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How do we scale our best ideals beyond our personal limitations?
Two ex-Apple employees brainstorm and argue about the best way to replace our current institutions with more humane, community-oriented alternatives.
Oh, okay. So the question, the question was.
And okay. Uh, we were in the delicacy. Uh, we have these document that people use to give history if this decision, uh, oh, the record of everything that happened, right. Uh, especially regarding, uh, decisions and, and things that happen. And just, just to be empty, whatever. So I'm asking where do we keep those documents or that document for an entity C like a smart contract, you know, in the crypto space where, uh, they participating in these have copies of the document and, uh, and, uh, that's genius to it and make sure that changes are valid.
Yeah. Yeah. Or is it like a, a repository where, uh, industry doesn't want place and people can add to it and make changes to it, but that's more like as well get, can be distributed. Right. So, um, yeah, I'm just probably thinking how, who lives, uh, um, and in an ecosystem or an entities library of things and how do we store it and what is it kept and how do we work with it?
That was the question. Well, there, uh, Let's start with how the document is access. So that's the most important part of the question. I think the answer to that is you want it to be access from within the org and potentially not without your position. So it says to me that we have a networked document and we would probably use standard protocols for that distributed systems.
Well, distributed blockchain systems are usually for where we have transactions with potentially untrusted third parties. They're usually not efficient for like transactional within an organization, documented age system, where we can assume that there aren't a lot of adversaries. So this is a couple of thoughts there.
Should it be distributed? Certainly. And I guess, let me add an interesting thought to all of this is that if, if we trust that by the design of the system, every edit is transparent. We that in and of itself is a kind of protection against adversarial or nefarious behavior. It's not the same as data security, but it does mean that, you know, you get the property that we want within the organization, which is non-repudiation people can't say, oh, I didn't say that because everything is digitally signed.
And so I think the short of everything is it's a network document and it should be buildable from components or technologies that we already understand. Right. One, uh, just a data point. Uh, we had this discussion a couple of episodes ago is that it's easiest to think about this in the context of our organization.
But I think the, the, the, the framing that we're having our conversations in and sort of at the level of a society, which has, you know, some cohesion. Um, and in fact, one of the questions is exactly what sort of cohesion, but in fact can have multiple organizational entities within it. Um, but it is interesting, actually, this is kind of a silly question.
Is there, uh, you know, it seems like the good model of, you know, there is a central repository, but then there was a central GitHub repository, which is kind of the, uh, de facto authoritative branch. But everyone has copies of that. And I guess one question is, is that, has that ever been successfully hacked to rewrite history or does the sort of the nominal existence of multiple clones of everything tend to make that infeasible in practice?
Yeah, so it isn't in that case, it isn't the replication that gives you the security it's the hashing. And so the non-repudiation and get comes from the fact that you can't invert a hash for it. So another, in order to impute something to the, you didn't say I would have to break the hashing function. And now there are known attacks against Shaw one, which is what, what get uses.
But no, one's really worried about those. You can find, I think we're called pre-image collision. So in other words, you could find two different pieces of code or two different documents that produce the same hash. And that breaks a digital signature scheme to some extent, because you don't sign the whole document, you sign the hash of the document.
That actually is so I guess very quickly, if you want to do this in a societal context, then a blockchain does make sense, but we probably don't store the data itself on chain. We just signed. It's like an H Mac. You just sign that you just store the sign hash on the blockchain. So it's a record
either way. If you've got a broken hat. Even a blockchain is unlikely to help you. Oh, everything. Like, I won't say the world will end, but, uh, yeah. If, if any of these cryptographically strong hash functions turn out to be invertible or otherwise vulnerable, like, you know, it's digital doom, many ways. Yeah.
But the reality is, is that it is, it is not trivial to create two documents that have the same hash. And so no, it's, the odds are, you can have one that is perfectly benign. And the other one that is deeply malicious, that's it, that's a good science fiction, novel scenario, but not really a, uh, this has been the other failure modes that are likely to be hit before that.
Yeah. And what's interesting is that perception, we were hitting the perceptual limit, like deep fakes, you know, within five to 10 years are going to be crazy. Crazy, good to wear cheap. I don't know what, what you're going to have to essentially do is digitally sign the videos as well because the digital signature is stronger.
Right? Perceptual guarantees are perceptual discrimination that people have, like, did the president really say this? Well, video's not going to be a reliable measure of that, but you know, I hate to use the word flippantly, but a block the cryptographic signature is. Yeah. So anyway, the sort of answer is that what I'm hearing is that like, in some sense, both get, and the blockchain are limited by hashes.
And the thing that actually tends to be the practical factor is knowing who did what, which is tied to the digital signature, right? So the commits are digitally signed as well. That's correct. And you know, just to, to your earlier point, yes, there is a repository on GitHub, but by design get, has no head.
It's just a distributed network of nodes. So in other words, there's, well, I had is not the right word. Uh, there is no privilege node I can pull from you or you can pull from me and it's, you know, wherever you want the commits to live at any given. Uh, what's interesting. That is that as a practical matter authority is more like, um, the, the deploy pipeline, right?
It's like, I, I'm not going to go around checking everyone's pass or security or whatever. I just know if I hit this end point, I expect to get something like a reliable transaction or the most recent version of the document or whatever. And that feels like kind of a, the sharp end of the stick to your point in that if, if the, if there's a good chain of trust.
So that, that usually works. And then when it breaks, you can figure out what went wrong. That's what it sounds like the conversation we had last week and for a day within an organization also. True. Yes. And actually that's an extraordinarily important point, right? So traceability, I mean, these are all related, but not saying traceability reproducibility prove ability requires this chain, this ledger of mutations, which is what, for instance, a commit log is.
And part of knowing what went wrong is just writing down what happened. Yeah. So that's interesting. So if I'm understanding this correctly, it's like in some sense, the, the things that are interesting are really at the edges of the system, you know, the, the end points where, you know, services are provided or people kind of expect to hear authoritative information.
And on the consumer side, on the producer side, it's sort of who holds the digital key to find this thing. And, uh, really that's probably where things are gonna break down most of the time, right? Is that someone sloppy with a key or, you know, whatever tools and chains are using to do that, or they're sloppy with the last stage of the deployment piece, those who much more likely to be socially engineered.
You've got various cryptographic security items themselves to be compromised. So, yes, and we shouldn't oversell what we can do with either a get like protocol or a blockchain protocol, because a blockchain ledger can guarantee that there's no double spend and through digital signatures that the transactions are valid.
The blockchain ledger does in some sense, a much weaker entity than what we need, because it says nothing about the veracity of the data. So in other words, that's a whole nother class of problem. In other words, the blockchain will guarantee that things like we don't have double spend that this transaction came from this person, but now there's a much harder problem because we were worried about the content of the document.
All we can say as well, this person signed this document. We can't say anything about the truth of the document. At least not with the perimeters that we've talked about. And I think that's the hard problem. It's interesting. There's a duality here that we ran into before and that you can kind of come up with technical standards to guarantee readability, but the problem of understandability is a, uh, you know, open-ended problem, you know, can one human being ever understand it.
Uh, and that similarly, it seems like we can build technical systems that can guarantee a certain level of consistency in the sense that the system is behaving, you know, according to all these different rules and things, but that's different than utility, is it actually doing the thing we want it to do?
Yeah. I would break that down as syntax and semantics. So, so computers are the rule or right, exactly. So, so semantics, and now, now that actually brought up something very interesting. So the process of writing unit tests and the process of creating reliability within the organization is turning as much of the semantics into known syntax as you can cause that only unit tests.
Yes. Yeah, no. Keep running with that because this is interesting because at this, let me throw another curve ball. If I may, as this gets to the issue with Hyack and price, you know, because historically price was sort of the. The one semantic around which an economy could coalesce and have a generally agreed understanding of it.
And one of the interesting questions to me is, well, actually, one of the interesting observations I have is that within various local markets, we have, uh, managed to achieve things beyond price, as part of the shared semantics, you know, for airline seat, you know that you see the price, you see the duration, the number of stops the window seat, et cetera, for food, we have the general nutrition labels and this idea of semantically, enriched markets, enabling wiser choices on the part of customers.
Isn't something that I've heard, uh, economists talk about, but it seems like it could potentially be a significant shift in our understanding of how. To achieve sort of better outcomes without a central planning authority. Well, this is great. So, so the, I think the economists who touched on this as Elinor Ostrom and she, her career was spent attacking the tragedy, the comments problem.
And she said, well, there's this. She basically said that the tragedy of the commons is a fallacy. And you'll see it a lot in debates about public policy. Well, that, how do we prevent the free rider problem? How do we prevent a single individual? When we have a common resource, let's say a pasture, how do we prevent a single individual from disproportionately accruing the benefits and then the harm?
Right? So she, she came, she, what she says is this is a solution, neither that an individual consult, nor that the government can solve and what she says, she calls me, there's a special name she has for these. Um, and they're like, um, common commonly shared resources, something I have to I'll have to crack her book.
Is that what it is? I'm not, I'm not familiar with that term. So I don't want to guess it's just a minute. I'll come up with exactly the term, but here's, what's, here's the short of everything that she does, you can attain. And there are many examples and she, that she uses in the book and one of them is I think fisheries.
Okay. And she says, here's a short of everything. She has eight specific steps that she breaks down to, but here's a short of everything. If the users of a shared resource come to a task set of agreements, they can all use that resource to advantage without over-fishing, without under fishing. And, and the, the system becomes sustainable.
That's right. Basically it's covering government. It requires sort of a cooperative governance. It does require Dennis. Correct. That is an important distinction. Yeah. And I think that's the really interesting thing to me about, um, you know, the, this, the post financial economy, just to clarify. Is that we can create these ad hoc, which we already do.
I mean, kind of a waste it's purpose for existence, right? It's creating ad hoc. Uh, I think the, the key phrase is turning semantics into syntax. I may use that as a, uh, episode title, right? The idea is that by Neal Stephenson called, uh, computers in one of his parallel university's syntactic devices. Cause all they do is manipulate syntax.
But if you can create these little micro-communities that build here, the question, this is in principle, there is no limit to which semantics you can encode in syntax or is that. Right. So I guess the first thing I want to, the first observation I want to make is that software eating the world is exactly turning semantics into syntax.
That that is really what the world is. And the, so what we, your job as a software engineer, or as an other form of technologist or technology leader, is, is to take things that were formerly labor intensive and required a lot of thinking by human beings and automate them. And, and there's a frontier between things that only humans can do and things that we can codify well enough for machines to do.
Now that frontier is always moving, but you again, is this a valid defeater? No, you run into things like the halting. Right. So in other words, you can add, there are a lot of special cases that you can do to detect whether or not a program will haul. And we might have to step back and explain what it is, but you will never be able to get all cases.
So in other words, there is an elegance to the universe and the universe has a logic to it that no number of rules can capture. I probably said too much there, but if we can back it off to the halting problem and just, just focus on that, right. Three images of the thing is that like a sort of little, the theoretical problem of, of halting rarely interrupts my daily job.
Uh, I usually, when I hit much closer is that, you know, the word that we use in this meeting, we had a certain vague understanding of what we meant by that. But as we accumulate more understanding, we realize that. Uh, either a week that, uh, the difference between the formal understanding of that term, I encoded in the software and the cultural shared understanding that we had when we designed the software and then the real world consequence that we were trying to manage to end up being three different things.
And that's usually where the encoding of semantics and the syntax breaks down well. And so there's something really interesting here and essentially in the world of cognitive science, the, the Gulf between execution and evaluation is the difference between your mental model and the actual state of the world.
And so what, and by the way, the term, I just happened to have posters book on my desk. The term that she uses is CPRS. And I believe that's common pooled resources, and she, she never, I, or I'm not deep enough into her work to know whether she sets a limit on the scale of CPR. This is a unifying thread in all of our conversations, which is to say, first you attain local alignment within your business unit.
Then you try for a more, maybe an organizational alignment. And I feel like the questions that earnest are driving is like, how do we get global aligned? And the observation I can make is that these CPRS are these small groups for communities of practice. They kind of have to first agree with one another and then we start piling up the contract, so to speak, or we start matching semantics across groups with Syntec, Rebecca, I don't know, but the doggone Gilbert's vision was this idea of a medical community of practice that a community of improvement.
Right? So the idea is that we have communities of practice. We net worth them together so they can share best practices. And then we have a medic community that helps optimize the way that they live. Right. It is the community of practice that helps other community practices to become more efficient. And one of the interesting, um, insights here, which at least is new to me, um, was the thing that Ernest and I bumped into a couple of weeks ago, which is that maybe the way that we build this sort of, and maybe global the wrong word, but you know, an expanding society, which can be better to within a larger society is of people who are, you know, sincerely devoted to their community of practice.
They actually want to make things better. And they documented through the process of turning somatics into syntax in a very open and transparent way. And if we could actually come up with a sort of common substrate, whatever that means for people to do that, then that allows us to. Uh, build this a hierarchy of learning and improvement on top of that in a way that isn't sense, potentially global, it doesn't necessarily tie to a particular language or format.
Well, the sense that if there is a, um, the act of turning semantics into syntax means that there actually is sort of code, which given a set of inputs produced as a well-defined set of outputs. And if you have, I guess, not just, this is probably reaching a bit, but if you have not just sort of open source, you know, where the code is visible, but you have sort of open services where you can see how they run in practice and you have open communities where you're actually.
Um, you know, kind of seeing how things actually work out in the real world, not just how they work out on paper, to the extent you have these things, you can accelerate, learning and sharing. You know, you can look at meme culture on, uh, you know, Twitter or YouTube or Tik TOK or whatever. You can see how having ticks us a great example of how a mean can spread globally, uh, even across barriers of language, because people have a certain set of primitives and tools that are designed for easy record replicability and variability on a common substrate.
That's kind of what I meant. Yeah. That's so interesting. I'm thinking now, people that speak up. Emojis, which file is that I'm not gonna, well, first of the thing of H company and interpret the Modi standard, whichever way they want. So in, in one particular case that put me off use completely is the apple decision.
Oh, we're going to, we're not going to pick a real gun. We're going to be going to, it's going to be a water gun, something. And well, the politics came into emergencies. Yeah, yeah. Filtered through, through their personal political opinions. Exactly. So I don't, I'm not using it more useful document. You sent me that I just don't use it because there's a possibility in there.
That is, is that zero is great. It's much better than zero of actually it did happen to me. It did have a developer. I was talking emojis with, with my iPhone, with that person who's has an app. And the, um, I think iPhone has, was ahead of the standard. I dunno, a couple of years from the whatever standard the, uh, her iPhone had or her Android phone had.
So the emoji that I sent got translated into something that she interpreted as being offensive, and then that costs, right? So I'm like, Nope, I will never use emoji again because I don't know what comes out of the other side. So emoji, we want to make it into a language. Apple talks about, uh, all the paths of emojis and emoji or whatever.
And I'm like, no, I'm not doing that because, you know, we can we go into the 1984 thing where they missed up language so much that, you know, you, you can't express yourself because the language is so limited that you, you know, you. Yeah. Again, I hate to put a theoretical notions in front of this is an applied science, right?
How do we create this set of hyper documents for people to self-govern? But if I, if I remember from my theory of computation class, I remember my instructor, Dr. Stark, he actually explained, so Ernie, this is the frontier for you. He said that whole, let me think if I can remember this. Yeah. I think you can show that if, if a language is somatically checkable, it's not complete so well, I think what that means is there's going to be a limit to how far we can again.
And we may be well below that limit. And I'm not saying it's not good to push that limit, but there are some, there are some paradoxes baked into the problem. And to tie that to what Ernest just said, you know, you lose a certain amount of expressivity whenever just to get this on the table, by the way.
I'm not sure. I, I turned completeness as a valid measure of computation, but that's a different heresy for a different. Yeah, there's something I just I'm so compelled. So I, I literally had Dr. Olson's book. This is governing the comments on my desk and she has, I won't, I won't read the, kind of the lengthy description of each one, but I want to throw these out cause it's too perfect.
So what she has is she has designed principles illustrated by long enduring during CPR institutions. And boy, it feels like we're skating right around this. And let's remember that her, her goal was to establish, first of all, how collect, how institutions for collective action could work. Right. And they happened to be non-governmental.
All right. So these are her eight design principles. One clearly defined boundaries. We were just talking about that to congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions, three collective choice arrangements. We can double click on any of these that you want for monitoring five, graduated sanctions, six conflict resolution mechanism.
Seven is minimal recognition of rights to organize. And then finally, for large, for CPRS that are part of larger systems, nested enterprises, that feels to me a lot like a blueprint for the, I don't know the types of structures, organizational, and otherwise that we need to put in place in order for a Detoxy to begin to work.
And maybe just this realization that it's neither individual, that it, that it is collective action, but not driven by a governmental organization is important in and of itself. This is something that's always confused me about philosophy and economist is they always talk about society and the state, like it's a given and that individual as if they are givens and maybe more recently as corporations or firms as given.
And like, this is my weird brain. It's like, yeah, all of those are kind of fuzzy to me. It's like the, the line between, uh, You know, my messy brain with all my competing impulses and personas and roles and it government is, uh, you know, what composed of many constituencies is always felt like it's, it's all more or less the same sort of, uh, passion Stu.
And to me, the interesting, like, to me, that's actually the really interesting, and maybe even provocative thesis is that we have this almost religious attachment to things like the state or the individual or the firm. But the reality is, is that in the modern world, it's much more fractal and we all have different personas and identities that we work collaboratively on different things.
And, uh, you know, maybe that's actually one way we solve this problem is by recognizing the fractality of governance, um, all the way up and down and that, like, we don't have to get rid of governments. We don't have to get rid of markets, but we can subvert them by treating as variables, things that they treat us.
Hmm,
right? Like we talked about one example, like in a world of open source where you want to have like reward for creators, you don't necessarily have to have firms with all the legal and political and informational and financial stuff, all bundled into one big thing that oversees everything. You can have many different facets of it.
My daughter is getting annoyed at me, so I need to move to a different room. Well, I, this is the last it's just too perfect. So, and it's from the end of Dr. Ostrom's book and I'll just go through, she attacking exactly the problem, which you're attacking right now, which is we reify. Well, there's two issues that you identified.
So one is the local state and the global state don't always seem to be that different, but that's part of, because we reify the government into this fictional entity and I can't do it better than Dr. Austrian. Here's what she says. What I find remarkable about Ralph's observations. This is the background.
In regard to the groundwater cases is that the only policy actor she sees as being relevant is the amorphous fictitious and omnicompetent entity called quote unquote, the government. The users are viewed as turning to quote the government for a program rather than themselves, struggling to find workable and equitable solutions to difficult problems within arenas provided by courts by legislative bodies and by local authorities.
So that means that people or local entities can take something or address something much better than the suspicious dormant can't. I think that's the implication. And that, that is what her work is like, Hey, we have a common pool resource. Can we make it work? And her answer is yes. Ooh, this is interesting.
This is the failure mode I keep running into. Um, I had this, uh, my long running, uh, the great reason, a 42 week experiment and sort of online social discourse. And what was interesting to me is that I really wanted to make this group self-governing, but people still were upset with what the group was doing.
And they always vented they're upset at me, despite my best efforts to say, Hey, why don't you try doing something different or take charge of it or run it or whatever. And I realized, you know, to the point she was making is that when groups do collectively self-organized, they are far more effective, but there is also a countervailing impulse, which is, it actually feels good to have a daddy figure or, you know, a God figure or some other thing that is like the thing that you can blame.
You don't have to take responsibility for the situation. And getting people over that hump to taking on collective self-governance is actually quite hard. And what's worse is when you actually do succeed in doing that, they often do that only by, um, uh, shrinking the circle of concerns they consider valid so that, you know, like I'll take ownership of this as long as that's the deal.
I don't have to deal with those people or those issues. Right. You know, this is a problem with corporations, right. They're really good at self-governing, but they're really horrible at managing their own externalities. And so I think that maybe one intrinsic feature is that that's the way we manage our shame.
And our finiteness is by saying, well, I'll handle that, but don't talk to me about this. That's not my problem. Yeah. So there's a really deep and really interesting paradox here. So, so first of all, turning semantics into syntax is a process of abstraction. What does that mean? That means that a formerly semantic.
Task is now syntax, so I can give it to a machine. So the process of going from semantics to syntax requires agency or abstraction, but yet that very abstraction, which makes it possible for us to abstract becomes a barrier. When cause now we look at the group and we start reifying the group and say, well, the group needs to persona for the group.
And the thing that kind of got us out of the first mess gets this into a second one. And I guess, I don't know that that's really interesting. So who, who is? This is the question. And I think. Thinking about Dr. Rosa, what was missing from your group? So the reason I keep picking on fisheries, because it's a, it's a very good example.
They can get together as all their livelihoods depend on it. There's very little skin in the game and a Facebook group. Like people may come in with certain expectations, but it's not like, you know, your family does eat as resolved or not as a result of what happens in that group. And so I think the, the level of ownership, the level of skin, the game is probably missing from that situation.
Yeah. Hold on. There is this, what is the volume I sent you is to say the reason faculty politics are so horrible is because the stakes are so low. Um, but there is also this weird thing that, you know, but it works both ways, right? Is that if you're, you know, want to be president neighborhood association, there is a lot of obligations that come along with the power and the privilege and the.
Um, and there's also just that there's the founder effect, which I've discovered you can't really get away from. Even if you give away all the nominal power to somebody else, everyone still knows you're the founder and being in the room distorts the decision-making. The other thing I was surprised by though, is the process running semantics and just syntax.
You called it abstraction. I would have been tempted to call it digitization. Um, and I was curious, I agree with you. I don't know. They're, they're definitely different. Um, so turning semantics into syntax, isn't so much abstraction as it allows abstraction. And I'll tell you what, I mean, the thing that used to take my whole day now it becomes a black box that I can say, make X do X.
So you're focusing on how semantics syntax. Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting to me is that this is human civilization long before, or maybe it is total hammer Ruby or military organization. I mean, in some sense, The, um, the idea that I can deal with, you know, the general of the army rather than a thousand people in a mob as individuals abstraction and arguably that is civilization.
Like that's actually, one of the definitions I have on civilization is where I can deal with rather than individuals. Right. I don't have to know everybody in my spirit. I know, and I trust whatever processes, uh, generated a cop. I trust a cop of the way that my wife did when she came to the U S because you live a different semantic mapping onto that syntactic structure.
Um, and I guess blacks and whites in America have different, uh, Symantec mappings onto that as well, uh, for all sorts of complicated reasons. And so this idea that civilization is fundamentally a process of abstraction. Uh, it's what enables this work, but it's also what alienates us and makes us. No less happy, uh, uh, in different ways.
And one could argue, um, I think it was some of my favorite word and I've been thinking a lot about is self-differentiation originally he's in like psychology, like a child differentiates from the family, but there was an author whose name I'm escaping, who worked for Lyndon Johnson. And the thing he reminded about Lyndon Johnson was he was self-defeating that as a leader, you cannot have so much empathy that overwhelms your ability to make decisions, right?
So the classic star Trek episode, where the officer has to order this over until his death, in order to save the whole ship, Jeff, to be able to abstract away from the emotional immediacy. And so the ability to abstract away is what allows you to make globally optimal decisions that are locally suboptimal, but the comprise, conversely, it allows you to justify locally suboptimal things and pursuits.
Global optimality and, you know, historically we've, uh, you know, gone back and forth on sort of collectivism versus fascism. You know, we even one strong autocratic figure to make all the decisions, diffusing it. And what you generally find is that, you know, egalitarian, communal situations are more just, and, uh, autocratic institutions are more, uh, innovative and the autocratic ones tend to outcompete the collectivist ones in some way.
Interesting counter example of that of course, is the, uh, is the distributed system of like a market or an economy or an ecosystem, right? Is that, is that a well-designed ecosystem? Uh, usually the, it was ours, right? Usually out-compete the cathedrals and it's interesting to figure out why. And when that works.
Sorry. I do. I think I have an answer to that and I think, I think it comes down to, uh, so, so first of all, I think the right polarity is individualism versus collectivism. And the reason is the actual decided societies that all the marks and societies that aim for collectivism actually became authoritarian states like deeply authoritarian.
So, so the first thing now, now here's the question. So under which conditions does individual realism, let's say distributed autonomous systems produce better results versus let's say monolithic or authoritarian systems. And I have, I think there are three dimensions to this. So one is scale, right? So when, when systems are extremely large, you almost always require a distributed approach and I'll, I'll break this down and give this Oracle examples as needed.
So, so scale is the first dimension. The second dimension is, is what I call heterogeneity. So for instance, the Scandinavian economies, which are actually in point of fact, our market economies, but they have some socialist features and social democratics. They're highly homogenous and it is okay. It is very conceivable to work for the healthcare of a fellow Swede who is probably distinctly related to you in some way.
Number one has the same sense of work ethic. Number two looks like you. Number three, I'm not making that right or wrong. I'm just pointing out the scale homogeneity. And then the third piece is like what I would call alignment or shared fee. So if a family is, is a fairly heterogeneous entity, however, they're all in a shared fate.
So the shorter version, yes.
High scale attributed systems, low scale is for let's call them centralized systems. High heterogeneity is first centralized systems. Low heterogeneity was, let me say that differently. Sorry. High heterogeneity is for distributed systems, low heterogenic Navy or homogeneity is for centralized systems. And then lastly systems that are well aligned, right?
They have common fate, those work, centralized and systems that don't need a distributed. Yeah. So I feel like there's a dimension there that you're operating in that is different than what I'm thinking about, where like, like I think about like the Roman empire was that homogeneous. I mean, that seems like that covers a larger, you know, larger percentage of the world than, you know, uh, any given country does now, uh, in a, you know, and so I think maybe the issue is that, um, I think maybe like if it's purely distributed like a local centralized thing, congenitally one circles around a decentralized distributed system, but not against a decentralized system.
And I think maybe that's where I'm getting confused about decentralized versus distributed. Right. Cause I think that, I think the interesting thing to me, yeah, actually, I'm going to make a posit. Is that a morphous distributed system? Congenitally be out competed by a centralized system. You know, the, uh, the Mongol Hort, you know, crushing, uh, the fiefdoms of Europe, for example, but that a de-centralized system, uh, out-compete a centralized system.
And I think that the things would be decentralized and distributed as well. Really important to me, even though I can't define it. Oh, I see. You're saying, uh, decentralized versus distributed. So that's an interesting one. I want to come back to, I guess, what local means, uh, uh, operating to achieve a global goal.
I think that's probably the definition of decentralized.
Well, the, I think there's, there's an, it depends asterisk anywhere. Right. So, so, and I hate to bring it up again, but it depends on what is the question. Yeah. Well, right. So, so, and, and I, I still propose that it's scale heterogeneity and alignment, like then those, those, the factors that you need to look at, I feel like I, I'm not sure I understand like a concrete example where you could demonstrate to me, why do you mean?
So I certainly agree that like, uh, so certainly, you know, managing a, an, uh, a homogeneous population is so sorry. Are we arguing? It's easier to have one mark running a homogeneous population or easy to have that central centralization is by centralization then. Got it. So here, let me, let me look at it a different way.
So, um, the, when you have a homogeneous system, one size fits all. When you have a heterogeneous or multimodal bi-modal system, one size fits none. So the average is exactly the wrong thing to do in the case where you have a very varied population, multimodal distribution. Okay. So the point is, is that for any, for any given figure of merit, the, the, the heterogeneity of the relevant parameters relative to the thing that you're optimizing or standardizing on is, uh, the thing that you're talking about.
Yes. So the other two systems of government, it could be, although I have thought about this a lot in the context of COVID and I'll give a really simple example. The, the Chinese regime was excellent at locking down, like they're expert at this, it's a highly racially homogeneous population. There are clearly problems telling people what not to do.
Yes, they can. They're experts. Yeah. And, and I mean, the way they isolated UConn was they rumbled the roads with bulldozers. You couldn't physically leave now. And so that strategy worked very well for them. It's completely against the ethos of Western society though. And part of the reason, the reason America got its name of melting pot.
There's so many different people and so many different cultures and lots of people who don't like to be told what to do. And lockdowns is an optimally bad strategy for that case. So here China, let's see with Chinese about a billion. The us is about a third of the size of China. Let's consider them both roughly equivalent.
On the scale of standpoint, the centralized command economy command and control philosophy is going to work brilliantly in China. And it's gonna, it's gonna work terribly in the United States. It's gonna fall on its face because of our health, but there's also, you can make a case that. You know, China wasn't always homogeneous, right?
They have all, they've had their own melting plot over the millennia too. And what's happened is that they, um, they do have a cultural tradition of centralized authority, which has created heterogenic homogeneity across that and has been periodically renewed and periodically rebelled against and periodically suppressed and violently enforced.
And I think the, so there's two things, right? One is that having a culture of obedience, if you will, uh, of deference to authority. Is really good at solving a certain class of problems like imposing lockdowns. It's really horrible. And other classes of problems, like, you know, getting the truth of what's actually going on right at the beginning and the end of COVID and trying to disastrous, but the middle part they did brilliantly at.
And it's really interesting. And what's interesting is that, um, this is, I think where I get, this is the thing I want to focus on is that the interesting thing to me is not the level of, of, of diversity or whatever it is. What are the things that if we have them in common actually makes for a resilient antifragile system.
Right? So for example, you know, if the us was, uh, you know, which is, I think possible to imagine had really rigorous reporting standards, Four states and around the free access of information, uh, so that people didn't have to, you know, say so on the one hand that wasn't the CDC, couldn't say, don't say this, uh, you know, so th there's there's good and bad centralization, right?
If, if the CD hits, he had been saying, you know, Hey everyone, publicly post all your data. Uh, every time something happens, you know, that would have been a good use of central power versus the central power. Like nobody can do tasks. Nobody can talk about what's actually going on in their places until we say right there seems to be that like distinguishing of sort of a pro transparency centralization that increases the flow of communication versus anti-trans versus the simulation seems to be two very different types of central power.
Oh, I see. You're saying, well, there is a unified paradox. I think it is. And you asked, you know, what is, what is the trope or the axis along which people can align. So that collective action becomes possible. And the free market economists all said it was self-interest. And as long as we enable a voluntary exchange, that's the thing that everybody shares in common.
And they can always bet on every single time, but that's always been something of a crock, right? Because if you leave, if you I've never seen a coherent definition of self-interest that actually scales around all the use cases, people claim it for itself. What I want at this moment in time is the self, my larger sense of identity with my family and loved ones.
Is it enlightened self-interest and that I can perfectly perceive the longer cuts with my actions ever you want. And the reason that's what Friedman points out, Milton Friedman points out is that whether you are a missionary or scientist, You are still acting in self-interest. So even if you do a self-esteem, you it's totally useless.
I got to just react to this and right now, because I can distinguish in myself, okay, this is what I want for me right now, based on my personal, emotional state of mind. And then this is what I want for myself because of the kind of world and country and state and family I want to live in. Right. And so to,
it seems to be kind of the point cause they, the eminent for today, this is a, this is the, it was stick game that someone called out for me, there's two different definitions of self-interest. One is interests of the self and the second is interest in the self and along the literature, glosses over those two different things.
So as I have a self-interest in, you know, uh, you know, being willing to pour out my life for my children and my things okay. That is an interest of the self, but it explicitly interests against the self where I willingly be cheated and betrayed and lied about in order to achieve this greater goal. And so it's worthwhile to distinguish those two kinds of things.
And, you know, the point is that, like, I think the big, interesting thing for me that I think so few minutes write about is a system that require voluntary participation because people see that they have an interest in the system. Succeeding is important, but the, to your point, like at some level it requires somebody to be willing to put aside their short term interests in favor of the long-term group interests.
Uh, otherwise you can not have any sort of, uh, trust in anyone. In fact, we do trust people. It's like humans have evolved precisely determined whether or not we can trust people to actually fulfill the obligations we have on them versus their short term selfish interests. Right? Well, and it's working, it's working quite well where there's voluntary exchange.
So I think there's a couple, this is super interesting by the way. And I don't, I don't have all the answers, but there's, there are a few reasons why markets don't have this problem. The first is, sorry, don't have the problem that you pose the problem that persists over time, which is so you're making a semantic distinction between self-interest and interest in the self.
So I understand that that exists, but there's two reasons why markets don't care. And the first is the price is an instantaneous scale. That arises from the collective desires of a bunch of individuals, including organizations. Right. Okay. Sorry. So you're saying that markets work to achieve what ends? No, the district D it's it's the distribution.
So liquid market with symmetric information, we'll, we'll find a market clearing price that optimizes distribution of scarce resources. Right. But the semester intermit information, isn't the point? I think the point point absolutely is no, no, it's not without a market without with asymmetric information.
Clearly, does that reach a clearing point and does not optimal? There's there's one there's hang on. Let's come back to this. So, so here's the nuance. So the nuance is if it is a free exchange, both parties, profits. So that means it's with full information. I got to put that caveat in there. I don't know if that's possible
periodically convinces my daughter when they were small to trade her $5 for $1. It was a perfectly voluntary exchange, but I hard, I have a hard time considering that being a fair exchange. Yeah. I can understand that. I think it's implied that this is uh, well, yeah, right. Uh, the libertarian myth of this difficult rational adult, right?
Cause the reality is, I mean, you know, most of the actions we take in America are voluntary to a greater or lesser extent. Um, but you know, there are all sorts of horrible decisions that people make under those things that are detrimental to their own. Self-interest right. And you know, you can to say that and you know, there's lots of market failures that occur because of it.
And I think my point is precisely that, um, you know, in a world of limited information and reasonably equal power, equally informed peers or market based on price is a great thing. It's a huge step up above feudalism and mercantilism. No question about it, but you don't have to look very hard either extensively at different edge cases or even intensively, any signal given transaction and say, you know, um, asymmetric information, asymmetric power leads to some really ugly suboptimal outcome.
I don't see any way you can avoid that fact other, unless you're reifying this concept of a market based on price. For some reason, I do not fully understand, well, I guess asymmetric information and asymmetric power are two very different things. The only reason I can't stomach asymmetric information is because the two parties in a transaction are going to have different perspectives on why they're doing what they're doing.
They wouldn't affect the trade if they did. So they value the same qualities. Right. And so I think what you're saying, but that's asymmetric utility functions, which is different than asymmetric information. Sure. It seems unlikely to me though. Let's let's give an example. Could you can, should the drug company reveal its patented process for creating the drug to you when you buy?
I don't know if they reveal all the side effects so that it revealed, I mean, that's a given, well, no, there is no given here, right? This is exactly the problem with a drug company pays for all the studies and they have an incentive to do that, right? I mean, this is why my friends or I have friends who are anti-vax because they don't trust the financial incentives of the people pushing vaccines, because they look at the companies, look at the history of them.
They look at the funding models, they will to all these failures of reproducibility and they say, why should I trust these people? I mean, it's tragic, it's horrifying, but it's not entirely rational. It's not entirely irrational and this is the thing. And I think it comes down to the Dunning Kruger effect, which is to say that.
Individuals lay people may overestimate their ability in a given domain like science. But when you add the Peter principle to that, the experts have all been put to work on science problems that are so hard, that they're wrong most of the time. And we've watched through the pandemic like CDC who Fowchee, they've all had to go back and forth.
So the lay person can rightfully look at what are held up. So there's honest mistakes of people who, you know, or imperfect information that is one set of problems, but there is a second set of problems, which, uh, like to me, it's like fundamental to trust in the system and the brokenness of markets, which I'm not sure you're willing to acknowledge, which is that if you have asymmetric information in many contexts, that gives you asymmetric power and allows you to impose, um, reality on your terms.
Right. In the olden days, when, you know, car dealers knew exactly what the price of a car was and the person coming in had no clue, right. They held all the power and they were able to, well, yes, yes and no. Right. Tar was explicitly taught to me in my high school, consumer economics class no longer. True. Now it is cabinet.
Then the daughter is that if you push a shoddy, good on a consumer, you are liable, right? The world is very different than it was because of the, the, the, the, because of Ralph Nader and UN, and these people who pushed for symmetric information exchange. And it's created a very different world and you can see a huge difference from consumer segments where that is true, like food and drugs and where it's not true, like financial products, right?
Yeah. Then the one I don't, I don't really dispute that. In other words, I don't have a problem with open information and we should get back to the main line. We should end on the main line, which is organizational structures. But that's the interesting thing is that this idea of a, uh, this idea of an enriched market to me is a really big deal because in the past, all we could agree on was price because that was the only shared semantic we had as a culture.
But now that we have shared somatics with things like calories or pollution and things like we have an enriched market that is able to, and the idea is that government should be in the business. I guess I'm pitching this as is the government. It should be primarily in a world where you actually have globally shared transparent non-reportable data.
It can change the game of government from Fiat use of force to enforcement of disclosure standards. And maybe that gets us most of the way to a healthier society.
I have no, I certainly think it's true that with better information, people can make better decisions up to some limit and the semantic limit. Might be closer to the paradox of choice, which is, you know, like, and in fact, Google found this in the interview process, they were putting people through these long marathon interviews, 10, 12 interviews.
And when we looked at the data, they realized, you know, after, after five interviews, their decision quality was getting any better. And I can certainly imagine cases, information, overload, analysis, paralysis, where too much information doesn't help. Right. But the point is, this is why you want to have a hierarchy.
Right. Is it like you have sort of a, this was, I think pretty much what your tool does, right. Is you want to have the lake where you gather everything and then when you have markets where you curate it up, but it's a scalable Herchel thing where you say, you know, Hey, this doesn't look right. I want to have the right, like the rights to drill down through the layers of abstraction that gets to the ground truth.
Yes. And I'll, I'll give you the hierarchical. Without the necessity. Correct. So, in other words, you, you have the right business application to just drill down into the lineage of the data. The problem is the data and it, to me, a data lifecycle is more of a horizontal than a vertical thing. So it's, it's less hierarchical.
It's just about, Hey, you know, what is my level of competence in its data? And what is our level of competence team? The hard problem, which I think we've left. And I apologize, we got off the main line there talking about economics, but the hard, I think the question set of questions that we need to ask. So first of all, we're all bullets, this concept of local alignment, okay.
Tribes, tribes, uh, business units, individuals, individuals can understand, they extensively understand their own personal semantics. They can turn their whole semantics into syntax successfully. Where do we go to some extent, my I'll be honest with you. Just to me, my internal alignment is at least as hard of a problem as social Alliance.
Figuring out what it is I actually want. And being able to articulate it to myself is actually in many cases, harder than it is getting a group of coworkers together to agree on something. I can understand that, but the machine is there to keep you honest, right? This is what the data unit tests, agreements that are, that are captured where I have a functioning system.
It's like exactly the questions where I have like, so I started doing unit tests on my site, right. I have a personal, oh dear God. I've never even thought of says, no, you've heard of these things too. Right? It's like I do a meditation to clear my mind and to say, am I part of that? Are there things that are troubling me either causing me thoughts that I can't bitterness, right.
Forgiveness? No, all these things are really unique. Personal devotional practices or medicine practices are unit tests for yourself. You're trying to create something syntactic and measurable makes sense. Right. Well, my argument is, Ooh, this is the idea is that the scale is almost irrelevant. What matters is having these syntactic tests in a codified practice that the interested parties can, uh, rally around
and that's a global level or individual that the psychic level. And let me interject a little bit here. Um, you were both talking about markets and systems and all that. I was thinking just more basic and like values and principles. And I was thinking of, you know, when do we need, uh, Autocratic leader versus what do we need a decentralized, uh, not leadership, but, um, working environment, whatever.
So I'm thinking of getting the, you know, the Stahlman the head of the new Linux thing, uh, who at the beginning he was, you know, he actually wrote code and, uh, you know, did all kinds of things to get that movement going right on the later years, um, uh, when the machine was, uh, you know, established and, you know, we had all kinds of different versions of, you know, Linux, you know, uh, again, uh, uh, well, don't forget he lost his power when Lynas built around the herd.
Right. Well it, yeah, but don't forget the computer. And the desire was literally written to describe how Lynise built an ecosystem when Stallman was trying to build an empire. That was very much the point where it's stalled and lost his power. But yes, yes. I guess that will be acid power, but the moral power or the, he still kept it until it was discovered that he was, or, or he was made clear that he had problems with young women or whatever, and then all kinds of, uh, all the people let's, let's, let's say that all the Linda's new distributions and programmers and conceivers were cats and they were, uh, going on in that in one year.
The direction that, uh, there's a self-interest or selfless influence, whatever it takes them, which is to have better computing for the world. Right. So they all believe in that whatever their interests were. I would say that there was, there were different interests. Some people were much more commercial.
Some people were much more libertarian, so people were much more anarchistic, right? There's different interests that people had. And before it was sort of this rallying point, which was lost. Yeah. But the installment, he, he, whatever he did, he kept his, um, like people are married him and he was like a guidance boy, whatever, until he kind of betrayed that personally, he didn't bring his values, his personal life sort of undercut, you know, the, the, the external.
And that's the interesting thing is that certain kinds of behaviors. In certain communities is sort of cuts across that. But even before I think it's important to note that the interesting thing to me is that the beauty of Linux is that, uh, it a survived, you know, escaped from the herd by, you know, basically clinics, repackaging, all that stuff in a different decentralized metaphor.
And then the community then survived the loss of Stallman. It did lose some cohesion and unity because it didn't have that rallying figure. Uh, but you know, and you know, this is a interesting thing, cause I think you have a lot of the same values, uh, that Stallman had an interesting question is, is okay.
How do you actually, um, do that without autism, without any of his annoying personality characters? Do you have another way? Oh, sorry. You have to go to apply those values that Solomon had hired, you have to codify them and then separate them from him, you know, and say, Hey, okay, these are values that Selma.
Have we believe in them? We need to separate them so that when he dies, whatever anything happens to him, we can continue. So there was this programmer. It wasn't, the rice RSS is a member of that super file system that people, oh yeah, this is great. But then the guy murdered his wife or something and it went away, the writer Fs, everybody went, oh, we cannot touch that.
They had earlier said, okay. Right. So you're perfect. You're a great program or whatever. You have great values. You need to separate those from yourself. Or he needs to separate these things from himself and put him in. Entity. So that editing that he does, you still cannot damage the, uh, uh, the entity.
That's what you have to do. You know, the, I think, I think I would say bit more precisely as the more effectively we can convert our internal analog semantics into externalized, digitized syntax or structure, the more survivable and extensible that system is. Right. And that's an actually fascinating design principle, which I'd never heard articulated before, but I think it's not just how rapidly it has to be effectively because if you do it too fast, I've had this problem.
Lots of people have this problem, like a founder who gives away 90% of his company without realizing what's truly important to him, you know, and it gets run into the ground by some acquisition or the VC. Right. So it is being able to wisely externalize. Your semantics into syntax to make sure that the best parts of what you aspire to are embodied in that and persist and that your personal weaknesses, and you just think proceedings don't.
And I think Alan Kay talks about this, where you want me to design for yourself at a deep level, not an idiosyncratic level. That is the thing that actually creates breakthrough design. And that's why very much actually the introspective interests, psychic problem of knowing yourself and knowing what you want.
And what is good about that is, uh, maps directly onto this external social construct. This is why I put you to through the zigzag, right? Ernest, to force you to dig through all the interests, like except for what you want to find it, externalized structure of something that we can hang on to that actually matters.
And, uh, you know, Hey, we've got a nice drugged into the conversation in both senses of the word. Hmm.
sorry. So in, in our lifetimes, the last decade, a masterclass in codifying your principal and making sure that the principals are stronger than your called the personality, that's the Toshi Nakamoto and his solution, by the way. And this, this would kind of be my reply to some of your points earlier about Ernie, about, you know, selfless versus self interested versus interesting in self action.
His solution was nobody not even me is trustworthy. I am disappearing. And the amount of self-discipline that that takes is, is truly staggering. He is worth if he's alive, something like $48 billion. Like the $45 billion, something in that has never spent a dime or movies down with that money than anybody knows, and is not active in the project.
And by the way, because it individual, it could be several people, right. But B was of his abstention because of his anonymity. And ultimately, what is the word I'm looking at his withdraw from the process only for that reason, is this system more resilient than any. B precisely because other systems can be sued and have a CEO who could be hit with a wrench, so to speak, you know, and, and his principles can be bent.
Now that's actually, it's this idea that you can create something that is, I mean, there's failure modes around that you need to have a Bitcoin council and you've got forks and things like that. But yeah, that is the, um, certainly the, the high watermark of an individual building a system that transcended himself so completely and transcended any other individuals clearly that is definitely hoping to aspire towards at least spiritually.
Well, here's the interesting thing. It point only has to count. In other words, Bitcoin is not at the semantic level. And I think we're asking the question of how do you do something like that with a summit to some Bitcoin.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't, I didn't understand you if Sirium is also asking that question is, can you do that? And it's a much more complicated product. It's definitely a much write and edit and there's different places we'll to solve that. And, but, but here's what it is an interesting thing. And the fact of the matter is, you know, we have another example of something where we managed to agree at a syntactic level, which is the internet IATF DNS, IP, et cetera, where there is the sense of this thing, which at least set a mentor really there's stuff that is not really under the control of anyone.
It's just part of our common shared culture and, you know, uh, many pieces of at work without any, uh, so we did find a certain set of semantics that have become globally ubiquitous. Uh, that allow us to do that's all FinTech. So that's all, that's the whole point. The whole point is it is, but it is much richer semantics than just counting.
Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. More, I wouldn't use the word some insecurities, it's a richer set of abstractions or the functionality you talked about, but like Bitcoin and money where like the small scaler thing, you know, certainly well, hyper dimensional scalar, if that makes sense. Yeah. But that's it. But there's also these vectors that we have found that also you can build these robust syntactic systems around things like names, right.
The domain naming system and addresses and like, it's, it seems obvious to me that there's lots of that in the world that if you can, and here's, I think the important thing is that, you know, prior to money. Or, you know, or I was just reading Neil Stephenson's Brook cycle, which is really about the development of chronology and the development of money and modernity as an emerging phenomenon and all this stuff that was happening.
And, you know, before that, like real money was gold. If you had a piece of gold, you know, it was worth its weight in gold, literally. And people would shave it in order to get these weights or whatever. And then you moved from that concrete instantiation as gold to a bank of England note, uh, was this convoluted process, uh, that took, you know, a century or two, but at the end of it, it's like, um, the people who figured out how to cement, how to, uh, syntactically create money right out of this big analog artifact, uh, took over the world, you know,
Because the paper is just purely paper now. Sorry, the reason. But the point was is that, you know, even thinking of money as a price, as an abstraction was an innovative way of looking at it, right? You have a market which had a clearing price, as opposed to just whatever you can bargain out of a merchant that was a novel innovation, you know, in the bad-ass or London or somewhere, right?
The things that the Milton Friedman was idolizing as this amazing thing that wasn't a given that was handed down from heaven. That was a social construct that emerged
what's the step of market clearing price. And it was a huge step forward. We did that.
It happened. That's different than we did it. And so let me explain what I mean, the price contains. Yeah. So the concept would be a market clearing price. That was not a thing that existed until we had a certain concept of a market. Okay. So before the market was this place where random vendors would come here and you would haggle with everybody and there was no market price until at some point someone noticed this phenomenon, put a name on it and built machinery around it and learned to optimize it.
And then they out-compete everyone else who didn't do that. Yeah. And, and what we would call an exchange as in a stock exchange, it's a very formalized version of that, where there's actually a single price broadcast to everybody. Right. Yeah. And that was very much a thing that, that, that emerged and then was then reapply.
Sure. And we did it once. Like it, human beings did it, maybe not a single person the way. But different communities over time did this thing. And that has enormous unlocked potential. It's like, well, we did it once for, um, you know, money. We did, uh, again for the internet, we did it, you know, sotoshi did it again for blockchain.
Like why can't we build a competency around doing this, more of learning, how to create these shared converting these shared semantic into, into syntactic exchanges. What is this though? So, so that is, that is my question. You were right back on the main line here. So, so what is the, this, so in other words, competency, in what compensate and turning shared semantic, achieving a certain that understanding, but as embodied in a functioning syntactic system.
Wow. And both of those are hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad this is recorded. Sorry, it's just one second. I'm glad this is recorded. Uh, there's one thing, I think small thing that's missing and I, what I still didn't where I got stuck and I think is, is an open problem for me, at least in photography is how we go from local linemen to global one.
And it seems to me that that isn't just piling up more and more syntax there's I claim that there's a clever twist required in there because if it wasn't, we would have syntax our way out. We need, sorry, go ahead. We need context. And, and that's a discussion that Ernest and I had, so , it's like uptick that serves as a mapping, uh, who, uh, you know, between two, uh, communities that speak that have a different culture.
Uh, for example, uh, gay people and straight people that's about that and the word marriage, right? There's a common meaning, but there's also not this, the meaning eight is like, uh, uh, published, you know, I, I wanna, I want to show the world that these person and myself are linked. Like, so, um, uh, that's the, the, the, the meaning that he has, but then it's got, it's got emotional.
Yeah. Emotional. Would have such an emotional way that people do all kinds of things to avoid it. When, you know, when it comes to like, uh, for gay people with the people's unions or something, but they rejected that term. No, this is not a civil union. This is a marriage because I wasted that a word. Yeah. So there's contact there's culture.
Speaking of context. Yeah, I think that's, that's, I think this is a great place to actually, uh, I'm going to have to bail and get back to my family context. Um, so I think this is a good place because I think the way I would phrase your question and he says, even if you manage to get some level of agreement alignment in a local context, how do you grow that to other contexts?
And I think that's the, uh, hard problem. Um, Uh, is that, is that a fair way of reframing your question anyway? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, that, that is, that is the good question that earnest is really pressing is like, okay, I think we have some understanding of what I'll call tribal alignment or tribal semantics.
Right. And in fact, a tribe is a group of people with a shared language organizations have a better chance. We see across business units, it's really painful, but it's doable because at least there's a shared corporate culture and you're in an autocratic figure at top. Right. This is the thing that makes it necessary to break ties.
Correct. Yeah. And here's the interesting thing is, is can we do it in a bottom up away with rather than a top-down way? And that is both a practical question I have for you in terms of, uh, using your tool and a great fall softball question for us to pick up next week. That's good. All right. Any last words?
Okay. Let's uh, um, I think we just another cliffhanger. No, no. I just want to, when it comes to reflecting and having examples of people that are imparting their values on their organization, I think Charles Hoskinson, you know, the head of Carano, uh, you know, we were talking about a whole lot of, uh, Bitcoin and Ethereum, but I think he is right now, he's the head of his, uh, the Cardinal movements.
Right. And he's taken all the shots people are, you know, before in the project, because it takes long. And you know, like you saying that it gives moving, um, milestones, but I see that as you know, we want to do this, right. We don't want to break, move fast and break things. We want to do it. Slow, methodical testing, testing, testing.
He's doing that. You know, betting against him and his companies and all that stuff, but he is taking all the, all that to himself. But then through that, he is kind of imparting all those values. So when, when he goes, they will stay with collateral, they will stay with that company so that the members remember what he did, what he is doing so that, you know, anything happens in the future.
They will, they have those things in themselves. Now we have to, oh, they have to make sure that they not only have them individually, but they haven't recorded some somehow. Right? So that they knew the newborns that 20 years, 20 years from now, they learn not just from the practitioners, but also from history.
They can see the history and see what Charles went through, what his philosophy of developing systems is. And they will keep that going. Uh, so I, I think civilizing and, uh, education and culture at all and legacy and all these things, which are literally how civilization is passed on in these ways. And we see how it works amazingly well in some ways and horrifyingly bad in others.
And this was the interesting question of can we do better? All right. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.