This is how I read your proposal:
"I am a smart person who wants to avoid having a job, and would rather do some cool stuff instead. Searching for more team members. At this moment we have no results, no experience, and no expertise, but we already have a web page and a few very superficial ideas about how to change the world. Here is a system to send me money, similar to Kickstarter/Patreon, but without all the competition."
Seeing examples of your work didn't make a good impression. Is this a representative example of how far you got?
Solution is simply, - put the money to the right places, on the things that people are passionate about. However, due to the social stratification, this easy fix seems only possible with the more conscientious upper class.
This is either naivity or scam. I am going to suppose that you are extremely naive (because in the other case there would be no point debating with you). I would say the problem #1 is that you are focusing on the parts that you are able to do -- making a web page, inventing a "Need / Goal / Idea / Plan / Step / Task / Work" classification, designing a system of how to share money -- completely ignoring the real work that needs to be done. How do you expect to accomplish anything with that?
Maybe you hope that someone else will join the team who will do all the hard work and have all the experience. The problem is, such person wouldn't need you at all: they could simply give $100 to someone in India to make them a webpage in Ruby on Rails, and invent their own terminology during an afternoon. Also, such person would already have contacts from their previous work (where they got the experience).
I think what you should do, if you want to achieve anything, is trying to become such a person. This will take a few years. Before trying to organize your own team, become a member of an already existing team, because there is so much to learn.
You want to do the most "meta" work, because (a) you don't want to get your hands dirty, (b) the "meta" work is high-status, a signal of high intelligence you have, and (c) you are actually not very good at doing anything else. The problem is, you are also not very good at this "meta" work... and it is definitely not the place where you should start. Knowledge progresses from specific to abstract, not the other way round.
I'm not saying you must now get a 9-5 job and come back here 20 years later when you have an impressively sounding job title and an expensive car. Just... do something that is useful, or start by learning something useful. Something not "meta". There is Kickstarter, Patreon, you can put advertisement into your YouTube videos. You could work for an existing NGO. Focus on doing something useful, not only on how to make money while having no specific skill -- there is too much competition in that already, and you don't seem to have a competitive advantage there either.
I suspect that you simply didn't sell this right for the audience.
From what I understand, it's something that LW could get behind - a way to crowdsource ideas then crowdfund them, and get equity based on how much of the idea you helped to generate. That's not a bad idea with some refinement.
I have some ideas on how to actually make sure this grows, if you're interested.
From what I understand, it's something that LW could get behind - a way to crowdsource ideas then crowdfund them, and get equity based on how much of the idea you helped to generate. That's not a bad idea with some refinement.
Good point.
I have some ideas on how to actually make sure this grows, if you're interested.
Definitely interested.
You likely don't want to have money transfered peer-to-peer but let money go through your website.
Your website name is hard to remember. Get a .com domain with a decent name: http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
Btw., we aim for culturally-neutral domain name. Thing like oo.io would be great, but it is already taken.
infty seems to me very strongly culture driven. You likely need to spell it out for most people to remember.
In general it's better to optimize for effectiveness than to try do everything and the kitchen sink.
infty is not an English word, it is just a sequence of latin symbols, which are used in mathematical (LaTeX) texts to write lemniscate, meaning infinity, which is a mathematical concept.
If you come up with interesting truly culturally neutral name though, I'd love to know :)
infty is not an English word
It's an abbreviation of the English infinity and most people won't easily grasp it. Companies like Amazon and Google on the other hand have names that are a lot more neutral.
What do you mean by "neutral"? Odds are you wouldn't have found the name "Google" neutral if you had just heard it for the first time.
. infinite love, .. long-term strategy, ... cultural neutrality.
culturally-neutral domain name
Ain't no such thing. You're using Roman alphabet, that traditional tool of white dead male imperialist aggressors!
Now, if you manage to do a domain name consisting of a some letters from a Roman alphabet, some from Cyrillic, some from Devanagari, some from Hangul, etc., that would actually be fairly impressive. Unusable, but impressive :-)
Anyone who defines a problem (Goal) on Infinity Project, gets hyper-equity, which allows the user to own a fixed percentage of all the future ḥ that will be generated from ideas, projects, steps, tasks, and works below that specific goal.
All these words and only for a pyramid scheme....
All these words and only for a pyramid scheme....
If you look, currently the fraction of "hyper-equity" that a user can have, is very small (0.0001 to 0.001), and I believe we should use risk models to adjust it in the future, with everyone's help, and choose the appropriate maximum amount of it. The reason why we have so little of hyper-equity, is because it precisely because we would like to avoid an unreasonable pyramid scheme.
If you look
I did try to look. My browser said "Secure Connection Failed".
the fraction of "hyper-equity" that a user can have, is very small (0.0001 to 0.001)
So, all of hyper-equity can be controlled by 1,000 - 10,000 people?
I did try to look. My browser said "Secure Connection Failed".
Ha:) Is that because we use self-signed SSL cert? Try again. We'll upgrade cert later.
So, all of hyper-equity can be controlled by 1,000 - 10,000 people?
No, as many people as there are problems (Goals). Potentially infinite.
If you're looking for gullible recruits, you've come to the wrong place.
Don't lease the Ferrari just yet.
My impression is "naive" rather than "cynically looking for gullible recruits", for what it's worth.
Yep, though the beginning, bolded in the original, is worrisome:
I strongly disliked the idea of 'work for money'.
Is exciting! :) [To be rational, we must work for well-defined goals, not for money that lacks descriptive power.]
On the contrary, it is worrisome that some people treat others as merely workforce that can be bought, and lack any empathy whatsoever.
we must work for well-defined goals, not for money that lacks descriptive power
So, who feeds you and pays for your housing?
See, we are not talking about the modern world. We are talking about changing the world to create the world of abundance.
In the real -- not future -- world one needs money to surivive. If one dislikes working for money, one needs to acquire money in other ways. Many of these other ways, from mooching to con games, are... problematic.
And so you appear on LW, mention that your family wasn't rich (so you are unlikely to be a trust-fund baby), are very explicit that you dislike working for money, and propose a pyramid scheme.
[Lumifer], what you are? Are you what you think you are? What kind of future do you want to have?
LOL. I am a human, I think. Maybe? Could be a brain in a vat. Or a character in some alien kid's SimEarth game. A chatbot which escaped from supersekrit lab, even? Hard to tell, really.
What kind of future do I want? That's a very general question. Before this devolves into a list of positive adjectives, do you have something specific in mind?
So you are very undefined. I know that I'm an 'infinitesimal' part of the observable universe, which wishes to understand: the Universe, and where and how does it originate; wishes that everything that anyone truly wishes could really exist; and, doesn't lose the hope to improve the whole Universe, because it knows that butterfly effect works... if used properly.
Sure. But you are talking about things inside your mind. How about things in reality, outside of your mind?
In that case I don't understand your difficulties. Just persuade your mind to stop screwing around and give you what you want.
In the OP's defense, he appeared on LW for a reason. The reason being that a pitch in the same ref. class worked on this cohort in the past.
Knowing whether you are funded is useful estimating the lifetime of your project. It's also useful for understanding potential biases and the business model.
But ideas are not a scarce resource, anyone can easily copy them. Even if you created good ideas, why would anyone pay anything? Unless you patent your patentable ideas I don't think this system can work.
"Unless you patent your patentable ideas I don't think this system can work."
If something won't work in the U.S., or E.U., because it is patented, it will work in China, or in bitspace...
Because there is a track record, like a blockchain in Bitcoin, and people will be able to figure out eventually, to whom the credit is due. Eventually, we will not need hidden intellectual property to retain credit to whom the credit is due... Many people say that time is money, few say that information is money, but it is. The whole internet keeps a record of who came up with what idea. With the rise of things like Ethereum, and other advanced information technologies, it looks like there will be a day, when thinkers will get their proper credit, even for the ideas of the past.
From the outside it's not clear how the sorting works. You likely want to have a system that's not simply chorological but that put's funded items that receive money and are therefore likely of higher quality at the top of the list.
A new comment pushes the topic back to the top of the list. So, whenever someone comments, -- someone notices it... We're working on it.
Seeking for knowledge, resources, and love; one world's dream, intercultural understanding, and safe arrival of technological singularity, I am creating a public self-explanatory, inter-lingual, financial, programmable, hierarchical think-tank: https://infty.xyz [The Infinity Project]. Anyone's welcome to join, just send an e-mail to forever@infty.xyz and I'll send you an invite.
I'm posting a story on it for your scrutiny. :)