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All of JohnGreer's Comments + Replies

Brain preservation to prevent involuntary death: a possible cause area
JohnGreer2y5
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Nice to see other people interested in the topic! 

Robert McIntyre, the CEO of Nectome, the brain preservation startup, is probably the person who knows the most about this space.

For those interested, I did a writeup on a talk Robert  gave that summarizes his thoughts and process here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N7j4xHkyjKbimmF6A/notes-on-robert-mcintyre-s-brain-preservation-talk-at-the-1

And I interviewed him here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s2N75ksqK3uxz9LLy/interview-with-nectome-ceo-robert-mcintyre-brain

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Towards effective entrepreneurship: Good Technology Project post-mortem
JohnGreer6y1
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I agree that that's a possibility regarding problems and solutions but wish I would see it more in practice.

Re: certificates of impact. I talked to my team about this. One of my cofounders said:

“That's an interesting idea. It'd be really cool to create a currency that incentivized people to do good things and pay for good things! But it seems like coordinating that would be extremely difficult unless you had a central institution that was doling these things out. Otherwise how could anyone agree on the utility of anything? Like, I ate lunch, and therefore ... (read more)

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Michael_PJ
6y
I think the easiest way to understand is by analogy to carbon offsets, which are a kind of limited form of CoI that currently exist. Carbon offsets are generally certified by an organization to say that they actually correspond to what happened, and that they are not producing too many. I don't think there's a fundamental problem with allowing un-audited certificates in the market, but they'd probably be worth a lot less! I think the middle man making money is exactly what you want to happen. The argument is much the same as for investment and speculation in the for-profit world: people who're willing to take on risk by investing in uncertain things can profit from it, thus increasing the supply of money to people doing risky things. Here's a concrete example: suppose I want to start a new bednet -distributing charity. I think I can get them out for half the price of AMF. Currently, there is little incentive for me to do this, and I have to go and persuade grantmakers to give me money. In the CoI world, I can go to a normal investor, and point out that AMF sells (audited) bednet CoIs for $X, and that I can produce them at half the cost, allowing us to undercut AMF. I get investment and off we go. So things behave just like they do in the for-profit world (which you may or may not think is good). What you do need is for people to want to buy these and "consume" them. I think that's the really hard problem, getting people to treat them like "real" certificates. Happy to talk about this more - PM me if you'd like to have a chat.
Deliberate Performance in People Management
JohnGreer6y4
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I use PredictionBook for keeping track of informal predictions I make but this provides a great way to formally apply it more in the workplace and could be extrapolated to interpersonal relationships as well. Thanks for writing!

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Towards effective entrepreneurship: Good Technology Project post-mortem
JohnGreer6y3
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I've been thinking of similar things as I co-founded a crypto startup that just got into an incubator. Our original idea was a personal finance app for cryptocurrency, but we started building it and realized it might be too early to make money because there wasn’t a market for it yet -- very few people use cryptocurrency as an actual currency! We have sort of the reverse problem most people have where they have a great idea and just need someone to back it: we have the backing now but with no good idea. We’ll probably build some moderately useful cryptocur... (read more)

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Michael_PJ
6y
I'm pretty interested in blockchain-based tools as platforms for improved institutions. For example, I'd love to see a well-thought-out implementation of certificates of impact. I think that there is an important distinction between problems and solutions, so I'm optimistic that it could be possible to make a useful breakdown of problems without having to (or being able to) say much about solutions. However, I'm largely speculating.