Protecting the Truth

How to change the world:

1. Discover true facts.

2. Acquire sufficient distribution.

I said I was a pragmatic ideologue, and this is why. I’m an ideologue about discovering true facts and pragmatic about acquiring sufficient distribution.

It’s unusual for someone to consciously combine discovering true facts and executing to acquire sufficient distribution, via money or followers. You need to learn how to make media clips and movies, write, publish, direct, encapsulate, build relationships, and build political coalitions; you need to learn how to fight.

I come into every discussion with the assumption that I need to justify everything from scratch. I take nothing for granted. I’m used to having people quibble with every word and every statement.

Non-obvious truths are always unpopular in some way, because they are either very technical or very sacrilegious. Popular communication channels are biased toward telling you obvious things or false things—or both.

I worry about how to protect the ability to discover true facts. We need a huge variety of reproducible research. The pseudonymous economy is important because to discover and share true facts, people need protection from backlash or cancellation.

For whatever comes next, we need to have decentralized sources of truth. We need to have statistics that do not come from guys in their basements making things up. This is very important.

We need to grow from “who owns what Bitcoin” today to “who said what things at what times” in the future. We will know what facts were asserted, when, and by whom. That is a very powerful thing. With cryptography, we can start to displace media corporations as the source of truth.