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cab·er +quep·a +cup·iera +cabr·ía I have been living part-time in Madrid for the past three years, and my Spanish is still not as fluent as I want it to be.

When 2 + 2 Does Not Equal 4.0 Introduction: What Do You Mean by Equal?

Introduction Quadratic funding has received a lot of attention recently as a mechanism for funding public goods.

Introduction The rules that determine what gets attention on social platforms are often called “algorithms,” but algorithms are only part of the story.

Introduction: Scalable Group Decision-Making A deliberative consensus protocol is a process that online groups can use to make decisions.

Introduction In my article on Understanding Community Notes, I describe the basic Matrix Factorization algorithm used to identify notes that are helpful despite user polarization.

UPDATE: See a discussion of this article on Hacker News.

Every online community has rules that determine how the attention of the community is directed.

This article is part of the series on distributed Bayesian reasoning.

In this article we develop the basic mathematical formula for calculating the opinion of the meta-reasoner in arguments involving a single main argument thread.

In the Introduction to Distributed Bayesian Reasoning, we argue that the rules of Bayesian inference can enable a form of distributed reasoning.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, all that remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” – Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle) For a long time Bayesian inference was something I understood without really understanding it.

In this article we introduce an argument model: a set of terms for analyzing arguments by naming their parts.

Introduction This essay explains how you can pay people to tell the truth, even if you can’t verify their answers.

In this article, I argue that we can apply game theory to explain and control the behaviors that dominate in an online community.

How To Get People on the Internet to Tell the Truth Everyone knows that you can’t believe what you read on the Internet.

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.” – Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 1920 The Algorithms Everyone knows that the infamous social media algorithms promote the spread of false and misleading…

Brief Introduction Distributed Bayesian Reasoning is a kind of hypothetical opinion poll.

A deliberative poll measures the informed opinion of a group of people who have participated in a discussion about the topic of the poll.

In this article I argue that a decentralized community moderation system can be seen as is a kind of consensus protocol, similar to those used to secure blockchains; and that such a protocol can be designed to produce a Nash equilibrium where users reliab…

The Democratization of Misinformation “Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?

The other day a friend of mine watched an online documentary about the wet markets in Wuhan, and decided not to share it with others.

Many of us struggle to separate the information from the misinformation on social media, especially in the past weeks and months as we seek facts regarding COVID-19.

In public political debate today, there seems to be little capacity for nuance.

Components of Belief None of us are omniscient.

Politics and Social Status People’s politics are partly driven by a desire for status.

Many political issues end up being framed as “pro vs “anti”.

The Problem Why were keywords and vectors added to LISP, a language that was already based on symbols and lists?

In my post on Procedures in a Pure Language, I discuss how even pure functional languages can be used to create procedures that have effects, and how that is how things should be.

Global environment variables violate a core principle of functional programming.

In this post I’ll talk about dependency injection and IoC in functional programming languages, and propose a solution for achieving IoC with given/inject preprocessing.

The Problem The fact that you can write procedures, which produce side-effects, in Haskell, which is supposed to be a pure language, can be confusing.

Implicit currying and folded application are language feature that render moot the distinction between curried and un-curried functions, allowing functions written in curried style to be called as un-curried functions and vice-versa.

The pass-through list is a programming-language feature intended to make it easier for programmers to modify functions to return additional values without breaking backwards compatibility, in the same way it is easy to modify functions to take additional…

Today I have been thinking about Prediction Markets, and thought I would share some thoughts on how the Decision Engine could be designed to behave very much like a Prediction Market.

Is it really necessary to invent a new syntax, complete with a new grammar and parser, for every new programming language?

In my last post, I introduced the general idea behind the decision engine.

The Mystery Abdul wanted to see the Mekong Lights.

My big project right now is something called a “decision engine”.