Hey people and whoever and whatever is out there watching this! Welcome to the second episode of “saving the world in three simple steps”.
As established in the first video, saving the world essentially means optimizing the political and economic system. Let’s talk about the first one.
The political system is about community decision-making. Who is making decisions, how, and based on whose proposals?
In today’s world, the agenda is set by a limited number of people: elected officials, people with a lot of money, with certain titles, or in certain positions.
There are historical reasons behind this, but I argue that with today’s information technology, we could involve everyone and increase the efficiency of decision-making.
Anyone should be able to tell their opinions, ideas, and comments about anything anonymously. Anonymity is important, it helps to create an open and constructive debate.
People should also be able to search for and react to whatever ideas they are interested in. They should be able to point out logical fallacies or emotional biases. This is a learning curve; even smart people tend to overlook their fallacies or bias.
How do we evaluate these ideas? We have a rule of thumb: one person, one vote.
I would apply that, but with a twist: instead of equal votes, let’s aim for equal average voting power.
Let me show you how it works. In this example, we have three different ideas, opinions, or policy proposals: “a”, “b” and “c”. For each, we have a Likert scale going from -1 (strongly disagree) to +1 (strongly agree).
Let’s say that I strongly agree with idea “a” and I strongly disagree with idea “b”. If I agree with idea “c”, but only half as strongly as with “a”, my vote is +0.5. To keep my average voting power at the same level, we should revalue all the votes that I have cast so far.
My voting power for “a” and “b” will increase to 1.2, while for “c”, it will be 0.6. The total of these is 3 and I have cast 3 votes.
This is a simple concept with a lot of implications. For example, the less frequently you have strong opinions, the more they matter.
I ask you to use your imagination, and envision millions of people and ideas, as a system of collective intelligence.
You may ask: why would people spend their time coming up with and evaluating ideas? I will talk about that in the final video.
Take care!
