have that in normal organizations. Can you imagine if that's how you hired your marketing team? Yeah, in a corporate environment.
33:53
At the same time, I've been told about those kind of House of Cards politics that happens in those private chats where basically if the proposal is being submitted on the forum, it means that it has been already like it has already passed with with the delegates, because otherwise it wouldn't be even submitted. Like, which isn't, happens in behind the scenes, and that's, like, not healthy.
34:22
Why is it happening behind the scenes like I do think they need to be formal discussion channels, and the LLM that we've been talking about should be on top of those formal discussion channels. And it should be obvious to everybody where that takes place. Dr. Nick was working for a while I don't know if he's doing it or if he got funded for it, or whatever. He was talking a lot about, how do we do that in terms of like, could you create, like your, I'm gonna call it your formal disclosure like this is the place where we talk about this. This is the channel it's talked about. There's no informal back channel, whatever. There's always some informal back channel but this is where it's supposed to be talking Wow. And then we run. We run some LLMs on top of that. And we start to understand who's smart, who isn't smart, who's, you know, like, what are some innovative ideas that somebody said that somebody said, Oh, that's cool. But nobody else saw it. Just listened to a podcast where somebody they weren't saying his tweet is brilliant, and only has two likes, and one of them is me. And you know, she beats it out and on her podcast, and right, how do you how do you capture that? The best ideas? Probably something nobody noticed. Very likely. But so I think that those are, I don't think there's anything wrong with having deliberation before you make a proposal. But we haven't made that a formal part of most DAOs. And where you have you got like something like those like, it might be rocket chatter, but it might be those like snapshot proposal deliberation threads that are just like, not great. We can do better.
36:09
Yeah. What when was the last time you submitted the proposal somewhere?
36:16
Well, I mean, I submitted my candidacy to the Supervisory Council and this and that, that must have been four months ago. And then within that week, you know, we, as a smaller, so we did, so I'd submitted that. Oh, well. I also in Tommy, I didn't really submit it on my own behalf. But they have because they have a NFT gated. They have an NFT gated thing. So they have a DAO official representative who submitted on my behalf a proposal on the Tomi DAO, that was like maybe in in November, I got that money, October, September, October. And it was a grant for writing the specifications there, which didn't get fulfilled completely. There was some weird politics there. And instead of paying me through the DAO, and all the people I wanted to hire, they paid me. They paid some of the people through the DAO. And then they paid me through a retainer. It was weird. Half of the my salary through the DAO and half of it was through this retainer. But yeah, but I did get a bunch of other people as well in through that. So that particular proposal included money for other experts to help me out. So I was able to use the funding from that proposal, which was, supposedly, well it was from my work and writing specifications, which I did write. And also, I had some other people, including Griff, by the way, and a general magic and including, yeah, a bunch of people who gave expert talks. And
37:58
so when the writing that proposal, did you like did you consider like, the inputs from the, like, the founders of Tommy, or you did some kind of, you know, you tried to engage the DAO members? They don't have?
38:20
They don't have that. I mean, it's some input from like, you know, token holders or members,
38:27
right? Yeah. Yeah, I also was put up, it was open for input. I didn't get any input. It's just a new organization. But yeah. And the same thing with the Supervisory Council, they had had a really interesting process where their ambassador program and they had really considered even how to elect a Supervisory Council and what should the role of the Supervisory Council be? And so they had actually a very long process of, of considering what what their stakeholders wanted in the council that would be elected, before they even opened up the elections. So that was quite good. But that was down to the like, they have an individual in the Foundation who is in charge of decentralization process. And she made sure you know, like, there was her and one other person in the Foundation who did that. I think one of the things that's really hard to do for somebody who's an outsider like myself is know who do I ask other than just, you know, both in Tomi and and singularity net other than putting something out on the discord channel. I don't really know how to ask the community. Just another thing that I was, you know, sort of alluding to there is like, if I wanted to join I can immunity, right? Like, how do I even know who the person is I need to politic to. And so in both Tommy and in singularity net, they, they have an individual whose job it is to help me not screw that up.
40:17
So they will act like intermediaries between yourself and the community.
40:22
Yeah. And that is a kind of centralization of power in some ways. They, they want to decentralize, so, you know, whatever singular network foundation or the Tommy calm company wants to decentralize, and they have somebody whose job it is to go around and find me and invite me to come to something and invite me to run for elections and invite me to send a proposal. And that person, like recently, I finished the specifications. And that person asked me who should I send the specifications to, to who's, who are two programmers that I can hire. And I gave them five names, and they sent it to five names. And so that person's job is to decentralize. But they, you know, how did they do that?
41:19
But in terms of sensemaking, do you know if they did any surveys with their communities or something like that?
And what exactly did they do with us that members?
Grace:
They had, as far as I know, you would have to ask Esther, it has to be a great person for you to interview about this. but they did with their ambassador program. They had a number of discussions of what they had originally, they hired us they had originally and I don't know how had hired some nation and hired a Supervisory Council. And I think their ambassador program was not happy with it. Their bachelor program is, I mean, it's their community program, it's kind of hard. I don't really know why they use that name for it. But anyway, the ambassador program wasn't that happy with the interaction between the ambassadors of the previous Supervisory Council. And so the foundation is with the ambassador programs, which were I think they were just at the Ambassador town halls, I don't think they had special meetings, or that it was just like a certain number of minutes were allocated in three or four different Ambassador town halls. And then they use something called the sway platform Swa II, at the time, they were using that platform, which is something like snapshot in terms of having a discussion forum. So you could put up a poster and have a discussion forum. And people put up puzzles of what they thought about what how long does should the Supervisory Council serve? How many people should be on it? How should we compensate them? And so and they didn't. It wasn't really a vote on that. But the foundation took that into account when they publicize the elections. And then when they publicize the elections, Esther went out and again, she asked other people, like who should run who should, and she had to run around and get she got an amazing, the set of candidates was unbelievably good. The three people who are elected really qualified, I love working with the other two, which there was a lot of, I'm gonna call it centralized work done in order to find us and decentralized the process.
Artem:
So so it was something like a forum, right?
44:04
Yeah, there was there was both zoom meetings and a forum around this. So both or both, it was both zoom meetings, like there was a lot of zoom meetings. That's how they operate over there. They have a lot of zoom meetings, which is great. I mean, I think I think that's the other thing about sensemaking.
44:27
When you're talking about humans, right, like it's like, you want to hang out. If you send text, you will cause misunderstanding. This is just the case. It will always be that if you send text you will cause misunderstanding. And, and so, we're trying to do large scale sense making over A medium that we know causes misunderstanding. We all know that and so I have a real yeah, there's a real problem with that. And there's certainly a problem with disembodied, you know, disembodied AI systems, trying to actually, you know, parse people's nuances and parse who's an expert and who's full of shit. How do you parse who's really an expert and who's full of shit?
45:34
And just talks a lot. They just take everything at face value, right?
45:42
Yeah, yeah. Well, you say face value, which is interesting, right? Like that one of the ways that you parse whether somebody is full of shit is their face? The body language, right? Yeah, their vibe, their face, their whatever. And
46:05
you can read between the lines, you can see that they withhold something, right?
46:10
Yeah, the or that they're, they're talking about it, even they don't really know about it, but they want to sound smart. You can even see that in text in a discord channel. There are people who talk a lot. You can also like, there's somebody who I know of who I really like, in the community in one of the communities I belong to. And I really like him very amicable, but a lot of his contribution is a little bit too old fashioned and formalistic. And he has a lot of influence, because he works hard, and because he's very likable. Yeah, but an LLM can't make that decision about like, well, that's pretty formalistic. And it could make a decision saying like, nobody actually reads his documents. For example, like, oh, this person puts out really great stuff, but nobody reads it. And it doesn't get implemented, or you know, something like that. I just worried about I worry about that feedback loop. And I think that's been the main thing like what's your feedback loop? Where where's your feedback loop? What does success look like? And and if you're using something disembodied, how do you compensate for that? Which disembodied could be just text itself right text is disembodied. I mean, how many times have you misunderstood somebody who you've known your whole life? When they write text, and it would never have happened if it wasn't text?
47:57
It's really people don't think of it we're so especially young people don't think about how different
48:07
so did the singularity now to use AI to process? That sounds? No, they can't do that manually, like just
48:19
people made sense of it. I like that they have. I mean, they have a fair like, they have a lot more meetings that I wish that I had to go to. But I think that that's why their community is so strong is because they actually have a lot of zoom meetings. And the there's another thing about losing that sense making but also about elections, and whatever there is real value to people liking each other versus being the best person for the job. There's value to a team that has worked together. That is very hard to manage in, in these decentralized networks like that team cohesion causes things to happen, that wouldn't happen at the individual level. So it's not clear that even individual reputation is an individual reputation isn't the truth of how things work. It's part of the truth. Right. Part of it is like I'm a better person when I'm around these people
49:39
because I like them, which is a very unintelligent thing to say. Right? Yeah. It's not what Yeah, You could train artificial intelligence to start understanding who likes who as well, to understand politics, you know, you could.
50:07
Yeah, especially if you use some kind of community analytics. So you can gather like a lot of data, like, engagement, emojis.
50:23
Emojis are really interesting, right? You could also use emojis to understand people's expertise in anything. You could use emojis, like, you know, slash dot, you should look at slash dot.org, they have a moderation capability, where you get a turn to moderate. So rather than centralized moderation, if you're in good standing, which they call positive karma. So if you're in good standing once every, whatever, two weeks a year, or whatever it is, it's your turn to moderate other people. And so you go through your normal behavior in the, in the reading the articles that you would read, and, you know, whatever it is, but being able to give people a rating, a moderation rating, and the moderation ratings that you can give are, I think there's six or seven of them. And they're things like there's things like funny, insightful, repetitive troll bait, you know, and so, you know, something like that. And so that instead of just getting up, down, which means agree, disagree, you might get insightful, but disagree. You know, I mean, like, I could disagree with something that's insightful. And so by using a they're not emojis, they're just it's a drop down box. But by using a group moderation capability with emoji, like, understanding of what does it mean? Like, not just I agree, I disagree. But like, this was insightful, and this was redundant. And this was funny, and this was controversial. And this was scientifically backed, you could create a layer of sensemaking, that would be quite profound. And I think the way that they've done it in that, like, it's not your turn every day, to moderate, but you have a couple of weeks to moderate. And then it's not your turn to moderate again, is is brilliant. Because it doesn't favor people who've got a lot of
52:34
time on their hands, like sortition.
52:38
It's, it's not it's like it's more like jury duty. Everybody gets a turn. Right. When it's your turn, it's your turn. And yeah, so it doesn't favor people. We've got a lot of time. And when did your turn when I was when I was on that platform was the first web three platform that there was really no sorry, web two platform that there was it was the first web platform that really leveraged that kind of thing. And it's still alive, but like, just not as interesting anymore. But when it was your turn to moderate you got excited. Because you only got those two weeks years you have notification like it's your turn to have power and you got excited that you got to do that. So yeah, you knew you were gonna get turnout, which is weird turn you really want him to fulfill that duty. Yeah, so I like that kind of you're calling it sortition. But yeah, turn taking jury
53:38
duty sortition Yeah, Georgia petition
53:41
are basically the same thing. And you had to have the in good standing like if people had marked it. And also you're good standing had to do with that moderation. You are not you're never rated as a person. But the things that you said were rated. So if you said a lot of flame bait things you were not in good standing and you didn't get a chance to moderate but it wasn't we don't like him. It's this post and this post and this post in this post. Which I like much better because if you think about that, actually, you're voting every day. Whenever you have the moderation stick you're you're voting you're not trying to remember like, oh, you know, what was that guy that wasn't there that ah, no you at the moment. Yeah, continuous continuous participation. And you could give people a certain number of points per month, instead of doing it that way. Like look, you've got this many moderation points per month. So only use them you know, on things that are really interesting or things that are really bad. You Don't use up all your money, you could do it in different ways.