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Xerographica
01-14-2018, 08:37 AM
Imagine a 10k race. The race is a contest. The point of the contest is to rank the runners by speed.

Now imagine an idea race. It's also a contest. The point of the contest is to rank the ideas. However, we're not interested in how fast an idea is, we're interested in how useful it is. We want all the ideas to be ranked by usefulness.

The thing is, unlike runners, ideas don't have legs. This means that ideas can't rank themselves by usefulness. Ideas need to be ranked by people. So the fundamentally important question is... how, exactly, should people rank ideas? Here are some options...

1. The Democratic Hand (DH): voting
2. The Visible Hand (VH): committee
3. The Invisible Hand (IH): spending

The problem with the DH is that a vote doesn't have a cost. So if you vote for an idea, it doesn't reveal just how useful it is to you.

The problem with the VH is that nobody is a mind-reader. The chances are slim that a committee will correctly guess just how useful an idea is to you.

The IH doesn't have the the cheap-talk problem or the divination problem. The amount of money that you spend on an idea reveals just how useful it is to you.

Yet, in our day and age, most ideas aren't ranked by the IH. The problem is that the IH isn't obviously useful. Here's the solution...

http://IdeaPlug.org/

This is the very first website where people can spend their money to rank ideas. IdeaPlug will help everyone clearly see how useful the IH is. For example...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/top/?sort=top&t=all
http://ideaplug.org/?t=libertarianism

On Reddit... the top ranked libertarian links/ideas are nearly all... memes. Would I vote for any of them? Maybe. It's not like it would cost me anything. But would I be willing to spend my money on them? No. I'd much rather spend my money on the link to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which is exactly what I did on IdeaPlug.

IdeaPlug will prove that, when it comes to ranking ideas, the IH is vastly more useful than the DH. But what about the VH? We’ve all had ideas shot down by committees. It doesn’t cost a committee anything to shoot an idea down. IdeaPlug will quickly change this. The cost of shooting an idea down will exceed the amount of money spent on supporting it.

Logically, IdeaPlug itself won’t be steered by a committee. The site’s decisions will be made by the market. If you’d prefer a different domain name, then buy it and let the market judge its usefulness. If you’d prefer for IdeaPlug to be a for-profit, then submit your idea and let the market judge its usefulness. No decision is off the table.

Right now, as you can see, the site is super basic. Here are some relevant pages…

- IdeaPlug's code (https://jsfiddle.net/0cutwvap/)
- Google sheet for the site's data (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NKhJH7fBtztZDP3HyTcz86cjaHqyvHhWcDlVpDOfeUA/edit#gid=0)
- Google sheet for the valuations (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/127OA6T3uGvXQOTIVSAjlSheSPZ_0Tr4wHT8VxE47gTM/edit#gid=0)
- Google sheet for the links (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F64YhwK5UiUqGsFhTYyQmGr-BXH8SEgoiDxSplv_Y30/edit#gid=0)

To submit a link, you’d private message me the following info...

Your valuation (minimum $1, whole dollar amounts only)
Link title
Link URL
Content creator
Content creation date (Month/Day/Year)
Tags (up to 5)
Your username
Desired payment use

For example…

$3
The Case for Freedom
https://fee.org/articles/the-case-for-freedom/
Friedrich Hayek
10/1/1960
economics,libertarianism,markets,tolerance,liberty
Maqo
Automate submission/valuation process

You’d paypal me the money and I’d manually enter the data. Clearly this isn’t the optimal system. But we can use this system to help crowdfund the optimal system. “Optimal” will be defined by the market.

IdeaPlug means that we win. We all win. Even though liberals and socialists will lose the ideological race, they will all win the race for the cure. They are currently suffering from the deadliest disease… economic ignorance. Their ignorance prevents them from clearly seeing and understanding economic reality. So they waste their time and talent on useless ideas. IdeaPlug will change this. The eyes of each and every liberal and socialist will be fully opened to economic reality, they will clearly see the most useful ideas, and they will redirect their time and talent accordingly. Everyone wins.

Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns or suggestions. I really look forward to seeing and learning which ideas are the most useful to you.