In this series, I'll be sharing my own highlights from Eric Jorgenson's book "The Anthology of Balaji", which presents a curated collection of transcripts, tweets, and talks by Balaji. Content from the book is presented as-is, without any editing or interpretation on my part. My goal with this blog is to provide a useful future reference for myself and possibly for readers. I hope to create a valuable resource with this post.
MY HIGHLIGHTS
THE TYPES OF TRUTH
Most people do social diligence; Only a few do technical diligence.
Determining the type of evidence people accept is as important as knowing their incentives. Some take data , but many accept only popularity.
In theory, we could all just trust computer science. In practice, those who can't code will fallback on trusting in a computer scientist. Decentralizing truth-finding means enabling as many people as possible to do the math themselves.
SCIENTIFIC TRUTH
Only trust scientific truth what can be independently verified.
I have thought a lot about what a crypto sci-hub could look like. It might align incentives so publishers earn money by making all their papers open online. I'm all about aligning incentives if at all possible. If we can, that attacks the problem at its base, because our entire society is based on "science".
Every statistics is a numerical distillation of a raw data table. Ask for that table.
I see a strong correlation between lack of technical ability and naive trust in social authority. The only true authority is raw data .
TECHNICAL TRUTH
Technical history is the history of what works; political history is the history of what works to retain power.
POLITICAL TRUTH
Politics at its root is about tribes, not truth.
In politics, there is almost never an incentive to tell a truth that could annoy your tribe. A truth that leads to your tribe suffering a disadvantage is a truth that goes untold.
Journalist Michael Kinsley says, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth - some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."
We select people who win popularity contest, the wonder why they're bad at allocating scarce resources.
The monopoly on truth is upstream of the monopoly on violence.
Popularity doesn't equal truth.
Argue with signal sources, not signal repeaters.
Everybody has strong opinions about people they've never met, based on tales told by people they do not know.
We have a huge problem in every area where social consensus determine truth. Its much, much deeper than people think.
Is it all a social construct ? Well, then, that means we can construct society.
ECONOMIC TRUTH
Finding truths in a decentralised environment is important.
More verifiable economic information enables more complex economic alignment.
Crypto is turning the world into investors, just like the internet turned the world into publishers.
CRYPTOGRAPHIC TRUTH
The blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of the writing itself.
You can't delete history anymore.
The "ledger of record" is essentially the integration of these crypto oracles.
Crypto oracles are more important than people think. Today its global consensus on price history; tomorrow its global consensus on history.
Without cryptographic truth, there is only blind faith. Show us the time and proof-of-work chain, it will take a while, but eventually immutable timestamped recording of almost every significant human event will be generated. Then the highest truth comes not from the faith in GOD or trust in state, but from the ability to check the math of the netrowk.
Future societies may think of the year 2022 AD as the year 13 AS, with "After Satoshi" as the new "Anno Domini" and the block clock as the new universal time.
You have a digital history, an unalterable history, everybody can know what happened when.
PROTECTING THE TRUTH
How to change the world :
- Discover the facts.
- Acquire scientific distribution.
You need to learn how to make media clips and moview, write, publish, direct, encapsulate, build relationships, and build political coalitions, you need to learn how to fight.
We need to have decentralised sources of truth. We need to have statistics that do not come from guys in their basements making things up. This is very very important.
We need to grow from "who owns what bitcoin" today to "who said what things at what times" in future. With cryptography, we can start to displace media corporations as the source of truth.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU SEE
If you are what you eat, then you think what you see.
You are rebuilding you body with what you ingest with your mouth and rebuilding your brain with what you ingest with your eyes and ears, Put these two concepts together and you realise what you eat and what you read have enormous power over you.
Whether you are agree or disagree with them, the information sources you choose will steer your life and establish your priorities. In real sense, they are upstream of "YOU".
You can see your glucose spike after eating a cookie. Could we have graphs that show the effect of information diet on your neurology ? Could we see the dopamine spike after reading a tweet ?
If we can, social media, is a superstimulus we need to identify and consciously limit in our information diets.
THE TRUE NATURE OF LEGACY MEDIA
If it enrages, it engages.
Emotionally aligning people against something appears easier than economically aligning people for something. Many writers and TV producers these days are like boxing promoters. They get two people to fight and make money from the spectacle.
Media has an incentive to create conflict. Since legacy media corporations interrogate everybody else's incentives, its worth asking what their incentives are. "If it bleeds, it leads", well, that means there's an incentive to make it bleed.
Editorial judgement is more obvious in what is absent than what is present.
We are being cautioned about Zuckerberg exerting editorial control over Facebook. We're not really focused on Sulzberger, who has indirect editorial control over the New York Times by appointing the editor-in-chief and the CEO.
OLD : Trust one source to hear all sides. NEW : Hear all sides before trusting one source.
The story behind the story is usually more interesting than the story. Why this journalist ? These sources ? This tone ? That omission ?
THE NYT SAID ROCKETS COULD NEVER WORK
To give the perspective of Tech V/S Jurnalist thing, I am including this complete example of NYT article on professor Goddard.
On January 13, 1920, the New York Times published an editorial insisting that a rocket couldn't possibly work in space.
The quote:
That professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and the [financing] of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react - to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
Goddard pushed back against a wave of criticism, unsuccessfully. He retreated from the public eye and from most interactions with other scientists but continued his research. Eventually, he'd be vindicated when a rocket launched in 1944 and the Apollo mission was completed in 1969.
It took until July 17, 1969, almost fifty years later, for the New York Times to take back its harsh words. The correction is almost comically dry and conspicuously doesn't mention the Apollo missions. "The Times regrets their error."
How much did this set back humanity ? The Apollo missions might have happened decades earlier ! Did you notice how they went after his grant funding? They said, "Why is the Smithsonian funding this guy?"
The journalist versus tech thing has been going on for so long. Matt Ridley writes about this in his book "How Innovation Works". Ida Tarbell and a lot of other muckrakers went after Rockefeller and the other captains of industry who built America. They were all attacked by these journos in the early 1900s. Now we're fighting that same battle in reverse. I think this time the tech founders are going to win.
MEDIA HAS ITS OWN MOTIVES
You must build your own distribution to avoid distortion.
Highly negative stories dominate headlines (If it bleeds, it leads), while highly positive outcomes determine returns (the power law).
With a clickbait business model, the goal is to maximally distort what somebody said so the headline is almost unbelievable, yet it has a very, very narrow connection to the truth. Its a massive distortion of what actually happened, but with enough truth that in some interpretation these media outlets can say "its not flat-out lie".
Media outlets have absolutely no incentive to tell the truth. They have incentive to play this game with the truth. They have incentive for getting clicks.
The term "story" indicates the importance of narrative in modern media. Its so easy to repeat a narrative.
The NYT company is worth $6.35 Billion, it makes more than a billion dollar a year in revenue. It directly competes with tech for advertisers and influencers. Not everything it publishes is "FAKE", but its not neutral arbiter.
HOW TO REALIGN MEDIA
Build something better. Its incumbent on us to build something better.
The media you consume changes the decision you make. The technology you have, changes the decision you can make.
May be the new local news is by intellectual vertical, rather than geographic areas.
Imagine a site maintaining up-to-date information on 3D printing technology and all the companies in the industry, almost like an investment research report. A reader's goal may be to make an investment, join a ocmpany, or download a new program to start something or build something. This is a production-versus-consumption focus.
Journalist Gautam Nagesh said "Content is a lousy business to be in, unless you have got information worth paying for." Put mathematically : differential profits from acting on an article must routinely exceed the differential cost of purchasing that information.
Twitter is a dispatch mechanism for our attention, in the same way Uber dispatches drivers to riders, You could imagine a very different dispatcher that maximizes long-term wealth creation.
Coding tutorials have in-built fact checking. Tutorials can't "lie" to you, not that they would want to. They can't misrepresent anything. They can't understate the complexity or overstate outcomes. Because they are instructional, you are learning and you are also fact checking as you use them, which is not obvious. People don't think about that part.
It would take your whole life to even learn the names of the seven billion people on the earth. You can not possibly care about them all equally. You have to triage or somehow prioritise, you have to rank-order what you're paying attention to.
Infotainment should be filtered out from your information diet.
Twitter and other social media platform are like restaurants that have learned to secretly put sugar in your food.
MEDIA DRIVEN BY READERS BENEFIT
In this high dimensional space, you are being pulled in a bunch of different directions, not really making any progress. Progress is doing some math today and doing some math in the same area tomorrow. A little bit of compounding progress along the same direction each day adds up to something.
We are overconsuming the novelty and underconsuming purpose.
You should try to level up each day for you and your family, then you are really making progress.
The first thing you look at personally each day shouldn't be random stories some one else picked, it should be carefully selected matrics you want to improve, like your health or hobbies. A personal dashboard is a good path to disrupt newspapers.
Algorithms and incentives could surface what is important and true rather than what is popular and profitable.
Imagine personal dashboard for your own fitness, diet, sleep and then may be a family dashboard. This type of the dashboards will would be more useful to you than a Twitter(X) or Facebook. It would be right app to check each day .
If you're interested in exploring more of Balaji's ideas and perspectives, I encourage you to check out the book, which is available for download or purchase at https://balajianthology.com/.
TO BE CONTINUED...