Love, Bryan

PS - Roo Code with Claude Opus is pretty cool. I had it make me a greasemonkey script to extract article data and publish it to NOSTR. I’m still testing it out, but I’ll tell you about it when it’s ready.

Again, we all do it. Don’t act like you’ve never swore at somebody in traffic. Don’t act like you’ve never called your political opponents four-letter words. Don’t act like you wouldn’t love to be able to write a name down in a notebook, and see that person drop dead in the exact way you write.

That’s judgement. We all do it, but some of us do it better than others. (I’m looking at you 🫵, asshole!)

Just kidding, but you get my point.

When you do it, you’d better have good explanation for doing it, because it has consequences for those who get judged. I try to live by a set of moral principles, and I’m frequently bad at it. So grace is important too. Probably even more important than the principle of trying to evaluate objectively.

Plenty of people have judged me. Sometimes wrongly, and sometimes to an egregious degree. But also frequently correctly, because we can all be assholes sometimes. The only question is whether we’re assholes all the time. Because some of us are.

Some people are acting with malice, and relying on our generous propensity to give grace to sinners. Some people use words that they intentionally redefine to suit their needs. Some people are manipulators just trying to recruit you to their smear campaign. Some people are resentful of those who have it better than them. Some people say different things in private compared to what they say in public. Some people are using others. Some people are shirking their responsibilities to others. But none of this makes them evil.

If we classify people according to their moral disposition, I would say there are three types of people: garden-variety sinners, the wicked, and the evil. But which is which?

Most people are garden-variety sinners. These people are self-acknowledged imperfect people, striving in vain for perfection that can never be attained. I would say these people are good people.

Wicked people are those who are not actually trying to be good. It’s not that they’re evil, it’s that they “know” themselves to be good, so they don’t listen to you when you say, “Ouch, that hurts!” I’ve seen it so often that I’m not even sure they have the ability to hear words which implicate them in often minor ways.

It’s not a big deal if somebody accidentally steps on your toes. Most people offer a quick apology, and it’s like it never happened. That’s what good people do. But what if, instead of apologizing, they instead said, “Watch where you’re going!” You may infer that this person may not care much about others. If a person who wrongs you can immediately rationalize away their guilt, that person is wicked.

But how often can it happen and still be an “accident”? Two times? Five times? Twenty times? What is your threshold for determining that somebody who is “sorry” is not actually, in fact, sorry? Maybe the third time somebody mashes on your toes and says, “Sorry! 😏” with a shit-eating grin— you should go ahead and realize that this person is not looking out for your interests, and is in fact bent on your destruction. That’s evil!

Now maybe you want to point out that this is not a very detailed framework for defining and quantifying evil, and you’d be right. But the point is that we all have ways of identifying evil. We all have a sense of what is moral. Some of us believe morality is objective, and some of use believe it is subjective, but we can all define what is and is not moral, at least to some extent.

We have families, court rooms, religions, clubs, organizations, and everyday garden-variety sinners all telling us who is right and wrong, and why. We do not lack the will or ability to judge others. We do not lack the frameworks to judge others.

But when you look in the mirror, I doubt you say, “You judgmental asshole!” I’ll bet you think you’re a good person, and it’s all those other assholes who don’t have the decency to feel bad about who they are. I bet you stare at yourself in the mirror, and become slightly aroused by your own perfection. I know that’s what I do.

And that’s really the problem. Most people aren’t willing to take an honest look at themselves. Most people are so convinced of their own righteousness that they’re probably not worth listening to. And if all you do is complain about all the bad people in the world, people correctly start to believe you’re one of them, and tune you out.

Because until you’re willing to be honest about your own capacity for evil in this world, people should not trust you. I encountered evil at a very young age, and I was forced to contemplate whether I was capable of murder. I am. And by the way, so are you. Only after you acknowledge your own capacity for evil can you keep it in check.

But it’s not easy to admit, at first. When you learn about your own nature, it can be downright scary. How could I even contemplate such a thing? Doesn’t that make me evil? I would argue it’s a fact about me held in common with the entirety of humanity. No matter what you believe about yourself, you are human and I know that much about you.

Generally, if you’re not held accountable by others, your capacity for wickedness will increase to fill the space available. So how can we hold wicked and evil people accountable for their actions without entangling good people along with them?

We already have frameworks for judging the actions of others. What we lack is a set of facts held in common. In fact, wicked and evil people depend on it! They thrive when they can defeat transparency. Their power grows when your ability to speak against them is limited. They win when they can discredit you with lies you’re not aware are being told about you.

Therefore we must establish a set of facts held in common. Right now we can do that with writing. Speech is how we help to establish those facts. But wicked people can simply avoid engaging in good faith, or engaging at all. Evil people employ lies. So how can we avoid such things in our commonly held facts?

Courtrooms employ a standard, imperfect though it is, that could be emulated or improved upon. Or overhauled. The point is that we don’t lack the will or ability to change how judgments on people are adjudicated in this world. Instead we lack the infrastructure to bring evidence, testimony, and judgements into a common space where everybody can see the codified rules of engagement.

That is a solvable problem.

I aspire to be less wrong. However, in world of propagandists and censors willing to lie to score political points, this is increasingly rare.

Why?

As my favorite whipping boy points out, this problem is fundamentally about economics:

But there is one other sort of cost asymmetry that I do think favors misinformation. It’s about public vs. private goods.

Some people may spread misinformation as a hobby or a political signaling device, but many people are doing it for personal gain. Antivaxxers have blogs and podcasts to promote. Propagandists serve their nation or movement. Corporate shills are collecting a salary, academic frauds get tenure, and so on. For all of these actors, spreading misinformation is a job rather than a hobby. It confers direct financial and/or reputational benefit.

In other words, where economic incentives favor fraud, it will bloom! (EDIT: For a more in-depth look at how public goods are defined, see “The Continua of Excludability and Rivalry”. Just subscribe to everything Bryan Caplan!)

For example, if you know that inflation is actually “fiddling with the unit of account”, but you make your living telling people that inflation is a mysterious phenomenon that you’re probably imagining anyway—people should rightfully suspect you of misleading.

The problem? They don’t!

And how could they? Noah Smith is an excellent writer! He has a ton of education and experience! He has excellent reasoning skills! And, aside from a curious blind spot for the moral hazard of printing dollars, he seems to be a nice guy!

It is simply too difficult for the average shlubbs of the world to see propaganda and shoddy work for what it is. It requires the integration of too much diverse knowledge to be reasonably practical for almost anybody, particularly those with lower incomes and less free time.

Fortunately, we are on the cusp of a major innovation in information technology that will flip the incentives in favor of good faith by making deception—of every kind—so risky as to be rendered obsolete.

NOSTR (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is a new internet protocol that is the first elegant solution for defeating information gatekeepers while allowing for the wonderful benefits of social networks. Right now our information networks are distribution-centric rather than information-centric. In other words, most people are forced to read whatever journalists and editors decide to write about, rather than whatever may be in demand. To be sure, competition helps over the long term, but the economic paradigm still favor centralization.

That is about to change.

In a world where trust is routinely abused without consequence, the disruptive potential of passive information sharing among trusted peers cannot be overstated!

Passive information sharing, or rather, private knowledge bases are the necessary innovation here. Remember, most people don’t have time to do research because we have jobs and such, which makes it easy for bad actors to get away with lying, even pathologically. And once you’ve bought into something like flat-Eartherism, the in-group-out-group mentality is likely to trap you there, even if you Think Again.

But if you are part of a network with disproportionately high-quality information, like Substack, you will be able to reap the benefits of your network’s knowledge without having to know it yourself. For those in the rationalist community, I believe this represents an opportunity to codify Double Crux protocol.

Imagine a world in which you can trace the lineage of each and every idea! Imagine a world in which redefining words to bolster bad faith arguments can no longer hold sway! Imagine a world in which the “social contract” can be codified among a Network State! Imagine a world in which you can search your friends’ “brains” without even talking to them! Imagine a world in which your employer must pay royalties to access your knowledge after your departure! Imagine a world in which you can *immediately* integrate a new knowledge base by hiring someone! Imagine a world in which AI can be trained on information that is known and agreed upon!

How?

Every word you read here has associated meta-data, even if it is only implied. The previous sentence is both a declarative statement, and a factual assertion that can be tested. The words within each sentence have (presumably…) an agreed-upon definition. Everything qualitative can be made quantitative, and then aggregated. That means we can do magical things like count up factual assertions, how many have evidence, and ultimately, how many are correct! And other fun stuff like track the quality of work over time, and rank journalists and publications accordingly. Not only that, we’ll be able to overlay corrections IN REAL TIME, and pay journalists for exposing truth! Whistleblowing could become very lucrative!

All of this—and more!—will be made possible by the native data model of NOSTR, which can be expressed in a graph database.

The free market is about to regulate the information economy.