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May 21, 2022 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:46:52
Elon Musk, Twitter, and Free Speech: Bret Speaks with Jim Rutt

Bret speaks with Jim Rutt about Elon Musk's move to takeover Twitter and free speech on social media.Jim is an American businessman and entrepreneur, the former CEO of Network Solutions, and the former chairman of the Santa Fe Institute.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw1Sl_jFYRl2gbkBLp7w4lghttps://twitter.com/jim_ruttMentioned in this episode:Jim's article for Quillette on Elon Musk takeover:https://quillette.com/2022/04/27/musk-and-moderation/Game b website:https://www.game-b.org/*****Find...

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If you give users the ability to play with the parameters, see what other people see, right?
That could potentially be a game changer with respect to how we understand each other.
Yeah, I love that.
I love that.
And you combine that with the marketplace idea, because that way there would be innovation in these sliders, right?
Not just right and left.
That's kind of stupid.
How about open-minded versus closed-minded?
How about neurotic versus anti-neurotic, right?
You know, you could have all kinds of interesting ideas.
Or again, someone could actually put, I want to look at the world the way Kim Kardashian looks at it for 30 seconds before I went insane.
Right.
And there'll be lots of innovation in the features around feeds.
So, I love your idea.
Frankly, I've never thought about that.
That's a great one.
I'm stealing that.
Awesome.
And I'll give credit when I remember.
Brent Weinstein said that we should have sliders on our feed owl goals and be able to switch shoes with other people and see the world from their that alone see the world from their perspective for even if it's just an hour would be really quite valuable.
Hey folks welcome to the Dark Horse podcast I'm I am, of course, Dr. Brett Weinstein, and I have the distinct pleasure of sitting today with my good friend Jim Rutt.
Jim is a podcaster.
He is the host of the Jim Rutt Show.
He is the former chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, which studies complexity.
He is a tech entrepreneur and investor, and he is a co-founder of the Game Bee Movement.
Jim, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here and reconnect with Brett.
We've had some good times over the years.
We certainly have.
Now, am I right?
I was looking back over our history, and I think I've been on your show a couple times, but this is your first time on Dark Horse.
Is that right?
That is correct.
Wow.
All right.
Well, that is a mistake that we are correcting as of this moment.
I should probably alert my viewers to who you are and what our connection is.
Some of it will be evident to people from that introduction, but you and I met when you and Jordan Hall, who was then known as Jordan Greenhall, Invited me to what was not yet the game be movement at the time.
It was called the emancipation party We can possibly get into some of that history later if it becomes relevant, but nonetheless I met you as a I would say long since Recovered Reaganite right winger.
I think you have told me that your your Reaganite position began to break down in the early 90s.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I was a basically, I would say I was a Goldwater Republican.
And in fact, I one time wrote in Goldwater, I think it was 1984 presidential GOP primary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was quite humorous, because Reagan had pissed me off about something or other.
So I considered myself a Goldwater Republican up till 1991.
With the demise of the USSR, rabid anti-communism, which had been my main attraction to the Republicans, went away as a main issue and I kind of started getting repulsed by the other parts of the coalition.
In 92, I actually voted for Bill Clinton and have never voted for a Republican presidential candidate since.
Very interesting.
So, I will say, you know, it's funny, I look back at all of the hyperventilating anti-communism of the era you describe and
Yes, it looked crazy on the other hand now that I see all sorts of communism arising and all sorts of minds without most of them even realizing that that's what they are invoking it looks different to me now in some sense that the the paranoia was partially paranoia and partially Farsighted and maybe not as articulate as it might have been about what the hazards were.
Maybe it didn't even really know and Yeah, I would say that's fair, though I will say I do have not and will not ever repent for my fairly aggressive anti-Marxist Leninism back in the day.
No, I think history has actually borne out the hazard, and I must say I've done a good bit of thinking In the time since you and I met about what the hazards of communism are why they exist whether they're solvable and I've concluded that in fact it is a a malignant perspective inherently that even if it starts with good intentions it inevitably evolves in a direction that's that's devastating and we are now
Watching this unfold in various places.
We're seeing one version of it in China.
We're seeing another version of it domestically, but it leads nowhere good.
And one of the jobs I think people like you and me have is to articulate the reason that it cannot work.
And that even if it has sympathy from you on the basis that it has an objective that sounds good, That that objective is something that can only be achieved with a different mechanism, one that is game theoretically well constructed.
So anyway, maybe we'll get back to that later, but when you and I met...
I know that you regarded me as a far left person and probably regarded me with some suspicion as a result of that.
I think you and I came to an understanding very quickly that those labels aren't particularly evocative of the actual uh, programs and suppositions running in each of our minds.
And anyway, we've become good friends.
And I know that you're certainly somebody that I find always has a fresh perspective on things that I'm, uh, grappling with.
And, uh, I would have a very hard time placing you politically on the map.
You're independent-minded on every front and that has been, I believe, an excellent match for an era in which there just simply is no cheat sheet that tells you, you know, one side doesn't have it right.
Basically, everyone's got it wrong.
And so if you don't have an a la carte view of what policies you might want to see enacted, then basically you're in the weeds.
And I think that describes me pretty well.
I mean, like, say, in economic matters, I'm probably to the left of Bernie.
Right.
On the other hand, I'm a Second Amendment, pretty strong guy, but not an absolutist.
You know, when it comes to things like climate change, I take that right seriously.
Don't believe it's bogus by any means.
Right.
And and so, you know, I choose what I believe to be true.
And I guess what makes me makes other people uncomfortable sometimes when they're talking to me about politics is that I just seem to lack the gene for the tribal knee-jerk.
I don't feel at all compelled to associate myself with one of the political tribes.
And I think that was one of the things that we were trying to do with the Emancipation Party, was to go off in an orthogonal direction, something that I actually spent no time thinking about left or right.
But when I go back and read the Emancipation Party reforms, You know, in 2012, when we did it, you would have called it left to quite a degree.
And oh, by the way, those old reforms are still up on the Internet.
I still pay the 10 bucks a month or whatever to keep it up.
Emancipationparty.org.
I don't think you can find it with Google, but you can type in Emancipationparty.org and read our 10 reforms and all that stuff.
But what they didn't do is get into the identity politics stuff.
And that's where, in some sense, the modern two-dimensional red-blue was stupid anyway, but now when the blue team has essentially abandoned economic opportunity and egalitarianism as the basis for their whole political perspective and instead has turned it into identitarianism, essentially neo-tribal racism, the way I would describe it, you know,
makes me not interested in those far, far reaches, at least, you know, the second half of Team Blue.
Yet I'm still, as I say, left to Bernie on economic matters, probably.
And that's OK by me.
Yep.
Yeah.
I must say, as you know, and as some of some of my viewers will know, my sense is that one of the mistakes that we made in in our collaboration over the Emancipation Party and Game B is that the Emancipation Party evolved into Game B rather than the my sense is that one of the mistakes that we made in in our collaboration over the Emancipation And my sense is that history very quickly bore out the idea that there was room for.
for a third-party effort and one that was well-constructed and non-ideological and non-identitarian would have been very popular.
We now see Andrew Yang, of course, trying to boot up something like that.
Obviously, there's the Unity 2020 effort which, you know, was never widely understood but was certainly caught the attention of some influential people and
Anyway, there's clearly a hunger for some alternative to the duopoly, and there's also an awareness that basically we're stuck in a trap in which every time somebody comes up with this obvious idea, they become, you know, basically they are portrayed as unwitting dupes of the greater evil, and effectively we have to escape that puzzle, which is why Unity 2020 was structured the way it was, to neutralize that concern.
But in any case, I think the Emancipation Party was a great idea a few years ahead of its time.
A few years.
If we kept with it, you know, it might well have gotten some traction, but the time wasn't right.
It was just too hard.
And I think the fact that Many of the leading figures were business dudes, led us to a premature abandonment.
You know, us business guys, well, that's shit.
And we're not getting any traction.
And we tried six different things, we didn't get traction on any of them.
So I guess this is not the product to sell at this point in time.
And that was probably accurate.
But if we had Waited three or four years, the times might well have been better for this orthogonal.
What my wife, who was a member of the Emancipation Party in the early Game B movement, calls pragmatic progressivism.
And I think that's really what the EP was all about.
And there's such a gigantic hole in the center like there's never been before.
And just a final reminder, I did buy the domain name Brett Weinstein 2024.
And so whenever you're ready, let me know.
I think there are a lot of people hoping that I don't even survive till 2024.
So anyway.
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The interesting thing about what you're describing is that if the Emancipation Party was ahead of its time, it was so barely ahead of its time that something is wrong with any system that would would declare it so on the basis that it missed by three or four years, right?
And so one of the things I think we've learned from what happened with the Game B movement, when the Game B movement came apart, when it stopped being a group of people who was meeting in a physical space that you had rented, You described what it was that you were doing in terminating that effort as putting it into spore mode.
In my language, I would say that Game B was a prototype, and I was focused from the beginning on seeing how far we could go, and at the point that it failed, learning what the lessons of that failure were so that Game C or Game D could do the job, because something certainly has to.
And in any case, no matter what language you use, whether it's Spore Mode or Prototyping or Navigation or any of these metaphors, what we do see is that the concept of Game B has actually caught on, and it's acquired some of its most powerful thinkers in the aftermath of the stage in which there were actual physical meetings anywhere, right?
So, people who pay attention to Dark Horse will probably know Daniel Schmachtenberger, for example.
is an important feature of the Game B movement, though he came to it.
I don't even think we knew who he was at the point that we were meeting in physical space.
So in any case, somehow we've got to get out of the business mindset where the idea is, oh, the emancipation party isn't getting any traction.
It must be the wrong idea and kill it off and get into a different mindset where as soon as we know that something has to occur, the question is, well, how do we continue, how do we put this thing into a low cost, like a seed or a spore, into a mode where it doesn't cost anything to just idle so that at the moment that into a mode where it doesn't cost anything to just idle so that at the moment that the temperature is right, it can be That worked with Game B, right?
The spores rehashed in 2018 due to some fortuitous things.
Basically, an essay that Jordan Hall wrote, and then it's now going.
It's pretty big.
There's at least 30,000 people that would identify themselves as Game B. We recently put out a film.
People can check it out at game B film dot O R G.
We have a online community of a few thousand people at game dash B dot O R G.
Better put a WWW behind that.
For some reason, the hosting company can't figure it out without the WWW.
And there's some real activities starting.
Proto-Bees, the building of on-the-ground communities.
Two already exist, though neither of them are, I'd call it, in pure form.
And I know of at least 20 other groups that are working to figure out how to pull the capital together and the team together, etc.
And two of them are pretty far along.
Yeah, I would say it's done exactly the right thing.
It's not only managed to persist through that period, but it has diversified.
So we've got proto bees, we've, you know, various people who were part of the game bee movement or who quickly found us or we found them have their own versions.
People, in other words, have taken the idea and they've forked it.
And, you know, for Heather and me, the last chapter of our book, Talks about the fourth frontier, which is explicitly our take on what a Game B future would have to look like.
For those who don't know what we're talking about, Game B-wise, Game B is a very simple idea.
It's not a plan, but it is an idea.
That our system is on a fatal trajectory and that it requires, if we are to persist, it requires that we find a better solution.
And the key insight, the thing that makes it better than every other version of this idea, is that Game B, whatever it is, has to be game theoretically stable.
It has to be an evolutionarily stable strategy.
It has to beat Game A in its own terms.
In other words, we can't say, here is a blueprint of a better society, now let's start a revolution, win the power to make it, etc.
It has to be so good that it is effectively contagious and displaces Game A in a world that has been structured by Game A. And it is a non-utopian analytical approach to solving that problem.
Anyway, I think those of us who understand why that has to be the general form of the solution effectively can't and won't walk away with it.
We may never accomplish it, but we know that someone must.
And until it is accomplished effectively, The short time horizon of modern civilization is presently structured, and the potential extension, indefinite extension, that could be achieved if we got to this Game B space, it's obviously the right thing to do, whatever the form that it takes might be.
I would just add one thing.
You hit all the main, biggest points.
The other, and it's in this non-utopianism, this is critical, is that we have an empirical and experimental perspective.
Many of the people involved in formulating the original Game D idea either had a background in complexity or were infected by it or its near neighbors like evolutionary theory.
And if you know anything about these domains, you know the ability to predict the unfolding of a complex system over any extended period of time is bupkis, right?
You can't do it.
In fact, the whole definition of an emergence in complexity is something which cannot be predicted with any plausible amount of computation, at least from the current state of the pieces.
And so, very important in Game B thinking is that we have a theory, we sort of have a destination, but we hold it very lightly, and we try things, we probe systems, we build little things, we experiment, we analyze, and then we share the results horizontally, whether they worked or not.
And that makes us totally different than guys that show up with this tome that says, here's the truth.
If we just did this, we'll solve all mankind's problems.
We know where that generally leads, which is to the gas chamber.
Yeah, to gulag starvation gas chambers, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I would say, I would counsel us to stop talking about vaguely knowing the destination.
And I think if we talk in terms of knowing the trajectory, we know what direction we should be heading, but we also know that we will be surprised by the final structure if we allow ourselves to be taught by the complex system about what the real rules actually are.
And as far as the utopianism goes, as you probably know, I've said many times, I think, That utopia is the worst concept that anyone ever came up with, right?
It's this very seductive, impossible place, and that it has, you know, as you point out, led to all kinds of tragedies of history.
But when people hear you say that, they sometimes get the sense of like, oh, I'm no longer so interested because it sounds like some brutal, pragmatic future that isn't very exciting.
And my point would be, look, in a complex system, we know that there are no perfect solutions.
There is nothing like utopia, but take a good look at a hummingbird sometime.
It's non-utopian.
It's built with feedbacks, right?
That's how it works, but- - Step at a time, somehow it got to the hummingbird.
Isn't that amazing?
It got to the hummingbird, and if you look at it and you say, yeah, that's the level of imperfection we might be shooting for, it's pretty darn good, right?
It's pretty close to what any rational person would call a miracle if you didn't know that there was a process that had built it up incrementally.
And so anyway, non utopian doesn't mean it couldn't be marvelous.
It means it won't be marvelous right away.
It will take a long time to get where we're going.
And it will be surprising in its structure because there's no one on Earth who can blueprint it from here.
Amen, brother.
And by the way, the hummingbirds have just returned to our farm.
Yeah, they've just come back here, too.
I never tire of watching them.
Never, never.
We sit on our porch, hummingbird feeders on both ends, and watch them go at it.
It's fun.
It's beautiful.
I, as of this morning, may be on the trail of a nest.
I've never had a nest that I could watch them raise chicks in.
So anyway, I'll keep you all posted on whether or not I figure out where it is.
But let's get to the the heart of the matter that has us podcasting together today.
You, as of I think this morning, have a new article out on Quillette.
Excuse me, Quillette.
Is that right?
Correct.
All right.
So I will say I have at the moment a kind of a fraught relationship with Colette.
Claire Lehman having ruthlessly attacked Heather and me over the course of at least the last year plus.
But anyway, let's put that aside.
I initially was a huge fan of Colette, and in principle I still am, although I can't help but be somewhat annoyed at her approach to someone I think she would have called a friend.
But nonetheless, you have an article out.
Your article is about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and what it may mean to us.
And in fact, I think it's fair to say that your article contains some guidance that comes from a very long history, not only of thinking about structures and complexity and ways that systems like Twitter can be improved, but also very directly a long history of participation in Online forums of every kind, right?
You have as long history as anybody I know stretching back to long before any of the structures on the modern internet.
I mean, back into the bulletin board days.
Am I right about that?
Or that even, back to 1981, right?
To the very beginning.
I designed, I wrote early forum software.
I managed many to many communications businesses as a product manager as early as 1982.
You know, to this day, I'm a part owner of the well, which is the oldest surviving, I think, online virtual community, which still to this day has amazingly high quality discourse, even though it's quite small community.
We sometimes joke it's the Colonial Williamsburg of the internet.
And so, yeah, I've been doing this for a long time.
And of course, I help run the Game Bee platforms and, you know, been involved in various things.
And so, yeah, that was the idea was to bring what I've learned from watching it with real bullets, you know, how hard it is to make virtual community work and, you know, take
And, you know, take some of what Elon had to say and kind of mix it all together and talk about his critics and then lay out how I think he may be on the right path and that some of his critics, at least, are guilty of gross strawmanning and not talking honestly about what's going on.
And yeah, so that basically was the intent.
And I do hope he reads it.
And I've actually been trying to explore my connections to people, see if I can get somebody to get it into his hands.
And maybe I will, maybe I won't.
Well, I think there's a decent chance that This conversation will cause him to take a look at it.
I will certainly There will be a link to your article in the description of this podcast and I tweeted my own thoughts about things that I felt were necessary to a Functional Twitter environment before reading your article this morning And I tagged him, so I don't know that he will see any of those things.
Obviously the amount of traffic aimed at him is absolutely staggering, and so it's possible for anything to get lost.
But nonetheless, there's so much in what you wrote that is, I mean, for one thing, Your central point or at least your initial point is so obviously Clarifying with respect to how you know, there's a fundamental paradox that anybody who's thought about the question of free speech has to grapple with which is
You effectively either forego all moderation and you create an instant dystopia because of all the terrible things that can happen or you sign up for some level of moderation and then the point is you become responsible for where you draw that line and there's no good way to make everyone happy.
But your point, if I understand you correctly, is that there's actually a very natural place to draw a line that will not make everyone happy, but it is maximally likely to be useful as a first stroke on the canvas.
And that, you want to lay it out?
And because exactly because there's so much of the reaction to the idea of Musk taking over Twitter was extremely simplistic.
And I actually quote in the article, two experts, world class experts say, oh, Elon's going to have no moderation at all.
It's going to be the law of the jungle, et cetera.
Right.
And he had previously laid out on the TED Talk, which I have a link to in the essay, that he, you know, he obviously knows there has to be some moderation.
So, I thought about it a little bit and said, all right, how can we explain this?
What is lacking in this conversation?
And I realized it was, frankly, a simple ontology and vocabulary problem because people are thinking simplistically.
Moderation, yes!
Moderation, no!
Free speech!
Absolutist, you know, totalitarian fascist dictatorship.
Nope, wrong.
And so the ontology I laid out, the vocabulary I laid out is to distinguish first content moderation from what I call decorum moderation.
Decorum could also be called behavior.
Basically, decorum, which I talk about first, is analogous to manners in the real world.
I use the example, for instance.
We might share the gory details of our most recent dating debacle with our close friends over a few drinks, but we're probably not likely to do that at our grandmother's Sunday dinner table.
And the distinction between manners with our friends over drinks and manners at our grandmother's dinner table correspond to decorum rules in different kinds of online venues.
For instance, a family-oriented online system like Disney might have one set of decorum rules, a more serious one like Twitter for adults might have a different set, and 8chan might have an entirely different one.
And it's absolutely key to the success of a platform that you think about who your audience is, what your purpose is, and you craft a decorum set of decorum rules and decorum moderation that's appropriate for what you want.
You know, in a case like Twitter and many more or less mainstream ones, some of the obvious forms of decorum are, you know, no racial slurs directed at people.
I prefer the rule of no personal attacks directed at another person that's a member of the community.
You know, there's some funny ones like Facebook has a rule, no nipples.
The only time I ever got a sanction until I got banned by Facebook was I posted a story about kind of hippie communes.
And on the picture that was pulled forward, there was a like a four year old child with long hair, couldn't tell the gender or the sex to be more precise.
And nipples were showing.
So Facebook kicked it.
So that's the quorum.
You can be absurd and ludicrous like Facebook is, or you can be smart and enumerate what it is that we are not going to allow.
In our Game B Online home, for instance, we have one death penalty rule, which is if you direct obscene language at another member, you will be terminated instantly.
Period.
As an example of a decorum rule which we enforce.
It actually was named after a specific user who was the cause for it.
And so, the other thing about decorum is it's viewpoint neutral.
Whether you're talking about Trump or whether you're talking about Bernie, you can say so using decorum without attacking other people if the rules for this particular platform are safe.
We could use the George Carlin, no seven dirty words.
I'd be out of luck because I don't know how to talk without using the seven dirty words.
But one could imagine a platform that might choose to do that.
You could talk about anything with decorum.
I like to point out the Beatles never said fuck in any of their songs, right?
And yet they were pretty revolutionary dudes.
And so you can, you know, the quorum and then the other side content are two different worlds.
If you make that divide cleanly, I think you get rid of an awful lot of the confusion that the discussion around moderation has falls into in the simplistic all or nothing perspective.
Yeah, I would say it's likely to be, you know, who knows whether there's actually a justification for this, but you might, you might find that it's a Pareto, you know, you've nailed 80% of what people want protected versus what people want excluded with the single, you know, the single stroke.
Now, I want to take you to two places here.
First off, there is bound to be some confusion.
I have described myself as a free speech absolutist, but I am for a solution like the one you describe, and I would reconcile those two things in this way.
In environments like those historically that have existed, one does not need absolute rules over decorum, because they are effectively agreements in a community about what is and is not tolerable behavior.
And there are obviously, you know, there's variation, but the basic point is certain things are outside of what this community Typically tolerates and one can certainly simply infer those and in fact You might be very much in favor of those rules of decorum as I am and very much against absolute rules You know posted on the door that say what will happen to you if you violate this rule The basic point is we don't want this to be authoritarian.
We want it to be voluntary and the point is You can't have it be voluntary in a space like Twitter, right?
We're not anywhere down near Dunbar's number.
We're so many orders of magnitude above it that what could be done informally in another context must be done formally at the level of something like Twitter.
And so a free speech absolutist is not saying everybody should say everything that crosses their mind at all moments.
Right what they are saying is that we want to be very careful Not to create any limit that could potentially Eliminate some kind of valuable perspective we need to protect all sorts of speech that may not be Obviously valuable in order to make sure to catch everything that is valuable so Let me go on to the other distinctions, if you don't mind.
Yeah.
So, decorum.
And again, different sites will have different decorums.
And I'll sort of finish up on what you were talking about.
In a face-to-face community, it's generally speaking implicit.
And also, interestingly, you have skin in the game.
If you're in my face talking about my mother, guess what?
I might punch you in the nose, right?
You know, somebody sitting in their mother's basement typing away on their computer 3,000 miles from nowhere.
You don't have that skin in the game.
So you have two things.
There's skin in the game, right?
There's literally skin in the game.
You might take a punch if you say the wrong thing.
There's also reputation, right?
It is not so diluted by the number of users or the anonymity or any of these other features.
Yeah, if you're part of a face-to-face community and you're known as the asshole that, you know, dishes shit to everybody, nobody invites you to any events anymore and they cross the street when they see you coming.
You know, community of the Dunbar number of 150 plus times two, maybe.
So yeah, so now let's go on to the next distinction, which we have content versus decorum, and that's a pretty bright line.
Yeah, there's a few edge cases, but if you stop and think, Is this a decorum question or is this a content question?
It's usually pretty clear.
Now, in content, I have a second distinction that's a little muddier, which is between actually bad, inherently bad content, but again, most everybody would agree is bad, though there'll be some corner cases.
For instance, attacks on privacy, doxing, right?
The advocacy of imminent violence against specific people or groups.
The advocacy for the committing of serious crimes.
Now, it's interesting, I make a distinction in the article about serious crimes, because I might well allow advocacy for civil disobedience, right?
If people want to go out in the street and march without a permit and get arrested for blocking traffic, At least if I were designing the rules for Twitter, I would not rule that out.
On the other hand, if I were someone were to be advocating murder or bank robbery and, you know, in a very specific way, we might rule that out.
So there are some are some judgment cases on there.
And then the other content in this sense, dangerous content, inherently dangerous content, Would, you know, could include, you know, detailed descriptions of how to make bombs or poisons or how to kill yourself or things of that ilk.
So that's that bundle.
And You know, each system will make its own decisions about that.
I'm reasonably confident Elon will come up with some reasonable set of choices.
They're probably more liberal than many people might, but it's not going to be insane.
It's the third bucket, which is what I believe Elon actually cares about and which could be so important to help our world become a better place.
And that's what I call point of view moderation.
And point of view means what is it that you are trying to deliver, that you are trying to say, the substance.
Are you trying to say capitalism bad, communism good?
Are you trying to say trout fishing is more fun than bass fishing?
You know, you have some substance that you're trying to deliver, and that's your point of view.
And my perspective, and I'm with you here, I'm pretty close to an absolutist on good faith point of view.
You know, as I give an example in the essay that all the platforms ganged up simultaneously and booted the QAnon folks in late 2020 and very early 2021.
You know, frankly, I think the QAnon folks are ass clowns, and the chances of their ideas being correct are essentially zero, or at least most of their ideas are essentially zero.
But then, as I said, I also say the same thing about Christianity, astrology, and Marxist-Leninism.
And, you know, I don't consider it right to ban those three just because I don't like them, right?
And I think they're false, and I think they're bad.
I do believe they're both false and bad, all three of them.
Yeah, although I've heard you say, and I agree, that there are things in Marx's critique of the way capitalism functions that are well worth discussing.
Oh sure!
Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is a goddamn good set of moral lessons!
Absolutely right!
And so that's an important thing for those who want a bright line to recognize, is that in the case that something has value but it's not all of one nature, How are you going to draw that line?
And so what you're saying is you draw that line liberally because you need to be able to hash it out.
If it's good faith, if it's presented in good decorum, if it isn't obviously imminently dangerous and not in the kind of the new sense of safety bullshit, we can talk about that some.
But, you know, then let the ideas flow.
Now, this is what I believe to be Elon's actual motivation.
And, you know, Really hard for me to think about where in a point of view, you know, one would stop.
And again, this is to you, you were alluding to this earlier.
Yes, there's some bad ideas will float around.
QAnon Marxist Leninism.
Let's just give, you know, two examples.
But the attempt to pick and choose amongst ideas inevitably leads to the squelching of these fresh shoots that we need.
And I was in an email conversation with somebody today and they were going, Blah, blah, blah.
Democracy.
People who are able to say whatever they want to be the end of democracy.
And I point out to them, did you realize that when the American founding, democracy was a bad word?
The founders went out of their way to say that what they had created was not a democracy.
It was a mixed republic, which was actually true.
It wasn't until 1800 or so, when Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party got underway, that democracy even became something other than an embarrassing word.
And very partisan newspapers campaigned democracy for a number of years.
And finally, democracy was more or less consolidated in 1824 with the election that Andrew Jackson narrowly lost to John Quincy Adams.
And so, the thing that he thought he was defending, democracy, is actually a perfect example where upstart insurgents waged memetic warfare for 24 years before they actually consolidated the idea that America was a democracy.
And so, if we're allowing the Peculiar oligarchs who control these platforms to stomp on fresh ideas, no telling what fresh ideas might be being stomped on.
And I believe that it's the fresh ideas that are going to save humanity and help guide us or help us navigate ourselves towards a better place, rather than, you know, the old tired ideological ideas from the 18th, 19th and 20th century.
And so, truthfully, Bottom.
That's why I'm a point of view near absolutist, is that I'm so afraid that, you know, reflexive defense of the status quo ends up killing the ideas that we're going to need to save ourselves.
And putting up with some bad ideas in circulation is a price worth paying to be able to harvest the fruits of those fresh little sprouts when they grow up.
Yeah, this is an issue near and dear to my heart on many different fronts, right?
This is something that is now happening in the realm of science.
It's obviously happening in our political discussions.
And once you spot the following puzzle, it's obvious that you can't go about this the way we're doing it.
The puzzle is the fringe is mostly garbage.
It is therefore reasonable, if you wanted to get an algorithm to bet on things, just simply reflexively betting against the fringe is a winner in general.
But it's not a very big winner.
And what it does is it guarantees that you will neuter all of the things on which progress is based.
In other words, all of the status quo stuff that works arose on the fringe.
And it became mainstream.
And so, effectively, this reflexive betting against the fringe, the dismissing of everyone on the fringe as a kook or a crank or a quack or whatever, is the end of progress.
Right?
It is beyond conservative.
It is reactionary.
And it doesn't matter which side it's coming from.
That's just its nature.
And in fact, it's coming from self-interest.
People who are trying to protect themselves from competitors who have yet to have risen We'll, you know, invoke this need to do quality control of the fringe because there's so much garbage there.
But the point is, you know, the Founding Fathers were fringe, right?
Right, they were.
The Enlightenment was fringe in 1725, right?
Science was considered heretical.
Literally, people were burned at the stake or imprisoned for life.
Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest for being the first real scientist.
Right, so it's effectively, you know, are you for or against explosions?
Well, I guess in general I don't want explosions, but, you know, internal combustion engines run on explosions, so if I rule out explosions, I've caused a problem.
And, you know, in this case we have to protect the fringe, even though we also have to acknowledge that it is true.
Most of what is on the fringe is garbage in every era.
That's always been true.
And the thing that has never been solved is how you can go to the fringe and sort between that which is ahead of its time and that which is truly nonsense.
Right?
And our complexity lens would tell us you can't.
You can't.
It can't be done.
Because the unfolding of a complex system is unpredictable very many steps out.
So, you know, something whack-a-doodle like Game D, right?
Is that the answer?
I think it is, but truthfully, can I prove it?
Hell no.
And the only way you're going to find out is to watch the world unfold.
Either Game B will change the world for the good or it'll disappear, right?
Right.
And in some sense, I mean, you know, I hate to say the sentence because I know that it will potentially invite all kinds of nonsense, but I think you and I would both agree that in effect, in order to protect something potentially important like Game B, you also have to protect nonsense like QAnon.
Exactly.
That was the point I was trying to make.
If your reflex, and even worse, on Facebook, where they actually write algorithms to do this, if your algorithms essentially are targeting anything that is anti-status quo, as you'll say, we'll never have progress.
This is what happened to China, interestingly, in the late Ming era, where they had the biggest ships in the world.
They went as far as Keep of good hope.
And then they got their institutions got captured by this hyper reactionary ism.
They burned all the treasure ships, and they basically fell into centuries of passive nothingness, and then had their butts kicked when the Europeans and the Japanese emerged and collided with them in the late 18th and early 19th century.
And only now they recovered.
And so that can happen to a society, it can just say, No change.
No change.
That's a prescription for disaster.
In fact, my understanding of that chunk of history is that it is very likely, maybe even near certain, that if the Chinese had not done that, that instead of the Europeans showing up in the Americas, it would have been the Chinese and it would have changed the history of the world.
So anyway, yes, we need to be incredibly cautious about imagining that any rule of thumb is good enough to deal with the problem of a fringe that is mostly garbage but is also the incubator for all of the most important ideas of the future that none of us can spell out yet.
And to just speak to your own field, as we know, the vast preponderance of mutations are bad.
I don't have to pick a number, 99.9, right?
But guess what?
We'd still be single-cell bacteria or archaea if it wasn't for mutations.
Yep, right.
So, all right, we've got a bunch of stuff here.
I did want to mention that you talk about the question of doxing and you deal with that, I believe, according to what you've just said.
As a form of content that does not need to be protected, whereas I would say that in the case of doxing, actually, you can deal with that by saying this is a violation of decorum.
But there is no place to put the decorum line that does the full work, right?
So, for example, let's just take a real-life example here.
I retweeted a clip of a speech that I had delivered on video at the anti-mandate rally in Los Angeles last month.
Maybe it was the beginning of this month.
In any case, in that clip, I argued that we are effectively faced with questions that were settled at Nuremberg, and we are now unsettling those questions, and that in fact these mandates, because We have not been given full information on the consequences of things like these vaccines.
They are a violation of our right to informed consent and therefore the orders to administer these things are immoral and must be rejected.
So there are two violations of Nuremberg in the one case of mandates.
Now we can argue about whether or not I'm correct in my interpretation.
But nonetheless, what I have effectively said is that we are morally required to reject what may be lawful orders to administer a mandate that violates the informed consent of patients.
Now, is that a case of me advocating to break the law?
Is that equivalent of me suggesting that someone should rob a bank?
Or is this me actually saying, That is a settled matter of moral principle.
We all recognized until five minutes ago that we were required to ignore immoral orders to reject them in favor of a higher principle, right?
So the question is, This now puts us in a, you know, a gray area.
Anybody who recognizes the importance of Nuremberg is not going to want some algorithm to regard that as me advocating the breaking of some law as if I've argued that you should, you know, drive 150 miles an hour through a school zone.
Right.
But there is a question to be adjudicated.
Right.
Is that's a good that's a good test case, actually.
And it's one that, you know, the the answer to me is instinctually obvious that.
Yep.
It's it smells to me very much the same as being allowed to advocate for civil disobedience.
Which you say that in civil disobedience, whatever the minor social costs are for minor criminal activity, like blocking a street or even building a bonfire in the middle of the street, the ability to speak truth to power is worth taking on small costs of criminal infractions.
And in this case, I say very similar again, the whatever crimes that you're advocating for, they're not violent, they're not predatory.
They're essentially what they call malum in se, malum purpur hebrum versus malum in se.
That's an interesting distinction in the law.
Malum in se are laws that Any sane person would agree should be illegal murder, robbery, arson, rape, assault, that kind of stuff.
Prohibition is laws that are essentially regulatory and that societies will differ on.
Right.
Failure to file your Federal Election Commission report on time is actually a felony good for five years in the United States at the current time.
You know, the founding fathers would have thought that was utterly absurd.
And in most countries around the world, they don't have such things.
So that's a classical prohibition style law.
So perhaps There we go, talking out loud, thinking, doing real thinking, as our friend Jordan would say, as opposed to simulated thinking.
A first cut would be malum in se laws at the felony level should not be permitted.
But to advocate breaking a regulatory law that humans in general don't agree is a crime, maybe that's a good bet.
Yep.
So, I would also point out, I think, to me, one of the most interesting things in your article was, you know, it's classic Jim Rutt, it's also classic Game B, people will find some analogy in it between what you've done and the structure of the Unity 2020 proposal, but in your article,
You propose a an adjudication mechanism that solves many of the problems that many people would throw up their hands at right if you're going to you know, we've got a basic decorum versus content distinction Right, we're going to enforce some rules of decorum because the harm of doing so is very, very small.
But somebody's going to have to decide whether a given violation is decorum or content.
And then within content, we're going to have to have adjudication of whether or not something like the case that I've just presented Is within the scope of tolerated behavior on Twitter or outside of the bounds, right?
So how are you going to do that?
Are you going to have some gigantic structure, a baroque court system inside of Twitter?
How could it be paid for?
How do you keep it from being abused in the way that our court systems in the outside world are frequently abused?
So anyway, do you want to describe the structure that you propose?
Yes, yeah, that's great, because I do think this is important, because anything has to be able to scale at a reasonable price, right?
And so, what I propose is first, whatever the rules are on a platform, they need to be laid out very much like the criminal law, which is with sections, numbered sections, and numbered paragraphs.
You know, 12.4.3, right?
That's the crime of picking a pocket, let's say.
And the bottom level, the leaf on these trees, should be no more than 100 words, and it should be written in plain English.
That's the starting point.
If law is not comprehensible, you can't hold people accountable for obeying it.
Second, any moderation action of any sort, including warnings, must specify the exact post in question and must quote the exact section that you are in violation of.
And it is true that that may have to be done algorithmically at times.
However, those algorithms will fail at a pretty high rate.
And so, all algorithmic moderation must be appealable to a human within 24 hours.
And then that's the first level of appeal.
Then the second level of appeal, I think, is the one that is really necessary for producing the healthy ecosystem.
And it's something I came up with, and I'm pretty proud of it, actually, which is if you Been rejected by your human right of appeal against the algorithm.
You can take your case to arbitration with third party American Arbitration Association certified arbitrators.
And I've used them before in a business at scale around domain squatting of all obscure shit, where we basically had a relationship with an army of arbitrators and they arbitrated the cases and it worked.
They're not perfect, but they're way better than an internal bureaucracy with all of its self-serving tendencies.
And so, this is what would happen.
I'm not happy with my human appeal from the $13 an hour staffer at Twitter.
So, I say, I'm going to arbitration, and here's how arbitration works.
You put up $100 or more in You, the ostensible violator.
Me, the violator, put up $100 minimum or more and I appeal.
And the arbitration is what's called baseball arbitration in the art of arbitration, which is the arbitrator may not split the baby.
They must decide either A or B. Either the tweet or comment Violates that 100 word or less statute, or it does not?
A or B. It has to be brisk.
And arbitrators know how to do this.
A fair amount of arbitration is structured as baseball arbitration.
And now here's the two clever parts.
If you find for the platform, the appellant, the user, loses their stake, let's say their $100.
And that $100, if it's only $100, goes to pay for the arbitrator.
On the other hand, if the platform loses and the baseball arbitration is found for the complainer, the user, they get 10x the money from the platform.
So I put up 100 bucks, and if the arbitrator finds in my favor, I get $1,000 from Twitter.
And now a step further, For many people, $100 is really too much.
And further, $1,000 is not enough of a penalty for really bad behavior.
So I provided in this plan for stakes to be as large as a million dollars.
Right?
And so, worst case, platform's paying 10 million when they're wrong.
And further, very important, that there's a marketplace, the ability for anybody who think they've been done wrong by the platform to post their appeal and syndicate it, meaning that a community of, frankly, some of them just gonna be sharky financial dudes, right?
They're gonna look at the tweet, they're gonna look at the mandated 100-word statute, and they're gonna say, that doesn't apply.
Fuck, I'm gonna back this bet, right?
And if they back the bet, the backers will get 80% of the win in the case that the appealer prevails, and the appealer gets 20%.
So he has an upside.
If he can get his appeal syndicated, let's say he gets $10,000 worth of backers, and he wins, gets paid out $100,000.
$100,000.
He, the appellant, gets $20,000 for not doing anything except appealing and injustice.
And so the net emergent result is that anybody can get justice.
The justice is self-liquidating in terms of its cost.
The deciders are independent and professional deciders who are not under the thumb of Twitter.
And the American Arbitration Association does a great job of protecting their arbitrators from any kind of recourse from either side in the operation.
And because of the 10 to 1 leverage, the platforms will lose their ass if they're not right 90% of the time.
And so I look at this combination of force fields, which this proposal creates, and I just feel really good about this, that people will now feel that moderation is transparent, because we know the rules, we can read them, they're in plain English.
When we When they claim we violated the rules, it's not, well, you have violated our terms of service.
I mean, that's what most of these things are.
You violate terms of service.
You go to Facebook terms of service, 64 pages of gobbledygook, right?
But if they have to quote the exact 100 words which correspond to this exact post, then you can understand what you allegedly did wrong.
You can make the decision whether you feel like you have been done an injustice.
And if you have been, you could appeal and you could make some money off it and make them pay.
We all know one of the human senses of justice is to inflict a penalty on people who do you harm, right?
It's one of the things that keeps coming up in the research on deep human nature, that punishing evildoers is something that humans actually like to do, even above and beyond the rewards that might come from it.
That's my proposal, which I think if you implemented it on something like Twitter, would revolutionize both people's attitudes about moderation and the actual goodness of the result.
All right, so let me give you a couple observations on this.
One, it doesn't have to be professional arbiters.
It could be.
I like your structure.
I think it would be useful.
But you could also source this work from inside the community in various ways.
Also, it doesn't have to be individuals.
You know, it could be that certain cases are important enough that you would want to have more eyes and a debate process inside the adjudication.
The structure as you propose it, and I know you're going to agree with this, I'll be surprised if you don't.
Let's put it that way.
I mean, I will be surprised if you disagree.
The structure, as you've laid it out, is a great prototype.
Were you to implement it, you would almost certainly discover that the parameters are set incorrectly, right?
That you could get away, you know, that either the process is too likely to bar certain kinds of people from getting important things adjudicated because they don't have the hundred bucks or aren't likely To risk it, and their case isn't likely to garner the attention of somebody who's waiting for a particularly golden version, or who knows.
But the point is, the parameters as laid out are likely not to be right.
They're a good first guess, but we don't know what the right parameters are until you've run it.
So what you want is a system in which that can evolve, and the fine-tuning of this system so it works maximally efficiently, covers the maximum number of cases, and does so reasonably well.
You know, comes out in the wash.
I also believe that there needs to be a feedback between this process and, I will argue, I did argue on Twitter this morning, that there needs to be a Bill of Rights, right?
Now, the Bill of Rights should spell out what the intent of the various provisions are.
And so as the system of adjudication that you've laid out gets refined, it will also reveal ambiguities in the Terms of Service and the Bill of Rights for users.
And so that feedback can be used to refine those things so that any ambiguities get wrung out of the system.
So that the, you know, unspotted problems get introduced in, in some formal way, and then the parameters around them get refined.
And this could all be done, must all be done transparently, so that people can discuss the process, they can discuss the moral hazards that may arise, etc, etc.
So those inter Interacting feedbacks can both refine the adjudication and the structure of the effective laws that are being... laws or standards that are being adjudicated.
I like quite a bit of this.
I'll go through the parts I like and then the one part that I considered what you proposed and rejected it.
Okay.
First, I love the idea of a Bill of Rights, right?
You know, in the same sense that the Founding Fathers forgot to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, the Madisonians, Jeffersonians demanded it and they got it.
So, I think that's a wonderful idea.
And that should be one of the basis on which you appeal, which is, you know, not only did I not violate Rule 12.3.4, but 12.3.4 violates the Seventh Amendment of Twitter.
And either of those would be would be ground for the arbitrator to find against it.
Of course, Twitter pays out $10,000 to somebody because an arbitrator found a rule was unconstitutional.
They're going to change that rule damn quick.
Otherwise, people are going to mine the shit out of that.
Right.
So that's that's, I think, a very good, good idea.
Of course, you're correct.
I mean, you know, of course you're correct.
The parameters that I propose are not the correct ones.
They're the ones I made up when I wrote the essay.
They're a good first guess.
Yeah, they're not terrible, but of course they're going to change, right?
It's going to turn out, probably, that a million dollars is too high.
Maybe the cap should be $10,000, something like that.
Hard to see how you get professional arbitration for much less than $100 on a consistent basis.
Maybe you get to $50 at scale, but if you're going to use professional arbitration, you're going to have to have the minimum of $100.
And I am sympathetic to the issue about, you know, let's say about the kid in Nigeria who makes, you know, $5 a day, he can't come up with $100.
But that's where I perhaps have more confidence in rapacious investors, right?
You know, that if there are, you know, there is money to be made, especially the cap is $10,000.
And you can find a kid in Nigeria who was done injustice by, who's posted his claim, there will be sharks, they'll be looking for those things.
This is injustice.
I'm putting the whole $10,000 down.
I'm going to win $80,000 if I'm right.
And I believe that all I have to be right is 12% of the time.
Right.
So I guess I'm enough of a market purist in some sense that I have more confidence that a marketplace in syndicated appeals will actually work pretty good.
All right.
I dig it.
But then we got to go one more step.
Before we do that, let me come back to it.
Let me finish up on the one part that I considered and rejected.
You didn't quite say it explicitly, but you alluded to it, which is maybe there's other ways to adjudicate these cases than a third party arbitration.
And one that I used to love, and I used to actually propose this, is automatically selected juries of users for this sort of thing.
And I actually, as I started to write the article, I actually wrote that in.
Then I stopped and thought about it a minute.
What would happen if you did that?
And I realize there's a flaw in it, unfortunately.
Because it's a great idea and for years I've advocated it.
And here's the flaw that I saw.
Unfortunately, societies today are highly, highly tribalized.
Knee-jerk tribalism.
So if you, let's say, and this was going to be my proposal that, you know, a decorum, particularly decorum violations that were low stakes.
So the worst that could happen to you is the content was taken down or maybe a three-day suspension.
So anything, you know, relatively low stakes would go to a randomly selected of currently active users of 10 of them and to make the same call as the arbitrator.
And if, you know, somebody who was picked didn't make the call, the algorithm would keep sending it to people until 10 of them had voted.
And if eight voted against you, you lost, right?
Now, unfortunately, humans being where they are, especially today, suppose I, you know, say Donald Trump is a motherfucker, right?
It's against the rules to say motherfucker.
People hate Donald Trump are going to say that's not a violation.
Right.
And so motivated reasoning would triumph over careful application of the rules.
And therefore, I rejected my own idea as I was writing the article.
Well, I reject your rejection of your own idea, Jim.
Let's hear it!
Bring it, dude!
Bring it!
Let's see if I can't resurrect it.
Okay, let's do it!
That was what you were alluding to, was my guess.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Well, here's the thing.
A, I think it's such a good idea that I don't want the tribalism objection to kill it, but I totally recognize your point, is that basically if all you're doing is subjecting a particular question To the arbitrary process of how many people, you know, whether you picked one person from this side or that side of the puzzle.
But here's the thing.
I do hope and I think it is imperative that Musk makes transparent whatever algorithmic stuff is affecting who we interact with and how we view them and all of that.
But it is also true That the algorithms are in a position to figure out who is not subject to those tribal dynamics.
In other words, I don't know what the algorithm thinks about you, and I don't know what it thinks about me, but I bet it's confused.
I would say.
Most likely.
It would have to be because the point is you get into a level of a la carte evaluations of things and every you know beyond some level everybody's one-off and yeah big data can overcome some of that but anyway my point is The algorithms are in a position, or at least the data matrix is in a position, to identify people who are in a good position to adjudicate these things.
People who, you know, people who have a consistent history of nuance in some area that makes their position somewhat unpredictable from a machine perspective could be found.
And so it could even become You know, a badge of honor.
In other words, to be spotted as somebody who's capable of adjudicating these things could be an indication that you're actually a nuanced, independent thinker, and that could be a badge of honor, which would then incentivize people to get off their tribal shit, which would be good for society.
So, anyway, somewhere in that neighborhood might be a solution to the hazard you rightly point out is a sizable one.
Interesting.
And here's a way to tell if you're right.
And a company the size of Twitter with Elon Musk's billions could do this, which is at some substantial scale, big enough that it's statistically significant, do both in parallel.
Yep.
Yeah, AB test it.
Yeah, AB test it, have the arbitrators do it.
We can have pretty high reliability that arbitrators are good.
There's a lot of literature on that.
They're not perfect, but they're good.
And if it turns out that finding these untriggered people, these people who are not tribal in their decisions, or have the intellectual fortitude to override their tribalism, and I do know people like that, you know, that My mother was a famously fair person.
You know, I would put my life on the line if my mother was on a jury.
She was somehow able to get her tribal alliances, which were quite strong, and put them aside when she was making a judgment, right?
But how you find that with a computer algorithm, I don't know.
But we could test it, right?
Brett and his gang, Renown, create or evolve, most likely from machine learning, you know, a proposed mechanism, and then we run it in parallel with the arbitrators.
And if it doesn't beat the arbitrators, we don't adopt it.
When it can consistently equal the arbitrators, then maybe we'll consider it.
We will consider it.
We will adopt it.
Now, with respect to this other thing that you alluded to, we might as well go on to this, which is the algorithms and transparency.
And this is something that I believe Elon has gotten almost right, which is he suggested that the feed algorithm be made open source.
You know, because as most people know, you don't see all the tweets of your friends in their time order in which they were made.
You used to on both Facebook and Twitter, but it's been many years.
And frankly, an awful lot of their money comes from feeding you clickbait and things that will keep you on, drive engagement, etc.
And nobody knows what those algorithms do.
They're magic, right?
And people think they've been shadow banned.
Shadow banning is the idea That based on the content or you or something, they feed less of your stories to people who follow you.
I've occasionally been fairly convinced I've been shadow banned for periods of time.
You have to be careful because there are multiple patterns.
One pattern I've seen, which you will spot right away why it exists, Is that when you take a break from Twitter, Twitter is very tepid on your tweets at the point that you return.
That's very true.
And as somebody who takes a six month sabbatical from social media every year, it does take a while to warm the algorithms up when I get back.
Right, which I take to be effectively punishment to keep addicts on, right?
It's very addictive, you know, when my tweets are, you know, regularly getting 4,000, 6,000, 8,000 likes and then I take a break for a week and I come back and I, you know, Stuff isn't getting seen.
It trains me.
Actually, those breaks for a week aren't so good for you, Brett.
And anyway, it's a lot of sense, a huge amount of sense.
And God damn, is does that suck?
God damn, does that suck?
And the thing is, I can't even swear.
I mean, I'll bet you that they understand what they're doing.
But it's the kind of thing that if they have a learning algorithm, what, you know, what biases cause people to remain engaged on Twitter, it will discover the pattern of how to punish somebody who's trying to control their addiction.
And it will generate that algorithm.
So this algorithm generates more actual views than that algorithm.
The management may not even know.
That has this feature.
And in fact, that's one of the dangers of black box machine learning.
Black box machine learning is damn useful for certain things, but for things like this, with no transparency in it, it can produce very bad unanticipated results.
I never thought of that.
You're exactly right.
That's got to be true.
I mean, especially the guys who are growing massive machine learning, which are mostly Facebook and Google, I guarantee either intentionally or unintentionally, they are punishing people who stop Shooting up the heroin.
And if you want to, if you want to be a paperclip, that's the thing to root for.
That's the thing that's going to get you turned into a paperclip faster than anything else, is these black boxes where the people who made them don't know why they work, right?
But they work!
On the metric they were given, you know, we want lots of paperclips.
You don't get a whole bunch of paperclips, motherfucker!
But anyway, now back to my solution on where I think he's half right, or 60% right.
That feed algorithm ought to be open source, not that, you know, I was talking to my wife about this, and she's a very smart person, but she's not a software person.
She said, I don't know what I would do with that.
Well, you don't need to do anything with it.
There are professional critics out there who will evaluate the software, and they'll say, oh, look at this.
It's done just what Brett said.
The motherfuckers, they punish you if you go on break.
And then everybody would know it and start complaining, and maybe they'd fix it.
But the downside is it would also provide lots of clues for how to game the algorithm.
And that's not good.
So here's my response to that.
Here's my solution, which is, all right, let's have a market in feed algorithms.
And they're all required to be open source.
And you can charge up to 10 cents a month to somebody to subscribe to your feed algorithm.
And they're all open source.
And more important, and also very importantly, the architecture of Facebook Other users do not know what algorithm you're running, so they don't know how to game you.
So, suddenly, the gaming of the algorithms problem becomes exponentially more difficult.
And so, I think you get the power of open source algorithms, you get innovation in algorithms, which itself is a pure good, and you get a dense and complicated ecosystem, which is very difficult to game.
Yeah, but there's a big danger in that, Jim.
You know, if you take that too far... I know there are some dangers.
Let's hear it.
Well, but this is like the mother of all dangers, right?
If you take that thinking too far, you could end up saving Western civilization.
I'd hate for that to happen.
I know, wouldn't that be terrible?
Yeah, because if people had too much insight into the way they were being manipulated and started to understand why other people see things the way that they do, then they would be much harder to fool, right?
And actually, so this is my elaboration of that idea.
As it happens, I was working with some other folks about what to do about the collapse of all of our platforms, which May not matter, because Elon may be in the process of rescuing Twitter, and if he does, that will change the dynamics for the rest of the, you know, if the rest of the social media platforms are like the kiddie pool, and Twitter is like a place that adults can go and have any conversation that needs to be had, then Twitter's going to be the only place anybody wants to be, so that's going to change what the other platforms do.
This is an extension of my zero is a special number claim, but Anyway, one of the things that I think is true, and this is a response to Celia's point about not knowing what to do with the algorithm, even if it was open, is I don't even think that that's right, because one of the things you might build in
is a it could be sliders right where you could just play with them and see how your view of the world changes as you move yourself from twitter thinks i'm a liberal to twitter thinks i'm a conservative or something like that but you could also there's all kinds of fun things you could do right hey you know brett weinstein sounds crazy to me i I cannot understand how a smart person would reach the conclusions that he seems to have reached about, for example, COVID public health policy.
Let me see the world as Brett sees it for a week, right?
Then maybe you'll understand a few things, right?
Now, if you could do that, if you could say, look, I want to see what my opposite, you know, take every parameter that describes me and flip them all the other direction.
What does that person see on Twitter?
Now this begins to empower us as citizens to understand the crazy world we've landed in, right?
I think this could be... I have wondered about this for at least a decade.
Why is Why is there not a cottage industry of people trying to reverse engineer Moment to moment, the content of these algorithms so that we can, you know, put a corrective lens on them and stop seeing through some, you know, Baroque structure's desired viewpoint, right?
Why?
There is an industry, right?
It's people who are basically trying to promote stuff, right?
The influencer type stuff.
It's all about, you know, how to game the algorithms.
There's a giant industry and how to game the algorithms.
True, but there's no public spirited effort to allow you to correct for the algorithm's impact on you.
So anyway, the point is, look, if you give users the ability to play with the parameters, see what other people see, right, that could potentially be a game changer with respect to how we understand each other.
Yeah, I love that.
I love that.
And you combine that with the marketplace idea, because that way there would be innovation in these sliders, right?
Not just right and left.
That's kind of stupid.
How about open-minded versus closed-minded?
How about neurotic versus anti-neurotic, right?
You know, you could have all kinds of interesting ideas.
Or again, someone could actually put, I want to look at the world the way Kim Kardashian looks at it for 30 seconds before I went insane.
Right.
And there'll be lots of innovation in the features around feeds.
So I love your idea.
And frankly, I've never thought about that.
That's a that's a great one.
I'm stealing that.
And I'll give credit when I remember.
Brent Weinstein said that we should have sliders on our Feed Al goals and be able to switch shoes with other people and see the world from their, that alone, see the world from their perspective for even if it's just an hour would be really quite valuable.
Oh my god, it would be so great!
And you can imagine, you know, the podcasts that are just waiting to happen.
Somebody runs an experiment, right?
What, you know, I lived for a week in Jesse Singles' shoes, right?
Let me tell you what I learned about the difference in our perspective.
There's so much room, you know, for us to become sort of like next level conscious of our collective consciousness.
That it's hard to imagine how it wouldn't be invigorating and tremendously insightful.
As the big heads say, multi-perspectival, right?
Literally, you'd have an opportunity to be multi-perspectival.
I could look at the world as Brett sees it.
I could look at the world as Kim Kardashian sees it.
I could look at the way, heaven forbid, Trump sees it.
And that would be educational for short periods of time.
It sure would.
And that's really hard to do.
You know, it's impossible to do in a face-to-face world other than through empathy.
But this is literally a place where our technology could provide us a capacity we never had before.
Totally could, and for a troublemaker like Elon Musk, this is, I think, a natural, right?
Elon!
Give us a call, we'll tell you how to do it!
Well, actually, that does raise a question, right?
Which is, you know, you've been thinking about this stuff forever.
Game B was an explicit effort to figure out if we could get ourselves out of, you know, the eddy that we were being flushed down to some new kind of self-governance that wasn't coercive and accomplished all of the things that it needs to accomplish and was resistant to capture and all of the things that we understood Game B to be about.
There is a question about whether or not if this was, if it sounded like this style of thinking was of the right sort to figure out what to do with a property like Twitter that has huge potential to do both good and ill, right?
He could create a council and, you know, we could figure it out.
And if we didn't figure it out, he could chuck us.
Yeah, we could buy his fancy dinners for, you know, here's an idea, you know, three day weekends every six weeks for a while, right?
That was the pattern we used to cook up the Emancipation Party in Game B. And then when he decides we're not getting any value, no more free dinners, gentlemen.
And I think we could cook up something for him.
Yeah, I'm pretty confident of it.
All the people you and I know together, you know, we've been thinking about this stuff in a way more nuanced way.
I do worry about that.
I do think that Elon and his move, taking over Twitter, has an opportunity to break the monopoly of these goddamn Silicon Valley blue church discourse chokers.
But I also think that there is a chance he could fuck it up really, really bad and actually make things worse.
And it's really important that he gets some good advice because he's a brilliant guy.
But I made this point also online today.
It's kind of weird jumping back into social media after, you know, Almost a month being away from it, because I did say when I went on sabbatical that I would come back to post my podcast episodes, which my producer actually does, so I don't have to dirty my fingers with the filthy environment of social media.
But I also said I would do it when I posted essays.
And so, I did hop back in today.
One of the things I made the point on was that Elon, as someone said, Elon, Elon Musk can figure this out.
He's brilliant.
And I go, Yeah, he's motherfucking brilliant.
But let's look at all the problems he solved.
They all live in the realm of the complicated.
They're engineering problems.
Even SpaceX, which is magnificent, huge-scale engineering, is still engineering.
And when we say something is complicated, it means we can take it apart, put it back together again, and it will still work.
Twitter is in the realm of the complex.
It's basically networks.
It's nonlinear.
It's humans.
It's game theory.
It's agentic game theory, the worst kind.
And unlike the complicated, you can't take complex systems apart, put it back together again, and they'll work.
They're just different.
And so I would put up as a finger up saying, yeah, Elon Musk is an extremely impressive guy in the land of the complicated.
But he has really no expertise At all in the land of the complex.
And while I believe he's so smart, he could learn how to use that lens.
He needs some lens makers for the realm of the complex.
I absolutely agree, and it's such an important distinction, because to almost everybody, complex and complicated sound like synonyms, right?
And until you spot the huge distinction and its implications for something like this, because whether you like it or not, Twitter is a living dynamic.
You know, with, I don't know, how many, presumably it's billions of users?
Hundreds of millions.
Hundreds of millions of users, each of which is a complex system in and of itself, which virtually guarantees that the interreaction, if it's anything other than stupidly simple, is going to be a highly complex, complex system.
Yeah, H1's going to be not only complex adaptive systems, but it's going to be strategic, which adds a whole nother level to the analysis, as it turns out.
Yep.
So anyway, yes, whether it's complex systems is your fundamental bent or evolutionary biology, you definitely need some, you know, at the very least you need people who know that they don't know the solution and that you're going to have to basically use an evolutionary dynamic to solve any problem and that you will discover, you know, unending unintended consequences along that road and they will have to be dealt with in real time.
That is a fundamental piece of the puzzle.
Yeah, which is very different than building a Tesla car or even more so a rocket where you have to be extremely disciplined, right?
Extremely disciplined thinking could lead you into disaster in Twitter land.
You're going to have to be adaptive in near real time, as you say, much like we talked about anti-utopianism.
You're nudging Twitter in better directions.
I actually closed out my essay with that point, which is anyone who thinks that Any group of people, but specifically Elon, is going to get it right and do it perfectly from the beginning?
No fucking way!
The best we can hope for is that we'll be moving in the right direction and doing more smart things than we are stupid things, and that rejecting Elon because he's not perfection is the classic example of giving up the good for the perfect.
And again, on the other hand, with Elon, without the right guidance, might not even be good, but I think there's a good chance that, particularly if they can find wise folks like you and me to give them advice, this will be a massive improvement over having our ideas of the green shoots of these new important ideas being stomped on by the peculiar oligarchs of Silicon Valley.
And I think this will be great, but we'll see.
Well, let's put it this way.
I, you know, I said on Twitter the other day that this could be a disaster, but I would bet strongly in the other direction, because I do, I am a believer that Elon has interesting instincts, and he's very good at problem solving, and so he's going to spot the part of this that nobody is equipped to handle yet.
I will say, in your essay, you point to his, it's not really a TED talk, it's a conversation on the TED channel.
And I only got a short way into it before I had to put it on pause.
But I was struck because he is explaining in there why.
So the question was, some of your predictions have been almost strangely spot on, but other ones have been way off.
Why the distinction?
And the one that was used as the exemplar for why are you way off sometimes was Was when are we going to get fully autonomous cars?
And what he describes is a series of diminishing returns curves stacked on each other.
He calls them false horizons.
And I was struck because this is actually an image from Heather and my book.
We went looking for versions of this image.
This is an idea I came up with years ago as I was working on trade-offs, which was my dissertation.
And I realized that there was a parameter that was causing certain patterns to emerge in nature, and it has a very different effect in, for example, academia, where it causes fields to get stuck, right?
Which is a pattern most people aren't familiar with.
They sort of think there's always progress going on because there are always papers being published.
But that's not how it goes, and there's a very good reason for it.
But anyway, I was struck by the fact that he was effectively describing this figure in our book, which we, you know, made great pains to construct.
We couldn't just find a version of it somewhere because it didn't exist.
I'll tell you where it does exist, which is in the SFI and Flavor Study of Innovation.
What we have found is that innovation is a whole stack of S-curves.
At various scales.
And one of the ones that people at Sanofi Institute have studied more than most others is machine-generated motion.
Actually, motion in general.
So, you start out with walking, then you get a horse, and then it tops off.
The best Arabian horse is only a bit better than a sort of half-assed horse you buy for $10, right?
But it S's out.
Horse ain't going no faster than the best horse in the world.
Then you get a steam engine, right?
You get a simple steam engine that's not optimized thermodynamically.
It can't go faster than about 30 miles an hour.
Tops out.
Then someone comes up with a new innovation.
Then there's another S curve.
And if you look at the history of transport, it's S-curve after S-curve after S-curve, with middling innovations like the more efficient condensers on the steam engines, to totally radically new ideas like diesel, then diesel-electric, and then gas-turbine, then jets, and then rockets, and those are all separate S's.
And so there's where I think you can find this idea laid out in some considerable detail.
Right, but the point is you can also extrapolate from it, right?
If you know that that's the process you're involved in, and you're on your first S-curve, then you behave differently than if you think, finally we figured out how to do this, and then you're deeply into diminishing returns before you ever decide to do anything else.
And so, take for example the academic context.
Somebody discovers something new.
They have an insight in a field, right?
Maybe it's Einstein who finds the flaw in Newtonian physics and opens up this brand new line of inquiry, right?
That brand new line of inquiry is going to pay dividends.
At a spectacular rate and the problem is that what we infer from that is that this is the truth rather than this is the next s-curve and The school of thought that owns all of those gains in what we call the bargain phase ends up killing off all its competitors So at the point that it hits diminishing returns, which is predictable enough There's nobody left who remembers how to think any other way because the school of thought that was so dominant taught all of the students and so
If you realize this is the pickle you're in, then you realize that the obvious thing to do is never to whittle down to one school of thought.
You at least need the second most vibrant school of thought to be fed and protected through lean times because that's likely... I mean, this goes back to the conversation we were having at the beginning of this about what's on the fringe.
You know, what's on the fringe is the school of thought that's on the outs because something else is paying high dividends.
But of course, that's a finite process until you've got the ultimate diminishing returns curve until you've discovered, you know, enough of the truths that there isn't the next one.
Which is a long way out.
Physics actually fell into this in a famous way.
The search for the theory of everything and string theory.
And the funding flew to string theorists, the PhD wannabe students came to the theorists, and instead of cranking out one PhD student a year, as is typical for a physicist, they were cranking out five.
And by the early double aughts, This is an astounding number.
60% of the graduating PhDs in physics were string theory people.
Well, it's turned out string theory, maybe there's something there in the very long term, but at least in the short term, it appears to be a bit of a dry hole.
And so physics had to essentially re-diversify itself from Relatively small islands that were outside of string theory.
Now it's done so, but essentially it may have lost a whole generation of physicists who got over-sucked into the vortex of string theory.
Right, and now I always point out that in part, the poor discipline of physicists with respect to the term theory is part of the problem here.
Because there's no evidence for string theory.
It's purely a hypothesis.
It's not even a hypothesis.
In order to be a hypothesis, it would have to be... You have to point to the experiments.
It would have to be testable.
And so my point is, this is actually string notion.
It doesn't make you wrong.
Truthfully, it's string math so far, and apparently the math is so beautiful.
I'm not a serious mathematician.
Yeah, I can do differential equations and shit like that, but theoretical math ain't my thing.
But the people that look at the string theory say it is beautiful math, and that's really all it is so far.
Now, it is possible that there will be some experiments But nobody's even been able to conceptualize one that we could do in the next hundred years.
Right.
Which is a little scary.
So to your point, discipline of applying the scientific method should definitely not be called a theory.
Yeah.
And calling it a hypothesis is with a grace and a nod about the fact that they can speculate about some experiments they might be able to do in 200 years.
Hopefully it becomes a hypothesis at some point.
In the meantime, it's string cheese.
That's my feeling.
I like it.
So yeah, Lee Smolin, who I've had on my show, has written very eloquently about the bad attractor in physics that grossly overstaffed string mathematics for a considerable period of time and probably slowed the human species rate of innovation down to a measurable degree, because an awful lot of our Fundamental advances come from physics.
If people had been working in solid state physics around the parasitism that occurs at the four nano level in computer chips, we might be a whole generation ahead in computer chips, for example.
Yep.
It's an interesting thing.
Opportunity cost is a bitch.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So, what else do we want to talk about here?
I'm going to have to run in about 10 minutes, but... Well, I don't know.
We've done a pretty good job here.
I mean, I do think... I guess there is one other thing that I want to talk about.
All right.
Let's hop into it.
I think, you know, in watching people's reaction to Elon's successful takeover of Twitter, I'm struck by the fact that it brings up an echo of another conversation, all right?
I often say, I'm sure you won't disagree with this either, that the best form of governance is sure to be a brilliant, benevolent dictator, and that the problem with the benevolent dictator plan is two things.
One, there's a question of whether they remain benevolent at the point that they accumulate power.
I don't think it's as certain As many people would have you believe that every person becomes corrupt upon having great power, but I do think there's something about power that tends to accumulate corrupt people.
But the second thing and maybe even the more critical flaw of a benevolent dictator program is There's no rational way.
There's no handoff plan that keeps something in the hands of a benevolent dictator.
But anyways, there's a third one, too, which is for any big problem, the benevolent dictator is a benevolent dictator for the janitor.
your school might be great.
But benevolent dictator for you know, a country, he needs a whole bureaucracy and the bureaucracy inevitably becomes corrupt, will not be especially if it's only answering to one person and their careers are in his hand forever.
OK, I take that.
I agree with you.
But in this case, I guess my feeling about the takeover of Twitter, in principle, if you said to me, you know, 10 years ago, are you in favor of these giant tech platforms being in the hands of, you know, billionaires with effectively absolute control over how they function?
Obviously, my instinct would be, hell no, that sounds pretty freaking dangerous.
On the other hand, at this point, am I willing to bet on a particular billionaire who appears to have a desire to solve extremely difficult problems and has a good head am I willing to bet on a particular billionaire who appears to have a desire to solve extremely difficult Yes.
Yeah, in this case, I'm willing to bet on the kind of guy who could get electric cars to where he's gotten them, could get a private space program to where he's gotten it.
And it doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to work, but it does mean that it beats the hell out of any other alternative on the table, right?
We are talking about a benevolent dictator, but a benevolent dictator that's closer to the janitorial department at the school than it is to, you know, civilization as a whole.
I'm with you there.
It's funny you mentioned this.
This is actually good, because if you'd asked me 10 years ago, if I suppose the richest guy in the world who made his money doing something entirely else came in and took over one of the main online platforms to run it the way he wants with an extreme point of view, probably, I would have said almost certainly a horrible idea, right?
Because I would imagine somebody like Larry Ellison, right?
Or Bill Gates or somebody like that.
Or it'd be like Jeff Bezos taking over the Washington Post so that he could, you know, strangle democracy in the darkness or something.
Exactly.
But yeah.
But yeah.
So I think you're right that this is an idiosyncratic and therefore risky proposition.
But nonetheless, it feels right.
You know, maybe we're all wrong.
Maybe the dude is just the usual vile shit that corporate America throws up.
But it doesn't seem like it.
I mean, the guy seems authentic.
He seems curmudgeonly.
He seems like he doesn't give two fucks what anybody thinks.
All the things that, in my experience, have made for people who can do serious innovation.
And serious innovation, particularly because he's going to get an unbelievable amount of flack from the people who had this chokehold around the discourse.
And this is, I think, such a tell.
You know, the people who instinctively think Elon's move is bad, most of them are not thinking at the level we're talking about here.
They're talking about the fact that their side no longer will have the chokehold on discourse.
You know, they don't maybe not even realize that's what's motivating, but this is motivated thinking big time.
And so it's a real tell the people are instinctively.
You know, are basically are telling me that they don't want their side to lose this this stick in the fight.
Yeah, they do not like the idea that somebody is going to disarm them and create a level playing field because they've been enjoying... Everything I can tell about Elon, I could be wrong, right, is that he really sincerely wants a good faith marketplace of ideas where the good ideas will gradually build support and prosper, and the bad ideas will gradually disappear and sink into the ground.
Now, that's much harder to do than it is to say, At least he wants to do it, which is not something I see in any of the other players.
Well, so here's the, there are a couple interesting pieces of the puzzle that sit somewhere near here.
One, there's something about the startup process that allows people to become powerful without being trained into corruption.
In other words, I think there's something vibrant about startups in large measure because they do have this exponential growth potential, which can take quirky people who do have, you know, their own way of viewing things and put them in positions of significant power.
And it tends to erode away.
But Musk's rise has been so spectacular in terms of the wealth at his disposal.
that in some sense, I think he carries whatever values he's got.
Obviously, they're not going to be completely unchanged by what he's been through.
But in some sense, he's doing something that looks more like what I would expect somebody who became that wealthy to do than what most really wealthy people do.
Right?
Most really wealthy people, most of the billionaires, look to me like it has made them timid rather than bold.
And I don't quite get it because I feel like it should be exactly the opposite way.
The people with fuck you money should be bolder about their visions and bolder about doing something wild and less concerned about failure.
And I see a lot of the opposite.
And that is weird.
That is strange.
But it is very true, you know, that, you know, the whole point of fuck you money is being able to say fuck you.
And, you know, truthfully, I made my fuck you money pretty young.
And I have taken advantage of that platform to say fuck you lots of times.
Yes, you have.
But the people that don't, I mean, why would you be, you know, a multi-billionaire and to become a timid toady?
What the hell's that about, right?
Right.
But we know Elon's not that type.
I believe, hey Elon, if you're listening, I believe you're game B and don't know it yet.
You know, having sold all your mansions and gotten rid of your fancy cars and live in a $85,000 shitbox house in West Texas, you know, the Game B spirit is in the lab.
It's strong, right?
And I, you know, again, you can be wrong, but I got a good sense about Elon here.
I have the same sense.
He's not one of these people that's fallen into timidity.
And of course, a big part of it is not giving a fuck what the other rich dudes think, right?
You know, you saw the kind of fairly bad taste image of he made of Gates the other day.
That was pretty good.
Yeah.
But, you know, that shows me he just doesn't care.
And that's what you need right now.
You need somebody who cares about humanity, cares about the trajectory of the human race.
This is another sign to tell him that he's a good guy.
He's obsessed with going to Mars.
Yep.
By the way, I think that's probably a bad idea.
It'll turn out the asteroids are where we should go first for a number of reasons.
But he may be right and I may be wrong.
But the fact that he has said things like, I want to be buried on Mars, right, makes me realize that this is not Jeff Bezos, or this is not Larry Ellison, or this is not whatever apparatchik is running General Motors these days, right?
This is a guy who, you know, marches to the beat of a different drum.
And that's just what we need right now.
Yeah, I absolutely agree and I think there is something quite hopeful in it.
I will say that there is also something very hopeful in Mark Andreessen's recent exploration of what he's calling the current thing.
This strikes me as a positive, you know, another person who's achieved great wealth, doing something early in his life that made him quite wealthy and powerful.
And that, you know, I also know him a bit.
He's quite a deep thinker.
I know him too.
I knew him before he got rich.
Oh, is that right?
I was a mentor to him.
He was a little rich, but he wasn't, you know, big swinging dick of the valley.
It was back when he was the CTO for AOL, believe it or not.
Oh, my goodness.
We used to hang out and, you know, I gave him one of his first public speaking opportunities and things of that sort.
He is an impressive young man is the way I looked at it at the time.
And he's grown up to be a very impressive dude in general.
Yep, absolutely agree and I'm very favorable to the way he is, you know, turning his attention to the way our collective consciousness works or more often than not doesn't work.
I think it's very productive and I have to say I also feel that there's something about what Peter Thiel is up to at the moment.
You know his speech at the Bitcoin conference also struck me as an important bold move in which You know, he basically planted a flag and he pointed to the gerontocracy and, you know, outlined what I thought was a pretty interesting model of the way we should think about Bitcoin versus Ethereum, etc.
So anyway, I don't know, but I do have a sort of sense, you know, and Somehow, pieces of Gen X that have gotten very wealthy and powerful through unusual mechanisms that have left them mentally intact are on the move.
And, you know, I don't mean to say, you know, Peter Thiel and I disagree on a whole bunch about the way to view the world, but nonetheless, I am heartened to see that people are actually up for a major change and that I think In some sense, they are feeling the same urgency that motivated Game B and other such endeavors to start thinking big.
Yeah, there's something in the air right now.
And frankly, all I got to do is look around, see how fucked up shit is.
And if you're not blind, then you should be thinking about bold alternatives.
And it is great.
Though, again, we should caution that have it being driven by peculiar oligarchs is a dangerous strategy and that the people themselves need to get some skin in the game here.
Oh, and I think in some sense this is the message we've converged on here.
This is a dangerous strategy, but it is so late in our trajectory.
We are in such danger that at some level, as dangerous as it is to have oligarchs effectively navigating based on their own understanding and the understanding of those around them, it's a better plan than allowing this system to continue on autopilot because it's going to get us killed.
Hear, hear.
All right.
Thanks so much, Jim.
This has been really enlightening.
I will, of course, post a link to your piece.
I would strongly encourage people to read it, to think about it, and to extrapolate from it.
Figure out what we haven't figured out that could be added to the model or critiques that need to be made.
Anyway, it's a living discussion and I look forward to seeing where it goes.
Thank you, Brett.
It's been a wonderful conversation, and I think we actually came up with some good new stuff here today.
I think so, too.
All right.
Be well, Jim, and be well, everyone else.
All right.
Bye-bye.
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