Building Better Blockchain Brotherhoods By Blocking Bias / B.S.

Executive Summary

• We provide two tenets that are essential to building better decentralised organisations.
• We elaborate upon the two tenets by providing seven pillars on which the two tenets rest. These pillars also serve as clarifications for the principles summarised in the tenets.
• The overarching goal of this article is to improve productivity in organisations engaged in developing blockchain technology.
• An unintended yet welcome consequence of integrating these tenets and pillars into the DNA of any decentralised project is that people can come and go, products might come and go, but the protocol will stay.
• Clearly, the concepts mentioned here can be applicable to organisations outside the decentralised realm as well. We conclude with a colourful verse, recited hundreds of years ago, that perhaps captures the essence of what we are trying to express.

The Two Tenets

1. The more people (sentient beings?) we include the more successful we will be.
2. The more the focus, of the people we include, on real problems the more successful we will be.

The Seven Pillars Upholding The Two Tenets

1. Focus on real problems is simply doing things without Bias and / or B.S. (Bull Shit).
2. Bias is not being able to see things clearly. B.S. is dishonesty, which is seeing something but saying it is something else [1].
3. The more we focus on real problems, the more involved we will naturally become towards finding superior solutions. This can be measured using a new metric for gauging intelligence called IQ. IQ stands for Involvement Quotient [2]. There are many ways to increase IQ and clearly this will result in improved decision making [3].
4. The lower the focus of someone on real problems the lesser their decisions will affect organisational policies. The lowest level of non zero positive impact someone can have, on the operations of the organization, is by being a part of the community [4].
5. Everyone that is involved with the organization, and creating positive impact, will be either team members or community members. Community membership is by choice. Team membership will be based on certain selection criteria.
6. We will do everything we can to help the team members we recruit overcome Bias and B.S. including sending them to the community for extended time periods. The converse is even more important: we will commit significant efforts to identify individuals from the community, with pure focus and involvement towards solving real problems, and give them additional responsibilities.
7. We will not give in easily to the temptation to jump to conclusions, instead we will try to understand the situation more throughly and do what is necessary. We will be the best problem solvers we can be.

As Shakespeare Would Put It:

Something along the above lines has been expressed in a very colourful manner in the following verse [5]:

A Startup Right As It Is Starting Up

The first few people that are part of the team will be role models for everyone else.

This necessitates that the first few team members have to be held to a higher standard.

Conclusion: An Unintended Yet Welcome Consequence

An unintended yet welcome consequence of integrating the above tenets and pillars into the DNA [6]of any decentralized project or protocol is that people can come and go, products might come and go, but the protocol or the platform will stay.

Notes:

[1]
• Bias manifests due to the Baggage we carry in our lives or the B.S. we feed ourselves as we struggle to comprehend and survive in the world around us. B.S. can also be considered a form of Bias wherein there is an awareness of the difference between what is seen and what is acknowledged, but this awareness is concealed. Bias is unintentional. B.S. is intentional.

• B.S. generally stands for Bull Shit. Note that, B.S. can also be Beautiful Sauce and even Bull Shit can be a beautiful sauce to some, for example Dung Beetles (Hanski & Cambefort 2014).

• Kashyap (2018) is an attempt, which is still in a very early stage, to probe further the distinctions between Bias and B.S. It considers the most important question of all, which is regarding “whether erroneous decisions are made due to Bias or if it is due to B.S.”. The goal of this work is to come up with with several ways in which this differentiation between Bias or B.S. can (should?) be made and the treatment for these two symptoms.

[2] This alternate measure for intelligence, the Involvement Quotient, is discussed in Kashyap (2021a). The Involvement Quotient (also, IQ), gauges the level of involvement of the sense organs to whatever is happening around the individual.

[3] A detailed discussion of creating, or rather increasing, intelligence is given in Kashyap (2021b). Terming the Involvement Quotient as IQ might cause some confusion. The possibility that confusion might aid better decision making is also discussed in this paper.

[4] Someone can be part of the community and have negative impact. But since community membership requires owning protocol tokens, such negative behaviour would be detrimental to their own wealth. We can invoke the actors are rational assumption, common in economics, to arrive at this conclusion. Team members can also create negative impact, which may not get noticed in a timely manner and suitable remedial procedures might not get implemented accordingly. But if the majority of the players are following the concepts discuss here, harmful actions will be detected soon and the length of destructive episodes will be curtailed or at-least unfavourable events cannot continue for too long (indefinitely?). That said, negative impact is a possibility, which cannot be fully ruled out, and mechanisms to handle that will be discussed in detail in later versions.

[5] The quote is from William Shakespeare: Richard III, Act I, Scene III.

[6] Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA; Alberts, etal 2002) is a molecule composed of two chains (made of nucleotides) that coil around each other to form a double helix carrying the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning, and reproduction of all known living organisms and many viruses. DNA and ribonucleic acid (RNA) are nucleic acids. Alongside proteins, lipids and complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides), nucleic acids are one of the four major types of macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life. DNA, Wikipedia Link

References:

• Alberts, B., Johnson, A., Lewis, J., Raff, M., Roberts, K., & Walter, P. (2002). Molecular Biology of the Cell, Garland Science, New York.
• Hanski, I., & Cambefort, Y. (Eds.). (2014). Dung beetle ecology (Vol. 1195). Princeton University Press.
• Kashyap, R. (2018). Bias or B.S. (Bull Shit)? Working Paper.
• Kashyap, R. (2021a). Seven Survival Senses: Evolutionary Training makes Discerning Differences more Natural than Spotting Similarities. World Futures, 77(3), 222–244.
• Kashyap, R. (2021b). Artificial Intelligence: A Child’s Play. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 166, 120555.
• Shakespeare, W. (1989). William Shakespeare: the complete works. Barnes & Noble Publishing.

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