> But what interests me most about Community Notes is how, despite not being a "crypto project", it might be the closest thing to an instantiation of "crypto values" that we have seen in the mainstream world.
The attempt to argue that any community-consensus system is "crypto" is absurd.
Read it again. He very explicitly says it's not a "crypto project", and is just saying that it feels close to something with "crypto values", which, to Vitalik, seems to mean decentralized mechanisms for building community consensus.
Except this is not about community. Communities are often exclusionary (e.g. "we, who are not those smelly hippy leftists"). This is about credible neutrality, an attempt to soar above tribal politics. Credible neutrality is an important aspect of money. Many (including Vitalik) think that cryptocurrency can't be considered money if it is not credibly neutral.
It seems like we're still at quite early stages of collective intelligence amplification. It would be cool to have a Community Notes for HN. It would be awesome to automatically find consensus on comments and posts that lack attention. I suppose the votes are currently behind a private API on HN. It would be cool to play with sliders for the thresholds and see what different content floats or sinks. It's great to see Vitalik poking around with this sorta stuff, with less than 200 lines of Python code - I'd love to see it vastly simplified. I'm glad he pointed to Polis also recently. Really interesting stuff.
Edit: Actually it occurs to me, you might be able to use ML to infer cross-partisan support from arbitrary sources like HN comments and posts. Especially if trained on Community Notes. Might need to absorb some HN audience specific preferences / biases though.
One option would be to show more of these notes but also make their rating public. For example, “you may find the following note helpful, although only 65% of diverse users did”. But all in all, it’s already a great feature.
In reference to the article's question: "could we turn Community Notes itself into something that's more like an economist algorithm?" My answer would be: no, as soon as you add an economic incentive to a system such as this, you break it, by adding an immediate and direct incentive for abusing and gaming it. FWIW that's why I think the concept of "credible neutrality" applied to money is a fantasy, like a neutral weapon (as soon as it is used it has, by definition, to have taken a side).
I don't think the idea of an "economist algorithm" is to add an economic incentive, but rather to realize that such incentives already exist (of course people want to abuse and game the community notes) and to design a mechanism so that these incentives lead to using the system as intended. (cf. https://xkcd.com/810/ )
Great write-up. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the white-boarding, trying to figure out which tensor math would be useful to solve this.
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The attempt to argue that any community-consensus system is "crypto" is absurd.
Crypto has nothing to do with community notes. Not even tangentially. Trying to attach your pet internet money project just reeks of desperation.
Edit: Actually it occurs to me, you might be able to use ML to infer cross-partisan support from arbitrary sources like HN comments and posts. Especially if trained on Community Notes. Might need to absorb some HN audience specific preferences / biases though.
I think it would encourage better discussion and community.
May I have the list of those values?
Most crypto projects fail on one of those axis, hence why it's worth studying things that succeed.
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