Manifesto

Whoever advances the ever-expanding horizon of knowledge should be rewarded.

Because if we don't reward it, the incentives to do so collapse.

Advancing knowledge means understanding.

It means coming up with better explanations for why something happens.

Powerful abstractions are cross-cutting: they travel across hierarchies of problems, unlocking paths toward solutions that were previously invisible.

Breaking a system down into the smallest constituents we can name is part of that process.

This is why this endeavour should be collaborative first.

There is more to gain from building on each other's work than from blindly competing. Without a visible dependency graph, people duplicate work, pursue dead ends already explored by others, and fail to see which discoveries unlocked what came next.

We can and should compete:

• 01on better formulations of subproblems;
• 02on showing why a particular road cannot lead to a solution;
• 03on producing new explanations and formalizations that better fit reality, based on what we have learned.

And we should do it in a permissionless, borderless and transparent manner.

Back to rewards

If we don't own the capital and the distribution mechanism, truly fair rewards are impossible.

A new video compression algorithm might save 20 cents per user per month.

Across hundreds of millions of users, that insight could be worth an extraordinary amount.

But users buy Netflix. They don't buy better compression algorithms.

In the current architecture, there is no open mechanism for determining which solution is better, measuring the value it created, plugging it into the system seamlessly, and rewarding the people whose work made it possible.