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I really enjoyed this interview between Casey Newton of the Platformer and Molly White of Web3 is going just great.

In it, Molly made a point I’ve thought about before but not been able to fully articulate, which is that in an effort to align incentives financially, many web3 projects undermine their own effectiveness:

There also aren't really intrinsic monetary incentives for people to contribute to Wikipedia, which I think is a very good thing. Where people are paid to edit Wikipedia by outside parties, it warps the incentive to contribute into one that's very different from (and sometimes at odds with) the incentives for most community members, and is often a very negative thing.

She references Everipedia, a blockchain-based wikipedia alternative:

If you look at their recent blog posts, it's all about how many tokens their editors have supposedly earned, and it even brags about the fact that "Over 70% of stakers have locked their IQ up for over 3.5 years to earn max APR". This is the same token that people are supposed to be spending to edit and vote on the quality of edits, but they're excited that people are locking them up on staking platforms? The goal is not to create a reference work, it's to make money off the token.

Speaking more broadly, monetizing things just shifts the dynamics in enormous ways. We've seen this same thing happen with play-to-earn gaming, where people start doing things really differently when monetary incentives are added.

I think this is a really smart point and poses problems for Web3 projects.

Financial incentives aren’t always the best way to get people to do what you want (see the daycare that started charing parents for being late and then saw an increase in tardiness), except that it’s worse than that for Web3 projects because it makes it harder for them to tell if they have product market fit. Because there isn’t a great way to distinguish the speculators from the true believers, it feels like the project has true momentum, when all it has are people trying to make a quick buck.

Another episode of Browser Bets, this time with Tom Chivers. We made bets about Boris Johnson’s future as Prime Minister of England and the likelihood of AI wiping out humanity.

Bets aside, my favorite part was processing the experience of going through COVID together. Tom and I had never met before this conversation and live thousands of miles away from each other, yet we instantly had this shared experience to talk about. This is pretty unique. Watch the whole thing.

Office spaces are dangerous

I did an interview with Helen Toner for The Browser where we made bets on China’s economic development, the possibility of an AI delivered milkshake, and quantum computing.

One of the things that living in Switzerland caused me to appreciate is the impact of trust in society. Switzerland measures as an exceptionally high trust society.

When you live there, it’s something you can actually feel. The way I describe it to people is that in Switzerland, everywhere feels like high end American suburbs (holding aside for the moment that not everyone feels welcome in American suburbs). Things just work. You can leave your door unlocked.

I have a hypothesis that this trust is self reinforcing. Because people trust each other, additional things are possible. Because of these things, people trust the system. My example here is the Swiss Recycling system, although I’m sure someone could come up with something better.

Because of this experience, societal trust has become something I really want to better understand. Where does it come from? How can we make more of it? What destroys it?

With that background, I loved this interview between Phares Kariuki and Uri Bram. The whole thing is worth reading, but Phares offers two hypothesis about what creates trust and one about what destroys trust.

Trust creator #1: Violence

How you move from one equilibrium to another, from observation seems to be violence. It is cruel to think about but Europe went through countless wars in order to integrate.

Trust creator #2: Contract enforcement

The primary thing that can be done to increase trust in society is to have a level of justice for crime / breach of contract. This enforces good behaviour and dissuades bad behaviour; places with high trust have the highest rates of contract enforcement but also contracts aren't needed -- folks can shake on it.

Trust destroyer: Foreign interference

Phares Kariuki: Additionally, I've seen high trust societies get decimated by foreign interference (Korea, Somalia, Germany).

Uri Bram: I’d love to hear more about the Somalia example -- I think some people reading this might be surprised to hear it had a previous high-trust phase.

Phares Kariuki: The Somali were one people, largely Sunni. Their territory covered part of Eastern Ethiopia, North Eastern Kenya. They were split into multiple countries during the colonial era, with Kenya famously oppressing them during the Shifta wars of the 70s. They wanted to secede. The interference in their leadership due to the Cold War led to oppression and clan based mistrust; the fallout stands until today.