Charging the potential of Proof-of-Brain for so much more

Today I have seen/watched a couple of posts talking about Proof-of-Brain in both support and criticism of it and thought this might be a good time to bring up something I have been thinking a little bit of, but haven't really thought it all the way through yet or all of the implications. Since @theycallmedan posted about it in the positive and I fall on that side of the argument, I wanted to add my thoughts and while tired, I know that I won't sleep and it will churn in my head until I put some effort in.

Essentially Proof-of-Brain is a type of wisdom of the crowd type of mechanism on Steem that aims to determine what the community finds valuable or not by using Steem Power staked voting to allocate and redirect rewards from and back toward the pool in a process of up and down voting actions. The goal is to unearth the gems and raise them above the soil and if distribution of Steem and the interest of users were wider, it could work relatively well. In fact, it is working relatively well considering it only takes into consideration one particular metric, Steem Power.

Complain all you want, this is the way it is, but that is not the way it has to be and it is actually already changing significantly, albeit imperfectly. Imagine if rather than stake being the only metric used to determine voting value, ones own interests and skills influenced the vote weighting.

We are seeing this to some degree on the SCOT tribes where people who are interested in a niche are spending their time creating for, curating and policing the tribe that they connect with. Again, this is stake based for the most part but due to the interest of users more closely aligned with the topic, we can see that there is a little more brain being used.

While far from perfect, most countries in this world govern somewhat democratically through voting and while it is great that many can have a voice, it has some pretty obvious flaws. Namely, one vote, one person. I know, I know... but hear me out and there are many layers and caveats to this that I won't go into but perhaps you might want to think about at some point.

The first problem with one vote is with that vote, a person has to be able to satisfy all of the things that are important to them and necessary for them and for every benefit there is going to be a cost. It is never going to come close to satisfying all of the things that are important, let alone the things that are important but unknown, which leads into problem two.

The next issues is that everyone has an equal say with that one vote that is going to impact on a myriad variables, whether they know anything about it or not. Imagine having a friend who is a talented lawyer, and another who is a talented oncologist and you decide to give them the vote on your life decisions. When you are diagnosed with cancer, who do you listen to? What about when you need legal advice? Do you weight each opinion equally?

The third problem looks at the topic of the quotes I like from Eleanor Roosevelt that talks of types of people who talk about ideas, events and people with people being the "small minds", events the "average" and ideas the "great". The depth it doesn't go into though is that while a small mind could talk about people in an area though know little about, that some person can be a great mind and talk of ideas when it comes to something they do know a lot about.

The problem is that when it comes to voting for a leader, because there are too many aspects to consider, rather than answer each point individually, they lump them altogether behind a face, a personality, a politician. And because, most people in this world are either average or below in most things, it is essentially all they can do, and with their one vote, they are unable to influence the outcomes in the fields that they are experts in.

As some small examples, if all the climate scientists in the world were to vote on what to generally do in regard to approaching environmental policy, how spread would the field be? What about nutritionists on dietary recommendations? Or engineers on infrastructure considerations? The problem is that with only one vote, even though each of them may be an expert in their field, they are always going to be a minority against the masses.

However, if expertise were taken into consideration when voting where instead of one vote, one person, the skillset of the voter was factored into that vote to give it a unique profile that weighs some factors higher than others, a much more accurate voting profile of the masses could be considered. On top of this, it could remove the concept of voting for a compromised personality, and instead introduce a process where a great number of factors an be considered by experts in their given fields on policy ideas, rather than a party.

The image I created above is a representation of what a voting profile might look like and when layered one atop the other, there could be some very clear indications of what direction the entire voting base is looking for, without a politician in sight and still being able to take into consideration the individual. Of course, the challenge is that how do we evaluate and create a profile of skill levels and decide who has skills, and who does not.

Well, that is a problem yet to be solved but when I was at SteemFest in Poland, I was in a group discussion where @blocktrades was talking about developing a web of trust so that unknowns can be trusted through networked relationships, or not. The only way to do this at mass scale is going to be through hundreds and thousands of blockchains that collect data from various points that are relevant to building trust, and as corporations start building their own internal chains to monitor and manage their supply chains, resources and ultimately their employees too, more expertise data will emerge.

If a lot of trusted data can be included, that one vote could hold a great deal of information that makes it representative of the voter and able to provide a much more tailored vote. What I think that this could do is that it strips away the irrelevant facade of the voter that can be targeted by their social group (colour, race, creed) and perhaps surprisingly bring a more human approach to it where decisions are made on skills and interests.

We can see from the last elections how when coordinated, a social manipulation through the likes of Facebook are possible, but what happens when they have to target across thousands of group profiles. How do you target and manipulate a highly skilled and knowledgeable scientist who shares nothing but their science in common with another voter who carries a similar weighting on their vote and is similarly skilled? The weight of their "science" vote isn't going to be based on a person, it is going to be based on their experience with their field of expertise - and that is how it will be recorded.

Essentially, through a massive network of decentralized sources of information that are pulled into a blockhain weave of rope that then becomes a trusted voting profile of an individual, all that would be left to do is to create a questionnaire of points where users can fill based on their feelings, thoughts and knowledge and their weighted vote will be applied lighter in some, and more heavily in other areas. Each person's voice will be heard at the level they are qualified to speak at every point that is important to all of us as a community.

While we are far from this point, I think that one day in the not too distant future, blockchain ledgers, webs of trust, AI and the continual and growing stream of information that they are going to carry will question the fundamentals of how we organize our world, resources and our selves to fundamentally change our outcomes.

As said, I haven't thought through all of this in depth and there are plenty of risks, caveats and room for abuse and dystopia, especially in the early phases. And while I used governance voting as the main example, there are many other areas this could be applied also. In my opinion, while it might be a made up catch phrase of some kind at this point, Proof-of-Brain has some very interesting and very real potential applications that become more sensitive and appropriate when we start combining it with a growing number of weighted metrics, not just stake.

At least, I hope that this gave you something of interest to think upon tonight.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]