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That was a very thoughtful comment. Let me attempt to unpack it. My first motivation is that I believe network effects can be used to represent empirical truth
by arthurhur 3y ago
That was a very thoughtful comment. Let me attempt to unpack it.
My first motivation is that I believe network effects can be used to represent empirical truths and track how they change over time. The more people vote on a statement, the more accurate the sentiment around that statement will be. You can check this comment out for more context:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35819443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35819443
The presumed winners behind prediction and finance markets are the market makers that choose what markets they will make, and either charge a commission or collect the bid/ask spread. Anyone that is on the other side of that transaction opens themselves up to financial risk.
In the marqt, anyone can be the marqt maker and there is no financial downside.
It is more of a UGC model where the creator that builds engagement earns the points for all activity generated inside their marqt. However, there is no financial risk for participants in this system – you either vote true or false, and then try to write the best reason why you are correct (which you are both rewarded for also). You are only penalized if someone downvotes you as unremarqable (side note: you can only downvote a remarq that matches your marq, so if you marq a marqt false, then you can only downvote a remarq that is also marqed false, and those downvotes cancel if you change your marq to true).
Keep in mind that "marqs earned" are just numbers that represent activity. I'm not sure how karma is calculated on HN, but it's a similar concept.
What I am basically trying to do is think through how you might go about building and evolving something like Wikipedia using the pithiness of Twitter, as verified by Stack Overflow, while compensating creators like YouTube.
Do I think this can be used to train LLMs? Of course you could train an LLM on such a dataset. But I believe information and facts change over time, the same way sentiments around companies and weather change over time, as represented by changing stock prices and temperature. So instead of a static database, it would be a living knowledge base that could be referenced at any point.
For example, imagine a situation where you could ask, "What's the marqt say about who is responsible for the government shutdown right now?" and you could see, "Well, right now, the marqt says that 54% of people believe that Republicans are responsible." I'd rather open-source that for anyone to put out there instead of having to rely on some media outlet.
Okay, so to directly answer your question about whether I'm trying to build something sellable, the answer is yes. But who gets paid in the marqt should be the actual people that create value – anyone that makes a marq, adds a remarq, makes remarqable/unremarqable votes, or makes a marqt – and I want to track the amount of value that users create in the system so that they can eventually monetize it. It's not controversial to imagine a world where AGI replaces human labor, and if that happens, I want to have built a system where humans can be compensated by AGI for maintaining its "intelligence." I have an idea for how it would work (which I can go into, if you want), but it would only be later down the line, if we can actually build up a resilient network of truth.
I understand your reaction to the marqts I kicked things off with, but the idea is that anyone can create a marqt, and much the same way Wikipedia was limited and criticized when it first started, I believe an open-source knowledge base has exponential potential. There's a little more context in this response I posted:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35815567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35815567
In response to your anecdote about the dam, I think about it the way efficient markets work. If all the information is out there, then trusted sources would asymmetrically influence everyone else's votes, unless they lose that trust. But, generally speaking, the more votes, the better. And regarding your thoughts about sentiment, I think that it plays a stronger role in the grand scheme of things. There was a world where people were paying astronomical sums of money for cheaply manufactured masks and alcohol. There was a world where a crypto shell company was worth billions of dollars. There was a world where under-water mortgage backed securities were rated AAA. What's most interesting to me is when that moment changes, because no one can predict the future. And eventually the future becomes the present.
I could keep going, but maybe I'll stop here for now. Hopefully this answers most of your questions. Feel free to follow up with any other thoughts or get clarifications. But I really hope you try out the app and let me know what you think.