Reviewing what I've read up till this point. Good parts then bad parts.
The ideas themselves are quite good, and their depiction does a decent job of showing the current-day problems with decision-making, expertise-management, collective predictions, information distribution, etc. "The Forum" and "The Index", and their displayed implementations read nicely. (There's a bit of "childishness" on occasion, but I assume that's a deliberate stylistic choice.) (You're probably already aware of this, but Metaculus is doing something that could be viewed as a primitive version of the Index, having entries for predictions by public figures.)
The explanations are okay, but occasionally lacking detail or key points. I'd recommend trying to go a bit more into likely problems that would arise and ways they could be mitigated.
The fiction and characters are, ah, not good. The messianic protagonist, the over-the-top villains, and the ignorant state of the depicted society is cringeworthy. I'd strongly recommend dumping the named journalist characters entirely. The scenes of heroic efforts by The Good Guys do not add anything positive. I would expect a story around this topic to have a theme of problematic institutions and the collective development of their solutions, not of Good Guys triumphing over Evil Villains. The culmination of the president's face-off with reporters was awful, and made it hard to keep reading. Additionally, the depiction of the president being the country's best communicator (not to mention being the person who can single-handedly think up the best proposals) is also counter to the idea of having the best people in the best positions for them, rather than just assuming some people are good at everything and can just handle things (ie, the current system of elections to person-in-charge).
I strongly recommend heavily editing the relevant chapters. There's some good stuff here, and it would be disappointing if it were lose possible readership simply because of the issues with the fiction/story parts.
Thank you for commenting! And glad to hear the ideas are coming across. Those are the most important pieces to me and if those are coming through then I’m mostly satisfied. I was not familiar with prediction markets until relatively recently. I started this set of ideas as a private hobby as world-building for a science fiction story (different than the one you’re reading) and then I kept pulling it apart and putting it back together to make it more realistic, until one day I looked at what I had and thought “I don’t actually see where this wouldn’t work in real life anymore.” Wasn’t aware of prediction markets, DAO’s, Network States until relatively recently although it’s reassuring to see people thinking along similar lines. I’m going to write a post after I finish the narrative about why I’m releasing this now, but basically is an urge to fix the universe for my son. I’m going to be expanding out some of the details in the coming weeks/months but between remodeling, day job, and the baby have been a bit pressed for time.
The narrative is probably a bit juvenile on my part and I’m starting to feel the whole thing could have been better served as a series of essays. I was struggling to find the jumping off point to get someone to invest three hours to hear the whole thing out as the attempt itself feels a bit insane which is why I’ve been fairly private about it. Your criticisms are completely fair. I was aiming toward something similar in tone to “Don’t Look Up” which also seems to have divided people a bit but your mileage may obviously vary. I admit to having a knee jerk and reflexive disdain for the corporate press that is probably causing me to layer things on a bit thick. I come from an area that it is arguable to say suffered an economic depression entirely because the corporate press tried to paint a too simple story about environmentalism and well… you’re right. My bias there is very strong. Likewise with the Good Guys, I see your point on using that to address actual problems they have to figure out instead of me just making wisecracks about different devs I’ve known. I did not intend for Melvin to read as a “great” communicator in the subjective sense, rather only an accurate and complete one who most people would find too boring to listen to in our current culture. I was a bit inspired by what i have seen missing in COVID communications for those passages. I know a person who did not get the vaccine because they did not see the CDC making a strong, scientific claim or honestly discussing relative risk and he later passed away from the virus. I cannot help but think we might have saved a lot of lives if Fauci had just thrown out a few nods towards things like “you shouldn’t get the vaccine if you’re strongly allergic to eggs” which makes the whole message seem much better thought through. Seems I am not selling that message, there, though and I really want people to keep reading. My intention is to bundle it all up and edit it at the end so I can definitely try to care for that in another pass. I will reference this comment in that edit session. May not be able to get to it until the April/June timeframe depending on when this milk demon starts sleeping through the night.
Most of the modern day predictors aren't well thought out. Or they rely on narratives to dumb down the populous enough to manufacture a synthesis. It's much easier to write computer models that way.
Without the bureaucracy or the corporate incentives, the 'Forum' and 'Index' system would find healthier ways of funding for our institutions. A value for value type system instead of our for-profit-and-control methods now.
--
I read that first press conference similarly to your intent.
The press speaks with so much bravado and lie without blinking an eye. It makes sense why in a short story like this they can be characterized as the "bad guys". You did mention she was the main communicating actor for the MIC/IC, so her being such a big deal made sense to highlight her as a big shot.
The communication of truth, even if "boring", does come across much more genuine than all the platitudes and doublespeak coming from our modern pavilion. After a shock like the Columbus event, I can see truth being welcomed by more people.
Side note: I did not get the shot(s) because, simply, the authorities in charge weren't being truthful about anything for two years. They did everything they could to hush up the facts and truths around it all. Lying with statistics, silencing healthy skepticism, applauding doxxing, changing their minds when politically allowed, throwing money around, etc.
In the end I just took a real look at my life and made healthy changes. Self-custody.
Mocking the silly things we as a society do now is very healthy and keeps us self-aware so we aren't repeating the same cycles over and over.
Thanks for the comment! Getting people to align and produce value at scale is a hard problem, especially when no single person is smart enough to tell everyone what to do or even identify lieutenants to do the same. That’s my main critique of something I actually just leaned about recently with modern monarchists. I’m glad you like the Forum and the Index. Took a bit to figure out the incentives and I still haven’t listed them out as deeply as I should. Here’s to hoping I have some more free time coming up shortly to write some more.
Glad you liked the press scene as well. Never know if I’m out of line thee. I want these ideas to spread far and wide so figuring out how to make them sticky means means trying to see the back of my own head and figure out how to sell them to someone who hasn’t been thinking through them for a decade and who maybe still thinks cnn is somehow real news.
I’d prefer a future where I can see eleven hour presentations about things and just skip around to see if the pieces make sense. Hearing “trust us” from repeated failures is not confidence inspiring.
On vax stuff, I wish I could say I blamed you. As soon as fauci admitted to lying about masks that should have been his signal to honorably exit so we could trust our government sources were at least telling us what they knew. His total failure to be transparent after that has probably killed a lot of people. From what it’s worth all data I can see outside of very limited cases (which should be acknowledged) it’s safe. Not worth it for a healthy kid probably but seems like risk reward is good outside that. Or at least that’s what I see. I don’t know that I’d worry about getting it now since omnicron is predominant.
Re: producing value at scale, it's a difficult conundrum. I was hoping BTC or other crypto systems would inspire some new thinkers, but it seems like most people enjoy playing game theory within the rule set of our current crumbling system.
If the current system wasn't so corrupt with money going to incompetent bureaucracies and instead it went to triaging knowledge gaps in society, we might have more inspiring individuals like yourself.
The modern mythos is very poorly thought out ("Climate Change", "Space", "AI" - cool science fiction, but hardly realistic in the current framing and capabilities.). Stories and ideas like what you've shared thus far definitely is a breath of fresh air.
Your framing of topics is much better than the descriptors I have been using to explain some of these concepts.
I hear some of the frustration on crypto, although I think they are working toward some of these DAO powered futures. Or at least some are based on a podcast between Jon Stewart and Marc Cuban (I listen to a lot of podcasts while I do housework) but I definitely wish rights were at the forefront. A lot of people are too focused on the money part they’ve glossed a bit over the value/wealth part. I like Balaji Srinivasan because he’s got big good dreams, or at least I like what I’ve heard but I’m going to push for a republic as hard as I can. And I’m glad you’re liking it! I try to be as practical as possible although I recently won second place in a short story contest with one that isn’t as practical.
I should be in bed already so I'm going to try and keep this short, but I've never been particularly good at that. I just read up to this in one sitting, so I figured I owed you the benefit of my Unique and Very Important Opinion ;p
I enjoyed the read quite a bit, though there were some parts that were there seemed to be a substantial shift from "interesting narrative" to "the author wants to tell me all about something". That's not to say that what you were telling me was uninteresting, but it seemed like the conceit of the historian explaining the past to the reader seemed to give way to thinly veiled opinions about the present.
That's not to say I even disagree with any of those opinions, it just seemed like you slipped a few blog posts into an interesting and entertaining story. That said, I don't know dick about writing fiction, not to mention how to write fiction that is trying to explain ideas to the reader. It seems like quite a task, and one that I couldn't even come close to doing as good of a job as you at.
I don't have the issue with the characters that Odd anon seems to. Yes, they're relatively thin but there's something to be said for characters that are cartoons. I don't think you're trying to explain the essence of the human spirit or anything, so using characters as archetypes sits just fine with me. Yes, the intelligence/military shill character was devoid of any humanity, but given she seems to be more of a stand-in for those aspects that are present in many people, I don't see it as a problem.
My last comment is that I enjoy the light hearted, easy reading approach to your writing. While I consider Lem the gold standard of sci-fi, dear god can he be hard to wade through at times. As much as I get from Lem, I'm honestly more likely to read something by a "less serious" author who's style is less serious.
Keep up the good work! I'm looking forward to the conclusion. I'm just now noticing that yo posted this almost a year ago, and I swear to god if I don't get to learn what the Wizard is planning with several thousand watts of coherent light, I'll bug you on every one of your barpod posts until you finish!
Thanks for reading this! I need to find more time in my day for it as I do it semi secretly.
I think oddanon has a very very good point. If I want someone to be so inspired by this that they build the legal system of the internet (which is my number one hope, so if you’re a product owner at substack I will retire all the user stories and technical user stories and architecture docs you’d need for this for free) I really need to make it accessible and unobjectionable to a person who is going to stand atop it and build. I don’t really have a desire to start a company and build this myself unless I have to do I should write toward that.
Also I literally just now realized I forgot to link to the next chapter here. I’m such an asshole.
Reviewing what I've read up till this point. Good parts then bad parts.
The ideas themselves are quite good, and their depiction does a decent job of showing the current-day problems with decision-making, expertise-management, collective predictions, information distribution, etc. "The Forum" and "The Index", and their displayed implementations read nicely. (There's a bit of "childishness" on occasion, but I assume that's a deliberate stylistic choice.) (You're probably already aware of this, but Metaculus is doing something that could be viewed as a primitive version of the Index, having entries for predictions by public figures.)
The explanations are okay, but occasionally lacking detail or key points. I'd recommend trying to go a bit more into likely problems that would arise and ways they could be mitigated.
The fiction and characters are, ah, not good. The messianic protagonist, the over-the-top villains, and the ignorant state of the depicted society is cringeworthy. I'd strongly recommend dumping the named journalist characters entirely. The scenes of heroic efforts by The Good Guys do not add anything positive. I would expect a story around this topic to have a theme of problematic institutions and the collective development of their solutions, not of Good Guys triumphing over Evil Villains. The culmination of the president's face-off with reporters was awful, and made it hard to keep reading. Additionally, the depiction of the president being the country's best communicator (not to mention being the person who can single-handedly think up the best proposals) is also counter to the idea of having the best people in the best positions for them, rather than just assuming some people are good at everything and can just handle things (ie, the current system of elections to person-in-charge).
I strongly recommend heavily editing the relevant chapters. There's some good stuff here, and it would be disappointing if it were lose possible readership simply because of the issues with the fiction/story parts.
Thank you for commenting! And glad to hear the ideas are coming across. Those are the most important pieces to me and if those are coming through then I’m mostly satisfied. I was not familiar with prediction markets until relatively recently. I started this set of ideas as a private hobby as world-building for a science fiction story (different than the one you’re reading) and then I kept pulling it apart and putting it back together to make it more realistic, until one day I looked at what I had and thought “I don’t actually see where this wouldn’t work in real life anymore.” Wasn’t aware of prediction markets, DAO’s, Network States until relatively recently although it’s reassuring to see people thinking along similar lines. I’m going to write a post after I finish the narrative about why I’m releasing this now, but basically is an urge to fix the universe for my son. I’m going to be expanding out some of the details in the coming weeks/months but between remodeling, day job, and the baby have been a bit pressed for time.
The narrative is probably a bit juvenile on my part and I’m starting to feel the whole thing could have been better served as a series of essays. I was struggling to find the jumping off point to get someone to invest three hours to hear the whole thing out as the attempt itself feels a bit insane which is why I’ve been fairly private about it. Your criticisms are completely fair. I was aiming toward something similar in tone to “Don’t Look Up” which also seems to have divided people a bit but your mileage may obviously vary. I admit to having a knee jerk and reflexive disdain for the corporate press that is probably causing me to layer things on a bit thick. I come from an area that it is arguable to say suffered an economic depression entirely because the corporate press tried to paint a too simple story about environmentalism and well… you’re right. My bias there is very strong. Likewise with the Good Guys, I see your point on using that to address actual problems they have to figure out instead of me just making wisecracks about different devs I’ve known. I did not intend for Melvin to read as a “great” communicator in the subjective sense, rather only an accurate and complete one who most people would find too boring to listen to in our current culture. I was a bit inspired by what i have seen missing in COVID communications for those passages. I know a person who did not get the vaccine because they did not see the CDC making a strong, scientific claim or honestly discussing relative risk and he later passed away from the virus. I cannot help but think we might have saved a lot of lives if Fauci had just thrown out a few nods towards things like “you shouldn’t get the vaccine if you’re strongly allergic to eggs” which makes the whole message seem much better thought through. Seems I am not selling that message, there, though and I really want people to keep reading. My intention is to bundle it all up and edit it at the end so I can definitely try to care for that in another pass. I will reference this comment in that edit session. May not be able to get to it until the April/June timeframe depending on when this milk demon starts sleeping through the night.
Most of the modern day predictors aren't well thought out. Or they rely on narratives to dumb down the populous enough to manufacture a synthesis. It's much easier to write computer models that way.
Without the bureaucracy or the corporate incentives, the 'Forum' and 'Index' system would find healthier ways of funding for our institutions. A value for value type system instead of our for-profit-and-control methods now.
--
I read that first press conference similarly to your intent.
The press speaks with so much bravado and lie without blinking an eye. It makes sense why in a short story like this they can be characterized as the "bad guys". You did mention she was the main communicating actor for the MIC/IC, so her being such a big deal made sense to highlight her as a big shot.
The communication of truth, even if "boring", does come across much more genuine than all the platitudes and doublespeak coming from our modern pavilion. After a shock like the Columbus event, I can see truth being welcomed by more people.
Side note: I did not get the shot(s) because, simply, the authorities in charge weren't being truthful about anything for two years. They did everything they could to hush up the facts and truths around it all. Lying with statistics, silencing healthy skepticism, applauding doxxing, changing their minds when politically allowed, throwing money around, etc.
In the end I just took a real look at my life and made healthy changes. Self-custody.
Mocking the silly things we as a society do now is very healthy and keeps us self-aware so we aren't repeating the same cycles over and over.
Thanks for the comment! Getting people to align and produce value at scale is a hard problem, especially when no single person is smart enough to tell everyone what to do or even identify lieutenants to do the same. That’s my main critique of something I actually just leaned about recently with modern monarchists. I’m glad you like the Forum and the Index. Took a bit to figure out the incentives and I still haven’t listed them out as deeply as I should. Here’s to hoping I have some more free time coming up shortly to write some more.
Glad you liked the press scene as well. Never know if I’m out of line thee. I want these ideas to spread far and wide so figuring out how to make them sticky means means trying to see the back of my own head and figure out how to sell them to someone who hasn’t been thinking through them for a decade and who maybe still thinks cnn is somehow real news.
I’d prefer a future where I can see eleven hour presentations about things and just skip around to see if the pieces make sense. Hearing “trust us” from repeated failures is not confidence inspiring.
On vax stuff, I wish I could say I blamed you. As soon as fauci admitted to lying about masks that should have been his signal to honorably exit so we could trust our government sources were at least telling us what they knew. His total failure to be transparent after that has probably killed a lot of people. From what it’s worth all data I can see outside of very limited cases (which should be acknowledged) it’s safe. Not worth it for a healthy kid probably but seems like risk reward is good outside that. Or at least that’s what I see. I don’t know that I’d worry about getting it now since omnicron is predominant.
Re: producing value at scale, it's a difficult conundrum. I was hoping BTC or other crypto systems would inspire some new thinkers, but it seems like most people enjoy playing game theory within the rule set of our current crumbling system.
If the current system wasn't so corrupt with money going to incompetent bureaucracies and instead it went to triaging knowledge gaps in society, we might have more inspiring individuals like yourself.
The modern mythos is very poorly thought out ("Climate Change", "Space", "AI" - cool science fiction, but hardly realistic in the current framing and capabilities.). Stories and ideas like what you've shared thus far definitely is a breath of fresh air.
Your framing of topics is much better than the descriptors I have been using to explain some of these concepts.
I hear some of the frustration on crypto, although I think they are working toward some of these DAO powered futures. Or at least some are based on a podcast between Jon Stewart and Marc Cuban (I listen to a lot of podcasts while I do housework) but I definitely wish rights were at the forefront. A lot of people are too focused on the money part they’ve glossed a bit over the value/wealth part. I like Balaji Srinivasan because he’s got big good dreams, or at least I like what I’ve heard but I’m going to push for a republic as hard as I can. And I’m glad you’re liking it! I try to be as practical as possible although I recently won second place in a short story contest with one that isn’t as practical.
I should be in bed already so I'm going to try and keep this short, but I've never been particularly good at that. I just read up to this in one sitting, so I figured I owed you the benefit of my Unique and Very Important Opinion ;p
I enjoyed the read quite a bit, though there were some parts that were there seemed to be a substantial shift from "interesting narrative" to "the author wants to tell me all about something". That's not to say that what you were telling me was uninteresting, but it seemed like the conceit of the historian explaining the past to the reader seemed to give way to thinly veiled opinions about the present.
That's not to say I even disagree with any of those opinions, it just seemed like you slipped a few blog posts into an interesting and entertaining story. That said, I don't know dick about writing fiction, not to mention how to write fiction that is trying to explain ideas to the reader. It seems like quite a task, and one that I couldn't even come close to doing as good of a job as you at.
I don't have the issue with the characters that Odd anon seems to. Yes, they're relatively thin but there's something to be said for characters that are cartoons. I don't think you're trying to explain the essence of the human spirit or anything, so using characters as archetypes sits just fine with me. Yes, the intelligence/military shill character was devoid of any humanity, but given she seems to be more of a stand-in for those aspects that are present in many people, I don't see it as a problem.
My last comment is that I enjoy the light hearted, easy reading approach to your writing. While I consider Lem the gold standard of sci-fi, dear god can he be hard to wade through at times. As much as I get from Lem, I'm honestly more likely to read something by a "less serious" author who's style is less serious.
Keep up the good work! I'm looking forward to the conclusion. I'm just now noticing that yo posted this almost a year ago, and I swear to god if I don't get to learn what the Wizard is planning with several thousand watts of coherent light, I'll bug you on every one of your barpod posts until you finish!
Thanks for reading this! I need to find more time in my day for it as I do it semi secretly.
I think oddanon has a very very good point. If I want someone to be so inspired by this that they build the legal system of the internet (which is my number one hope, so if you’re a product owner at substack I will retire all the user stories and technical user stories and architecture docs you’d need for this for free) I really need to make it accessible and unobjectionable to a person who is going to stand atop it and build. I don’t really have a desire to start a company and build this myself unless I have to do I should write toward that.
Also I literally just now realized I forgot to link to the next chapter here. I’m such an asshole.