This thing on blockchain as a “hardness” technology is interesting
Conversation
‘“Hardness” is defined as the capacity of a system to make something very likely to be true in the future. Hardness is most useful where it is customizable or programmable - where humans can choose something specific we want to be true in the future.’
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‘One way to measure the hardness of a cast is to estimate probabilities...Another way to measure hardness is to estimate how much it would cost to create a world where the cast turns out to be false.’
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^^ that’s the really interesting bit.
Wonder if there’s a way to formalize this intuition using a kind of quantified modal logic. In what percent of all known-unknown worlds is a cast unbroken?
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‘…The cast is the “thing that is hard”, and it always takes the form of a statement or claim about the future. …I use the word “cast” for its dual connotations in English of a thing we throw ahead of us and a thing which hardens to protect or shape.’
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Hardness is similar to Schelling points
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The discussion of this that just wrapped was divided between people who thought there was a there there in terms of a real intuition being pursued, vs. just confused thinking about institutions. I was on the “there’s a there there” side of the debate.
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is any of the discussion public? keen for critical feedback on it
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We didn’t record this call, but my further tweets list some of the points I captured


