Multiple likes! “Peer-to-peer trust scores” is an elegantly practical measure. My pipe dream is to create more trustworthy citizens, but outing and penalizing the untrustworthy incentivizes trustworthiness. Solve the problems of recidivism and entropy, and poop emojis will become obsolete.
Strictly defined, yes, but it seems to apply socio-politically. A variety of human endeavors look great or even salvation-like for a while—the golden ages of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the American Revolution, Collectivism, Industrialization, unlocking the secrets of DNA and nuclear energy. The list goes on. In every case, weakness and corruption creep in, initial energies flag, and things fall apart without constant renewal. Your high-trust concepts are promising because trust and trustworthiness are human traits, and you’re producing ideas to stabilize and perpetuate both. It’s a challenge because humans are notorious sell-outs to self-interest, and we all eventually get old and die—both somewhat akin to entropy. Basically, system quality reflects the quality of people within it. So, I’m thinking, what produces, sustains, and perpetuates quality people?
In MapleStory, an MMORPG I used to play, there was a thing called "Fame". You had one Fame (Defame) point to give to another player per 24 hour period. The idea is basically the trust token. Many people used have you Fame when you did something nice, or Defamed you when you were being an asshole.
The majority of Fame points, however, were from trading Fame. If I were bored, I could stand around in the market saying "Trading Fame" and make a mutually beneficial Fame transaction in no time. (Of course, there was an inherent quality of trust involved, because whoever gave Fame first had no way of forcing the other player to return the favor).
Fame Farming. It made the Fame system not fulfill it's intended purpose. Some people made a joke of it and got as much negative Fame as possible.
People will find ways to do Trust Token Farming IRL, since it would provide massive personal and societal benefit. Politicians already do this, to some extent. In a hardcoded system, someone can Trust Farm and point to his extremely high trust score when running a scam.
Well if you say, "it's on public ledger, so people can verify it," we have the same problem as now, which you identify:
> If it were on a transparent blockchain ledger, there would be an irrefutable way to verify it, but most people don't want to invest that much time.
Especially if the person doing the verification has a low Trust Score, made possibly by the political machine's cronies.
So, the Trust Token concept is interesting, but attaching it to People has shortcomings.
What if you attached Trust Token to information?
Say, an article about How to Cure Type 2 Diabetes in 6 weeks.
Andy has been struggling with T2D for 15 years. His doctors got him on a strict weekly regimen and diet. Technology has improved so the injections hurt less, but it's still a really shitty situation. He just got a SlaveStyle Libre Bluetooth monitor thing on his arm that beeps when sugar problem.
He stumbles across the article on Truststack, written by DiaBeast79, with thousands of positive Trust Tokens and comments saying, "worked great"/"saved my life and my house"/"I'm free, never going back to the Dr."/etc.
His brain is skeptical, and his doctor advises against it, but hey, 6 weeks? He gives it a shot.
Turns out it works great. In 4 weeks, Andy is able to stop his medications, has lost 10 pounds, and has a new lease on life.
How Doctor, dumbfounded, deep researches and makes new [to him] discoveries, and starts recommending the article to his other patients with similar problem.
He returns to the article, pays $100 [required] to give it a Trust Diamond, and writes a glowing review. He wants it to help others, and is happy to pay, since he's saving thousands per year on medication and insurance.
The article, having provided real value, now ranks higher on Truststack, gets recommend more to people who might have T2D, and supports the author.
The value in the article is in the substance of it, not who wrote it. The writer, DiaBeast79, could have a very negative Trust score, could even be Hitler; that's irrelevant. He could even have written an article about How to Handle Art School Rejection that worked for nobody, is totally useless, and doesn't even show up on Truststack anymore.
-----
Anyway, the concept of Trust Tokens is of good intent. You want to be able to know whether someone is trustworthy or not, depending on the context. A general Trust Token system is too general and too easy to game or have it go awry. 3, 5 are better for Personal Trust situations, least likely to be corrupted, I think.
I would always want the option to be anonymous online. Sometimes in person. Depends on the scenario. Identity is important in some places and not in others.
You don’t see any value in having one place online where anonymity isn’t allowed and everyone is their real selves? Trust can only really be built with vulnerability. What if you were joining a business and they wanted you to operate online as yourself?
Depends on the venue. Certain communities could benefit from anonymity, both online and IRL. Lack of empathy, detachment, and imagination make it so.
What if you were joining a business and they wanted you to operate online as yourself?
I assume you mean that the business wants you to be yourself as a representative of the business online. Makes sense, but that won't preclude me from being anonymous in venues where anonymity is preferred.
If you can only give trust tokens away one time, it would be easy to see the network. The key really wouldn’t be to get the most trust tokens. It would be to get the most trust tokens from the most variety of people, who are also trustworthy. Remember they wouldn’t just be tokens, they would be tokens with a “review” written next to the token for what it was for. Like Amazon or Ebay does for seller and buyer reviews.
The tokens could also be weighted.
They do this for jiu jitsu. There used to be a real problem with fake black belts. The thing with jiu jitsu is just by sparring it is easy to tell if you are fake. However, after a little training, it becomes harder.
So they have a website called BELTCHECKER where if a white belt verifies your rank it is only worth 5 points, but if a blackbelt does it is worth 150 pts. So higher trust people giving out their trust tokens is worth more. Beltchecker.com allows the community to verify belt ranks through community voting. This would remedy the fame trading problem. That and the fact that you wouldn’t be able to trade away tokens. They would be more like reviews.
“He stumbles across the article on Truststack, written by DiaBeast79, with thousands of positive Trust Tokens and comments saying, "worked great"/"saved my life and my house"/"I'm free, never going back to the Dr."/etc.” This is pretty brilliant.
Great article, Josh. I'm Mentor, and I am 100% with you on all of this, brother! I am ready to roll in terms of building a high-trust community where privacy and security are paramount, but social engagement, especially IRL, is rewarded.
I've already got plans for a system like this, with invitation-based membership, so trust is built in from the ground up because members are inviting in only the best people they know. And because the purpose of this platform isn't for idle chatter and gossip and venting. It's a purpose-driven platform where the members are engaging with each other on productive projects.
I want to go on about it, but it seems a little inappropriate for the comments section of your post. So I'll stop there, but I want to encourage you to go check out my website at:
This is really fascinating stuff and similar in nature to what we are trying to do. I attended the Network State Camp in October in Texas. Were you there?
My issue with Web 3 applications is adoption. My mom, for example, would not easily adopt it.
I love your idea about the game. In fact wait until you see our next article this weekend.
Do you know what collective swarm intelligence is? Trust is required to build swarms. But they are the most powerful entity arguably in the know universe.
To your point about Web 3. I'm using the term loosely, which is really the only way to use the term still. It's not like Web 3 is a thing that was designed to be what it is. It's just a label that has been slapped on to this complex of technologies that have coalesced in an ad hoc fashion over the years. I suppose the defining characteristics of Web 3 are blockchain, defi, AI, decentralization, data sovereignty, privacy control. And it's allstill just a mishmash.
What I'm envisioning is swarms of members developing a new platform from the ground up on this new technology, utilizing the existing tech stack as a foundation to launch a next gen platform designed to be easily adopted by folks like your mom.
She might not be an early adopter. Those would be the people who build the platform. By the time she comes online, it will be so much more user friendly than this shit show of a web we have right now, it will be like a breath of fresh air.
Just checked out the Network Society Camp. I wish I had attended. It looks really cool! May next year. :-)
I wasn't familiar with the term 'swarm intelligence' until I read your article, though I've been picturing it in my mind for decades. I've just been referring to it is crowdsourcing, though I knew I was thinking of something more than that — collaboration within a high-trust organization in which all the members hold a stake.
So thanks for turning me on to that term! (finally) I believe this is going to open up brand new vistas for me. Because, yeah, we are definitely tracking.
Here's a few of the aspects our respective projects have in common:
- Game theory
- Collective intelligence
- Network state
- Swarming
- Built on blockchain
- Token economy (crypto)
- Transparency
- Privacy rights
- URL to IRL
- Social scoring (rewarding engagement)
- Transformation of socioeconomic landscape
And a lot more, I think.
So I'm excited to continue the conversation. What's the best way to contact you directly?
Perhaps you should review Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. The hubris of mankind will be its ultimate demise. But I’m certain your academic stature far exceeds mine. Just my opinion of course but I’m a trust but verify kinda person.
The digital life the deep state has planned for you will not be optional. Technology is a power. If you choose not to use it then we will be like sitting ducks. Like the natives on a remote island that technology never caught up with, easily destroyed.
1) won’t be part of a high trust society then and that’s ok.
2) don’t understand the difference between centralized and decentralized
Your concern is clearly addressed in the article. We need to form better systems to combat the corrupted ones. Technology is coming for us, we need to use it to fight back or we will all be enslaved.
Your fears are reminiscent of the people against Bitcoin because “technocrats.” Do you have the same fears when you use eBay, Amazon, or get a background check for a loan? If so you probably are not the kind of person other people want in their high trust society anyway.
We are looking for others who are. That requires understanding systems and personal courage.
The digital life the deep state has planned for you will not be optional. Technology is a power. If you choose not to use it then we will be like sitting ducks. Like the natives on a remote island that technology never caught up with, easily destroyed.
Multiple likes! “Peer-to-peer trust scores” is an elegantly practical measure. My pipe dream is to create more trustworthy citizens, but outing and penalizing the untrustworthy incentivizes trustworthiness. Solve the problems of recidivism and entropy, and poop emojis will become obsolete.
Solving entropy would be nice. But isn’t that a law of thermodynamics?
The characteristics of living things are anti-entropic
I can't add pictures here, so I put it in a note instead:
https://substack.com/profile/21170508-arjun/note/c-130224190?r=clr9o
Strictly defined, yes, but it seems to apply socio-politically. A variety of human endeavors look great or even salvation-like for a while—the golden ages of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the American Revolution, Collectivism, Industrialization, unlocking the secrets of DNA and nuclear energy. The list goes on. In every case, weakness and corruption creep in, initial energies flag, and things fall apart without constant renewal. Your high-trust concepts are promising because trust and trustworthiness are human traits, and you’re producing ideas to stabilize and perpetuate both. It’s a challenge because humans are notorious sell-outs to self-interest, and we all eventually get old and die—both somewhat akin to entropy. Basically, system quality reflects the quality of people within it. So, I’m thinking, what produces, sustains, and perpetuates quality people?
In MapleStory, an MMORPG I used to play, there was a thing called "Fame". You had one Fame (Defame) point to give to another player per 24 hour period. The idea is basically the trust token. Many people used have you Fame when you did something nice, or Defamed you when you were being an asshole.
The majority of Fame points, however, were from trading Fame. If I were bored, I could stand around in the market saying "Trading Fame" and make a mutually beneficial Fame transaction in no time. (Of course, there was an inherent quality of trust involved, because whoever gave Fame first had no way of forcing the other player to return the favor).
Fame Farming. It made the Fame system not fulfill it's intended purpose. Some people made a joke of it and got as much negative Fame as possible.
People will find ways to do Trust Token Farming IRL, since it would provide massive personal and societal benefit. Politicians already do this, to some extent. In a hardcoded system, someone can Trust Farm and point to his extremely high trust score when running a scam.
Well if you say, "it's on public ledger, so people can verify it," we have the same problem as now, which you identify:
> If it were on a transparent blockchain ledger, there would be an irrefutable way to verify it, but most people don't want to invest that much time.
Especially if the person doing the verification has a low Trust Score, made possibly by the political machine's cronies.
So, the Trust Token concept is interesting, but attaching it to People has shortcomings.
What if you attached Trust Token to information?
Say, an article about How to Cure Type 2 Diabetes in 6 weeks.
Andy has been struggling with T2D for 15 years. His doctors got him on a strict weekly regimen and diet. Technology has improved so the injections hurt less, but it's still a really shitty situation. He just got a SlaveStyle Libre Bluetooth monitor thing on his arm that beeps when sugar problem.
He stumbles across the article on Truststack, written by DiaBeast79, with thousands of positive Trust Tokens and comments saying, "worked great"/"saved my life and my house"/"I'm free, never going back to the Dr."/etc.
His brain is skeptical, and his doctor advises against it, but hey, 6 weeks? He gives it a shot.
Turns out it works great. In 4 weeks, Andy is able to stop his medications, has lost 10 pounds, and has a new lease on life.
How Doctor, dumbfounded, deep researches and makes new [to him] discoveries, and starts recommending the article to his other patients with similar problem.
He returns to the article, pays $100 [required] to give it a Trust Diamond, and writes a glowing review. He wants it to help others, and is happy to pay, since he's saving thousands per year on medication and insurance.
The article, having provided real value, now ranks higher on Truststack, gets recommend more to people who might have T2D, and supports the author.
The value in the article is in the substance of it, not who wrote it. The writer, DiaBeast79, could have a very negative Trust score, could even be Hitler; that's irrelevant. He could even have written an article about How to Handle Art School Rejection that worked for nobody, is totally useless, and doesn't even show up on Truststack anymore.
-----
Anyway, the concept of Trust Tokens is of good intent. You want to be able to know whether someone is trustworthy or not, depending on the context. A general Trust Token system is too general and too easy to game or have it go awry. 3, 5 are better for Personal Trust situations, least likely to be corrupted, I think.
I would always want the option to be anonymous online. Sometimes in person. Depends on the scenario. Identity is important in some places and not in others.
You don’t see any value in having one place online where anonymity isn’t allowed and everyone is their real selves? Trust can only really be built with vulnerability. What if you were joining a business and they wanted you to operate online as yourself?
Depends on the venue. Certain communities could benefit from anonymity, both online and IRL. Lack of empathy, detachment, and imagination make it so.
What if you were joining a business and they wanted you to operate online as yourself?
I assume you mean that the business wants you to be yourself as a representative of the business online. Makes sense, but that won't preclude me from being anonymous in venues where anonymity is preferred.
BTW I cured my autommune dieseases and anxiety with strict carnivore diet. So great examples!
Nice
If you can only give trust tokens away one time, it would be easy to see the network. The key really wouldn’t be to get the most trust tokens. It would be to get the most trust tokens from the most variety of people, who are also trustworthy. Remember they wouldn’t just be tokens, they would be tokens with a “review” written next to the token for what it was for. Like Amazon or Ebay does for seller and buyer reviews.
The tokens could also be weighted.
They do this for jiu jitsu. There used to be a real problem with fake black belts. The thing with jiu jitsu is just by sparring it is easy to tell if you are fake. However, after a little training, it becomes harder.
So they have a website called BELTCHECKER where if a white belt verifies your rank it is only worth 5 points, but if a blackbelt does it is worth 150 pts. So higher trust people giving out their trust tokens is worth more. Beltchecker.com allows the community to verify belt ranks through community voting. This would remedy the fame trading problem. That and the fact that you wouldn’t be able to trade away tokens. They would be more like reviews.
“He stumbles across the article on Truststack, written by DiaBeast79, with thousands of positive Trust Tokens and comments saying, "worked great"/"saved my life and my house"/"I'm free, never going back to the Dr."/etc.” This is pretty brilliant.
Great article, Josh. I'm Mentor, and I am 100% with you on all of this, brother! I am ready to roll in terms of building a high-trust community where privacy and security are paramount, but social engagement, especially IRL, is rewarded.
I've already got plans for a system like this, with invitation-based membership, so trust is built in from the ground up because members are inviting in only the best people they know. And because the purpose of this platform isn't for idle chatter and gossip and venting. It's a purpose-driven platform where the members are engaging with each other on productive projects.
I want to go on about it, but it seems a little inappropriate for the comments section of your post. So I'll stop there, but I want to encourage you to go check out my website at:
https://isitas.org/what-is-isitas/
Let's connect and make this happen!
Hey Mentor
This is really fascinating stuff and similar in nature to what we are trying to do. I attended the Network State Camp in October in Texas. Were you there?
My issue with Web 3 applications is adoption. My mom, for example, would not easily adopt it.
I love your idea about the game. In fact wait until you see our next article this weekend.
Do you know what collective swarm intelligence is? Trust is required to build swarms. But they are the most powerful entity arguably in the know universe.
Here is a teaser video for the game: https://youtu.be/xnI_UkkBVMs?si=gQ0VLaF9TTeocvzy
Best,
Josh Ketry
Society of Problem Solvers
To your point about Web 3. I'm using the term loosely, which is really the only way to use the term still. It's not like Web 3 is a thing that was designed to be what it is. It's just a label that has been slapped on to this complex of technologies that have coalesced in an ad hoc fashion over the years. I suppose the defining characteristics of Web 3 are blockchain, defi, AI, decentralization, data sovereignty, privacy control. And it's allstill just a mishmash.
What I'm envisioning is swarms of members developing a new platform from the ground up on this new technology, utilizing the existing tech stack as a foundation to launch a next gen platform designed to be easily adopted by folks like your mom.
She might not be an early adopter. Those would be the people who build the platform. By the time she comes online, it will be so much more user friendly than this shit show of a web we have right now, it will be like a breath of fresh air.
Looking forward to discussing further!
Just checked out the Network Society Camp. I wish I had attended. It looks really cool! May next year. :-)
I wasn't familiar with the term 'swarm intelligence' until I read your article, though I've been picturing it in my mind for decades. I've just been referring to it is crowdsourcing, though I knew I was thinking of something more than that — collaboration within a high-trust organization in which all the members hold a stake.
So thanks for turning me on to that term! (finally) I believe this is going to open up brand new vistas for me. Because, yeah, we are definitely tracking.
Here's a few of the aspects our respective projects have in common:
- Game theory
- Collective intelligence
- Network state
- Swarming
- Built on blockchain
- Token economy (crypto)
- Transparency
- Privacy rights
- URL to IRL
- Social scoring (rewarding engagement)
- Transformation of socioeconomic landscape
And a lot more, I think.
So I'm excited to continue the conversation. What's the best way to contact you directly?
TLDR: the best way forward, game-theoretically, is to start with generosity, then immediately switch to reciprocity.
Perhaps you should review Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. The hubris of mankind will be its ultimate demise. But I’m certain your academic stature far exceeds mine. Just my opinion of course but I’m a trust but verify kinda person.
This is a verifcation process. Our motto is: "Don't trust, verify."
A proposal for a social credit system for people who are ostensibly against social credit systems. Clever ruse.
This is worth repeating:
The digital life the deep state has planned for you will not be optional. Technology is a power. If you choose not to use it then we will be like sitting ducks. Like the natives on a remote island that technology never caught up with, easily destroyed.
Sounds like you:
1) won’t be part of a high trust society then and that’s ok.
2) don’t understand the difference between centralized and decentralized
Your concern is clearly addressed in the article. We need to form better systems to combat the corrupted ones. Technology is coming for us, we need to use it to fight back or we will all be enslaved.
Your fears are reminiscent of the people against Bitcoin because “technocrats.” Do you have the same fears when you use eBay, Amazon, or get a background check for a loan? If so you probably are not the kind of person other people want in their high trust society anyway.
We are looking for others who are. That requires understanding systems and personal courage.
Real life = freedom and the right to choose for oneself.
Digital life = SLAVERY and the complete loss of privacy.
You cannot trust government and big tech. Both are extremely money hungry.
The digital life the deep state has planned for you will not be optional. Technology is a power. If you choose not to use it then we will be like sitting ducks. Like the natives on a remote island that technology never caught up with, easily destroyed.