everyone this is Charles hoskinson broadcasting pre-recorded from warm sunny Colorado today's going to be a fun one always warm Always Sunny sometimes Colorado especially on the pre-recorded days so we have had a hell of a week it's been uh an interesting time and really the topic at hand is this concept of free speech and the rights of Cor operations the rights of individuals the rights to deplatform the rights to permit things and uh you hear all these terms like uh supporting Nazis or uh fire in a theater or anything like that and apparently all those who disagree with me are evil and must be deplatformed in order to prevent violence somehow the mere idea of letting a man speak or woman speak is so threatening that if we do the certainty of violence apparently it was free speech that led to the rise of the Nazis was World War I wasn't a crummy economic condition it wasn't the rise of fascism throughout Europe like Italy and other places like that it wasn't uh rampant racism in that society that uh had been pushed in the late 19th and 20th Century no no no no it was just simply letting people speak their minds even though actually people couldn't because there wasn't a guarantee of freedom of speech during the war Mark Republic or prior to that to the Kaiser uh that is what led to the rise of the Nazis it's a crazy thing and we kind of sit with these concepts of social media and we're being presented a lie a false dichotomy and the dichotomy is either absolute unrestricted complete Free Speech or controlled speech and the hypothesis is if you don't have controlled speech where some trusted third party usually self-proclaimed ruling by Fiat uh moderates the medium then uh you're going to descend and everybody's going to become a Nazi we're all evil we're all destructive we're all Bad actors violence is going to occur all these people are going to die and Society will completely collapse and they always use the fire in a theater thing when they talk about absolute free speech by the way you can always yell fire in the theater no matter what there's currently nothing that prevents you from doing that you will probably go to jail if it results in the loss of life or harm to others why because you incited a riot you're held accountable for the consequences of your speech yet you still have the capability of yelling it okay so let's talk a little bit about a third option something to get out of this false dichotomy you'll see this a lot in bad logical arguments especially by those who desire power or control over people or want to legitimize business models that are counterproductive to freedom and liberty these false dichotomies where uh either you do this absolutely crazy thing that's counterproductive or you accept that I have total control one or the other whenever you hear that you should be instantly suspicious it's a logical fallacy the reality is that when you talk about a social Network the whole reason these things work they're called a multi-sided market so you have a producer and a consumer okay and so you are the producer of information info and then your friends or other people who follow you who are socially connected to you they consume that information so the earliest multi-sided markets that we saw were things like eBay for for example and then we see with Airbnb we see with Uber and basically they have a middleman the platform provider and their job is to connect the producer and consumer and they also act as kind of a regulator of sorts uh of the producer and consumer so in the case of eBay uh consumer protections buyer protections seller protections uh Power seller ratings these types of things uh so you know who you're doing business with the case of Facebook well uh certain types of predatory profiles uh let's go ahead and remove like for example uh The 40-Year-Old creeper who lives in the basement that keeps sending friend requests to 11year old girls probably a good idea to look into that one that's probably going to result in a bad outcome okay so we accept that regulation of a platform makes sense and in small Comm unities usually the regulation of a platform is um not super problematic uh because if it's poorly regulated the community will die out if it's well regulated the community will probably have good information flow so for example if you're moderating telegram Channel or a Reddit moderator or something like that you kind of get a sense of what type of community is and it stays relatively consistent where gets problematic is when you start having interactions with the billions of people and here you have to figure out a little bit more you have to figure out uh H basically how to automate and then also you have to ask yourself what exactly are people doing what types of interactions are people doing like for example let's go ahead and have Alice and Alice give her a little dress actually let's give her a Blue Dress there we go go you can see those drawing classes really paid off let's say that Alice wants to share something so she wants to share a news article okay so uh let's say that uh there's a news article and the news article is the insur Insurrection Act of 1807 and how uh Trump has just enacted it okay now this is probably fake news I've been seeing it float around Twitter today and today is January 10th and a lot of people are saying oh Trump has initiated the Insurrection act and it's like the final cresendo of the kunon conspiracy and so forth all right so she wants to share that and she's friends with Bob all right so here's Bob and he sees in his news feed this article so first Bob has questions maybe he doesn't even know what the Insurrection Act of 1807 is okay and then there's a claimed event is that true or false and then there's a question about the credibility of Alice so in this type of a structure this producer consumer construction where you have Alice and Bob and Alice has pushed something where she's not the originator of that content there's an implicit statement that she's making if the only thing she can do is click a button and share about the veracity of the information okay it's the truthiness of the information how reliable is that is it made up is it true and really Bob is not in a position to really know too much about that so unless he has a lot of knowledge about Alice is she a conspiracies theorist is she very very discriminating in the things that she shares uh basically he's not in a position just on the origins of who shared it to know if that's credible and if the article is written in in a certain way and maybe come from a uh you know somewhat credible Source perhaps he's Ling to believe it so this is kind of the propagation of fake news and it can be indeed weaponized and the only defense right now if your system is completely uncurated and you allow people to share is that Bob in some way has to have and let's call it um a mind vaccine against fake news he has been inoculated with some sort of thinking skills Thinking Tools that when he sees something he can critically analyze it to a point where he is able to say oh that's fake that didn't happen but if Bob doesn't have that inoculation or if his immune system for this gets overwhelmed from many different sources then the issue is that Bob is eventually going to let one of these in and when it gets let in uh he's going to get either angry or paranoid or scared or he's going to share it himself to Jim and to Bill and to Jane and so forth okay and that's basically what it ends up happening in practice uh we see a lot of junk be spread on networks uh things riddled with confirmation bias things that have not been analyzed things that have been manufactured by uh uh foreign powers for the purpose of dividing people or attacking Truth uh it's a it's a pretty crazy Dynamics and there's numerous books and articles and scientific papers that are written about the spread of disinformation and the problem is if you're only Reliant upon the thinking skills of people receiving things those are only effective up to people's domains of competence and the quantity of information that they're exposed to on a daily basis if they continue continue to get further and further exposed over and over again just like an actual immune system uh the problem is at some point it folds and then it starts replicating and spreading throughout the network like a contagia so the platforms themselves can have a lot of power just on the tool sets that they give and how they allow people to quantify themselves uh to ameliorate this concern so what the LIE were being told when we go back to the uh controlled idea is that somehow the platform either through automation or a Mechanical Turk process is going to hire fact Checkers and then these fact Checkers are uniquely qualified and infallible and are somehow always going to look at these articles and be able to know that they're true or false or annotate them and label them now Bob had nothing to do with selecting those back Checkers he has no relationship with them didn't ask for them to be there apparently the platform as the regulator has decided to come on in and not only that they can attach social consequences to factchecking so if Alice shares too much stuff that they determined to be wrong then they just just get rid of her account altogether so you violated her terms of service it's an incredibly dangerous thing because fact Checkers are not God they're not infallible they don't have context especially if they're automated uh and what happens if they start viewing things that are political opinions as uh no longer just a difference of opinion but harmful uh fake news to their world Viewpoint huge problem so I think this entire model is puic at best and very damaging instead what you have to do is a much more bottomed up approach okay so first off you have to disting uh sourced and verified information from Anonymous okay then you have to create weights okay and those weights can be reputation those can be money uh those can be other things like work for example okay you can create all kinds of Weights that appear behind something okay so uh first was sourced and verified Bob knew it was Alice sharing it because let's say it was done on Facebook and that's a semi Anonymous semi non-anonymous system you can create a real life profile most people use their names but you still can create a fake profile now I did a prior video about dids in this concept of verified tweet but we are living in an age where you can create a verified legitimate credible kyc identity this would be equivalent to uh the blue check mark on Twitter or something like that so this concept of a uh verified account okay because impersonation occurs all the time we see this for example with giveaway scams in the cryptocurrency space where people share through social media all this very harmful content where they're trying to impersonate me or impersonate uh you know Steve wnc or Brad garlinghouse or somebody to basically convince people to send them cryptocurrencies and so the whole point of verification is that you know that the person sharing is real okay so verified is one and what are the sources behind it so if you already build into the system a strong differentiation between Anonymous sources Anonymous news so maybe when Alis shares something that was generated by Anonymous people or Anonymous people are sharing it that it appears differently in the guey itself so instantly when Bob is looking at it he knows it's in a different trust category okay so it's Anonymous and unverified now there's no fact Checker involves here it's just no one is willing to vouch for this particular information and you can have this in the granularity of the sharing EXP experience for the propagation of news so for example with Alice she can have different ways of sharing she could say share unverified and what this basically means is I don't vouch for this I have invented it myself I'm not willing to put any reputational weight behind it okay or she could say share and vouch okay so for example she could sign it with her dead and maybe there's a notion of uh some sort of social currency inside the system and she's willing to put some of that social currency at risk if it turns out that turns out to be fake so that's money you can even have a a rate limiting where she has to solve some form of a proof of work maybe use a vdf and has to solve that to create some weight behind this first to slow the propagation of things down and also to say hey There's an actual expense to sharing this particular type of information you can also share with a story okay so you can do things like you can add metadata to this for example I don't think this article is completely right uh there's some things that I'm as a domain expert uh aware of that were not mentioned here then there's obviously bias okay you could also share with request quests and that's where you say hey there's something missing here and maybe you guys can help fill this in for example maybe we can crowdsource vetting for example the other day I saw an article um and it looked legitimate but I still haven't verified it yet and it was that a town in Massachusetts has apparently banned uh from its curriculum The Odyssey now that would be a very deeply troubling and disturbing thing and I would have loved to have this option right here the share with request for crowdsourcing where I could ask people to come and annotate and give me the whole story and tell me a little bit more than what the article told me article looks credible but I don't know much about the uh publication itself and I don't know if I'm getting a very biased story are there alternative things Okay so this goes on and on and on and on there's many different options that you have when you talk about sharing things and it comes down to are you sharing unverified anonymously sourced Concepts and ideas are you prepared to put your identity reputation on this what are you prepared to vouch for the thing that you're sharing before it goes to Bob okay so that's one dimension is when Alice either creates something or she finds something and she wants to propagate it throughout her social network can you construct weights metadata challenges and Other Stories Behind that none of this is done at the moment in most modern social networks which is extraordinary to me because this alone would massively propagate uh the spread of misinformation disinformation and other such things you also can gain ify the ability to curate and get to the truth about things especially when you start crowdsourcing annotations to things for example you can have what are called uh bias pairings perhaps it's even uh more apt to call it a bias Tuple and what that's all about is let's say that you have a very biased article from CNN which tends to lean liberal these days well maybe on that same topic you can pair that with something from Fox News okay so now you have two viewpoints and you can call it a tuple because maybe you can do news One news two all the way through to I okay you can actually pair information together now what you can do if you have a monetary side of things some sort of a a token within the the system you can give incentives for people to link news together so instead of just having an article you have a news graph okay so you have your article in relation to many related news sources which in turn are related to their own sources and these vertices they have their own weights on them about what is the nature of the connections you can construct a graph database anytime a news article is shared and what happens is when Alice is sharing something if these things pre-exist what you can do is you can show her ahead of time the knowledge graph of where her article sits in relation to many other articles in the entire set okay and what's really nice is that if you have a good way of ically parsing things you can start using Ai and a lot of these different things and find some common themes and Trends and other such things and also you can get a notion of shallowness of understanding okay so we're starting to see this in certain social networks where they ask you did you really read the article before you tweeted it well if it's a 5,000-word article you spent 3 seconds on it you probably read the headline you don't really have a deep understanding of that or the graph upon which this lives and so forth so you can create rewards for people to pair ideas together especially different viewpoints and construct knowledge graphs and then there's all kinds of automation we can construct and being able to predict whether we actually understand what we've read and also uh the relationship of what we've read the uh to other elements of knowledge okay so it's a super powerful technique and Tool and this alone would uh moderate people tremendously why because you have idea flow we have this concept of confirmation bias and we have this concept of uh basically people living and Echo Chambers and so the problem is that people are only going to associate if left to their own devices with people with somewhat similar ideas to themselves and people are on average not always but most people when they're left to their own devices will actively seek information to confirm their biases versus information to the contrary we all do this no matter how good we are at thinking we don't this is a stand cognitive bias and you see it a lot with the antivaxer movement you see it a lot with dozens of human Endeavors okay if you start from a Viewpoint that somebody is bad or something happened you will actively disregard information to the contrary for example the election fraud allegations nothing the US government does no investigation the US government embarks upon will be viewed as credible so you can have a bipartisan commission come together you can have retired judges come out of retirement who are nonpartisan and conduct big investigations you can do all kinds of things the problem is the kind of conspiratorial thinking that's wrapped around election fraud has done so in a way that the very institutions that would conduct the investigation are assumed to be corrupt so any information they produce will be disre guarded and any information that shows their corruption will be overemphasized and you create a feedback loop that makes people more and more radical and more and more certain in the uh in the existence of a conspiracy and then when people oppose that even if those people were previously trusted they will then be exiled excommunicated because they've been co-opted or corrupted okay and this closely related to the dunan Krueger effect basically repe people believe they know more than they actually do and it gives them a false sense of confidence suddenly everybody knows about benford's law suddenly everybody's a statistician and knows that things are statistically impossible and have domain expertise that they really actually don't know suddenly everybody's an expert on every uh election system around and everybody knows how the voting machines work where those voting machines are the audit standards of the voting machines are wrong because they watched a video of something with limited context that's the spread of misinformation and because it's done in an echo chamber and there's no counterbalance to that it creates radicalization and it can be done for anything this is where ethnic cleansing comes from this is where rampant racism comes from uh you know if people are racist let's say against Latinos they're far more likely to share articles about MS13 they're far more likely to share articles about the negative consequences of illegal immigration certainly it's a social problem and there's certainly issues there and they need to be dealt with but they're much less likely to share an article about a positive thing that's happened let's say an illegal immigrant uh jumped off a bridge and uh saved a to to go into the water to save a drowning child they see that article they wouldn't even share it statistically speaking there's been thousands of studies about this in most major universities that think about these things over the last 20 years to show these biases at work it's why it's so incredibly important that you do bias pairing and you have tuples to ensure idea flow so whenever something is shared the system should create incentives for people to actively seek out opposing viewpoints or more nuanced viewpoints and share them together as a pair or construct a Knowledge Graph and if there's the absence of that and you notice that people are consuming only the same information again and again and again the system's algorithms should indicate that that's a failure inside the system now you know something none of the things that I've mentioned involve censorship of information none of the things that I've mentioned say that people should be deplatform none of the things that I've mentioned uh have said that uh basically there's certain forbidden pieces of knowledge that you are not allowed to see even if that knowledge is made up okay so far we're just talking about the structure of sharing the structure of consumption and a realization of biases see another thing you can do is you can incentivize people in the system to develop as I mentioned up here kind of a mind vaccine a mind inoculation a mind resistance Thinking Tools to consume information okay so in in essence you should have a checklist list when you share information and you go through the entire checklist is there confirmation bias okay is this person sharing it a domain expert or not etc etc and there's tons of cognitive fallacies you look at and the philosophers assemble them all the time human beings for example are very bad at at understanding exponential growth and what you can do is you can create Community curated checklists and basically say that if you go through this entire checklist when you're receiving a piece of information and the information passed you can also vouch for it and by vouching for that perhaps you give some form of Social Capital to the sharer the origins of it a Kudos so you see this a lot with like a thumbs up type of a system okay or thumbs down so you can create a far more elegant rating system and what you can do is you can certify and vouch information based upon how rigorous of the analysis that the information has you can even create bounties bounties where there's a reward for people to perform critical analysis of things and see if it passes we do this all the time in software security audits formal verification these types of things you can create thinking tool checklists Dan Dennett does a great job with that there's dozens of books that are written that explain uh how people's cognitive biases work and you can even create AI curation in this sense AI is becoming increasingly more capable of understanding context and parsing the semantics of things to a point where it actually can understand what you're trying to say what the AI can do because it has no biases you know not strictly true but doesn't have the human biases they can be uh absorbed through training uh but in general AI doesn't have an agenda other than the agenda we give it uh you can apply that towards these types of curations and then you can for high value information propagate bounties these other types of things okay and by the way all of this can be gamified it could be put into Fun experiences it's things that we can do to incentivize people to behave correctly and what you do is you say all right well the stuff that you don't do this for we're going to put into a special box and if you want to go parse that special box for hidden gems okay but more often than not the things that are sourced and verified the things that have weight behind it the things that are certified by some form of a community curation metric uh the things that we've actually invested some time in into and we've properly balanced and we've ensured there's idea flow it's also called social physics doing these types of things we're apt to be in a better place okay so what about banning what about deplatforming and these types of things well this is where you have terms of conduct and I think the reasonable way of approaching this is saying all right there are certain foundations upon which you shall never be restricted okay so if you're a member of the system you should be able to have your friends and communicate with your friends it makes no sense to cut people off because here's the thing if you deplatform somebody the Nazi doesn't go away they just use signal and they use increasingly more secretive and anonymous means of communicating with each other and then you have the Oklahoma City bombing predated Facebook by definition we were all theplatform domestic terrorism happens without social media radicalization happens without social media if you take them off the platform you're not solving the problem you're just making them more isolated validating whatever conspiracies they already believe in and radicalizing them more by having some baseline where they at least are there it gives you some starting point to work with Okay then you have a concept of communities and every Community has every right like an HOA does to have a terms of conduct so we do this for example with the cardono telegram channels so if they say this channel does not discuss trading information this is for information related to cardano that's not about trading and the appreciation or depreciation of value of ADA if somebody comes into that community and refuses to abide by that term of conduct what you do is you send them back you kick them out now did they lose access to the cardano Protocol no did they lose the ability to build things on the cardono Protocol no did they lose the ability to stake no did they lose the ability to vote no they still have those abilities because this is the Baseline it's a foundational thing you have fundamental rights as a holder of ADA to the be able to use the protocol and by possessing adaa those rights are guaranteed by code nobody has the power to come in and arbitrarily take them for you because they think you're a bad person however communities to function do require curation and by joining that Community you are signing up for that one of the problems we have right now with the platforming is it's not just the case where people have a communication platform and they're saying we're not going to let you advertise and use that platform they're being blacklisted and cut out of all of society okay so parlor is an example of this oh well you can always just compete with Twitter if you don't like Twitter's terms of conduct great that's what parlor did but then Apple and Google de platform they lose 100% of the mobile market the market that matters so now no communication can happen on iPhones or Google devices then their web host boots them off Amazon so now they can't even have a website okay so they were basically thrown away from the Baseline that's the equivalent of saying even though you hold data you should have rights we're just going to take staking away from you voting away from you your ability to transact the ability to use the protocol been put into a Sandbox okay that's too far but if parlor was allowed to compete with Twitter Banning somebody from Twitter would not be a problem because perhaps the speech viewpoints they have are acceptable on parlor okay and they can go in there and do their thing there and at least they have a a community that's accepting to them so for example in this example where I said hey this person is not allowed to talk about trading well it turns out that there's a trading telegram Channel there's actually several of them and they're by different entities and they're moderated in different ways so of course they can go there and say when Moon and these types of things there's a community for them no Community has dominion over the other no Community has power over the other and you're allowing people to communicate with each other so I think that there's a big difference between a baseline of functionality and community curation and if that Baseline if you go below it it causes harm to society as a whole gives powers to people that who shouldn't have those powers like the ability to pick winners and losers it creates a big problem uh you know I don't want a unilaterally hand to five companies the ability to decide who can stay in business and who can't imagine you being told you can't have a cell phone app you can't have a website and you're going to be unable to use any SAS product and okay go be a modern business it's just insane oh by the way you also can't have a payment process or or a bank account there's no way you would be able in a modern economy to survive as a business like that so effectively these terms of conduct have gone gone beyond the use of an individual service and they've percolated down to the Baseline saying you can no longer use the web of society okay that can't happen we can't allow that to happen and the goal here ought to be deradicalization so you take collections of communities that you know are not thinking productively and what you do is you engage you don't isolate and ban you engage to use the Nazi example back in the 1920s and 30s it was the lack of Engagement it was the demonization and uh their perceived persecutions in society that emboldened them to become more radicalized and militarized you see and so if somebody had the ability to penetrate into those communities and deradicalize them and demonstrate that the ideologies that they had and the viewpoints that they have are counter dve and need nuances they would have lost a lot of momentum and moral Authority it was then when they got bottled up and pressured up to a point where they felt the only recourse was to go into the most extreme Viewpoint and do it as a collective that's when they grab torches that's when they make bombs that's when they go crazy so engagement always is desirable over isolation never isolate uh crazy movements and philosophies uh it creates a lot of problems in the long term they get more and more radicalized and then they feel their only option is violence so removing people from their ability to communicate only legitimizes uh the um viewpoints that they have in their mind and then then what they'll do is go meet an uncle G's cabin in the middle of nowhere and talk about how to make a fertilizer bomb it's what they do okay so what the platform ought to do is have well moderated Comm communities and they do have terms of conduct and then have a concept of Engagement for people who can't fit into communities and create incentives in the platform for doing this deinen diviz the confirmation bias component and having bias pairings I think is one of the most powerful tools for that and creating Community expectations that ideas once shared they have to have work behind them they have to have vouching behind them and gamifying The annotation of content uh goes a very very long way because the kinds of things that will radicalize the crazy people inside a community will be absent of these things and it's very difficult for them to uh acknowledge that that absence is a a positive attribute they can't say well we can't do any knowledge prayer because only our ideas are valid no what ends up happening is that usually you have the most extreme of the extreme and then you have people kind of on the edge and the most extreme of the extreme only have a kind of a weakish hold on those people in the edges if you isolate these people they get pushed together if you uh disengage and if you engage them and and you give them an opt out and a process for Redemption a process to get out of that club what happens is that those people who have a weak hold will break free and then they'll actually become redeemed in fact there's a very famous guy and I forget his name right now but he's an African-American and he actively goes out to members of the Klux Clan an organization in America that hates African-Americans they're white supremacist and he engages them and he finds the the weak links and he breaks them and he convinces them to leave the Klux Clan and he's been so successful at this uh that he actually has uh a room in his house with all of the uh uniforms of former Clans members when they leave the clan they give uh their uniforms and so he has hundreds of them because throughout the years he's done that and the only tool he has in his tool bag is engagement he goes out and actually talks to people and he convinces them that their ideas aren't true an effective social media platform should have this capacity to lift people up it should identify which users inside the system are being caked into very siloed self-serving Chambers and which ones have good idea flow and are engaging with a diverse population The Silo caked units uh they need to find ways to build Bridges and connect them and these can be dramatic Affairs these can be subtle engagement these can be slight tweaks in algorithms and so forth the problem is the way that the algorithms currently work for most social media is that maximizing profit maximizing advertising maximizing the flow of information is usually around breaking people into silos and allowing those silos to become radicalized so in many ways the radicalization that we're seeing in the 21st century is a direct result of algorithmic malfant where the platforms themselves have been programmed and again I don't think the solution is deplatforming and Community Cur and uh top- down curation and anointing a collection of uh pre-selected fact checkers and so forth I think it's bottom up in creating marketplaces and actually uh the other thing is when we talk about fact Checkers and bounties you can actually create a Marketplace for fact checking okay so for example in the Twitter video I mentioned this idea that you do fact checking by installing plugins so you can still have a concept of a fact Checker in this entire set it's just an additional layer of cation so when we talk about bias pairings you can create fact check tupal okay so basically if you install one fact Checker you install alternative fact Checkers who have different philosophical viewpoints or standards and then you get the whole story you see the entirety of the factchecking so you see what PolitiFact has had to say you see what the blaze has had to say you know you see what I don't know the university has had to to say some Think Tank some NGO whatever and then maybe uh you know some person's opinion you know Bob's opinion or something like that but you get the totality of all these things you get these things and what AI can do is it can curate this in a way where you have common themes common things that all of these actors will agree upon uh some cases they disagree so fundamentally that you actually have disjoints for example uh you know the aliens didn't land in Roswell the aliens did land in Roswell right this is like one of those either it happened or it didn't happen type of a deals and you're going to have radically different opinions on that and where you have disjoints you have to have the presentation of evidence and then you look at this in a quality Viewpoint okay so it's not just good enough to anoint somebody as a fact Checker they must always show you the evidence that they're basing their factchecking and their methodology of analysis okay you say God Charles this is a lot of work well yeah it is a lot of work it's a lot easier just click share it's a lot easier just to click thumbs up it's a lot easier to click heart right but the problem is that if you don't put any work in then these systems are basically propag Anda machines Sovereign governments like the CCP the Communist Party of China uh and Russia and others in the United States uh they conduct what are called scops campaigns psychological operations happens all over the world Western governments and Eastern governments alike do it and what they do is they take advantage of the fact that we don't have a proper bag of tools and the social networks are not constructed in the right way to basically install div vision and convince people of things that are not true some cases they do it just to destroy the concept of Truth uh because the reality is that it is the single most coste effective weapon to damage a free Society here's the best example in recent memory a lot of the antia propaganda that's being pushed around right now is actually connected to China and to Russia why because they understand that in the Western World Germany the UK America Canada all these places if they absolutely convince you that these vaccines are going to change your DNA and kill you and are super problematic you're more likely than not going to not take it the longer that uh our economies go at a low vaccination rate the longer they're going to stay shut down so it's a super cheap weapon because you can cause billions if not trillions of dollars of economic damage by having the pandemic last longer than it should have without ever firing a single bullet and maybe a few million dollars of investment in a scops campaign writing some Bots strategically posting things in certain forums making some videos having third- Party Services get the funding that they need to be able to continue spewing propaganda and so forth now let's say you are an antivaxer and you really firmly firmly firmly firm believe in that concept I'm going to ask you some tests did you actually look for alternative viewpoints did you come up with some mechanism and methodology to systematically analyze what you believe you know did you go ahead and go through a whole checklist of things are you a domain expert in vaccinology and biology do you have a lot of experience in that okay did you actually be honest with your take the time to really dig deep or did you watch a few videos on YouTube read a few articles these types of things and yes it's absolutely true that vaccines have killed people and it's absolutely true that some vaccinations have resulted in all kinds of havoc in people's bodies but are you intimately familiar with proportionality in the numbers about how many people have actually been injured and how much damage has actually been done relative to the benefits also if you are citing data from the 1970s and 1950s and comparing it to today are you making the statement that we haven't had 70 years or 50 years respectively of progress in medicine to be able to fix that problem you know I'm not telling you what to believe but what I am saying is that there's a process that you have to go through before you should feel so certain in things that you're willing to make life and death decisions based upon it and what you'll find when you leave the cave and you start taking the veil of propaganda off is that a lot of the things that you believe firmly are actually on very shaky foundations and the reason why you believe these things is because we have cognitive biases human beings are very bad at dealing with uh things like exponential growth they're very bad at dealing with things that are far far out there we tend to have an availability bias um and so that's not your fault it's how a human brain is constructed and it turns out the work you have to do to get out of that mindset is extremely difficult and even professionals fail all the time many doctors because of cognitive biases got diagnosis wrong uh many professors because of their own biases teach things that aren't true or are highly biased okay media takes advantage of this social media is no different nation states are no different they understand these things and employ people with phds and psychology who study these things to purposely engineer information in a way that it propagates it becomes memes and it disarms and co-opts you to a point where you spread it just like Bob is going to spread that information to Jane and Bill and Jim okay if we're actually going to survive social media we have to understand that these networks can be both tremendously beneficial and Incredibly harmful to society what we witnessed January 6 with the capital was an example of a harmful event but by no means is it the most harmful in fact far more bad events have occurred and the only way we're going to get out of this is not by handing all of our power to fact Checkers and to the platforms themselves it's by a balanced multimodal approach a multimodel approach where we have many things we have to come together we have to share information in different ways we have to share information in context of alternative sets of information we have to create incentives for people to do things we have to label things in different ways about what we've personally verified we're willing to vouch and put our reputation or money or work for to share versus what we haven't vouched for we have to create marketplaces for factchecking where people can actually make money doing that create a market system for it and then pair them together so that you get many different viewpoints we have to slow down our reactions to things that we see and we have to always be asking what is the evidence and remain professionally skeptical and then when we construct communities we have to accept that there's a difference between the terms of conduct for that community and the use of the system in general in the ability to associate with people I do not believe ever that your freedom of Association Commerce or expression should be restricted just because you happen to have wonky ideas or be a deplorable person I do believe however that people have the right to not be around disagreeable toxic people and if you're a disagreeable toxic person then you have to then be put into the box now if you're in a collection of people Society has an obligation to break that collection up if you're an individual the isolation and Exile alone ought to be enough to be able to moderate the behavior because human beings have a desire to belong in certain cases it's not and then other things have to be done but you should never look at a group and vilify an entire group so for example in America 74 million people voted for Trump I have seen I counted them today 19 articles in my news feed equivocating those 74 million people to be white supremacist Nazi sympathizers how do I live in a nation where almost half of my nation has just been called a sympathetic to one of the most evil movements of the 20th century I'm willing to wager that the people who wrote those 19 articles don't know all 74 million of those people don't know what's in their hearts don't know how they think their motivations maybe there was one person in that group that just didn't want their taxes to go up that's the only thing they cared about but apparently they're a Nazi you cannot live in a society where you do these types of groups and divisions and expect that Society to have good outcomes you truly wish the label people things before you do that you need to engage them and give them a chance talk to them and if you have a properly functioning social media system it should have built within it the capabilities to do that and the good news is that our blockchain space actually has a lot of tools pre-built in so for example uh throttling of information spread you can do that with proof of work we can create currencies and we do mechanism design which is incentives engineering all the time we build reputation systems all the time dids enable real life identities or aliases with reputation metrics behind them to propagate the pairing of idea flow and the construction of knowledge graphs this can easily be done with blockchain technology in fact many entrepreneurs in our space are looking at these things and thinking about how to do and accommodate these things but there's a more meta thing regardless of what the tools are it's a duty that falls upon each and every one of shoulders the people who disagree with us are not often evil they just have a different Viewpoint and they perhaps have different values and understand that when people have different values you're not going to agree on a lot of Common Grounds because they're looking at a problem from a very different Viewpoint and so you're both right and you're both wrong in that setting so the old only way you can ever get beyond that is to have empathy for their values not necessarily acceptance or sympathy but empathy in that you understand where they're coming from and if you don't spend the time to understand where they're coming from then you're never going to accomplish anything there's a large chunk of the people in that 74 million who voted for Trump who honestly believe that globalism is killing the United States and they have ample evidence for that there are ghost towns in the midwest whole bunch of closed factories we're getting systematically poorer and the wealthy super classes many of which happen to be Democrats uh they keep getting richer and richer and richer and richer you know for example Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and these others uh they say oh we should have higher taxes and oh yes we do agree with all these liberal viewpoints but then somehow some way their wealth doubles when the rest of America is being hurt these are not isolated events and I'm not blaming or saying that they're caused by any one particular actor but as a block if this group Witnesses this and they see that an elite class is getting more powerful and Wealthy while they're getting poorer and feeling that they've been given the the the stick for globalism they're probably as a political Coalition going to be deeply angered by it it's just the same with the context of the rise of Nazism none of these things happen in isolation you have to look at the context of society as it was back then they just lost the world war a lot of people in the country believed falsely that the war was still winnable and that they were betrayed by their government uh there was an unstable economic situation a lot of people who used to be rich were now poor a lot of very angry veterans who felt that they had been shafted and there was also a dangerous ideological movement where communism was seeping its way into Germany and they saw the bulvik Revolution in Russia succeed and so many people believe it would eventually be successful in the whole of Europe and so people when they were looking to an inept government and had a lot of anger were willing to engage actors who were promising them a way out doesn't condone or excuse their behavior but you have to have empathy and context for what has occur heard and understand that people aren't monoliths just like that gentleman does when he goes and engages members of the clu clux Clan many of the members of the American clu clux Clan they didn't go and sign up at the airport they were born into that environment their father and grandfather and great-grandfather were members of that organization they were radicalized since birth that's what they know and where they exist it's just like most people with their religions most people who are Christian are Christian because their parents are Christian most people who are Muslim are Muslim or Jewish are Jewish because their parents were Jewish they inherited these beliefs reinforced from the earliest days they can remember and through ritual and ritual and ritual and what ends up happening is that as we grow older we get more life experience we start realizing that maybe we don't agree with all the orthodoxies our parents have inflicted upon us and we start drifting a little bit and that's what those weakly links are all about there will always be radicals and hardliners and fundamentalists and they do exist and it's damn near impossible to get rid of them completely but at the very least you can diminish that so if people had empathy and they actually walked into what these 74 million were saying they'd realize they agree with each other more than not and the same for the 80 million who voted for Joe Biden in the United States uh there's a lot of empathy one can have there too in fact many of the problems that the 74 million are complaining about are the exact same problems that the 80 million are complaining about both sides have an issue with fairness both sides are saying the system is rigged and they're seeking a resolution of that the reason why they're not agreeing and having a Kumbaya moment is first there are synthetic divisions that are created amongst them because it creates power for people divisions are usually created for the purpose of power but also they have different values a lot of people on the other side are looking at empowering government entities to have the ability to rebalance the scales and they call this the Justice movement they say we have to take these entities that have been purposefully in their View depowered and re-empower and reinvigorate them put diversity within them and then push for social justice and economic Justice and racial Justice and rah rah rah all the way through and then on the other side they say well if we increase freedom and uh make the markets fair and get rid of the cronyism and corporatism then what will end up happening is that that will enrich people and once we've enriched people people can find ways to carve out their own fairness for example the wealthier you are the harder it is to oppress you because people are fearful of attacking people with wealth and power so they're more likely to treat them with respect and fairness or at the very least not attempt to oppress them because they can shoot back they can punch back it's just like a protest if all the protesters are unarmed you're much more likely to shoot rubber bullets and tear gas at them if the protesters are all armed you're much less likely to shoot rubber bullets and tear gas at them because they might shoot back at you right so these are different values that exist one is this belief of self-determination and the ability to build things yourself grow yourself and Achieve wealth and prominence the other is saying that the system will not allow you to do that and therefore we need to empower some entity to balance things now again I'm not taking a position or side but empathy demands that we try to understand where people are coming from and I I haven't done an adequate job of really iron Manning the arguments on both sides I'm just using it in the interest of time as an example if you have an effective information curation and sharing platform what it can do is create a collective empathy amongst its members and that Collective empathy is the emergent property that you're looking for we may not agree with each other we may not share the same values but we at least understand each other in a collective empathy encourages engagement and the more engagement you have the less radicalization you have and then you'll see an Ever diminishing amount of violence more friendships form and uh more people happy about the outcome we don't have that with social media and the deplatforming and criminalization of thought is not going to accomplish that in fact it's quite the O opposite it's actually going to pull people together and it's going to take chunks of these people and make them very very very angry to a point where they feel their only recourse is with violence because there's no other Outlet can't vote their way out of it they've been delegitimized and so forth and that's the direction Society is heading I firmly believe our industry actually has a great toolbox because we can do the incentives engineering we can marry AI to these systems we can really reward good evidence we can reward good productive sharing and of the things I've mentioned here for example with how Alice shares information and how Bob curates and these are just a small sampling if we were to construct a social network there's probably 50 or a hundred Tools in that tool bag that we'd have to pull out and there's people at Stanford who study this there's people at MIT who study this there's a lot of papers that have been written Cornella has some great people as well uh that I think can be tremendously productive um you can encode with terms of conduct there's like a nomic game where the players evolve the rules you can do that with a curated Community there's some cool really things you can do there you can incentivize engagement especially engagement with people are radically different from you and the end goal ought to be that we're creating Collective empathy built on a basis of good idea flow if we achieve that then we get wisdom we grow as people because it turns out that some of the values we hold are not so good and it turns out that perhaps other values ought to be adopted and you start caring about people even if you oppose them and even if you're on the other side you feel a respect for them and a desire to have them around and so as a consequence you want the best for everyone in the system and that EMP empathy will be re will be reciprocal the other people will start caring for you that's the highest art of a a well-ordered and well functioning Society is the ability to forge Collective empathy develop wisdom and care for each other even if you don't have a strong reason to do so okay so those are some of my preliminary thoughts it's a very big topic there's a lot to do here I've undoubtedly pissed some people off uh by how I've labeled some things or talked about vaccines or things like that and if you feel a sudden visceral anger over anything that I said here you are probably the victim of propaganda and you're probably not responsible for that it's been installed in you through an exterior Source I'm just talking about process and I'm just using this as an example of how you can be manipulated we all are manipulated myself included uh by people for power whether that be uh nation state power or it be economic power whatever it may be people do this all the time you know the evil of trump was that he built a relationship with a lot of people 74 million people at the very least and a lot of these people are great people who have been given a very bad hand imagine being born into a family where your father is a meth addict and um your mother is on her fourth marriage and there's mental and sexual abuse there imagine if you have family members who have mental illnesses imagine if you went to war and you came back with severe disabilities and every day you feel like no one cares about you what Trump was able to do was that he found elements of society that he calculated were underappreciated or effectively on the fringes and he unified them and created a coalition with them and said I am your guy I fight for you and I'm going to give you a voice and so when people attack Trump for those people who were in The Coalition it was not an attack on Trump just like when people were attacking unlike for example when people were attacking Bush uh or Obama there wasn't that same level of kinship where it say oh well they attacked George Bush never once uh did any Republican say well they're attacking me no attacking Bush but with Trump they took it personally because they said this is the first time ever in my life or one of the few times in my life that I've had real power at the highest level of power now with that Coalition this man could have done a lot he and some cases he did do some great things like he exposed the hypocrisy of the political class and the collusion between the right and the left in the United States where they said a lot of stuff but they didn't really mean a lot of the things that they said and they worked together a lot more than they' let on and the things that they work together on are some of the most destructive things in America like the Warfare culture of the United States where we've been constantly at War somewhere in the world for decades and decades and decades and they've effectively disarmed the peace movement and depowered them uh for monetary reasons so there was some great exposition of malfant behavior with that Coalition being an outsider but when you're a leader of a large group of people especially people who have been disenfranchised and marginalized you have a moral responsibility to lead them well and lead them with integrity and to fight for a higher truth and a higher principle and what always happens with these people who gain so much power so quickly is that it becomes less about who they take care of and the principles upon which they were pushed into power and more about how do they preserve that power for themselves if Trump actually honestly believed that there was election fraud then the solution for that would have been using his gigantic bully pulpit instead of trying to preserve the presidency to go and fundamentally change the way that we elect people in the United States and because he's loyal to a higher principle uses considerable financial resources and that coalition to go and change every ballot in every place in the US and expose the corruption hypocrisy this act alone would have set up his children to run for president in just eight years 12 years time and he would have had the strongest political Coalition since Ronald Reagan to ride into that instead he chose to spend what little time he had left in office complaining that an election was stolen from him damaging the own political party that he co-opted to gain power and disenfranchising all of his political allies and becoming Persona nrata this is not the act of a person who seeks higher truth and principles and movements it's the act of a narcissist I've called him the orange Goblin many times and I've been very critical of trump many times now some cases I do have conservative values or libertarian values and so unfortunately people are so radical I alized and propagandized that they feel that because I have those that I must support people that I don't I've never been a supporter of trump I find him an thoroughly distasteful human being but I have empathy for the people who follow him and I have no umage against the people who follow them some of the people in his Coalition are the most abused and trivialized and hardoff Lifestyles across the United States uh they're the oil rig workers they're the ex-felons they're people who have really had a hard time and I understand how difficult it can be for them and I have tremendous empathy for them and I understand why they felt a guy like Trump was their guy because frankly Mitt Romney is not Jeb Bush is not Hillary Clinton is not people who go to Harvard people who are born into families with hundreds of millions of dollars people who have come from political dynasties where there are generations of people who have held powerful office will never understand the pain it is to go and be a rough neck on an oil rig or fight in a war as an enlisted Soldier and come back with broken hearing and burns over your body and traumatic brain injuries uh to find out as you come home from war that your wife is cheating on you and go through a brutal divorce and find out that the divorce uh laws are are not so much in favor of men I'm so sorry you're just not going to have that kind common shared experience and for whatever reason Trump had this unique superpower to convince that group of people that somehow he understands that despite the fact that he's none of those things and he comes from the same Blue Bloods as everybody else and because he built that Bond there's that loyalty there call those people Nazis is a disgusting despicable thing they're Americans and a lot of them were related to some of them were married to some of them are family members some of them are us and we're never going to get anywhere unless we develop a collective empathy and for the first time in human history social media actually gives us a superpower to do that if it's constructed correctly so this is the great challenge of the 21st century and if we fail this test what we will be doing is weaponizing this technology to empower totalitarian governments and dictators to preserve power and divide Us in ways that were unimaginable just 50 years ago if we succeed this test then suddenly as a society we're going to evolve develop a lot more wisdom and start caring about each other in ways that we never thought we would and learn things in ways that we never thought we could and so Society will get better so it is the test of our time and I'm glad that my industry intersects with it and I hope you found this video as useful as I found making it if anything perhaps it's a little therapeutic to know where we're at and where we could go and again if I've offended you then really think deeply about why and really think deeply about where your beliefs come from and try to have some empathy about where I'm coming from I don't have all the answers I'm just one guy and no matter how brilliant or lack thereof uh or how confident or Justified my confidence may be I'm just one person and this is the way I view things and I think it might work but at the end of the day this only can work if we can find a way to understand each other and view things with some common frame of reference so if we at least accomplish that maybe we will get it done thanks for listening
