We can define something that I call a "choice market". It's sort of a combination of democracy and capitalism. It's based on how American democracy actually works and the concept of a penny-war, which is a sort of charitable donation drive that you can probably Google if you're curious.

In a choice market, everyone who is a legit different person (i.e. an identifiable member of the species Homo sapiens) gets one vote. But! You can also purchase votes for some market rate. Let's say you have to purchase them from the startup that will implement the first choice market, which I call Leviathan. Leviathan reserves the right to set the price of a vote to whatever it feels is right. Probably in practice it will simply raise the price over time at some rate, possibly on a quadratic or cubic (quadratic is better) schedule.

So now you have what is essentially American-style democracy. Every person gets one vote, but rich people can sort of vote by proxy by purchasing campaign ads (in the case of American democracy) or by purchasing these weird proxy votes that I am positing Leviathan will issue in exchange for cash.

So now we have a way of deciding important global matters in a way that will seem relatively fair to poor people and will let rich people fuck with the vote a little bit. So it's probably capable of forcing the United States not to exit the Paris Accords, e.g. Like it can't stop the US from being a nation of rich assholes, but it can point out how fundamentally illegitimate that whole thing is.

Anyway, supposing that we start Leviathan tomorrow, who wants to work there? I'm guessing that I'll put Andrew Cone in charge of the company, if that makes anyone have a different opinion about the matter.

Andrew: does any of this interest you? I think it will be a force for good in the world, and I think it will enable us to make some scratch. You can run the company literally however you want to. You can check the earlier posts in this thread for more context about why I think this will be such a useful thing to exist.

Lydia: does this interest you? I think Leviathan should spend all of the money it makes on quality curated journalism. Maybe you could be in charge of that aspect of the matter, since it would sort of be a repeat of your work at News Deeply, which I assume you crushed like you crush everything that stands in your way.

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 11:42 PM, Michael Bishop <michaelbish@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd like to participate more in this conversation but I doubt I'll be able to in the near future because I am moving to Canada in about a week!

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018, 4:12 PM Eric Purdy <epurdy@uchicago.edu> wrote:
To tug on the loose thread some more, IQ is basically an ELO score for the game of making enough money to live. For other language games, the equivalent is generally called privilege (for positive valence) or stigma (for negative valence). So having money is a privilege, and being poor is stigmatized.

Given all of that, some research questions:

* Why do people (mistakenly) think that black people have lower intelligence? (Hint: it's because they have less money/privilege than white people!)
* Why do people (mistakenly) think that Jews and Asian-Americans have higher intelligence? (Hint: it's because they have more money/privilege than (poor) white people!)

Another research question:
* Given that the book The Bell Curve is pretty solid social science, why is it so deeply unreasonable to all reasonable people? Like how do we reconcile the idea that it's probably mostly correct with the fact that Charles Murray needs to shut the fuck up and never talk again? (Hint: it's because of the answers to the previous two questions!)

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 8:03 PM, Eric Purdy <epurdy@uchicago.edu> wrote:
I wish to construct a new paradigm for the social sciences, that unifies economics and all the math that economics has with all of the deeply true stuff that the other social sciences know about.

When this paradigm is full-grown, it should kill both neoliberalism and so-called "race realism".

Every paradigm starts from what I call a loose thread, a thing that no one can explain but everyone agrees is true. In this case, the loose thread that I think is most helpful is, what is IQ? What does it measure? I assert that it is mostly an empty signifier; there is no such thing as in-born greatness. All greatness comes from life experience. People who seem stupid or crazy to you are just trying to accomplish something different with their lives than what you think they should be trying to accomplish.

Dr. Bishop: you are one of the people I choose to create this paradigm. Your graduate work on social network formation is essential here, as is your vast experience with prediction markets.

Ms. Laurenson: you are the other person I choose to create this paradigm. Your vast experience in the social justice world and your experience with the world of journalism are both essential here. Remember that conversation we had about the privilege-stigma axis being essentially a rich-poor axis?

We also need someone with some real economics and finance training. Austin - maybe that's you? I know you don't have much training but you understand the market-making problem as well as anyone does, I think. Someone could also try to talk to my ex-wife about this, but we're not currently on speaking terms I don't think.

You will need Purdy's theory of "social facts", which I enclose some random musings on.

--
-Eric

--
-Eric

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