Life & Research Notes

Tomorrow (er, today… in 5 hours) a bunch of us MLers head out to the cape for the Simplicity Consortium meeting, then Tuesday night I’m going home for a few days. It’s a trip I originally planned as just a break and a visit with Jenn and my family, but it’s turning out to have some interesting business as well.

It’s actually been OK here in Boston the last few days, but the bay area is pretty great in the spring, and even thought it’s only a few days I’ll be stoked to be home. I’m also looking forward to scoping out the new Electric Works location.

In writing the background section of my Promiserver thesis, I’ve recently spent some time reading and thinking about promises and the relation to trust and social systems. I think of a promise as a relationship among participants who trust one another to make good on certain pre-specified goals and conditions. The foundation of this trust is the promise institution: the context in which a promise is made, and the methods by which it is enforced. (I grokked this idea of promise institutions from perusing the first few chapters of F.H. Buckley’s Just Exchange.)

Consider a basic laissez-faire market model in which each party tries to maximize its own gain, and in which their is no trust between the parties. There will be many cases like the Prisoners’ Dilemma in which cooperation is the optimal group strategy, but the individual strategy is uncooperativeness. A promise institution can change these outcomes, aligning the individual’s best interest with the group’s. As an outside force acting on the participants, the institution uses some condoned enforcement mechanism to deter breach of promise and incentivize cooperation.

The character of the promise institution may vary considerably. We can divide the set of institutions into two core classes of social and legal. Each operates differently, yet they overlap considerably in their scope. We rely on the social promise institution when we make promises with friends or family, or within a community. These are agreements that we would never expect to go to court. The social promise institution uses emotional, interpersonal, and community enforcement, such as gossip, guilt, shaming, or decrease in standing or reputation.

We invoke the legal promise institution in matters of government or business, where the social enforcement lacks sufficient scope or strength to ensure cooperation. The legal institution offers the greater trust firepower needed to deal with corporations and governments, yet at a cost of higher barrier to entry and far greater stakes. Participating in a legally binding contract generally often involves lawyers, fees and time for at least one party, and potentially severe legal ramifications for breach.

Promiserver lives in the social end of the spectrum, but cautiously dips its toes into legal territory. Enforcement is reputation based—clearly the social promise institution—but it aims to extend social enforcement further into the space in which people would traditionally feel the need to turn to the legal institution.

These promise institutions are critical, to both life and business. The more we trust the accuracy and efficacy of the institutions, the more we may trust in the promises we make. If I trust my community and feel they are fair and reasonable, I am more likely to make a social promise. If I feel the legal system is fair and reasonable, the more trust I place in the contracts I sign. In either case, good institutions incentivize cooperation.

Yet these institutions are not owned by any person, company, or government. They are created and owned by all of us as members and participants. Though at times the individual best interest may run counter to the enforcement laid out by the institution, the purpose of the promise institution is to protect the best interests of the group as a whole. If a corporation bribes a judge, thereby corrupting the legal institution, it may temporarily serve the best interest of that corporation, but in the long run it hurts everyone because it adversely affects our trust in the institution. This sort of “fragile, owned by everyone, benefits everyone” resource is classically referred to as the commons.

This line of thinking has reaffirmed for me that Promiserver is dabbling within a critical space. I’m currently reading Peter Barnes’s interesting Capitalism 3.0, which makes a case for creation of new policy to protect endangered commons like the environment using market incentives, and has me interested in how we approach other, intangible commons. So I’ve stepped onto this ride that is my thesis. It’s been a little slow and creaky on the uphill, but it is leading to something, and I see some interesting curves approaching.

When I get out of the habit of posting, it is so hard to come back. It’s been a few weeks since I actually wrote anything for this blog, and longer since a substantial post. What’s going on? My excuse to myself has been that I’m in special thesis lockdown right now. I know what and where I’m supposed to be thinking, writing, coding and debugging, and this blog isn’t it. My lockdown strategy seems to be keeping a tight seal on the ideas in other parts of my life, hoping the creative stuff will pour into the thesis.

Well of course it isn’t that simple. I’ve been avoiding the blog and avoiding the thesis too. Sure, the thesis is coming along bit by bit, but the progress is halting and there’s no rhythm to the thing. It feels like fill in the blanks—not exactly my most inspired work.

The lockdown hasn’t been working. I’m realizing that the blog isn’t a distraction to work; it’s an enhancer. This is a scratchpad that I can occasionally put new ideas into, and something to look back on. And when I’m blogging more fluidly, it is an outlet for all sorts of pent up thoughts, which is really a stress relief. My whole philosophy from the beginning was that this should be a place where it is ok for me to put bad ideas next to good ones, and bad writing next to good. The most important thing is that I’m writing at all.

So I’m going to try to get back to it, both here and… there. I’ve got an alpha version of Promiserver that’s nearly releasable, so that’ll be some news in the next few weeks. Plus I’m slowly chipping away at the background chapter, somehow jumping between a section on classic liberalism and another on the long tail of services. And apart from all that, I have a totally revamped portfolio in the works. So there’s potentially a lot of material here, a lot churning around in my brain. Writing this post is, I hope, the awkward, cathartic first step in letting some of it out.