Interesting, I’ll look for some of those. I guess prizes/bounties would be impact bonds, yeah? (Some recent examples: Musk’s 100M USD xprize for carbon capture, or MIRI’s 1.2M USD prize for generating a dataset associating sections of prose with the intentions of the author.)
I notice that there are sort of two ways of scaling down a public goods market for small-scale tests. We could call impact bonds horizontal down-scaling, narrowing it down to particular sectors or problems, while the VG system is a way of achieving vertical down-scaling, it’s a way of letting the market decide what to do for itself while looking over every problem in the world, despite having funding sources that are much smaller than the world’s needs, but without the funding being diluted away to a barely audible background noise, which is what I’d expect to happen with a lot of retroactive public goods funding?
And I think letting the public goods market decide for itself which problems to go after may actually be crucial! Most governments are not prioritizing the actual root causes (press, digital infrastructure and x-risk), unfortunately, good cause prioritization doesn’t seem to be democratically legible, it is part of the illegible component of the problem that has to be left to VGs, with their special illegibility-compatible accountability mechanism.
On the other hand, if we’re scaling down in order to run a demonstration, maybe fixating our systems onto very specific pre-determined goals would be preferable, the reality we live in is a crypt world where the past owns all of the foundations upon which the future can be built, the system has to be made convincing to these risk-averse organizations that do not like surprises. They do not want to find out that we should be pouring all of our money into some weird abstract indirect root cause, instead of the causes they were already invested in. So maybe we should just keep doing horizontal stuff.
Interesting, I’ll look for some of those. I guess prizes/bounties would be impact bonds, yeah? (Some recent examples: Musk’s 100M USD xprize for carbon capture, or MIRI’s 1.2M USD prize for generating a dataset associating sections of prose with the intentions of the author.)
I notice that there are sort of two ways of scaling down a public goods market for small-scale tests. We could call impact bonds horizontal down-scaling, narrowing it down to particular sectors or problems, while the VG system is a way of achieving vertical down-scaling, it’s a way of letting the market decide what to do for itself while looking over every problem in the world, despite having funding sources that are much smaller than the world’s needs, but without the funding being diluted away to a barely audible background noise, which is what I’d expect to happen with a lot of retroactive public goods funding?
And I think letting the public goods market decide for itself which problems to go after may actually be crucial! Most governments are not prioritizing the actual root causes (press, digital infrastructure and x-risk), unfortunately, good cause prioritization doesn’t seem to be democratically legible, it is part of the illegible component of the problem that has to be left to VGs, with their special illegibility-compatible accountability mechanism.
On the other hand, if we’re scaling down in order to run a demonstration, maybe fixating our systems onto very specific pre-determined goals would be preferable, the reality we live in is a crypt world where the past owns all of the foundations upon which the future can be built, the system has to be made convincing to these risk-averse organizations that do not like surprises. They do not want to find out that we should be pouring all of our money into some weird abstract indirect root cause, instead of the causes they were already invested in.
So maybe we should just keep doing horizontal stuff.