Introduction
This is my giant passion project to save the world. Basically, it comes down to setting up a system of carrots and sticks to force people to live in the same reality when they’re consuming news online. That’s not totally correct, but it’s as correct as it needs to be for you to dip your toes into this concept. When people talk about problems like “disinformation” they basically come at you with two approaches.
In the first approach, people want to vest some person or exclusive group of people with god-like authority to decide what is and isn’t true for everyone.
In the second, the proposal is to do nothing and suggest that every individual person simply do a long research project to determine what is and isn’t true.
The Trust Assembly is a third approach, where people can meaningfully share their cognitive labor but done in such a way that makes it highly accurate and meaningful. Sounds nice, right?
If you are interested in having a headache reading about how that will actually work, here are some links to pieces I’ve written.
Trust Assembly Pieces
I wrote this as a comedy explainer of what a Trust Assembly is meant to accomplish. Basically honest news and good governance. This is one of those things where I’m really proud of it and zero people other than me like it, which is true of most of my stuff outside my biographical pieces.
How to Make an Information Super weapon
This is a very long piece about how a Trust Assembly could be used to make an ultra-reliable news service. Basically, let people follow people they believe in, hold everyone accountable, add reputation scoring to track success over time, throw in money to create positive incentives. This would feel a lot simpler to the front end user than it would to the architect who has to build all of this.
The Basic Things that Make Civilization Work are Good Actually
I lay out a lot of content moderation schemes here to balance “I should be able to speak my conscience” and “I like to shout racial slurs at strangers on the internet.”
Attention Epilepsy and Freedom of Speech on the Internet
Can we please stop pretending that mob justice is a really great idea?