Building socio-technical infrastructure
A core task in social choice is the allocation of fixed resources among a set of items: funding across projects, budget across priorities, prize money across submissions. The output are weights – percentages out of 100 which say how valuable each item is relative to the others. A common approach – asking people to score items on a scale, and then taking some sort of average – is fast but…
This essay describes a research process culminating in a significant overhaul of Chore Wheel’s internals. The research itself – analysis, dead ends , and eventual solution – was a collaboration between myself and Anthropic’s Claude taking place over the course of about four nighttime sessions. Afterwards, we wrote up this report based on our notes – Claude drafted, I edited. From my ChatGPT…
The Pairwise Paradigm Abstract: Pairwise methods are best thought of as composing a paradigm for turning scarce attention into robust allocation signals . With the right algorithms , interface , and audience , they can support the continuous funding of ecosystems at surprisingly low attention cost. Thanks to Carl Cervone, David Gasquez, Ori Shimony, and Dandelion Mané for feedback on earlier…
This analysis explores 611 pairwise judgments from 51 jurors evaluating Ethereum dependencies through the Deep Funding experiment. Key findings: Pairwise evaluations show 89% agreement when comparing diverse projects, and 63% for similar. Contrary to intuition, longer thinking times did not improve decision quality. Results suggest pairwise methods are ready for greater deployment in public goods…
I. Technology At some point in the last few months, I saw a tweet from a software engineer who had just started using Cursor , one of the new AI-powered code editors. His hot take went something along the lines of: I realized that 80% of my engineering skills have become obsolete. My leverage on the remaining 20% went up 10x. I was intrigued, so I downloaded the app. I was impressed. Cursor was…
I. Overview This is an essay defending blockchain-based generative art as a contemporary form. It will address three major critiques of generative art: The artistic legitimacy of generative art, The value and meaning of digital ownership, and The advantages of a blockchain-based art market We will demonstrate how these critiques are not only unfounded, but represent an narrow understanding of the…
I. Overture Los Angeles is a city dreamt into existence. Unlike the great cities of the old world (or even the American east and midwest), which emerged organically around rivers and harbors, supporting trade which supported life, Los Angeles was simply willed into being: in a desert, the product of salesmanship, speculation, and solipsism. Truly the “postmodern city”, nestled at the edge of the…
This essay was originally prepared for a London-based zine on gentrification. Sharing the Wealth Smoother residential gentrification through shared ownership From the moment early man first pointed to the ground and said “mine”, we have fought for control over land. For most of our history, this conflict involved bloody violence; in recent decades, however, economic conflict has replaced physical,…
I. Introduction Some months ago I read William Poundstone’s Gaming the Vote , a comprehensive survey of the history and attributes of various alternative voting systems – a topic of longstanding personal interest . The villain of Poundstone’s story is the plurality vote , a fair-seeming but perniciously flawed way of choosing leaders, and Poundstone devotes fully the first third of the book to a…
This essay is meant as a mild and constructive engagement with one part of the constellation of ideas being advanced under the aegis of RadicalxChange (pronounced “radical exchange”), specifically the concept of quadratic funding, and it’s claim to “optimality”. Let’s review the argument and then assess the strength of that claim. This will involve a few equations but I’ll narrate the whole thing…