Daily Balajisms - Truth, Health, Wealth
A new Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
Balaji Srinivasan proposes a new motto for the era of web3 and network states: Truth, Health, Wealth in that order. It is not enough to be a full stack software engineer. People need to include morality in their stack, as a fundamental layer-0 that enables all their endeavours.
Balaji mentions how “fiat money is backed by men with guns”, quoting Paul Krugman. In contrast, bitcoin is money backed by math. Fiat states rely on reinterpretation of history to fit current narratives. Network states will need to provide better narratives of tech progress and a more reliable account of history, where tech progress was hindered by the lack of smart regulation and smart regulators.
So why is it important for tech progressives, protopians and optimalists to have mottos like Truth, Health, Wealth or “learning, burning (calories), earning”?
Bitcoin is the digitally-native form of money. What would be digitally-native forms of education, learning and news?
Balaji talks about “news you can use” as the model for digitally native media and education. This is the “truth” bit of the motto. News should demonstrably boost your health and wealth. They shouldn’t just provide infotainment. Like a healthy food diet, we need a healthy information diet, and a quality information supply chain.
We need auditable crypto-information and truly reproducible research over fiat information and publications based on prestige, peer-review and quotations.
News today is mostly entropic (clickbait). Balaji sees certain value in serendipity, but explains that seeing 20 random links in your twitter feed is entropy. There is a difference between work and heat. News going in all directions is like particles going in all directions, producing heat, instead of work. Balaji mentions Brilliant.org as an example of a service that demonstrably boosts your skills, instead of entropic news about events far away, that you can consume but can’t act upon.
Bitcoin inverted basic premises. Even mild inflation is bad. Deflation is good. Limited supply of coins is good. Bitcoin made transactions public. Bitcoin also created a rare type of game, where the rules of the game don’t change once they are known, because they can’t be gamed. Balaji sees Longevity similar to crypto in a sense that it inverts basic premises. He mentions that fitness might be the key to longevity and crypto-medicine.
Web3 and zero-knowledge tech, combined with wearables, will enable “news you can use” business models for media. Because it will be possible to measure progress in terms of health and wealth of a community, that has a certain information diet and consumes specific media.
Balaji says, that “Truth, Health, Wealth” is the new “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”.
I think in a way, these mottos are connected, because the truth in form of cryptohistory will set us free, longevity as a reinterpretation of health, will increase healthspans and equality, and “win and let win” brotherhood and sisterhood will create wealth.
We can build startup societies and ultimately network states around these values.