# Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket podcast | Ep 1 (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [773], part 2 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2021-08-02 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Vinay's own description of the mass-relocation programme that Harappa targets.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Black Elephant (2009): The black elephant: a foreseeable disaster that institutions ignore and later call a black swan. Coined by...
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - black elephant: The black elephant term, from its naming to a Singapore lecture series.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas developed here: Black Elephant
- Topics: Incentive-based epistemology — truth markets and Mattereum (61%); Climate politics & democracy (13%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: human rights (7 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Black Elephant (3 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); black elephants (2 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); walled gardens (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); FluSCIM (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); climate disaster (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); State Failure Management Archive (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); world trade (2 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Mattereum (9 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); masks (2 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.52 (1.00 is the top), number 71 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [303] [How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md): same career work: Black Elephant
  - [128] [Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/128.md): same career work: Black Elephant
- On the same works, just before: [774] [All Power To The Imagination #10 | with special guest... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/774.md); [733] [Trust models, founding Mattereum, and 'Turning Law into... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/733.md); [741] [Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, and the Hexayurt |... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/741.md)
- On the same works, just after: [245] [Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/245.md); [717] [The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/717.md); [677] [Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket podcast | Ep 1, video, 2021-08-02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [773], https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[40:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=2445s) uh ex experiments or discoveries is that capital and entrepreneurship is one of the probably more effective ways to approach this it kind of sounds like uh by building material you're incentivizing the changing of the paradigm by giving people the opportunity to profit from doing that does that align with how how you see it because it seems like there's that might be an avenue for accelerating the change if you can make it like a sexy adventure of some kind well i mean government is dead from the neck up civil society is dead from the neck up commerce seems to be very very alive right now you know i'm thinking to your view on mask and google and you know amazon these are all institutions which are doing radical new things with the world some good some bad but you can't deny that they're getting results better than the governments are typically getting when they go out and try and do something crazy um so i don't think we have a choice about doing this stuff in an activist way as business people i also think that it's very important that as we get to these points of transformation we understand who is in charge of the story and what they can do because sometimes you think that before in charge of the story and then you try and change things and you discover the government as you chart then at that point wherever you put into changing the minds of the conscious people is largely wasted you know you have to be influencing the people that are the decision makers in a lot of cases that's not the people in the marketplace it's the people in the state department uh we we have a couple of questions here in relation to ideas as we are idea market uh just to perhaps take this on a tangent we could bring it back to climate change if we want but we can see wherever this goes so this this question is completely open but uh we'd like to ask you you know what's an idea that you're long on and what's an idea that you are short on generally so i would have really hammered this time right i got 20 years invested working largely for free on figuring out how to manage hundreds of millions of climate refugees because in 2003 2004 i completely gave up hope on any possibility that we were going to avoid climate change by social or technological change right i knew 20 years ago we were not going to turn the ship and we were going to run around right into the heart of this thing so what is it that i knew

[43:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=2595s) that allowed me to start changing what i did with my life 20 years before most other people realized there was a problem you see the information that we're exposed to changes what we prioritize this is what i mean about paradigmatic change right i'm in this position because of an old hippie bastard right and this old hippie bastard runs a thing called world watch institut he's called albert bates and in 1995 he sat me down and said right kid there's this thing called the environment have you heard of it i'm like no well it turns out we've cut down about half of everything that keeps the world stable and we're pumping out carbon dioxide and within your lifetime the wheels are going to come completely off i'm like the [ __ ] and because he was somebody that really had his [ __ ] together in terms of knowing how this was going to go that communication hit me directly like oh you were telling me the truth then it took me a few years to get kind of corroborating evidence and then by luck i found myself in a place where i had an opportunity to act right the idea right if everybody in the world had gotten that transmission from albert bates at the time and it had gone click right he's on he's on twitter as peak surfer right if everybody in the world had gotten that transmission just gone click we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in now the problem is the critical piece of information which is we are completely [ __ ] and you must act right it reached so few people at that juncture in history that we weren't able to get effective action organized right you know what's what is fundamentally necessary we need an emergency alert we need a system of information where somebody can basically go right i've been looking at this whole thing of like the kardashians and donald trump and you know the the latest greatest you knows netflix tv special right and i've just realized they're not talking about this kind of thing over here which is sort of like breaking agriculture because we're not able to get the oil into under control hey and when people get to that point hey what they're getting fed is a bunch of mainstream [ __ ] from

[45:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=2745s) environmental organizations are talking about small carbon reductions which make absolutely no difference to our odds of survival nobody has turned around saying look average middle class americans are emitting 70 tons of carbon per year per person that's pretty much what you get to the people you know the people you think of as being successful middle-class americans quarter of a million dollars your income average carbon emissions 70 tons per person acceptable emissions two tons per person there's no way that we can make this lifestyle manage within the carbon budgets that are available in west we completely green the energy grade at which point nothing that they're doing is emitting carbon because the entire grid is green including their vehicles right and because we don't accurately communicate the truth about the level of change where necessary for us to not break agriculture what you get is people that are trying to do the right thing environmentally who wind up shopping for different things rather than understanding that we need a root and branch transformation of the core processes of industrial capitalism right bad access to information you get to the point where you're about to wake up from the netflix thing and you think that you're going to worry about the world and they tell you the answer is that you need to eat less beef hey well i don't need beef anymore chicken i'm doing it for the environment big question though in relation to that in terms of because there is a there is a flaw which is trying to be solved here so i'm trying to get in the idea marketing which is in relation to the credibility right so you're saying the idea that you're long on is that everyone should have access to the correct information or you know the information which will change things for the better for the good there there is a fundamental problem underlying that however that we have that at the moment with the media right they're saying this information is the good stuff for you so what we need is another system which allows a decentralized form of credibility so you actually do know what you're getting access to actually is the good stuff and you don't have to go through this process of questioning you know it's sort of been checked for you how do you solve that see see how you make see how you make the skeptical face right i make this skeptical face because you think decentralized and credibility have anything to do with each other right um but you're not wrong right you know i wouldn't i wouldn't be doing this if i didn't think the work you were doing was important right i would not be

[48:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=2889s) wasting my time talking about climate change and mass death if i didn't think the [ __ ] that you were doing is relevant to solving that problem but it's worse than you think right because it's a two-tier problem there is paradigmatic change at the top and then there is factual information at the bottom right and the problem that we have here is that paradomatically people are stuck in the kardashians netflix universe so when they get accurate information about climate information it doesn't integrate into any kind of substantive matrix that can absorb the information so what happens is it goes dink and then it falls to the ground right for example right 50 celsius in portland oregon right 122 fahrenheit in portland portland becomes hotter than new mexico right heck it becomes hotter than actual mexico portland portland and in canada it's the same temperature as portwood what do you mean canada is hotter than freaking belize how did that happen well now but aren't they aren't they like three and a half thousand miles north of the equator yeah they are why is it 122 fahrenheit over there um something has gone wrong right so if you already are in the climate paradigm you get this information and it goes like oh yeah this is really on now it's on now and all the climate people that i know when they say it's kind of you know 50 celsius in canada they're just like finally people will wake up uh maybe not right so this thing of you have to be in the correct paradigm before you can absorb news from outside of your framework the ufo thing right i am a bit comfortable with the idea that there might be alien life in the universe so there might be massively advanced technologies we've never seen or we might find an unknown unknown i see the pentagon report is like wow they're finally going to admit that they've got radar traces of things which are way less likely to be errors than for example human observers right you sit you've got a radar trace you've got an optical camera they show the same thing in the same place this is as rude as we know how to measure outside of a lab for reals right but if you're not in a position where paradomatically you can absorb that information think and it just falls to the ground right so the thing that i think that you have an enormous potential to do here

[50:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=3039s) is to force paradigmatic change by beating people with the stick of the free market that sounds about that sounds about right but please yeah go on so beating the kardashians did you know about that right boom right so well you know if you are out there and you've got some kind of you know something kind of like a prediction market not exactly but kinda sorta right if i'm in a position where i am betting on the you know netflix kardashian's reality as this is what is real and this is what is important to the world right and actually what happens is all of the attention swarms to 50 celsius in portland and the pentagon is releasing a whole bunch of new ufo data what happens is that my inability to conceptualize that this stuff is important turns into a financial liability and i get kicked in the nuts repeatedly every time something weird happens that isn't inside of my payoff matrix you see what i'm saying right and what you're gradually doing is you are forcing the arc of you know kind of the market right on the long arc you're forcing it towards reality because the people that are paradigmatically stuck inside of kardashian netflix reality keep losing money to the climate nuts and the ufo nuts and the people that we used to call conspiracy theorists right because they're in a position where they understand when something is important the other news will come along which connects to that thing which is important which means that they're buying that feed at a lower price than the other people are who don't realize that stuff is important until it's already exploded that's pretty much exactly how i have uh described it so yeah that we're aligned on that and i've never used the paradigmatic thing the paradigmatic thing is super important right because if you don't have the paradigmatic thing you can't assimilate the news and the news is a series of events you know ding ding ding ding ding ding if you're inside of that paradigm every time that happens you're picking up another token ding ding ding ding ding ding because you know the news is coming on and it's bolting itself onto your existing structure of reality and gradually your pile of evidence reaches higher and higher and higher and that's your reality and you're sure it's true right but if you have the cup the other

[53:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=3189s) way up i will illustrate all of this good information just bounces off the cap and falls to the ground right you have to be in a position where you can paradomatically integrate the new information or you don't get a gradual build up of evidence right all you get is you've had the same information as everybody else has had but it's bounced off your cup and fallen to the ground right so what you have is a situation where in an idea markets context all of the cups are turned the right way up right because you can make money from knowing what will be important and it doesn't matter which paradigm that stuff is in because the money is blind you see what i'm saying the money doesn't have a paradigm right i happen to think that this ufo thing is important you happen to think this uh you know climate change thing is important you know james over here is pretty sure that what's important is actually the new stuff about money laundering by the global super elite right all of those things can exist in different paradigms but if you're correct about that being important you will get paid off now this also applies to the people that are inside of your kind of kardashian tube right those people are still going to get paid off for thinking kardashian stuff is important right because a lot of other people agree with them but there's no conflict or competition between their paradigm and the paradigm which is handling climate change and ufos right the existence of the kardashians reality does not block the existence of the ufo reality in the way that it does on something like a news channel where there's only so much time for the news you see what i'm saying yeah yeah sorry i just thought you was ranting about this no no i love it yeah i'd be i'd be i'd be doing quite a lot of thinking about this before we started the call i'm like oh yeah we're gonna do the podcast okay let's get ready so i'm kind of just like wow here's the thing yeah bring it on so you were saying kardashian if you got more rants please bring it on no no kardashian reality good on the good on the yeah i was saying hopefully the kardashian reality so the advantage with with with the you know the markets are blind model is the kardashian reality i'm hoping will

[55:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=3339s) be more fickle given that there's no you know sort of fundamental value in it there's no inherent reason for people to uh gravitate to representations of particular representation of the kardashian reality than they are to a particular representation of ufos or climate change or something like that so even if technically you can still make money from the popularity of the kardashian reality it's not going to have a pattern that de-risks it it's going to be sort of random it's going to be sort of memified and it's also um how did i say this exactly um i had the right word in my head a second when it slipped out um it's predictable right kardashian popularity doesn't wane or wax much year on year and if it does weigh in or wax it something like the taylor swift quarter for it you know taylor swift is gradually releasing fame to other artists right but the line is relatively predictable over time you know by we service she's on an upward curve it's relatively predictable so the year-on-year predictability of those kind of things there isn't enough volatility in the kardashian market for somebody to make a lot of money speculating on it yeah right predictable trend it's the equivalent of blue chip stock nobody's making any money in blue chip stocks whereas if you were a serious ufo person five years ago and you went out and bought a bunch of options at ufo stuff will matter boy how did you hit the gold mine right because we're at the beginning of a decade where i'm expecting continuous selective disclosure from the dod for the next 10 freaking years i might be wrong about that but it's certainly the kind of bet that one could make real money on in a way that you can't make a bet on the idea that khloe kardashian will continue to be a popular person fully agreed there's just no information there to be traded so are you are you sure you're sure on the kardashians then i'm i'm completely neutral on them they're not going up and they're not going down they're just stuck here like some kind of awful barnacle on the side of a boat you know i mean they're like the living incarnation of new jersey even if they've never set foot in the place okay okay so what i did what idea are you short on

[57:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=3479s) so um i'm massively short on religion i think i think religion is about to go the way of people crapping in toilets and throwing it out their windows at night um i think we're in a position where organized religion has no answers for the problems that are currently assailing the human race it doesn't give us any help on aliens it doesn't give us any help on climate change isn't going to send you real help on nuclear bombs um so i'm of the opinion that organized religion stress organized religion corporate religion is probably going to die very very soon within 20 years i think it's just going to be a shattering series of revelations of like oh this thing doesn't work at all led by the catholic church do you have any thoughts on what might replace it or serve that function in the social psychology so religion has a whole bunch of different functions right there is a paradomatic thing of like this is what is real life is about salvation or life is about the end of suffering for sentient beings or whatever it is you know there's a kind of structuring story level of religion and then there's a personal transformation story so i am not happy with the idea of corporatization of psychedelics you know i think i think corporatization of psychedelics is going to be seen in two or three hundred years as an enormous negative turning point in this story um to be honest you know i think corporatization of psychedelics is next and i don't think there's any way around that so probably what you will get is personal transformation using psychedelics franchised as branding and it will look something like scientology or est or the landmark forum but they will have access to psychedelic drugs at which point they really can make that brainwashing stick that does sound like a nightmare it doesn't sound like a nightmare because that's what happens if you legalize use of psychedelic therapies you're gonna just wind up with freaking landmark forum on mdma i i i can see it now like you're in the middle of a trip and you're talking to all kinds of weird luminous beings and suddenly a pepsi logo comes into view and just passes by and you know you have to progress through the series of heaven through a series of microtransactions if i wasn't so busy with the Mattereum the temptation would be to start exactly that you know like personal transformation

[1:00:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=3629s) cult plus use of psychedelics and jurisdictions where it's legal i mean you know the amount of money that unscrupulous people are going to make playing those games at least i could infuse it with accurate yoga philosophy taken from my days of swami have a banana can you tell that story oh so swami have a banana um started out as a stand-up comedy routine that i would do for friends at parties so whenever i have some terrible terrible idea which is like fundamentally unscrupulous and has something to do with human consciousness it's like oh swami banana will get very rich running this scheme oh it will be very good very good um you know it's you know it's it's an awful racist stereotype but it's 100 accurate in my case i i for one would subscribe to that podcast immediately i want i want swami he's like the jon stewart of eastern mystics so there is high praise um so yeah i think you know corporatized psychedelic personal transformation stuff i think is going to be a huge curse on the future of humanity and i think it's going to be a gigantic industry i think it's becoming kind of going to become an american export industry that will rival hollywood or rock music or blue jeans wow um because you know and it's inevitable right it's what happens when you finally take mk ultra and you sell it to civilians in the same way that we took spread spectrum wireless encryption we sold that to civilians as wi-fi you know military technology eventually leaks into the civilian domain and mk ultra has not yet made the jump across but when you get civilians using psychedelics in a corporate setting it's just going to be the conversion of the mk ultra know-how into a corporate environment in what ways could we potentially inoculate ourselves against this future other than simply just not participating when it arrives to be honest i i haven't really figured out what to do about that other than potentially starting one fight fire with fire fight fire with fire could do or the opposite advice is tell people be straight edge because i'm now i mean i am heavily advising young people at this point not to do psychedelics right my standing advice having seen decades of my hippie peers doing psychedelics is don't do psychedelics

[1:02:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=3779s) like do them very little and do them in a party environment because as far as i could tell any kind of serious heavy internal lifting on psychedelics destroys way more people than it helps um i am i'm generally i mean if you told me 30 years ago that i would be down on psychedelics and i'd think they were a terrible idea for people i would have laughed in your face but now having seen the way that people turn out i just don't like drugs anymore i think culturally they're not negative people should have been doing hard freaking spiritual heavy lifting and they should have been doing hard to pull the tickle have you lifted so i'm sorry i'm very ranty today i do apologize i want to go back to this thing about paradigms right so paradigms are like hypotheses that people have about a market the market is a bull market right now as a paradigm the market is a bear market as a paradigm the market is going sideways as a paradigm um this sector of the market will experience explosive growth as soon as the fda approves this drug that's a paradigm right so right now we're in a position where the news shows right you know fox news fox news pushes a specific paradigm out into reality and says this is true right um cnn slightly different paradigm one or two others right these things all cluster into a much more fundamental kind of meta paradigm western rationalist positivism something like that right it's a pardon me you know the future will be better than the present technology is very useful people are basically good except the people that we make news about politicians they're always terrible but government is way that anything ever gets done in this world so it's still critically important you know that sort of paradigm somebody you know there's probably 12 or 15 core beliefs that are in that structure half of those things are provably false in the environment that we're in um if i made a news show imagine what the gupta news show looks like i don't want to have to imagine it man let's do this thing well [ __ ] you i'm saying right climate change today is worse than yesterday because the carbon is still coming out of the pipes right you know the u.s still has bases in a 151 countries or whatever the

[1:05:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=3929s) number happens to be right maternal mortality in malawi takes a new plunge fantastic we've really made some progress on that one however botswana still has like a whatever is 70 infection rate for the following demographics for hiv you know if you just continue to talk about how the world really works to people you wind up with the news show which is not about the news it's about all the stuff which is true that they don't want to [ __ ] think about yeah the the group the daily slap go to daily slop right it's still [ __ ] and people are still dying for no good reason what the [ __ ] right the only reason that sounds like news even though those things have been continuously true for decades is because they're outside of the paradigm so every time one of these pieces of information arrives it sounds like news ding ding that's the same thing you told me yesterday ding yeah but you haven't updated the paradigm so you hear it is new every time ding and then eventually you get the piece of news which changes the paradigm right finally something lands and goes ding and suddenly somebody goes swamp and they go from like hey you know i happen to think that hiv is probably just caused by lifestyle choices that oh my god that's an infection right and when public health people understood that about hiv in the 1980s the entire course of the world changed dealing with hiv but it took you know many many many many individual pieces of data before people understood that hiv was an infection and then more research was required before we knew what was causing it right the the entire history of how we went from you know hey there's a lot of cases a couple something kaposky something somebody other sarcoma among men in san francisco or to you know we've just detected the on rushing you know whooshing sound of a global pandemic that's the same trajectory we'll run on climate change it's the same trajectory that we will run on covet right we're towards the probably hope we pray god last third of the covet pandemic half of the american population is still stuck uh you know the equivalent of aids denialism

[1:07:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=4079s) how you know there's just an enormous lag to change the paradigm to fit the facts you see what i'm saying yeah i have i have a theory that i want your feedback on oh i didn't mean to interrupt though no let me me let me punch through the thing i'll be trying to get to right in terms of framing where i think idea markets fits in this right monetization

[1:08:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=4095s) of paradigmatic change right if i'm in a position where i can convince you that your paradigm is wrong and my paradigm is right and i can show you the evidence you flip what you flip by buying my tokens from me indicating that i've bought into that paradigm literally i've bought into the paradigm right so i am asked the evidence that says this is true and news about this will be popular in future that's the equivalent of a portfolio a prospectus for a portfolio right hedge funds for hypotheses 100 100 yeah um so the aliens right the aliens there's decent chance that these ufo things come from under the sea they certainly seem to go in and out of the water with a fair degree of comfort and regularity it's in the pentagon stuff right so i have the aliens live under the sea portfolio and i'm gonna go and i'm gonna buy into tokens that have something to do with the idea that the aliens live under the sea right i then come to you and say right i want you to put two million dollars into the aliens live under the sea portfolio because if we're right about this this is going to become 80 million dollars very very quickly and everybody's going to be paying attention to this as a topic okay right and what we're creating here is a system of incentives which pays people to put together portfolios of data that will cause people to change their fundamental paradigm in a way that changes their investment decisions inside of the idea market space here's your climate change is real and bad portfolio here's your solar panels going to revolutionize life in africa portfolio here's your the kardashians are over the hill portfolio right what we're creating is an opportunity for skilled analysts to put together packets of evidence for different kinds of positions and right now we have no way of monetizing that kind of disciplined research in incentive based epistemology incentive-based epistemology i have taken an hour to say those three words very very very badly but yeah that's what i'm talking about instead of based epistemology and you know Mattereum is also in the

[1:10:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=4245s) incentive based epistemology business but we do it in a very very very confined space which is is this star trek toy fake and is this gold bar free of blood right you're doing this in a much much more much wider open space of the entire cycle of news and this notion of like incentive-based epistemology you know like that's always been latent in the discussions about you know like vitalik's thinking about smart contracts and prediction markets and you know quadratic voting and all the rest of that stuff that stuff is soaked in there but you know it's never been really seriously deployed because everybody agrees about everything inside the crypto space right the crypto people almost entirely operate inside of one overlapped paradigm which is this stuff is going to take over the world and other than that they've got nothing in common so you know we just haven't really seen the application of correct leverage to crack open that problem um but you know to me the exciting part about this is the possibility that you wind up with freelancers taking up the torch of assembling models of paradigmatic change in exactly the academia no longer does because academia is broken how do you get paid for being right you don't become a professor you basically become somebody that manages these but yeah but i think it would i think it would on board a lot of academics as well it's the same research skills right and you know if you have a hypothesis hedge fund that hypothesis hedge fund i mean if you don't understand you know like the way the truth is produced you're never going to be able to run a successful hypothesis hedge fund you have to understand epistemologically how do we get to a conclusion here well you know here's my evidence here's my rules of inference here's my prediction here's my risk estimation here's my margin of error you know if you don't have those kind of concepts at a fairly high level you're not going to be able to run a hypothesis hedge fund successfully so i bet you guys are going to have a real interesting decade likewise hey all i do is run a gigantic flea market for the entire world's second hand stuff everyone's got to make a living everyone's got a big living and you know okay so it's a zero friction free market

[1:13:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=4395s) and it has the ability to you know like fix half of what's wrong with industrial capital so that's kind of a minor side effect right yeah exactly right yeah it's just that's that's the price of doing business Mattereum is not a high concept project at heart right Mattereum is about scale but the thing that we do is relatively straightforward which is just tell me the truth about the thing that i'm buying well you're selling it to me too i don't believe you give me some other people to tell me the truth about thing and maybe i believe that right i mean it's a pretty meat and potatoes operation because if it works you know it's like oh you know i buy this or buy this or buy this they turn up at my house and exactly what i paid for how amazing is that oh it's better than amazon ebay in it yeah it's better than i was on ebay why because the stuff that i buy is always the stuff that i get oh yeah it's really nice you know like you're never gonna really notice that as a standout feature it's just like things become predictable rather than occasionally getting ripped off um the stuff that you guys are working on like you know people are really gonna notice that it's very very up front and it's very through the front door with a battering ram and that's good the world needs that sweet just trying to stay behind the steamroller as you as you put it but it might be a little difficult on this one um you want to be on the right side of the stream rover but at this point you know i mean the last time we really talked about this thing in detail was probably before we saw fake news about kovaid kill maybe 300 000 americans yep that kind of thing makes a difference you know like you wind up with three hundred thousand dead people because they thought that wearing masks was communism uh that's the steamroller right there yeah all right excellent it really clarifies the the necessity to the underlying yeah you know you just block fox news and all of these other websites on grandma's web browser and the only place she can get her news from is an idea market it's just safer that way um i have a theory from the the paradigm conversation that i want to run by you and get feedback on oh yeah what you go you're talking about a paradigms being the determining factor of whether or not information gets through and lands in fertile soil you might say and my question is what determines paradigms what allows them to change and the hypothesis that i want to put before you is that it has something to do with social permission it's not so much having more information

[1:15:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=4545s) pile on though that may be a factor but if they're if you're going to pay a really high social cost to change your mind to become a heretic in your community it doesn't matter how high that evidence piles it's still going to be too high of a price to pay so i think one of the chief things that we have to accomplish is give people a socially acceptable excuse to change their minds to be weird to consider things from outside their tribe and i'm hoping just trying to make money uh will serve that purpose and kind of lubricate that shift where am i wrong well i mean certainly you know if you are some bright kid in a redneck town and you are you know paying your way through college by speculating on truth against all of your friends and neighbors sounds good to me right it does kind of imply that the smart kids will be making a living from their bedrooms trading options on news you know they're the kind of people who might otherwise have stayed fast asleep at the wheel and said they're getting pulled into a different relationship with reality you know i think that kind of stuff is fundamentally important because it is going to disproportionately affect the bright kids and the thought leaders um but i mean the other side of this is you know what we've what we're seeing right now is the formation of these like walled gardens of thought you know cult like ideological formations like the red hats right and those things are shortable in an ideal markets paradigm right i can have a hypothesis hedge fund which simply says the red hats are wrong about everything and just universally shorts those people and sure enough it turns out that you know um um i don't even remember what drug it was that they thought originally cured covey do you remember yeah i have hydroxychloroquine yeah hydroxychloroquine right so i could have shorted hydroxychloroquine just on the basis that a bunch of red hearts thought that this stuff was here to save us well whatever it is they're wrong and they're wrong on principle they're wrong and if i'd bet on that i would have made money so you know this notion that you can begin to take these ideological you know balls where people are becoming resistant to truth and you can just short those guys and make a living doing it all of that pushes towards a rational news into rational politics

[1:18:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=4695s) and this can only be good i'm glad you feel that way and i feel obligated to confess that there is a bit of a twist in the shorting mechanism and that it can't really be done directly because if if we make it easy to short something directly then we make it less expensive for uh elite classes to artificially deflate the ranking of something that has genuine grassroots interest and support so the way we're doing shorting instead is the only practical way to short something is to long an alternative along a competitor so that the disinterest in the thing that you're shorting eventually overwhelms it that's the death of it um so for everything we want to short we have to figure out where are people going to go instead what meets this need better uh what's the what's what's what's the the balm on the wound that this is only a band-aid over that kind of a thing so i'd be interested in what you think that sort of positive version of this is because i'm hoping to capture all the mental energy that goes into hating stuff and channel it into replacing stuff yeah i i don't know i mean i haven't thought about the economics of this enough at all um but shorting is such a fundamental mechanism to markets i'd be really wary of a system where you block shorting at the start i'd be much more inclined to run shorting and then figure out how to restrict it if you solve problems but i don't know i got no opinion really interesting okay cool i guess more less on the economic front but how would you how would what would you long in order to and express a a net short view about red hats what's the alternative that people go to when they realize the red hats are wrong science no just that science i mean you know like the place where all searches for truth converge is either science or mathematics and those are the areas where there is so much action in the world which is anti-scientific or non-scientific if you just continue to buy science and short everything else eventually the arc of truth you know the reality will arc towards that truth there's a a a frustration of mine that about science within science there's the sort of dichotomy between the neil degrasse tyson ufos are not important

[1:20:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=4845s) kind of stuff and the science of people who are studying unacceptable things and who are there before everyone else like there's a real sort of schism between the scientists who put their reputations on the line and those who don't um that will be a topic for the next time we do this because i got a dash we're out of time um just at the beginning of the deep dive on science we should well thanks for joining us we should come back and do another one of these starting with what happens when you start using idea markets for science let's pick that up next time because that i need a little bit of time to think about but i think that'll be an explosive session um james what was your three word miracle again it was what was it consented faced epistemology incentive based epistemology that's how you want to title this series this uh this episode that's what you all call this thing Vinay gupta thanks very much for joining us uh we'll put links to Mattereum and your work in the link below and everyone listening like subscribe and all that good stuff um yeah thank you very much for coming on amazing this was really fun sorry i the time delay thing was causing some issues but you know it's like i live in a place that's kind of crappy internet for my sins and it's uh it causes problems sometimes um [Music] yeah good work guys good work just the beginning of the fun

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End of [773] Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket podcast | Ep 1, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [245](https://guptaoption.com/texts/245.md) Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation (2021); the most closely related, [303](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md) How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.