Worth noting: Eliezer failed to mention the phrase “assurance contract”, but that’s what the thing he was talking about is called. If you want to see what’s been done with assurance contract platforms already, it’s something you’ll want to look up.
Thanks! Always helpful to know what the actual term is. I did a couple minutes of googling… the one contemporary player I turned up is https://collaction.org. They seem to be playing from the modern web startup playbook (design aesthetic is Kickstarter-lite), but they don’t seem to have much traction: they claim six people on their team, but no evidence of revenue or fundraising, and their website is slow and a little clunky.
Their demo projects are pretty uninspiring; they don’t seem to be going after genuine collective action problems, but rather they’re just trying to see if they can get 50 or so people to commit to something: for instance “Random Act of Coffee: If 50 people pledge to buy an (extra) coffee for the next person to order, we will all do it!”
If I were trying to launch something like this, I think I would take on one project at a time, and pick something inspiring and ambitious enough that it might actually go viral, rather than try to get lots of small wins that aren’t really wins.
Getting people to use assurance contracts to solve coordination problems seems like another coordination problem. It would be funny to use them for that problem too. That is, get people to sign an assurance contract that they will start using more assurance contracts when enough others sign it ;)
Worth noting: Eliezer failed to mention the phrase “assurance contract”, but that’s what the thing he was talking about is called. If you want to see what’s been done with assurance contract platforms already, it’s something you’ll want to look up.
Thanks! Always helpful to know what the actual term is. I did a couple minutes of googling… the one contemporary player I turned up is https://collaction.org. They seem to be playing from the modern web startup playbook (design aesthetic is Kickstarter-lite), but they don’t seem to have much traction: they claim six people on their team, but no evidence of revenue or fundraising, and their website is slow and a little clunky.
Their demo projects are pretty uninspiring; they don’t seem to be going after genuine collective action problems, but rather they’re just trying to see if they can get 50 or so people to commit to something: for instance “Random Act of Coffee: If 50 people pledge to buy an (extra) coffee for the next person to order, we will all do it!”
If I were trying to launch something like this, I think I would take on one project at a time, and pick something inspiring and ambitious enough that it might actually go viral, rather than try to get lots of small wins that aren’t really wins.
Getting people to use assurance contracts to solve coordination problems seems like another coordination problem. It would be funny to use them for that problem too. That is, get people to sign an assurance contract that they will start using more assurance contracts when enough others sign it ;)