- Fiduciary code: the most important and mission-critical parts of a problem that run on a blockchain
- Use fiduciary code where the costs of human ("wet") problems due to unreliable or unsecure computers is higher than the hardware costs for running blockchain code
- Social scalability: ability to overcome shortcomings in human minds to allow for participation between participants
- How does technology constrain or motivation participation?
- How many people can beneficially participant in the institution?
- In the past: Dunbar number (~150 max participants)
- Improving social scalability: institutional or technological improvements that move function from mind to paper or mind to machine
- "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." -- Alfred North Whitehead
- Money increased the opportunities for exchanging a variety of goods, by providing a widely acceptable and reusable form of wealth storage and transfer
- Internet has predominantly helped via efficient matchmaking
- Blockchains will provide trust minimization
- Hick's law: RT = a + b * log2(n)
- RT = reaction time
- n = number of stimulants
- a, b = constants
- The more choices you present, the longer it will take for them to make a decision
- Simplify the decision making process, not eliminate it altogether
- Designing good UX:
- Find out the functionalities that answer users' needs
- Guide users to the functions that they need most
- Recognize there is sometimes no avoiding complexity, e.g. a fighter jet cockpit
- Using Hick's Law:
- Categorizing choice: do a card sort
- Obscuring complexity: only present specific parts on a screen at a time
- Define your People Outcomes
- A point of view on what should be different about the target's behaviour, understanding, or sentiment
- Identify the People Problem you're trying to solve: what is currently broken or unsatisfying?
- Is it a surface problem, or is it the root problem (I'd like to use my phone to order food vs. I need to eat here and now)?
- Define initial target audience
- What will people do differently if your product is wildly successful
- Product-Market Fit
- Keys: define good hypotheses and get conclusive results
- Define bold success metrics (avoid those based on volume), and especially use retention; successes are big step-function changes
- Focus on learning, not shipping!
- Reconciliation
- Optimize trade-offs in the broader ecosystem: external contraints are put in
- Make sure your product increases the overall pie (for the company, etc), not just your slice
- Growth
- How do you expand into new segments? Consider trade-offs and the value you provide (and how you could make it more valuable)
- How do you increase value for current segments?
- The Organizational Man's Social Ethic:
- The group is the source of creativity
- "Belongingness" is the ultimate need of the individual
- Applications of science allow us to achieve belongingness
- Becoming an Organizational Man had enormous economic benefits for individuals in the 20th century
- "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." -- McLuhan
- How do we create Sovereign Individuals?
- A new form of money, that allows us to reset the odds of those not forced into centralization?
- As transaction costs are again lowered an order of magnitude, corporations will start to converge to a single person
- "The Organization gave man access to the benefits of globalization but required conformity. Blockchains give the same access but do not insist on the same conformity."
- Organizations and centralized authorities are often opaque: they want to look deterministic on the outside, but really, they offer hidden gambles
- Blockchains will be transparent, enabling users to see what aspects of their life is actually probabilistic
- "Protocolism is the new nationalism"
- A desire for belonging, and perhaps, one for simplicity
- Protocol Ethic (the new Social Ethic)
- The individual is the source of creativity
- Serving the needs of the protocol is the ultimate purpose of the individual
- Applications of blockchains allow us to achieve our highest potential
- The Organization served as a shield from markets, but the blockchain will impose it
- Boundless Curiosity: The most creative people are insatiably curious. They want to know what works and why.
- Freestyling: We have to learn to dance with the robots, not to run away. However, we still need to make sure that AI is limited enough that it will still be dance-withable, and not not-runnable-away-from.
- Emergent Leadership: Emergent leadership: the ability to steer things in the right direction without the authority to do so, through social competence.
- Constructive Uncertainty: The idea of constructive uncertainty is not predicated on eliminating our biases: they are as built into our minds as deeply as language and lust.
- Complex Ethics: All thinking touches on our sense of morality and justice. Knowledge is justified belief, so our perspective of the world and our place in it is rooted in our ethical system, whether examined or not.
- Deep Generalists: Deep generalists can ferret out the connections that build the complexity into complex systems, and grasp their interplay.
- Design Logic: It’s not only about imagining things we desire, but also undesirable things — cautionary tales that highlight what might happen if we carelessly introduce new technologies into society.
- Postnormal Creativity: In postnormal times creativity may paradoxically become normal: an everyone, everyday, everywhere, process.
- Posterity, not History, nor the Future: While we need to learn from history, we must not be constrained by it, especially in a time where much of what is going on is unprecedented.
- Sense-Making: Skills that help us create unique insights critical to decision making.
- Focus: doing things with a clear intention and making sure that all your decisions match your intention
- "Focus is really about aligning with your purpose – whether it be your purpose on a specific project or your higher purpose in life. When actions reflect intentions, you’re in alignment with your personal mission. Only then can you truly shine."
- Consider focus to the a force you extert, rather than a quality
- Questions to ask:
- What is the main problem I'm solving?
- Who are the people we're solving this problem for?
- What emotion/feeling do we want to create or evoke?
- Is this implementation aligned with the problem we're solving?
- Is this product the must likely to successfully solve the problem?
- Challenging intentions:
- Are these intentions still the correct ones?
- Are my recent decisions in line with these intentions?
- Being intentional: stating your values and intentions clearly, to you and your team, and then putting your money where your mouth is
- Staffing is one of the greatest ways to express your intentions:
- Do I have enough people on this project?
- Do I have the right people on this project?
- What trade-offs do I need to make to get to a "yes" to the above?
- Staffing is one of the greatest ways to express your intentions:
- On building a culture that makes change expected and accepted: put people in charge of a problem, not a product
- Delegating to keep focus: direct questions, issues, and opportunities with forward momentum to people who is or can be focused on addressing them at that time
- Understand the priorities of yourself, team leads, and other colleagues!
- Remove distracting obstacles to allow for focus
- Understand the priorities of yourself, team leads, and other colleagues!