If you can convince someone you are a superstar, there’s a way out.  But if you are having trouble making that case, then maybe you’d consider becoming a Social Capital Uncontractor.  What’s that, you ask?  I’m not sure, I’m making this up as I write, you can help…

Here’s my life.  I have a large and growing number of projects that I am working on, and an even larger (and more accelerating) number of projects I’d like to begin.  The critical bottlneck for me is not money but time.  It’s getting so bad that I don’t have time to even think about the management of these projects, let alone manage them.  Plus I hate managing projects and it’s definitely not my biggest strength.  I’m much better advising and asking questions that make you think differently.

On the other hand I have many friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. who are underemployed, by their own definition.  I’ve thought about “clearing the market” by paying to get these projects done, but there are many issues involved.

Why I Won’t Pay You in Cash

• I refuse to pay a salary (it undermines the intrinsic motivation that is needed)
• I’m unwilling to have you in my life if you view me as a source of cash (if you need rent money, Starbucks is hiring, and there’s no time clock on my projects and any deadlines would be agreed upon upfront)
• If you’re thinking to yourself (no doubt, while you read this at the one internet cafe in your village before you trek home five miles with daily drinking water you just collected for your entire family) that there are no jobs paying what you need to survive so that you can work on one of my projects for no pay, you’ve failed the first test.

For all those who’ve passed and are still intrigued, I’m interested in doing an experiment in social capital.  I’d like to see how far I can get on my projects without my having to pay any cash and while reducing the time I spend currently on “the management issue”.

Why You Might Want to Work With Me

Eventually, if you are successful, you will become an equity stakeholder in one or more for-profit ventures that you oversee.  Or you may find a project that you go off and run by yourself.  Or I might pull some strings and recommend you for your dream job.

Uncontractors Only

Here’s the deal: there is no deal.  You either want to work with me in this capacity or you don’t.  There’s no commitment on either side, and no contract (stated on implied).  If you let me down, there will be no legal, financial (or otherwise visible) recourse.  Your social capital account with me will be diminished though.  And as it does, I pay you less attention, I stop recommending you to people, etc.  I start everyone with a positive social capital balance, but once you deplete it, it’s really hard to replenish.

Your Ideal Traits

• Emotionally self-sufficient
• Think like I do, but eager to accomplish stuff (vs just catalyze it like me)
• Can work well with others by generating, and using, your own social capital
• Communicate well via writing
• Communicate well visually (graphic design / video skillz are huge plusses)
• Technologically very savvy/geeky
• Only reinvent the wheel when it can’t be created with existing parts

Areas of Interest

Presentation Creation

• creating standalones like this and like this for subjects like cancer, social ventures, Science 2.0, whatever I blog about, etc.
• creating presentations on the same themes for live forums like TED, The Feast, Idea Project, etc.

Project Management

• Managing anything you see on RafeFurst.com and many more like them in development

Software Development

• e.g. email solution that sits on top of Mail.app or Gmail that adds functionality I want
• e.g. implementing crowdsourced rating system for my blog content (primary and comments)
• e.g. seeding the application space for A World of Goodies
• e.g. building out the vision on TruthMarkets.org (and combine with Goodies for EPIC WIN!)

System Administration

• Managing my domains, websites, blogs and integration thereof on an ongoing basis

How I’d Like to Work With You

Virtually, via a combination of skype video, email, and phone mostly.  Ideally, you just get shit done with as little interaction from me as possible, throw it on the web for the world to benefit, but do it in such a way that someone who knows me well could stumble upon it and “get it” in under two minutes and the first thing that would pop into their head would be: “OMG, Rafe would love this, I gotta call him and tell him about it!”

Time is Money

I love people who understand what this really means to me.  People who don’t understand it tend to write long emails and create work for me in having to read through stuff I don’t care about and expect me to respond appropriately.  People who do understand it, think really hard about how to get me interested in spending my limited time addressing what they’d like me to (and realize that it takes time away from my being with other people I care about too, helping other people with their also-important projects, etc).

Guilt works on me, but it very quickly depletes your social capital.  I take my obligations extremely seriously, which is why I hardly ever consciously create them for myself.

Money is Violence

I am not opposed to spending money to make things happen, I just view it — like violence — as a last resort.

I don’t want to pay you in cash because I don’t want to do violence to you.  My vision is that you make your money working hourly for someone else so you can meet your worldly needs, while at the same time, you work with me to get yourself to the Adjacent Possible where you can make increasing cash returns via the social value you add to the ecology.

I’m willing to pay cash for completed projects that meet my specification and exceed my vision.  I love crowdsourcing with cash prizes for this reason.  But I’m not going to pay you cash to complete the project because it’s a waste of your valuable time.

If you can figure out a model for a project that sustains itself financially and generates value (cash, social, some combo) then I’m willing to listen to your pitch as to why I should invest my money.  But realize that you start with two strikes against since I said at the outset this is about an experiment in pure social capital.

Want to Participate in the Experiment?

First and foremost I am looking for a single individual (a leader) who will oversee everything and not require oversight themselves.  If you fit into the big picture somehow but are not that leader, you can make your case below in the comments and prospective leaders will be able to evaluate whether they want to work with you.

Related posts:

1. Equity Micro-Investing
2. Social Entrepreneurship Tax Credit
3. “Social Entrepreneurship has Complexity Written All Over It”

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am working with founder Nancy Conrad on creating a self-sustaining, growing funding mechanism to expand the mission.  Might be an endowment, might be for-profit investment fund, might be an incubator, might be some combination.  We need to talk to people who are veterans of funding innovation (VC, hedge fund and angel investor types), who are as passionate about the mission as we are, to figure it all out.

What the mission doesn’t say, but what I believe, is that this will change the educational landscape permanently and profoundly.  There a a million “ideas” for how to fix the broken system.  The only way change actually will happen is through setting up subversive alternatives that the discontent (that’s you and me) can switch over to and replicate with appropriate modification for their context.  Spirit of Innovation Awards actually works in a big way.

So if you are someone with experience in funding innovation, we’d like you to join us at The Innovation Summit, held this year at NASA Ames, Moffett Field, California, April 8 – 10, 2010. The list of people presenting and attending is impressive, more info here.

Whether or not you can come, if you have something to contribute (expertise, connections, money) to the goal of creating this funding mechanism, please either comment publicly below or privately via this link and use the subject “Innovation Fund”.  And let us know whether you will be at the Summit so we can loop you into the breakout session.

Related posts:

1. What I'm Working On: Supercharging Innovation
2. The Nature of Innovation
3. Revolutionizing Angel Funding

…[Can] we make probability statements about the evolution of the biosphere? No. Consider flipping a coin 10,000 times. It will come up heads about 5,000 times with a binomial distribution. But, critically, note that we knew beforehand all the possible outcomes, all heads, all tails, all 2 to the 10,000 possibilities. Thus we knew what statisticians call “the sample space” of the process, so could construct a probability measure.

Can we construct a probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible? No. We do not know the sample space!

I won’t belabor the point except to say that I view the increasing irrelevance and danger of statistical reasoning as the essential argument of The Black Swan, the fundamental reason why the global financial crisis occurred, and one of the main things we humans need to understand better if we are going to solve the problems facing the world.

No related posts.

What’s interesting about possibility-space is that tomorrow’s Adjacent Possible depends on the actions and choices we make today; it’s not symmetric and it’s nonlinear.  Certain actions generate more future possibilities than others.  In my experience, those actions tend to be the cooperative ones, ones that produce network effects: financial, social and otherwise.

Due to our evolutionary heritage, having come from a resource-constrained world, we may be predisposed to see the more competitive actions which tend to shrink the Adjacent Possible.  Whether or not this is a bias or an actual state of affairs, much of our thinking is based on scarcity, so we are drawn to actions that become self-limiting.

Here’s how I visualize the Adjacent Possible, and it has profound consequences for how I think and live my own life:

Related posts:

1. Troubling Statistics
2. Coherence
3. The Secret

To get to “better” we have to be able to change our minds when we get stuck on locally maximal peaks.  That’s why I love this post on the Rationally Speaking blog called How to Want to Change Your Mind.  The techniques are simple, but profound, and harder to put into practice than they seem.  Here they are in summary:

• Divorce your belief from your self
• Think of disagreements as collaborative, not adversarial
• Visualize being wrong
• Take the long view
• Congratulate yourself on being objective, not on being right
• If you can’t overcome your competitive instinct, re-direct it

To these, I will add some of my own:

• Truly Listen – I am told that I am a good listener, but I am dismayed by how infrequently I truly listen, without judgment, and with compassion, to what people are saying.  Are you truly listening?
• Resist the urge to interrupt – How can I be listening as deeply as possible if I’m spending some of my mental energy looking for an opening to interject?  If I have something to say in response, surely it can wait until a few seconds after you stop talking.
• Ask how other person could be RIGHT – The habit of the scientist is to ask how things can be wrong; this is the hegemony of falsifiability.  Computers are the world champions of falsification (ask Kasparov).  This frees us humans up to do the creative part.  Isn’t that more fun than crunching symbols?
• Ask why the other person believes what they do – If the answer is “they’re an idiot” then try again.  That’s not very creative.  Nor is it likely true.
• Notice emotional reactions – Our mind-bodies know when something we hear resonates with our current biases or is in discord; the effect is emotion.  A negative emotion is a particularly good clue that there’s something interesting to explore…
• Notice language – Empirically I’ve noticed that I use the second person (“you’re wrong”) when my argument doesn’t speak for itself.  When I’m confident about what I’m saying, I have no trouble using first person (“I think”, “I feel”), or use simple statement of fact without making it personal at all.
• New models, no judgment –  There’s no harm in trying on new clothes, even if you decide to return them later.  What is harmful is trying on new pants and judging them without trying on the rest of the outfit first.  Hey, maybe you’ll be the belle of the ball if you give the new duds a chance…
• Embrace Paradox – Paradox and dualisms are your clue that you’re outfit doesn’t match.  Do you really think that “light sometimes behaving like a particle and sometimes like a wave” is the end of the story?

Hat tip: Eric Brooks

No related posts.

This is by far the most constructive article on healthcare, because it clearly identifies the fundamental issue in healthcare – our internal conflict.  Here are the excerpts, but read the whole thing and forward it on.  I dare anyone to challenge this of course; that’s the whole point of discourse:

“Those following the long march to health-care reform know that one of the few things beyond argument is that the old approach is unsustainable and threatens to bankrupt the country. Perhaps a little belt tightening and bargain hunting of this sort might make our health-care dollars stretch farther”

“To help maximize the overall benefits in health care under a utilitarian framework and conditions of constrained resources, health economists use an analytic tool called cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) that quantifies the added expenditure necessary to obtain a unit of health benefit (typically measured in quality-adjusted life years or QALYs, pronounced “kwallies”). The most common application of CEA is to examine the value of medical innovations compared to the standard of care routinely available, since new technologies are an important cause of the increase in health-care costs.

If the “unit cost” for a QALY of benefit (that is, the cost-effectiveness ratio) is less than some threshold (conventionally $50,000 or $100,000 per QALY), then adoption of the innovation is deemed “incrementally cost-effective,” since the benefit obtained compares favorably to that obtainable at similar cost using accepted medical technologies (such as dialysis, which has a cost-effectiveness ratio variously estimated at between $50,000 and $80,000 per QALY). Above the ratio, they are deemed not to be cost-effective. That is, the (relatively small) incremental benefits of the intervention do not justify the (relatively large) incremental costs.

“

“Of special interest is “Bernie’s kink” at the origin, which reveals how medical markets actually behave.  People prove to be unwilling to surrender quality using the same formula they would use to accept increased cost.”

“Of course, if all innovation in health care fell into this northeast quadrant, innovation could only increase the costs of care. That is, even so-called cost- effective health-care innovations would always cost more money than the alternatives they replaced. This is often a point of confusion, sometimes purposeful, as when our political leaders claim that “preventative medicine” is highly cost-effective and would therefore save money. In fact, while most recommended preventative services are cost-effective (meaning the value of their benefits in terms of QALYs gained justifies the costs in terms of dollars spent), only very rarely are preventative services actually cost-saving, even when all the “downstream” avoided medical expenses are folded into the analysis. Indeed, new “cost-effective” innovations are one of the principal reasons that health-care costs continue to soar.”

“the selling price (often referred to as willingness to accept, or WTA) and the buying price (willing to pay, WTP) of a QALY should be similar, and the societal threshold for accepting or rejecting a technology should be symmetric and pass through the origin of the cost-effectiveness plane as a straight line. However, as David Hume anticipated, a reproducible observation is that consumers’ willingness to accept monetary compensation to forgo something they have is typically greater, and often much greater, than their stated willingness to pay for the same benefit. Several explanations exist, including the so-called “endowment effect,” the psychological principle that people value items that they already have simply because they already have them.

A 2002 review of 20 studies by the late Bernie O’Brien and his colleagues at McMaster University found that the ratio of individuals’ WTA to WTP was always greater than 1 and ranged from 1.9 to 6.4 for two scenarios specifically related to health care. They suggested that rather than a symmetric accept-reject threshold on the cost-effectiveness plane, societal thresholds should reflect the WTA-WTP gap seen in individual preferences, which would be captured by a downward “kink” (subsequently known as “Bernie’s kink”) in the threshold as it passed through the origin, indicating that a QALY’s selling price in the southwest would always be higher than a QALY’s buying price in the northeast.

Thus, there may be an inherent cognitive bias against relinquishing the gains of health-care interventions that have already been accepted, and the cost savings from decrementally cost-effective innovation may need to be substantially greater than conventionally used thresholds suggest.“

“Indeed, fewer than 2 percent of all comparisons were classified in the cost- and quality-decreasing “southwest quadrant”, and only 9 (involving 8 innovations) were found to be decrementally cost-effective (0.4 percent of the total)—that is, they saved at least $100,000 for each QALY relinquished.”

 “That decrementally cost-effective innovations are so rarely described in the health-care literature suggests that medicine is distinct from most other markets, in which cost-decreasing, quality-reducing products are continuously being introduced—think IKEA, Walmart and the Tata car. Several reasons may explain this “medical exceptionalism.” First, there is fundamentally a lack of incentives both for physicians to control costs, especially under a fee-for-service regime, and for patients to demand less expensive treatment when insurance shields them from the direct costs of care. Second, medical “bargains” frequently come with health risks, and trading health for money strikes some as vulgar, regardless of ratio. The inherent ethical unease that decrementally cost-effective innovations can elicit poses a serious public relations and marketing challenge.”

 “But regardless of the mix, expanding coverage to the uninsured, caring for our aging baby boomers, and accommodating new, effective technologies—while still feeding, clothing, housing, and educating ourselves, and catching an occasional movie—will require our system of distribution of health services to be more cost- sensitive, and will almost certainly mean the adoption of some decrementally cost-effective strategies for saving money. For example, Canadian-style delays for expensive diagnostic or surgical procedures certainly pose real, albeit small, medical risks, and would fall into this southwest category. Getting insured Americans to accept such new risks may be difficult, but slightly quality-reducing (that is, risk-increasing) cost-saving strategies have already been widely adopted within the American system, even if not studied or widely acknowledged. The gradual increase in the “hassle factor” in accessing medical care is one covert way that the industry has found to limit the distribution of services. More overt examples of rationing already adopted include aggressively shortening hospital stays and limiting formulary options (which sometimes require patients to change from a medicine they have been tolerating well to another in the same class). Despite the fact that doctors regularly (although sometimes disingenuously) deploy patter informing patients that the hospital is a dangerous place to stay and that the formulary medication is “just as good” as the one they’ve been taking, these strategies are certainly associated with small but real risks. Even a preadolescent quickly learns the true meaning of “just as good”; perhaps a more mature citizenry can also come to appreciate some of the upside of having “just as good” alternatives.”

Related posts:

1. If Rafe Were In Charge: Major Medical Edition
2. The Climate or the Uninsured?
3. Fixing Health Care I: The Uninsured

But I have to be prepared to be more confused — and question more assumptions than I intended to — because chances are my new random placement on the landscape is initially lower than the local maximum I was on prior.  This part is scary.  People around me don’t understand what I’m saying initially because I necessarily need new words, new language, to describe the new landscape.

And rather than start totally afresh with a new lexicon, I notice it’s more productive (personally and in communication) to overload old terms and let them slowly blend into their new meanings.  We all resist the strain, especially those who did not sign up for the jump through hyperspace.  They use the hill-climbing techniques that incrementally achieve higher ground (logical deduction, reductionism) in order to deny that we are in new territory at all and “prove” every new claim as false.  But unless we eliminate most or all of our old assumptions and embrace the new ones, these techniques will always yield inconsistency.

Thus, it seems like a good idea to resist the urge to bring to in the heavy logical artillery until it’s clear we are on the upslope.  In practice what this means is adding more novelty — but not as much as last time.  This is the Boltzmann technique of simulated annealing: start with a high degree of heat/randomness and turn it down slowly, all the while pounding away with the tools of logic and reduction.

What I mean by Science 2.0 is an intentional (and methodological) injection of novelty into the scientific method.  This is the beginning of a series of posts on the hows and whys of such activity.  I hope you will join in constructively and creatively.

Related posts:

1. Two Books On Cognitive Science You Should Read
2. Non-Dualism
3. Why Falsifiability is Insufficient for Scientific Reasoning

TED Feb 2010 – Live Labs Pivot demo

and the world beyond facebook:

One way to put it, is to say that Live Labs Pivot is “smarter” than a Firefox, but guns don’t shoot people… (unless of course there’s an accident) :)

No related posts.

$10K for Crowdsourced X Prizes Platform

• Allows anyone to offer a cash prize for achieving a goal they want achieved
• Allows anyone to pledge additional dollars to someone else’s already-offered prize
• Uses crowdsourcing to vet which goals are worthy of public prize offer and which get top billing
• Uses crowdsourcing to determine if/when a prize gets awarded
• Has been used to award at least five prizes of one thousand dollars or more
• Does not have any pending lawsuits alleging that the platform violates U.S. federal or state laws
• Has an opinion letter from a U.S. law firm that the system does not violate U.S. federal or state laws

Note that this is different from Kickstarter in that (a) it’s the donors who set the goal not the recipient; (b) Kickstarter does not use crowdsourcing in its vetting process at this point.

$15K for Y Prize Platform

Same as the above except, instead of prizes, the cash award is an equity investment that gets executed once the stated goal is achieved (as determined by the crowd).  The platform must have been used to invest at least $10K in at least one for-profit venture in exchange for an equity stake in the venture.

Again, this is different than Kickstarter in that they only facilitate pure donations, not investment.  It’s also different from Unreasonable Finalists Marketplace as it currently exists.  I love both of these platforms and think they have worldchanging potential.  And both are eligible for my prizes here if they add what I’m looking for.  But I don’t think they will (they’ve got different fish to fry) so don’t be discouraged from jumping into the fray yourself!

$75K for 20%

I’d like a 20% ownership stake in a for-profit venture achieves the Y Prize Platform above.  I don’t know if my making such a “reverse offering” would constitute a violation of U.S. law or not, so I am not actually offering it yet.  What I am doing is suggesting that if you build such a system, and you start a for-profit company to monetize it, and you can convince me and my lawyers that your company is fully legal, and you are willing to offer me 20% of that company, then I’m willing to invest $75K.

Furthermore, this whole page of offers is null and void in any jurisdictions in which it’s not 100% legal (a determination that you need to make personally, I can’t advise you on this).  And I reserve the right to modify anything on this page at any point in order to assure compliance with all U.S. laws and regulations and to clarify my intent.

Finally, if you are a lawyer licensed in the U.S., I’d appreciate your posting any legal opinions you have on any of this via the comments section below.

Related posts:

1. X Prize Annuity Funds
2. Open Letter to Gotham Prize
3. Social Entrepreneurship Tax Credit

The New York Times reports today on the opposite idea: that human culture may actually intensify the selective pressure on our genes. This idea is known as gene-culture co-evolution, since although our genes and our culture evolve through separate processes (biological reproduction vs. sharing of ideas), these two processes interact and affect each other.

The Times article surveys how culturally evolved changes in diet, lifestyle, and social norms could have influenced the genetic evolution of our digestive systems and brains. But as a discussion starter, I’m interested in more speculative questions: is our evolving culture still shaping our genetic evolution? If so, in which directions are we being pushed?

Related posts:

1. What is a Gene?
2. Evolution & Emergence
3. Evolution Favors Cooperation Over Competition