Pairwise coordination subsidies: a new quadratic funding design

Sure, I can grok how inter-tribe coordination is easier and so incentivization should be reserved for inter-tribe coordination which is harder but arguably more valuable. If you wanted to you could probably model this with some type of gaussian mixed-membership model where everyone is part of many tribes and the subsidy k is a function of the hidden tribal memberships, which you observe via voting patterns. Computationally it would be more efficient to calculate k as a product of the tribal membership vectors and some weight matrix than to iterate over all pair-project triples but that is a conversation for another day.

I also agree that the problem of extra-model coordination is profoundly hard (much like identity, which IMO can only be asymptotically solved, i.e. never perfectly but increasingly well), which is why I said that we shouldn’t fault mechanisms for perpetuating existing problems, provided they solve at least one existing problem without re-introducing problems we’ve previously solved.

Regarding the time component, I strongly agree. Inasmuch as the world is fundamentally a process and yet all of our models of the world are static (to even model time, we must fix it with a symbol like t), the inclusion of actual time IMO imbues models with an essential dynamism. Along these lines, I think concepts like conviction voting will lead to invaluable tools for (cheaply) incorporating valuable (and hard to manipulate) information into models. I riffed a bit on this theme a few years back: http://kronosapiens.github.io/blog/2017/09/14/time-and-authority.html

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