Ideamarket's new co-founder (+ why fact checking won't work)
Hello Venture Philosophers,
I’m proud to announce Ideamarket’s new co-founder, Sam Ratnakar.
At 19 years old, Sam is a seasoned startup founder, deeply respected in the crypto space as the founder of Mintflint, a social trade-sharing platform that tracked over $6 million in assets at its peak.
Sam also co-founded Convey, a Consensys-backed protocol for messaging on Ethereum.
Sam immediately and deeply understood what Ideamarket is accomplishing, and brings a new dimension of talent, experience, and insight to our execution.
Follow Sam on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/mrdotboson
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Twitter’s “warning label” on Donald Trump’s tweet provoked debate about how social media companies should handle facts and censorship.
Many tech leaders spoke up, including crypto’s own Balaji Srinivasan (who was among the first to speak kindly of idea markets back in August 2019). Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey even quote-tweeted Balaji and agreed with him:
“Free, universally available code for epistemology” describes idea markets well.
But “fact checking” will never work.
Why?
What’s missing is not facts — it’s trust.
Devising new ways to deliver open-source, blockchain-based, algorithmically-verified “facts” accomplishes nothing for trust.
Someone has to build the algorithms.
Someone has to fix them if they “don’t work.”
Someone will say they don’t work, because “if they did, they’d say [my opinion].”
So they’ll fork it.
And we’re right back where we started.
There’s no removal of the trusted third party in technical solutions to “facts.”
The medium is the message.
If “facts” are the medium, the message is “I’m right, you’re wrong, and all the shame and apologies for the state of the world should come from you.”
It’s a delicious narcissistic fantasy, but will only add plausible deniability to our failure to revive public discourse. “Look at all these facts we gave them, it’s not our fault they don’t believe us!”
No — it is our fault.
If we’re so smart, we should be smart about persuasion. We haven’t been.
If we’re so smart, we should understand our ideological opponents. We often don’t.
If we’re so smart, we should be unafraid to change our minds. We usually aren’t.
We are not really “so smart” — we just suffer from different prejudices.
So if our ideological opponents think we haven’t earned the right to provide facts, then we haven’t, and providing more facts (or writing them to blockchains) won’t change that.
It’s time for a new approach.
Facts are answers. The last 20 years have shown all the answers in the world can’t bring people together.
A market is an open question.
—Mike