Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
Trying something new: casting long thoughts into the void. Tell me I'm wrong The primary problem the world faces is that of unpriced externalities. Firms are excellent at finding opportunities to provide goods to customers, but in their rush to remain competitive we frequently find them heaping costs they incur onto the shoulders of people and planet, rather than paying for it themselves. Fundamentally, this is a market inefficiency like any other, and it's a problem that all prior organisms have solved, humanity as an organism is now on the precipice of being able to solve it ourselves. The heart of the problem is this: in order to be able to address the problem of externalities all actors must come to a shared understanding of the costs. In other words, they must come to tell a shared (and true) story about how the world works and the consequences of an action in it.
2 replies
7 recasts
43 reactions
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
The problem with markets today is that they cannot do this for a single simple reason: the context markets create is one that incentivizes the maintenance of private information. To reveal information about how the world works is to give up potential future profits — alpha in the language of finance quants. This is exactly the problem that the negation game seeks to solve: by upgrading markets such that players can be paid for the revelation of information (both *model information* and *state space information*) the negation game is capable of enabling markets to arrive at shared stories of how the world works — such that public goods can be funded or externalities priced — or to fund the resolution of disputes about how the world is or how it works. If we succeed we'll have upgraded our economic structures such that entirely new and lucrative markets are addressable.
1 reply
4 recasts
37 reactions
Leo
@leohenkels
Okay I’ll play devils advocate Is this a market problem or a human problem? A fundamental belief I have is that humans are lazy and technology has accelerated this. IMO if humans valued the costs incurred on the planet and other humans, firms would seek to mitigate these costs or they would go out of business. I think a lot of people are too lazy to care about doing good. In my opinion, markets are the best system at optimizing our world, but perhaps humans in general just need to place more value on slowing down optimization to improve markets effects on the world. Or better put - de-accelerating. In a dopamine riddled world, where technology is created to optimize and make our lives easier - perhaps we need to create tech designed to incentivize us do more good - or at least give us the perception that we are doing more good.
2 replies
7 recasts
30 reactions
