🌟 Wishocracy

Congratulations! You’ve passed the 1% Treaty and now you’ve got $27B/year to allocate.

How do you avoid parasitic special interests from stealing it or bureacracy from wasting it all?

This chapter introduces Wishocracy, a system of direct, collective resource allocation designed to solve this exact problem. It ensures that large-scale funding serves the public will, rather than being captured by lobbyists, consultants, or political insiders. By replacing committees and representatives with a transparent, mathematically-grounded process, Wishocracy makes the DIH’s treasury truly capture-proof.

Instead of asking 8 billion people to understand everything (impossible), we ask them to make tiny decisions they can actually handle.

It’s like building a cathedral where each person only has to place one brick, but somehow the cathedral doesn’t look like it was designed by a committee of drunk toddlers.

The Six-Step Process (Or: How to Herd 8 Billion Cats)

Step 1: Collect All the Problems

“What sucks about existence?”

  • Cancer (sucks a lot)
  • Climate change (planet on fire)
  • Poverty (most people have it)
  • War (see previous chapters)
  • Spotify ads (surprisingly high priority)

Step 2: Make People Choose (But Gently)

Don’t ask “Rank these 10,000 problems.” Ask: “Cancer or climate change?” Just two things. Even Florida Man can handle two things.

Step 3: Let AI Find Solutions

Humans: “We want to cure cancer!”

AI: “Here are thousands of existing research papers and potential approaches, synthesized and ranked by relevance and probable success.”

Humans: “…we’ll take the top 10 to investigate further.”

Step 4: Break Everything Into Tiny Pieces

“Cure cancer” becomes:

  • Task 1: Sequence these genomes
  • Task 2: Test this compound
  • Task 3: Build this microscope
  • Task 47,293: Make coffee for exhausted researchers

Step 5: Match Tasks to People/Robots

  • Need genomes sequenced? → Beijing lab (cheapest, fastest)
  • Need compound tested? → Swiss robots (never sleep, don’t complain)
  • Need coffee made? → Unpaid intern (tradition)

Step 6: Track What Actually Worked

Did cancer decrease? No? Stop funding that approach. Did it work? Fund it harder. It’s science, but with receipts.

The Magic: Aggregated Pairwise Preference Allocation (APPA)

APPA sounds complex because academics need tenure. It’s actually simple:

How Your Broken Brain Currently Tries to Prioritize

“Rank these 20 issues by importance:”

  1. Healthcare
  2. Education
  3. Climate
  4. Defense
  5. Infrastructure
  6. Welfare
  7. Research
  8. Agriculture
  9. [Brain melts]
  10. [Random guessing] 11-20. [Fuck it]

Your brain gives up around item 7. You’re not stupid; you’re human. This is like asking a goldfish to do your taxes.

How APPA Makes It Simple

“Healthcare or Education?”

  • Healthcare: 60 points
  • Education: 40 points

“Climate or Defense?”

  • Climate: 70 points
  • Defense: 30 points

That’s it. Two things. You can handle two things.

Do this 20 times with random pairs. Takes 5 minutes. A computer does magic (statistics). Suddenly we have a perfect ranking of all priorities based on millions of these tiny decisions.

It’s like those Facebook quizzes that tell you which Harry Potter character you are, except instead of revealing you’re Hufflepuff (disappointing), it reveals humanity’s collective priorities (also disappointing, but useful).

Why This Actually Works (Math Warning)

When millions of people make pairwise choices:

Example with real numbers:

  • 5 million people vote
  • Each makes 20 comparisons
  • 100 million data points
  • Algorithm crunches numbers
  • Output: “Humanity wants 28% on healthcare, 22% on education, 15% on climate…”

It’s democracy without the stupidity. We still get the stupidity, but it’s evenly distributed and thus cancels out.

The Problem Marketplace: Capitalism for Good

Once we know what problems to solve and have budgets, we need solutions. Enter the marketplace.

Current System: Grant Hell

How research funding works now:

  1. Researcher has idea
  2. Writes 100-page grant proposal
  3. Waits 18 months
  4. Gets rejected
  5. Dies inside
  6. Repeat

Success rate: 10% Time wasted: 90% Researchers who quit in frustration: Most

Wishocracy System: eBay for Solutions

How it works with Wishocracy:

Post: “WANTED: Cure for Alzheimer’s”

Bounty: $10 billion

Deadline: ASAP

Responses flood in:

  • MIT: “We can do it with gene therapy for $5 billion”
  • Chinese lab: “We’ll try 10,000 compounds for $2 billion”
  • Some kid in garage: “I have an idea for $50,000”
  • Elon Musk: “I’ll fix it with rockets somehow”

Best proposals get funded. Multiple approaches run in parallel. Someone succeeds. Humanity wins.

It’s venture capital but for not dying.

Breaking Down Problems: The Task Tree of Life

Big problems are scary. “Cure cancer” sounds impossible.

But “cure cancer” is really just:

  • Understand these 200 cancer types
  • Which is really: sequence these genomes
  • Which is really: run this machine 50,000 times
  • Which is really: press this button repeatedly

Every impossible problem becomes possible when you break it down enough.

The Alzheimer’s Example

“Cure Alzheimer’s” (impossible, scary, $10 billion) ├── Understand protein misfolding ($6 billion) │ ├── Map all protein structures ($500 million) │ │ ├── Run AlphaFold on these sequences ($10 million) │ │ │ ├── Rent computing time ($1 million) │ │ │ ├── Pay grad students ($9 million worth of ramen) ├── Test 10,000 drug candidates ($4 billion) │ ├── Synthesize compounds ($500 million) │ │ ├── Order chemicals ($50 million) │ │ ├── Mix chemicals ($450 million) │ ├── Test in mice ($1 billion) │ │ ├── Buy mice ($10 million) │ │ ├── Feed mice drugs ($990 million of tiny pills)

And so on until every task is so simple a robot or intern can do it.

The beauty: Multiple problems share tasks. Cancer research needs protein mapping. So does Alzheimer’s. So does longevity. Fund once, solve multiple problems.

The Opposition

Politicians: “But how do we get bribes if there’s no one to bribe?”

Answer: Get a real job.

Lobbyists: “But how do we corrupt the system?”

Answer: You can’t easily bribe a transparent, open-source algorithm being watched by millions. The cost of capture becomes prohibitively high.

Bureaucrats: “But who will form committees?”

Answer: Nobody. That’s the point.

Consultants: “But who will make PowerPoints?”

Answer: AI makes better ones in seconds.

Think Tanks: “But who will write incomprehensible reports?”

Answer: AI will write clearer ones, instantly.

Congress: “But we’re the representatives!”

Answer: You represent donors, not people.

Skeptics: “But people are too stupid to decide!”

Answer: People are individually stupid but collectively smart. Politicians are the reverse.

The Truth: We Already Do This, Just Badly

Every time you:

  • Like something on social media (micro-vote)
  • Buy something on Amazon (economic vote)
  • Choose a restaurant (quality vote)
  • Swipe on dating apps (genetic vote)

You’re participating in distributed decision systems. We’re already a hive mind. We’re just a badly organized one.

Wishocracy just makes it official, efficient, and pointed at problems that matter.

Instead of our collective intelligence being used to:

  • Determine which cat videos go viral
  • Optimize ad targeting
  • Make billionaires richer
  • Argue about pronouns

We could use it to:

  • Cure diseases
  • End poverty
  • Fix climate
  • Explore space
  • Make existence not suck

Same collective intelligence. Better targets.

Democracy’s Operating System Upgrade

Democracy 1.0 was designed for:

  • 13 colonies
  • 3 million people
  • Horse-based communication
  • Life expectancy of 40
  • Three total issues (British bad, taxes bad, freedom good)

Democracy 2.0 (representative democracy) was designed for:

  • Nation states
  • Millions of people
  • Telegraph communication
  • Life expectancy of 60
  • Dozens of issues

Wishocracy is Democracy 3.0, designed for:

  • Global civilization
  • 8 billion people
  • Instant communication
  • Life expectancy of ∞
  • Infinite, interconnected issues

It’s not replacing democracy. It’s making it work.

Current democracy is like running Windows 95 on a quantum computer. Wishocracy is finally installing the right OS.

Will it be perfect? No.

Will it make mistakes? Yes.

Will it be better than letting cocaine-addled politicians decide based on bribes? Absolutely.

After all, we’re all going to die anyway.

Might as well die in a system that actually tries to prevent it.