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Zaine12y60

Create a basic multi-player browser game (simpler than the MS Hearts interface), then ask for people to play it. Make the game robust enough to test your ideas, yet simple enough that participants can quickly learn the rules and play the game properly - a condition that still allows for great complexity, depending upon the participants.

Run many trials, contrast the results of the games with your predictions, and revise or discard your hypothesis as necessary. Slowly introduce confounds into your game to test its real-world viability. Ultimately run a long-term game (a couple of weeks or so) in a real world setting as a mock trial. Scale up from there.

In other words, experiment. Prove the feasibility of the idea then build around it. Perhaps the above isn't even necessary; try your best to falsify the idea with the least possible amount of resources, I believe 'twas recommended. The above suggests one manner in which that may be accomplished.

See in context

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Call for participation - Centre for Organisational Rationality

by whpearson

4th Apr 2013

2 min read

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Or something like that¹. As per this article on Control Markets I am looking to experiment with them. This requires an organization of some sort. This post is my first step to the creation of the organization.

My skills are in technology and not UI or people particularly. So I have mainly been doing what I know², working around my day job.

So I decided it probably wasn't the best path, I was likely to get distracted and lose focus by myself. So other people would be useful.

There are three rough ways this can be attempted:

Try and create a swanky high profile website to spark interest: Get a co-founder type person/team. Stay stealthy and make a nice web app for managing funge for a charity based on exploring control marketers using personal funds to start with, get on social media. Raise money from donations to maintain infrastructure, refine the web app and possibly fund academic research on control markets when people can try it out for themselves. This webapp can then be open sourced for other people to use.
Get the theory started: Start a small organization with volunteer Actors and bootstrap using a google spread sheet to record funge transfers and bids, initially, and then use lessons learnt from that process to inform the design of a webapp. Leading to
Get someone who regularly wants to talk about control markets, just to keep focus.

So what is possible with people from lesswrong? And which would people advise? Or is there a different way to attack this problem.

I've thought about kickstarter, but I don't think it is within the ToS. Also I would want a decent demo/visuals before trying this style of thing.

I suppose there is also.

Create a webapp. Sell it as the next big thing for management consultants. But this is so far outside my comfort zone, I don't know I could do it.

¹ I would want to use a kitty for a logo if we went with this name. This is probably why I shouldn't be allowed to make these sorts of decisions.

²I've been noodling around with a django backend using tastypie to make a restful API, I was thinking about using AngularJS on the client (which I would need to learn). Still needs a lot of work. I also have a bad habit of wanting to make it highly available/scalable and other such things that aren't appropriate at this point.

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[-]ModusPonies12y110

Based on this post, I'm not sure what you're after, other than "something to do with this control market thing and a web app." Are you trying to build an app that will let users run their own control markets? Are you trying to use a control market to run an organization that will build an arbitrary web app? (If the latter, what are you building?)

What's your end goal? Are you trying to test your theory? Make money? Build something cool?

This is a "call for participation"—what sort of participation do you want, exactly?

[+]whpearson12y-50

[-]Viliam_Bur12y40

Do you have "something to protect"? Some specific real-world goal that you really want to achieve, preferably with help of other people? If yes, you could try using the Control Market app for this purpose.

Making a web application is relatively easy, you don't need a Kickstarter funding, just a free weekend or two. Implement the critical parts first, don't worry about design and other unessential stuff. Then start using the application. This is how you get feedback.

If the application will help, you have helped the cause you care about and did an experiment with the application. And you also have your first reference.

(As an extreme case -- I am not sure if this is even possible -- could you use the application just for yourself, to help you decide about your personal goals?)

[-]Decius12y30

You haven't defined the organization you are trying to form well enough for me to determine if I am interested or not.

[-]whpearson12y10

Can you define an organization that you would be interested in being part of? The trouble is that I am not that fussy as long as the Control Markets get tested, so will likely go for what will get me more participants and engagement. People I have talked to previously have suggested that the organization have a goal different from just exploring control markets, but I am at a loss to pick a goal.

Would people in lesswrong be interested in an X-risk focused organization?

[-]evand12y100

It sounds like you want to allocate some resources you don't have in furtherance of a goal you haven't defined and don't care about, and would like other people to be passionate enough about this to help you make a go of it.

[-]whpearson12y-20

I don't care about the goal but I do care about the method that the goal is selected and how the people are encouraged to work towards the goal. A good metaphor would someone wanting to try an organisation controlled by voting, he couldn't say what the organization will end up doing, because it would be dependent upon what the people who voted would make it do. If he had a firm goal that he just had to achieve, then he would probably would be better off without the organization. Voting is a method of combining diverse goals and knowledge into one organization; as are control markets.

If I can't get people interested in the idea now, building a web app by myself won't make any difference. I also understand my motivational structures well enough to know that working with other people helps a lot.

[-]ModusPonies12y60

A good metaphor would someone wanting to try an organisation controlled by voting, he couldn't say what the organization will end up doing, because it would be dependent upon what the people who voted would make it do. If he had a firm goal that he just had to achieve, then he would probably would be better off without the organization.

Well there's your problem. People didn't create democracy just to see if it would work. People created democracy to answer the question "how the heck are we going to run our nation?" There were firm goals. "Guard civilization against bandits, natives, and the French." (Or "bandits, barbarians, and the Spartans," depending on the era.) "Protect our liberty from the British." "Make sure the government stays beholden to the people."

If you want to build something, you need an actual, concrete thing to build. Locke didn't create modern democracy. That took Jefferson and Hamilton and the rest.

If I can't get people interested in the idea now, building a web app by myself won't make any difference.

I agree. You don't actually want a web app that badly, and frankly, neither do any of us. I see two solutions.

1) Apply this to a real problem whose mere existence causes you real emotional pain. (e.g., "open source software projects are shoddily run," "the healthcare system is fucked up and bullshit," "the technology to do this awesome thing I want doesn't exist.") Use the enthusiasm this generates to get others involved. 2) Follow Zaine's advice. Build a toy example of your system that's fun for its own sake. Use that to gather data.

Either way, I would suggest you learn to write better before you go ahead with any project that requires outside participation. Basic things like sentence structure and punctuation are still holding you back. Posts like your stuff here in Discussion are the best way to do that. Keep writing, keep getting feedback, and focus on specific techniques.

[-]whpearson12y10

Heh. Part of the reason I posted here was that Lesswrong is associated wtih CFAR. So I thought people would be more amenable to meta-improvement organisations. If people are interested in raising the sanity water-line of individuals, why not the sanity waterline of organizations? I see I was miscalibrated.

Zaines advice would most likely end up being a webapp of some flavour anyway :P The game would need to be multiplayer, no download required. And I may as well make it so the control market software in the game has an api and can be easily extracted from the game if people decide they want to use it in anger.

I will try and write more. But limited time will make it probably slip off my agenda in favour of coding.

Thanks for the feedback.

[-]gjm12y40

You might want to distinguish between the following two propositions.

"People here are not interested in raising the sanity waterline of organizations."
"People here don't see how your proposal for experimenting with 'control markets' is actually likely to do much to raise the sanity waterline of organizations."

It seems to me that you've had evidence for #2 and have concluded #1.

[-]whpearson12y40

I've been explicitly recommended to get a concrete outcome by villiam_bur and told to I need to focus on one by Modus Ponies. They got up voted. No one has said, "Hey I like your enthusiasm for trying a different organisational structure, would you be interested in helping me try out this type of system first?". This would have been evidence of 2 for me. And I would have evaluated the system and may have decided to help it.

We probably won't hit on the right one straight away, but we won't get anywhere without fostering a culture of experimentation.

Edit: I think most people are interested in improving organisations in the abstract, lots of people complain about governments etc. I'm looking for people that are actively looking for new organisational methods to try.

[-]evand12y10

If I had an idea I was passionate about, and was looking for people to help make it work, my first instincts would be to find other people who are passionate about it as well, or people who have a demonstrated history of making ideas like mine work. Which one are you?

[-]ModusPonies12y00

Technically this thread is evidence for both of those. If whpearson concluded #1, then that was probably because of bad priors (most likely, failing to consider #2 due to ugh fields and/or illusion of transparency), not because of misinterpreting evidence.

[-]gjm12y00

Almost everything is evidence either for or against almost everything else. I agree that this thread is some evidence for both #1 and #2, but I suggest it's better evidence for #2 than for #1 -- and, as you suggest, #2 has higher prior probability than #1.

[-]Decius12y40

Now it sounds like you don't want to create an organization, you want to use an existing organization. What problem is your app intending to solve, and what groups currently have that problem?

[-]novalis12y20

Control markets are a totally untested way of running an organization. Wouldn't a better name be "center for experimental organization"? That doesn't presuppose that the proposed way of doing things will actually work.

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