At the Bay Area pre-solstice unconference, I gave a talk which started as a discussion of how rationalists could build tools to enable better organization and conversation online. I'm a largely improvisational speaker though, and it quickly turned into a discussion of the future of the movement.
I'm pretty old now, and I've seen a number of groups of people move from relative obscurity, to positions of power or, at least, to being subjects of general curiosity. The most relevant, I think, for rationalists are the early (pre-2002) Googlers.
If a social group gets projected onto the broader canvas of mass attention, or their interests get magnified through access to the levers of power,... (read 530 more words →)
I think the problem (at least relative to assurance contracts, which as other repliers have noted, seem to doing okay with kickstarter and other pledging sites), is a mismatch of incentives.
The primary impetus to propose and fund a new dominant assurance contract lies with the entrepreneur, but given a choice between an assurance contract (where if the pledge fails to reach its total, everyone just gets their money back, and the entrepreneur gets nothing), and a dominance assurance contract (where if the pledge fails to reach its total, everyone gets their money back, plus a share of the entrepreneur's original stake), any entrepreneur is going to prefer the first. So it's hard... (read more)