The power of knowledge graphs

[burrrata]

@decentralion

SourceCred as an “incentive compiler”

This. This is so incredibly valuable. Really really want to explore more in this direction

When you say “incentive compiler” is this a reference to code compilers that take a bunch of stuff and optimize it so that it’s more compact and useful (taking lots of contributions, analyzing their connections, and distilling the value of contributions to numbers we can measure), or were you thinking that it would create an incentive for people to engage with a system and create value (thus bringing people to a system/topic/problem and “compiling” their knowledge/energy/thinking into that topic/thing to produce results), or was there something else you meant here?

@decentralion

Having thought about this a bit more, I want to turn the framing on its head: cred is at the core of every society and social structure. Money is one particular (highly scalable and legible) implementation of cred.

I really like the way you frame this. Humans create and exchange value, and cred is a way to measure that value. Money is another tool we use to measure and exchange value. The measurement tool itself does have some value/utility, but what’s important s the underlying value that it represents and enables us to work with more effectively. Not all things need to be hammered and not all value measurements are best served with the money tool. “Money-ness” is a completely different topic… but the point is that the heart of the matter is the value itself, not the tool that measures it. Losing sight of the underlying value and just focusing on the tool is when things usually get weird.

@decentralion

I think society has been developing in very unbalanced ways in the past few hundred years because we have a system for scaling economic cred (i.e. money and global finance) but we don’t have systems for scaling other forms of cred. So the economic sphere is coming to predominate all our other social or communal spheres. A key vision for SourceCred is to enable other kinds of cred and other kinds of values and communities to scale as effectively as economic entities do.

The term “economy” is a broader and more dynamic than they’re being given credit for here, but overall it’s clear that most economic models ignore or poorly measure lots of positive and negative value creation. In addition to the tools we have currently, Cred is another tool that can help us measure and manage value. At the end of the day the tools need to support and empower the people who use them, not the other way around. SourceCred has the potential to fill in the gaps where our current systems are deeply lacking. This is amazing. It’s like going from desktop to mobile, but for human coordination and value creation; it will enhance prior applications, but also create new things that never existed before.