But only now have both the technologies and the free-agent sector matured to the point where you can build out the infrastructure for real. Back then I think I was too early. It was pre-blockchain, pre- Stripe, pre-Freshbooks, pre most of the tools in the “passion economy” sector
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The ideas back then were *really* primitive. Mturk seemed like the bleeding edge. Read books like Tom Malone’s Future of Work (inspiration for elance which eventually got absorbed into upwork) and Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation for a historical view. A lot has changed since 2010.
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It’s time for a free-agency renaissance. The pioneer days are over. There’s no need to larp a dangerously and unnecessarily precarious cowboy economy. Time to do some settling and town planning.
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No this is not Metcalfe’s law (network effect). That’s O(n^2). It’s not even Reed’s law (powerset effect), which is O(2^n). It is Reed’s law *as a lower bound* on possibilities
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Replying to @vgr
Is this a restatement of Metcalfe's law or is there some substantial nuance to this specific application I am missing?
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I once actually tried to compute a formula for the size of this space in closed form and failed. If somebody wants, it is *at least* the set of all possible graphs, directed and undirected, defined on every component of every partition of every subset of the universal set.
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Informally, it is the “number of ways n people can organize into teams” (with only full membership; fractional head counts make thid even bigger).
The space of “organizations” is so huge and high dimensional, the part of it we occupy is barely a degenerate crumpled corner.
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Note on navigating the space. You can't just enumerate and brute force search it for good configs, it is too big.
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Yep, you need good ways to navigate it in emergent ways, but the path dependent degeneracy configurations we know are not necessarily the best ones for the present environment. In some work I did, I used reinforcement learning to identify good configs from work history.
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We have significant expertise on the options within the group. We have our reasons for doing it differently from what the crypto crowd wants to see us do.
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