NOTES

• Introductions: name, where you spend most of your time, your interests
  • Michael Mazzara
  • Ally Sprague
  • Max Bennett
  • Robbie Kanarek
  • Archi Duxus
  • Nico Szerman
• Context: MW to set the scene for what this project is about + introduce session goals
• Notes
  • Problem
    • In a complex society, people cannot see how they meaningfully fit into civilization’s project
    • The higher rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy are difficult to solve…what is a modern interpretation of the base rungs?
    • Symptom of failing institutions: suicide rates increasing in developed world
    • Extreme liberalism has created a “hedonistic” society built around immediate fulfillment of short-term “needs”
    • As technology automates more tasks, people naturally get placed into more trivial roles
    • Politics leaves room to be beholden to the tyranny of the minority
  • Solution Design
    • In a market economy, the success of the proposal depends on the proposer getting users to pay more than the proposer has to pay to create the thing (profit!)
    • Deciding what is good is a collective task
    • If the costs of climate change were levied immediately, people would react. It’s the cost being spread over the long-term that lets people ignore it.
  • Starting Point
    • Giving people challenges to work on
    • Going after spaces where the current systems are ineffective: FDA (hospital approval system…how hospitals set budgets or make patient decisions), prediction markets
    • Tie to a metric like cost per kwh
    • In small groups we naturally help each other and we don’t need money…when you get to a large group and people don’t know each other and you view others as anonymous, people lose empathy and there’s a tragedy of the commons. To solve that governments “force” people to clean the commons through tax.
      • Enable homeless to be producer, as opposed to viewing them exclusively as consumers. Look at switzerland example of how they tackles homelessness
    • Build a prediction market wrapper for evaluating something like is “XYZ FDA approval going to get approved or not” … in hospitals there’s a board that decides if a patient gets the experimental drug…the decision is based on the probability that the drug goes wrong / what ways can it go wrong and what are the consequences of it going wrong. Give the board the outcome distribution from the prediction market.
  • Misc
    • Idea maze

SESSION GOALS

• Verify the problem: our economy and other institutions are losing their ability to effectively guide us down meaningful paths.
  • belief in god, trust in government, and finding meaning through work are all on the decline.
  • Money can be “earned” by completing tasks that aren’t actually valuable (i.e. optimizing ads platforms or damaging the planet or working on redundant projects or creating financial products derivative of a lie)
    • Producing cigarettes, alcohol
  • Money can be “printed” without the creation of value (i.e. what the U.S. Federal Reserve effectively does by controlling money supply)
  • Money can be held and not invested into value creation (i.e. wealth inequality).
• Verify the solution design: a new system for proposing meaningful behavior and evaluating the proposal
  • A more efficient and dynamic proposal mechanism along with a more accurate evaluation mechanism
• Explore a starting point: could we have a system where a new proposal is submitted digitally > turned into an NFT > a mix of voting, market demand, and expert analysis evaluate the proposal > the idea grows into a real project or goes dormant based on that evaluation
  • Which category of ideas to start with? Geography-specific? Industry specific? Philanthropic? Problem based?

PROMPTS

Verify The Problem

Explore the current state of our coordinating symbols / institutions.

• How are our institutions doing? Do our economies, religions, and governments steer the ship of civilization and our individual lives effectively?
• Are our symbols degrading and losing efficacy?
• Does the pursuit of money lead to a personally fulfilling and collectively meaningful life?
• Does god’s will or a nation’s laws provide provide fulfilling guidance?