1. Zvi Mowshowitz and I are going back and forth about decentralization on Pairagraph. In progress. Self-recommending.
2. Tyler Cowen Bloomberg) does a one-person back-and-forth,
Why not, for example, put social media on blockchains and have efficient cryptocurrency micropayments to reward those who help maintain such mechanisms? Censoring postings on such a service would be as difficult as trying to overwrite a blockchain ledger, which is to say very difficult. (Indeed such postings would be a blockchain ledger, albeit in a more digestible form.) And instead of having to deal with the content rules of Twitter or WhatsApp, perhaps you could customize and build your own rules.
On the other hand, (a possibly atavistic) part of me likes knowing that someone or something is in control, whether it’s a government, a bunch of people in Mountain View, or even just my dean.
I do recommend the David Brin essay referred to in my first Pairagraph post.
Hey Arnold – FIT is a great idea that gets greater the more I think about it. Scoring the FIT game is now a more interesting topic for me – will read your links soon, but a bit later; I’m not first commenter so often.
We’re looking to help generate publicity, and PR influence, for the Best Thinkers.
The Pairagraph format seems an excellent way to compare & rate two “public intellectuals”. Once all our FI Teams are chosen, I’m sure most (at least many) “pairs” of “thinkers” on Pairagraph will have a couple who are on different teams. It would be good to have some FIT raters (judges? evaluators? central scrutinizers?) have a list of some 10 characteristics with which that event could be rated, and get that included in the 2021 “score” (rating?) of the ASK Fantasy Intellectual Team thinkers rating.
There will be announced a top 3 Thinkers for the year, as well as the top 3 in 7 different categories.
One thing on scoring would be to see how feasible it would be to go back and rate the thinkers from 2020.
Plus, who does how much rating.
Not sure you want to publicly discuss scoring systems, but like US News rankings of colleges, or The Heritage Index of Economic Freedom, it seems inevitable to be some list of characteristics and ratings on those characteristics, and score-relative weightings for those characteristics.
Fairly comprehensive,
but not too complex.
Fantasy that’s not fun is …
not fun.
“Censoring postings on such a service would be as difficult as trying to overwrite a blockchain ledger, which is to say very difficult.”
Wanna bet?
How are you going to access the blockchain if all the ISPs cut you, all the users and all the known hosts off? Maybe you are now known as a hater and thus can’t get internet service in your home. Maybe the network providers will insist on KYC proof of identity – no more cash for burner phones – and no one will let you connect to a mobile network. Putin just banned satellite internet and associated equipment too. When the app stores kick off all the blockchain apps? When the smartphone OS’s won’t let you easily jailbreak them anymore, or install the apps in the first place even if you get a copy (e.g., Blokada).
When you try to go to the webpages to download the apps direct, those webpages are no longer protected from DDOS attacks, or can’t get hosting servers, or can’t access the Visa / Mastercard duopoly for payments and transactions? Or if people are getting paid in crypto, it becomes impossible to covert that into digital fiat currency in the banking system, or, heck, even to maintain a bank account at all.
This is like playing a video game of escalating difficulty and saying, “Well, it’s very difficult for them to stop you from passing level 1.” Yeah, but there are 100 levels, every third one has a Boss, the Final Boss could beat all the Bosses combined, and no one has actually ever beaten even the Second Boss.
Yes, Tyler sounds like a 90’s era cryptopunk geeking out about how long it will take a computer the size of the universe to guess his keys, while ignoring the power of rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
Unfortunately, these forces came for the pornographers and drug dealers and legal drug industry and legal firearms industry. The genie is out of the bottle and now the normies are going to have to deal with technological exile too.
Kling said:
Which of course sounds a lot like Reddit, with all its different groups and channels and subfora, some heavily moderated and/or private or invitation-only. Discord and many others too on this model, and one could include blogging platforms with each blog having the potential to be a kind of community.
But of course, those community platforms have certainly not been able to solve the problem of being able to resist calls for censorship and cancellation.
They also don’t get paid for by their communities – Discord gets “boosts” which are non-repeating payments, but not subscriptions. But yes, I was thinking the same thing.
We sort of, kind of, have something like this is Patreon creators that run a discord server for their members. The problem is that they don’t control the infrastructure. I wonder if there is a market opening for someone to run such a chat service with an explicit contract for infrastructure with no provision for content based withdrawal of service (kind of like how the ink manufacturer isn’t responsible for determining if the magazine publisher has some wrongthink in their pages).
So very sadly seemingly true, that Woke Big Tech can target you and almost end your digital life.
But I don’t want to make back-ups of all my gmail, or old web-posts (many blogs already long gone). This game developer should have done so, Andrew Spinks.
https://www.polygon.com/2021/2/8/22272284/terraria-google-stadia-canceled-developer-locked-out
My own desire for an easy, comfy life, rather than doing the work of being more secure, makes it clear to me that Big Tech has too much arbitrary power.
I’m now more afraid of Google than the IRS.
Had not heard about Pairagraph. Looks related to my interests.
The disputation area reminds one of Amartya Sen’s observation from The Idea of Justice:
“Democracy has to be judged not just by the institutions that formally exist but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard.”
Just as the two-party system creates a sterile and narrow Overton window, so too would a disputation arena smothered by tech oligarch sensibilities.
Let a thousand disputation arenas bloom. From Questions to the Prime Minister, Munk Debates, pairagraph, bloggingheads, Cafe Hayek responses to commenters, the videos Tyler and Alex used to do debating issues, the old Posner-Becker blog, to new and creative ideas like the Fantasy Intellectual League, let engagement flourish. Blog based arenas would seem to be the most resilient as well as accountable platforms, unable to silence and no captive audience, and resistant to outside subversion.
This is also related to how one might wish to create one’s own FIT prospect rating rubric. The sorts of things that would score high for FIT would also make a good screen for fifth arena disputants whom might further qualify for pairings taking into account specialized expertise. How to turn a blog into a model UN competition?
NO – to any model UN competition (Brin wrong on this), but
YES to multiple disputation arenas – letting the audience & participants and the results build up. In different areas. Tyler seems to be supporting multiple platforms too, tho he’s more comfy with more controls.
BloggingHeads was a great idea, I thought – but I seldom watch now. They’re too long – I prefer reading transcripts to listening, and while it’s usually interesting, it’s not focused enough for my (now e-speed ADD) tastes. (Even novels suffer now.)
Brin is correct about arguments leading towards truth. Steelman vs Steelman, but in shorter versions than 50 or 75 page testimonials. The Court of Internet Public Opinion – with long term reference available, but eyeball attention at a premium.
Cato Institute used to send me emails of good debates & rebuttals, but they dragged on a bit too much, too. I looked up Cato Letters (Quarterly Journal):
https://www.cato.org/cato-home-study-resources/catos-letter
2002 Top:
Globalization Is Grrrreat! – Tom Palmer (who came to Bratislava for a talk)
Part of the “elite (/Washington) Consensus” which, when implemented, had the bad results Lee Smith argued about. Wonder how Lee Smith vs Tom Palmer would go on Pairagraph.
One simple start to a scoring system for FIT would be to copy or partner with Pairagraph for having pairs of Thinkers debate / discuss an issue, and have us (all??) / the raters use the FIT (so far unpublished) rules & guidelines to score their discussion.
So Brin’s support for centralized adjudication forces is changed into “Kling’s” adjudication scoring process. Primarily for PR purposes – at first.
End of the year — some number such events and scores are added up, and there is ranking, including a winner overall, and possibly 6 other top winners.
Obviously, other blogs could use the same discussions, & events, but with Tyler’s or Scott’s or Neo’s or Ann’s scoring process — and there could even be inter-blog / group PR competition about which scoring system is better. Handle notes reddit already has a way of upvoting better topics & comments, tho I like blogs & blog threads much better, so far. (Spending time where I’m more often more comfy.) But maybe a reddit style upvoting, which is simpler, is enough.
2 at a time is good. I like Pairagraph quite a bit.
Short is good – very good – especially with feedback.
Clearly I’m getting hungry for more guidance on the upcoming scoring process. To not just support decentralization in theory, but a bit more in practice.
Who hosts “arnoldkling.com”? Can they kick you off if they decide your site has Hate Speech?