Congratulations! You've passed a one percent treaty. Now you've got twenty-seven point two billion dollars per year flowing
into the one percent Treaty Fund. That's the good news. The bad news is that humans are involved.
Not all of it is available for allocation. First, the automatic deductions (think of these as the "cost of convincing humans
to stop killing each other" tax): VICTORY Incentive Alignment Bond investors receive ten percent, or two point seven two
billion dollars, to repay campaign funders. Political incentives (I.A.B.s) receive ten percent, or two point seven two billion
dollars, to keep politicians aligned. Eighty percent, or twenty-one point eight billion dollars, is available for Wishocracy,
which is what you get to allocate. How do you stop parasitic special interests from stealing that twenty-one point eight
billion dollars? If history is any guide, you don't. Every pool of money humanity has ever created has attracted lobbyists
the way a dropped ice cream cone attracts ants, except ants at least work hard.
Wishocracy replaces committees with code and representatives with mathematics.
It lets eight billion people collectively decide how to spend twenty-one point eight billion dollars without turning it
into a bureaucratic nightmare. The difference between this and the N.I.H.
is like asking two hundred bureaucrats what you should have for lunch versus asking your stomach.
Your stomach has never once funded a colleague's lunch out of professional courtesy.
How Wishocracy Allocates the one percent Treaty Fund: Decentralized Crowdfunding.
Your decentralized institutes of health (D.I.H.) network functions as a decentralized crowdfunding platform.
Anyone can submit a campaign proposal. Wishocracy allocates funds from the one percent Treaty Fund across competing campaigns.
It's Kickstarter, but backed by the G.D.P. of nations instead of your friend's credit card.
What the decentralized framework for drug assessment (D.F.D.A.
(a decentralized F.D.A.)) handles automatically (no voting required): Which treatments get tested: Companies register, patients
choose (capitalism, for once, doing something useful). Which diseases get researched: Patients join trials for their conditions
(people tend to be motivated about their own mortality). Resource allocation within trials: Market prices and participant
choices. What Wishocracy Actually Decides: The hard stuff. Allocation across campaign proposals competing for one percent
Treaty Fund funds: Infrastructure Campaigns (the boring but essential plumbing).
The Decentralized Framework for Drug Assessment Development is a one billion dollars per year proposal.
The Epic E.H.R. Integration Project is five million dollars one-time.
A.W.S. Infrastructure Services is three million dollars per year.
The Security Audit Program is two million dollars per year.
An alternative decentralized framework for drug assessment is an eight million dollars per year proposal (competition!
novel concept for government!). Public Goods (things the market won't fund because nobody gets rich curing diseases that
don't sell pills). The Patient Trial Subsidies Program receives eight hundred million dollars per year through an automatic
formula. Off-Patent Drug Research receives twenty billion dollars per year.
The Rare Disease Initiative receives ten billion dollars per year.
The Negative Results Publishing Fund receives five billion dollars per year (yes, knowing what doesn't work is worth billions;
your species keeps re-running failed experiments because nobody publishes failures).
Service Provider Bids (capitalism, but supervised). Data Storage Provider A receives two billion dollars per year.
Data Storage Provider B receives one point five billion dollars per year (competing).
The Pragmatic Clinical Trial Insurance Pool has a ten billion dollar reserve.
How It Works: Pairwise Comparisons Between Campaigns. No committee on Earth has ever looked at a list of ten thousand proposals
and made a good decision. Committees are where good ideas go to die of old age.
Instead, the global population votes using pairwise comparisons: "What's more important right now:" Framework for drug assessment
development versus Alzheimer's prize? Epic integration versus Security audits?
Rare disease research versus An alternative drug assessment framework?
Patient subsidies versus Infrastructure spending? Millions of people make simple pairwise choices.
The algorithm aggregates preferences into funding allocations.
No filibustering. No horse-trading. No senators holding medical research hostage because they want a highway in their district.
Why You Can't Just Use a Spreadsheet. Someone is going to ask, "Why not just write a formula?"
Because the decisions look like this: One. Multiple competing implementations.
Three teams want to build the drug assessment platform. Which one?
All three? Two? The one with the best logo? Two. Trade-offs between prizes.
One hundred billion dollars for aging reversal or fifty billion dollars for Alzheimer's plus fifty billion dollars for cancer?
There is no "correct" answer. There is only what humanity collectively values, which is exactly what Wishocracy measures.
Three. Public goods allocation. How much for off-patent drugs versus rare diseases?
Markets won't answer this because there's no profit in it. Four.
Service provider competition. Which companies get contracts for what amounts?
Your decentralized framework for drug assessment, or D.F.D.A.
(a decentralized F.D.A.), allocates resources WITHIN pragmatic clinical trials.
Wishocracy allocates resources BETWEEN campaigns. One is the engine, the other is the steering wheel.
You need both unless you enjoy driving into walls. The core of Wishocracy is a voting method so simple, even a congressman
could do it (though we'd recommend they practice first). It's called Aggregated Pairwise Preference Allocation, or simply,
the Pairwise Slider Allocation. Your brain can't rank a list of twenty priorities.
It gives up around item number seven. But it's fantastic at comparing two things.
Instead of asking, "Rank these ten thousand campaign proposals," the system asks: "What's more important right now: D.F.D.A.
platform development or security audits?" You make a choice.
That's it. You do this a few times with different random pairs.
It takes five minutes. Less time than you spend choosing a Netflix show, and considerably more important.
Millions of other people do the same. An algorithm takes all these simple, head-to-head comparisons and builds a real-time
ranking of infrastructure and public goods priorities. (Remember: Wishocracy doesn't allocate between diseases.
Patients do that by choosing which trials to join. Wishocracy allocates between infrastructure campaigns and public goods
that markets can't handle.). It's the wisdom of crowds, but without the crowds having to talk to each other.
Why This Actually Works (Math Warning). When millions of people make pairwise choices, something almost magical happens
(and by "magical" I mean "statistically inevitable," which is the only kind of magic that actually works): Random pairs
prevent gaming. You can't lobby 5 million people. Well, you can try.
Good luck. Statistical models (Bradley-Terry, PageRank) extract global preferences from individual comparisons.
The same math that ranks Google search results can rank humanity's medical priorities.
Google uses it to find cat videos. You'll use it to cure cancer.
Progress. Outliers cancel out. The guy who votes "fund my personal jetpack" gets drowned out by the millions voting for
"cure my mother's Alzheimer's." Wisdom of crowds emerges. Reliably.
Repeatedly. Boringly. Example with real numbers: 5 million people vote.
Each makes 20 comparisons. That's 100 million data points. Algorithm processes them in seconds.
Output: "Allocate forty percent to patient subsidy programs, twenty-five percent to D.F.D.A.
(a decentralized F.D.A.) platform development, fifteen percent to off-patent drug research, ten percent to rare disease
initiatives, five percent to security infrastructure, five percent to negative results publishing..."
No committee meetings were harmed in the making of this budget.
It's democracy without the shouting. The stupidity is still there, but it's evenly distributed across millions of people
and thus cancels out. This is called "the wisdom of crowds."
It works for the same reason that guessing the weight of a cow at a fair works: individually you're all terrible at it,
but collectively you're weirdly accurate. From Priorities to Projects (Where Wishes Become Tasks).
Great, so the Pairwise Slider Allocation tells you "Curing Alzheimer's" is a top priority.
Wonderful. Now what? Having a priority without a plan is just a wish.
And wishes, as a rule, don't cure anything. Wishocracy translates that priority into action.
A.I. Breaks It Down: An A.I. takes the impossible goal of "Cure Alzheimer's" and breaks it into thousands of smaller, concrete,
fundable tasks. "Cure Alzheimer's" becomes "Map protein structures."
That becomes "Run AlphaFold on these sequences." That becomes "Rent computing time."
Every impossible problem is just a series of possible steps arranged in a line.
Your species figured this out for building pyramids four thousand five hundred years ago but keeps forgetting to apply it
to medicine. The Bounty Board: The system posts these tasks to a global marketplace.
It's like eBay, but for saving humanity. WANTED: A cure for Alzheimer's.
BOUNTY: ten billion dollars. WANTED: A map of all protein misfolding patterns.
BOUNTY: five hundred million dollars. The World Competes: The best teams from around the world, from M.I.T.
to some kid in a garage in Lagos, bid on these tasks. The system funds multiple approaches in parallel.
The ones that show promise get more funding. The ones that fail lose funding instantly.
It's venture capital, but for not dying. Your species already uses this method to decide which restaurants survive and which
phone apps get downloaded. Time to try it with the thing that kills you.