Our goal for the Option is to create a tool for governance that’s so excellent that it becomes the obvious choice for the socioeconomic system used on Mars. For this to happen, we’ll need many flourishing communities using Option here on Earth and the mechanisms will have to be well understood by the players (just as voting is well understood as a governance mechanism for our current governance systems). And for people to trust us on those big things, we’ll first need to show that the various mechanisms in Option are useful for governing more parochial questions such that we can over time scale up to more high stakes questions. This means we need to solve a governance problem that’s sufficiently complex that it’s not being well solved today, one that is valuable enough that there is a market, and one where we can iteratively improve.
For these reasons, the initial beachhead market that we’ll target solving with the negation game is spam.
Spam is great for several reasons:
Everyone hates it
It’s difficult to solve
Automated systems aren’t sufficient (e.g. you need to allow appeals)
No company wants to have to roll their own approach
It’s a huge expense for major companies (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, other networks)
It’s a big legal headache (especially risky in light of threats to the Communications Decency Act)
But the primary question that’s likely nagging you is how are we going to do this? To some degree, the answer is, “we don’t know yet, we’re going to figure it out.” That’s ok. If it was obvious how to do this someone else would have already.
Another answer is that we already have a good start. We have a list of promising mechanisms for solving various subproblems in the space of governance, including several novel ones. That’s what this document is for: to enumerate some of those mechanisms and the purported problems that they solve as sort of our experimental toolkit.
Here we’ll list some of those mechanisms and brief summaries of what they do and how they can be useful
Index Wallets
Mitigate whale effects (whales can come in both economic and reputation forms)
Voluntary public goods funding
Epistemic Leverage
Gives additional influence to conviction and expertise
Intrustments
Allow non-wealthy players to go go head to head with wealthy players
Staking
Align long term incentives
Express preferred outcomes
Bayesian networks
Guaranteed to converge to epistemically “correct” conclusions
Credence algorithm
Reveal dissonance in a position
Turing complete way to express preferences
Bounties
Award a liquid currency to incent low-risk action where there is consensus on the right actions
Award a non-liquid currency to allow action with upside where there’s not collective consensus
Negations
A way to do “online structural adaptation” which basically means that you can play the game to align on new belief structures
Voluntary slashing
When slashing a stake is voluntary, you can allow people to stake whether a person will slash their stake and that can be an input into computing surprise
Conspicuously lacking from this list are markets. I’m of the opinion that markets are the wrong primitive. Markets are a great analogy for what we’re doing, but if it was possible to achieve complete collective intelligence using markets we would have done so by now (note, complete collective intelligence requires the mechanism to be self-regulating which markets do not do). Main issue is that markets provide an incentive for private information and don’t do align players with long term incentives (due to the ability to exit at any point).
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