Automate form filling

For every government form in every country, autosuggest inputs. Or at least show worked examples. Crowdsource new forms from users, SEO for the form name, and make it one-click to submit.

Start with the most popular, then work your way down.
This is a classic schlep business (paulgraham.com/schlep.html). Pieces of this already exist, but no one to my knowledge has done this for all forms across all countries.

It's immediately monetizable, and at scale it's a kind of API to governments. DM me with a link if you do it.
Thoughts:

1) this has broad appeal to many demographics
2) you'll attract many professionals too
3) once you put data into one form, the service can autopopulate other forms
4) once you get N submissions on one form, some basic stats will reveal common errors and best practices
For many forms, people don't even know where to start. You could hit a "show me" button to get a filled out example.

If you want to get fancier, you could do this via AI. Hit the button a few times to see the form filled out for a variety of different situations.

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More from @balajis

26 Jul
In any voluntary transaction, both sides gain. How to quantify this?

The seller of a good measures their marginal profit: the price-per-unit minus the cost of production.

The buyer could measure *their* marginal profit by subtracting the price-per-unit from their reserve price.
At first this is just standard consumer surplus. Gains from trade and all that.

But the interesting point is that the reserve price is usually an unobserved variable in most transactions, while the unit cost-of-production is usually known.

Could we measure more reserve prices?
For every transaction where we can measure the reserve price *and* the cost-of-production, we can prove that it was wealth creating.

Because at least at that moment, both buyer & seller profited from the trade to a *quantifiable* extent.

A provable positive-sum relationship.
Read 13 tweets
15 Jul
Current social networks don't have great tools for dispute resolution. They're a combination of anarchy (people yelling) and tyranny (arbitrary deplatforming).

An alternative approach is a global moderator hierarchy. In the event of dispute, the lowest common ancestor mediates.
The moderator hierarchy: a possible implementation

- founder is moderator 0
- founder sets up initial hierarchy, appoints mods 1-N
- mods recruit new users
- new users choose a mod upon signup
- new users can be promoted to mod
- mods are comp'd via token
1729.com/network-union
Choosing a mod has aspects of both friending & following.

Like following, it's asymmetric: when A moderates B, A has privileges that B does not.

But like friending, it's symmetric: you may require both A *and* B to opt in for A to take on the responsibility of moderating B.
Read 7 tweets
14 Jul
The corporate stack now includes three layers.

1) Legal entities
Delaware C-Corp, Wyoming LLC, bylaws, contracts, etc

2) Centralized services
Stripe, Coinbase, Gusto, SVB, etc

3) Decentralized services
Bitcoin, USDC, defi, private key custody, etc
The legal layer is official filings and local PDFs. The API is lawyers.

The centralized layer is both fiat banking and cloud services. The API is the website.

The decentralized layer is everything crypto related. The API is private keys.
These three layers have an increasing amount of interoperation.

Stripe Atlas bridges the legal and centralized layers.

Coinbase's exchange bridges the centralized and decentralized layers.

And Wyoming's DAO law bridges the legal and the decentralized layers.
Read 5 tweets
6 Jul
At first I thought this was a bad idea, but now I think there is the kernel of something very interesting here.

Random selection of moderators could, in theory, be a way to implement "you cut the cake and I choose the piece" for governance issues.

Rawls' veil in real life?
Divide & choose is a procedure for fair division of a continuous resource between two parties. The protocol proceeds as follows: one person cuts the cake into two pieces; the other person selects one of the pieces; the cutter receives the remaining piece.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_an…
The veil of ignorance concept: choose a rule as if you had no knowledge ahead of time as to whether you'd be ruler or ruled. Ideally, this would incentivize participants to select rules impartially and rationally.
fs.blog/2017/10/veil-i…
Read 4 tweets
5 Jul
If there are 1000 people at someone’s door, they could call the police. Assuming they haven’t been abolished.

But if there are 1000 mobbing them online, there is currently no police force. Only slow reports and counter-mobs.
I wrote about this just prior to the social media-fueled disorder of 2020.

I think I correctly apprehended that online madness would soon translate into offline chaos.

But it didn’t need TikTok (video tweets were enough). And it happened faster than I expected.
There are two resolutions to the situation of online madness and offline sanity.

The first is what we have seen: the mindless translation of media- and social media-fueled madness into the physical world.

The second is to set up online polities with physical levels of civility.
Read 8 tweets
3 Jul
From seeing like a state to learning like a machine.
A state can only make rectilinear decisions based on paper forms. Scalable but binary.

A machine can make curvilinear decisions based on digital data. Scalable and statistical.
Of course, some states have partially adapted & have some of their data online (albeit in often insecure databases).

But it’s just a retrofit. It’s not like the leaders are looking at metrics on the health and wealth of their constituents. Nor are they making decisions via code.
Read 9 tweets

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