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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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      Hmm. Idea for a personal currency: collect digitally signed to-whom-it-may-concern open recommendation letters from friends, colleagues etc. Maybe with expiry dates or revocation capacity. Maybe you have a stash of a hundred.

      2 replies 1 retweet 4 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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      Then (and this is the clever bit) sign a few over to new people you need to have trust you while you’re working with them. They return them when relationship is done. If they like the work, they issue you their recommendation letters citing the ones they held.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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      So old letters get more valuable as new letters blockchain on. You use them for more important things. It’s a secure currency because they are only useful in relation to working with you. You can stake a few letters or many, leaf-letters or roots of long chains.

      2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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      If they DON’T like the work, they have the option of destroying the letters they hold. You’d have to go back and get new letters from people for the entire destroyed chain. So it’s serious. You’re operating your own ransomware.

      2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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      How would you use this? Instead of saying “I really want this job!” you’d say, “I want this job so much I’ll stake my entire TWIMC forest* on this application!” * Set of To Whom It May Concern DAG trees

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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      You’d literally be staking your reputation. Or at least signing up for a very expensive reputation reconstruction failure mode. Including recommendations from dead people that may not be recoverable.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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      You could robustify your reputation forest. If Bob thinks Alice may in future turn out to be a criminal, he stakes his gig with Charlie using both letters from Alice and Dan. That way if Alice goes to jail, her letter can be removed without orphaning the Charlie letter.

      3 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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    8. starlight veronica‏ @veronicastraszh 21 Nov 2018
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      Replying to @vgr

      Honestly, I think participation in such a scheme would mark one as being a "hopeless techbro who can't figure out normal social networks."

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    9. starlight veronica‏ @veronicastraszh 21 Nov 2018
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      Replying to @veronicastraszh @vgr

      It would end up somewhere on the spectrum of "people who brag about their klout score" and "rationalists who want to 'solve' dating using Bayes theorem".

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    10. starlight veronica‏ @veronicastraszh 21 Nov 2018
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      Replying to @veronicastraszh @vgr

      (That probably came across as too dismissive, but really, human brains are pretty good at social stuff. I trust more adapting our neural hardware to online reality, rather than offloading it to a 'tech'.)

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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      Replying to @veronicastraszh

      Pre-Telegraph/train, people used to carry letters of recommendation and introduction around. Natural human neural stuff fails badly beyond small troop size, which is why impersonal institutions emerged. Now those are failing. Hence this idea.

      10:25 PM - 21 Nov 2018
      • 2 Likes
      • The Dark Matrix 👽Engineer Extraordinaire
      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        2. starlight veronica‏ @veronicastraszh 21 Nov 2018
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          Replying to @vgr

          I'm down with the recommendations idea, but turning it into a kinda fungible 'currency' which to me suggests placing a legible value on social connections -- that feels "off" to me.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Nov 2018
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          Replying to @veronicastraszh

          It’s actually lowering fungibility. Recommendations today (like on a LinkedIn profile) are worthless because they are infinitely spendable. Now they’re chained into stories about you that stake your participation in one project/transaction. Personal digital heirlooms to pawn.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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