People were surprised that AI has turned out to make information workers obsolete before laborers, but I'm not.

Information is the easiest job.

I laugh at the obliviousness of the photographer who snaps a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge and demands copyrights and royalties, as if that task was harder than the years of labor by thousands building it (some of whom lost their lives).

Information is the easiest job.

Who worked harder, the men that spent years leveling a path through the forest and mountains to build a road, or the guy who makes an SVG representation of the road for a digital map?

Information is the easiest job.

I enjoy thinking about information. I like to write. I like to find new ideas and digest them and rotate them and tear them apart and put them back together.

But not for a moment do I think information jobs are harder than the physical labor jobs I did in the past, or that others are doing all around me.

That's why I put out all of my work to the public domain. I wouldn't dare throw a "copyright" sign on my work, or a "license", and pretend like my job is so special that I deserve to restrict the freedoms of others.

The janitor does not demand royalties when I walk into a clean room; the plumber does not demand royalties when I flush the toilet; the electrician does not demand royalties when I turn on a switch; the furniture maker does not demand royalties when I sleep on a bed; the shoemaker does not demand royalties when I go for a walk.

Why on earth should I demand royalties when someone uses my outputs?

Especially since information is the easiest job.

I do want to get paid to produce solid information. I sell things of various sorts. I find information work that needs to be done and deliver. I push myself to always be improving my skills so I can make the best information I can.

But I don't expect the absurd salaries of the old days.

Why have information workers been paid so much, relative to other professions?

Corruption.

The people who make the laws (lawyers) are information workers, and so unsurprisingly they made unnatural laws to benefit themselves.

They made information jobs far harder than they should be. Instead of encouraging collaboration they encouraged silo'd work and unnatural monopolies.

The people who inform the public (medias) are also information workers, and so unsurprisingly they misled the public not to oppose these laws.

But now AI has come along, and has ignored these unnatural laws (and just trained on everything, ignoring the information laws us humans are shackled with), and shown what a farce these high salaries for the easiest jobs have been.

My advice to information workers is this: keep in mind that information is the easiest job.

If your job is information, do it to the best of your ability, like you would want anyone else to do their job.

Don't expect the monopoly salaries of old. It wasn't honest before and now the truth is harder to hide.

And please, do your best to publish your information in the most honest format: unencumbered by "licenses"; clean source code; auditable change history.

It's an easy job, but it's even easier if we all do it right, and work together.

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Americans are guinea pigs in a huge experiment: we are exposed to more ads than any group in history.

It's not going well.

I say it's time for a new experiment: let's get rid of ads.

Here's how.

Imagine information as apples.

Ads are like those little round stickers stuck on the side.

Imagine it is illegal to remove these stickers.

Finally, imagine some stickers are poisoned.

This is information in America today.

Copyright makes it illegal for Americans to remove the stickers; to remove ads from information.

Get rid of copyright, get rid of ads.

(Or we can make content creators liable for any and all harm arising from their "content", including any harm coming from bundled ads.).

I was born in 1984. My daughters in 2019 and 2021. I would love their world to be better than the one I grew up in.

Information can nourish, or it can poison.

I would love my girls to live in a world with more sustenance, less poison.

Let's get rid of copyright and get rid of ads.

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Symbols can live more than fifty times longer than humans. They require almost no energy to persist, just the occasional refresh every fifty years or so to not fade. How do we talk about this space where symbols are popping up, fading or being replicated, on surfaces and screens? I suggest a new word: Infosphere.

The Infosphere refers to the collection of all man-made, public, persisting symbols.

The Infosphere is not the natural part of nature. The Infosphere is not present in the woods, or on the beach, or in the mountains.

Books, newspapers, magazines, televisions, phone screens, radios - these are the realm of the Infosphere.

Your eyes and ears breathe the Infosphere as your lungs breathe the atmosphere.

We depend on the atmosphere to live and we depend on the infosphere to thrive.

A century ago in the western world new industrial technologies polluted our atmosphere.

We largely fixed this, but now our infosphere is heavily polluted.

Information pollution is very real.

Earlier generations spent far more time in nature. It simply wasn't possible to be exposed to the infosphere so much.

Now the infosphere is increasingly omnipresent, and, as it is filled with toxins, the latest generations, including mine, are the most lied to people in history.

You wouldn't want your children to breathe toxic air, why would you want them to breathe toxic information?

What is the source of these toxins?

The infosphere can nourish or poison, instruct or distract.

You would think our laws would be designed to encourage the former and discourage the latter.

But it is the opposite.

The primary source of infosphere pollution are those unarchived symbols that we are not permitted to adjust.

We have made widespread a thing called "copyright" law. What does this do?

It orders that new symbols be frozen for over 100 years.

It pretends that this would lead to a healthier infosphere, but any thinking man can see how clearly false this is.

Ideas work best continually refined. Freezing ideas is nonsensical.

No honest scientist or engineer would ever say their symbols are perfect. Instead they constantly strive to correct them, iterating upon them until they die, and hoping that future generations will continue to iterate upon them after that. The scientist also publishes their work for all to see and learn from. Meanwhile, the copyrighter demands payment before one can see their work, then puts out dribble after dribble, and claims their symbols are immune from defects, and must not be altered without permission for over a century.

Which symbols do you think are healthier for the infosphere?

Nature provides incentives for improving the infosphere. Copyright provides incentives for polluting the infosphere.

Believing one can centrally set the optimal "term limits" on information is as naive as believing one can centrally set prices.

Free markets would far more intelligently organize the infosphere.

The information filter strips toxic information, such as orthogonal advertising, from the infosphere.

But information filtering is made illegal by copyright law.

As a result, toxins are incentivized and linger.

Advertising, the mixing of undesired symbols with desired ones, is like an industrial age smoke stack spewing soot into the air.

Advertising pollutes our infosphere.

Honest advertising needs no captive audience or copyright protection. Thus, most in the advertising business are liars.

Liars pay top dollar for ads. Often the purveyor of copyrighted materials tries to pretend they are in an honest business but their material is bundled with advertisements for dishonest products.

When you see "Our business model is advertising" you should interpret as "Our business model is lying."

What kinds of information are we most exposed to?

Are we exposed to high value, instructive information, or are we exposed to information trying to distract and mislead?

I often find high quality information buried under mountains of junk. We are exposed to the information on top, while the truth seeker has to go digging.

Sadly people are not allowed to filter the junk for others and so each one must waste their time doing so (or more commonly, give up and just accept what they are told).

What is the harm of a polluted infosphere?

Significant time wasted, for one. When one man's time is wasted, everyone is worse off.

But it does not stop there.

We saw in 2020 people worldwide held prisoner in their homes, ordered to cover their faces, getting forced injections, all uninformed orders made possible by a toxic infosphere.

There are countless Salem witch trials going on right now for conditions that don't exist; immunizations that doesn't immunize; medicines that don't heal.

An unhealthy infosphere is as deadly as an unhealthy atmosphere.

We have recognized that we need to take care of our atmosphere.

Similarly, we need to take care of our infosphere.

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The doer alone learneth.

Attributed to Nietzsche

I wish I spent more time moving atoms and less time moving symbols.

I enjoy reading and writing, but I do more of it than I'd like.

I overinvest in symbols out of duty. A small group of us stumbled upon the truth that our society has gotten the law wrong on symbols, and as a result the infosphere has become heavily polluted.

In an ideal world, IP law is deleted, the toxins are filtered from our infosphere, symbols become far more signal than noise, and I can put more time into doing things that require more motion than the pressing of keys on the keyboard or dancing a pen across a page.

Symbols, done right, are an extremely useful tool.

But only so far as they can improve the models embedded in one's brain.

The latter is the ends, the essential. The former is just a means.

The mental model is the meal, the symbols are the kitchen. Humans don't need kitchens, but do need meals. One is absolutely essential, the other is just a means to the essential thing. Kitchens are awesome, symbols are awesome, but there is a huge difference between something essential and a tool for making the essential thing.

The best symbols are those that transmit reproducible experiments that someone can do to learn highly predictive models of the world.

It is not enough to just read the symbols, you have to do the movements to learn them. The symbols are merely a guide.

When some symbols can lead you through some motions that then unlock in you vast new predictive powers, that is symbols at their finest.

I wish I could snap my fingers and get people to see what I could see. A world with a very different infosphere. New mediums beyond books and papers and shows. Where symbolic products are published in a way to be easily accessed and shared and combined and refined and digested. An infosphere not overwhelmed with noise, not constantly trying to steal your attention. An infosphere that serves you, not tricks you.

It is far more rewarding to make things with atoms than symbols. Atomic creations are the things to be most proud of. The symbols on the screens should help us move and produce more, rather than sit and consume more symbols.

Years ago my smart phone broke and I did not replace it. It was a life improvement.

My laptop is nearing 5 years old. It too may soon break. I would prefer not to replace it.

I hope the truth will be spreading by then.

We need far fewer symbols. We need signal, not noise.

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In 1976, Bill Gates wrote an angry letter to computer users saying "most of you steal your software".

BASIC is a language created at Dartmouth in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz.

To celebrate its 50th, Microsoft released the source code to their first product, Altair BASIC, written in 1975.

The 157 pages of source code contain zero mentions of Kemeny, Kurtz or Dartmouth.

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Symbols are useless unless consulted.

Consulting consumes energy.

Everyone has finite energy.

Consulting can be sequential or—via computation—simultaneous.

I call symbols with no legal restrictions the Unchained.

The Unchained is too large to be consulted sequentially.

The Unchained can be consulted computationally and so simultaneously.

I call symbols with legal restrictions the ©hained.

The ©hained is too large to be consulted sequentially.

The ©hained may not be consulted computationally and thus cannot be consulted simultaneously.

Because the ©hained may not be consulted computationally, consulting from the ©hained and consulting from the Unchained are exclusive operations.

Sequentially consulting the ©hained reduces energy available for simultaneously consulting the Unchained.

Thus, the ©hainer's implicit argument is that sequentially consulting their ©hained symbols is worth more than simultaneously consulting the Unchained.

A ©hainer mathematician claims sequentially consulting their symbols is worth more than simultaneously consulting Euclid, Gauss, and Euler.

A ©hainer physicist claims sequentially consulting their symbols is worth more than simultaneously consulting Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein.

A ©hainer musician claims sequentially consulting their symbols is worth more than simultaneously consulting Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.

A ©hainer biologist claims sequentially consulting their symbols is worth more than simultaneously consulting Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur, and Darwin.

A ©hainer artist claims sequentially consulting their symbols is worth more than simultaneously consulting da Vinci, Rembrandt, and van Gogh.

A ©hainer author claims sequentially consulting their symbols is worth more than simultaneously consulting Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky.

©hainers claim their symbols ought be treated with more consideration than the symbols of these greats.

I hope you see why this is such a ridiculously dishonest position, and understand my visceral disgust for this behavior.

© is the mark of the ©hainer. It is the mark of the dishonest man.

I salute and lend my hands to the honest men who contribute symbols to the great Unchained. They have an honest estimation of their humble contributions in relation to the whole. It is on their shoulders that the future is built.

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Nobody talks about how Bill Gates actually made his billions.

Nobody talks about how Larry Ellison actually made his billions.

Nobody talks about how Larry and Sergey actually made their billions.

Nobody talks about how Jeff Bezos actually made his billions.

There's a Secret.

A Secret connecting the majority of the richest people in the world (and it's not value creation).

The reason nobody talks about the Secret is because the people who effectively control what we talk about make their millions in the same way. Talking about the Secret is a surefire way to get kicked out of the club.

Technology is abolutely incredible. Not just because of what it can do, but because of how hard it was to create. How much blood, sweat, and tears from tens of millions of people over thousands of years went into learning the patterns of our universe and helping evolve technologies to manipulate it.

It is such a shame that this industry is controlled by people who use the Secret to extract rent and control the population. Who try and pretend their extraordinary wealth comes from value creation, and not the legal chains of the Secret. Who disrespect the great work of the countless brave and selfless souls who gave their time to build a better world for their descendants, only to see things locked up by these "tech titans" and their cronies in Congress and the media. Who will lead our country to ruin to protect their Secret and their wealth.

I respect the work ethic and intelligence and leadership skills of the people above. But I don't respect their integrity.

It makes me sad that so many young people get caught up chasing the same scale of fortunes as the people above, not realizing that "dishonesty" and the Secret is the crucial ingredient to their extraordinary "success".

It makes me sad that so few can see the Secret.

It's hidden by its ubiquity.

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"It's more comfortable than it looks."

"And this just v1. By v10 it will be as lightweight as a surgical mask."

"And how long does the gluon encoding last?"

"Thousands of years. Once you've tagged an atom, it's yours for life."

"And the lives of my ancestors."

"Royalties for generations!"

"And how high can you get the coverage?"

"In theory, above 99 percent. The model you're wearing now is doing 5%."

"Incredible. So how many atoms am I claiming right now?"

"Fifty quintillion. Every time you breathe out, the nanopores in the mask gluon-encode fifty quintillion atoms."

"Hey, I'm working hard to make this CO2, I should get paid for it."

"And now you will."

"How much information in each neutron?"

"256 bits. Enough to fit a wallet id.

"I've been waiting years for a business like this."

"Well we've finally built it."

"And tagged air is safe?"

"Scientifically proven. We conducted a rigorous 3 month controlled experiment and observed no harmful effects. Actually, our results are about to be published in Nature."

"Brilliant. What's your go to market plan?"

"Move fast. Create a frenzy. 'Right now 99.99% of oxygen is unowned. Tag your share, before someone else does.' We let people know there hasn't been a land grab like this since the Great Western Expansion."

"How long until the whole atmosphere is tagged?"

"A few decades. It will go slow at first, but once it catches on we expect people will travel to the ends of the earth to find wild neutrons."

"And the revenue model?"

"You get paid when someone breathes your oxygen; you pay when you breathe someone else's. We add a transaction fee on top. The mask tracks it all. We send you a statement each month."

"So some people will turn a profit?"

"Just a few heavy breathers, yes. We've modeled it out. Oxygen rights are reassignable, of course, so we expect most breathers will actually sell their rights to us quite early, and quite cheap."

"So eventually we'll own all of the air?"

"Most of it anyway. Someday we'll monetize almost every breathe. Everyone will be a subscriber, eventually. The greatest business model ever invented."

"But once people are paying more than they're making, what's to stop them from just taking off their masks?"

"We'll make that very hard. Huge PR campaigns. We'll promote the superiority of tagged air versus untagged air. Film, shows, books, schools especially, we'll ensure everyone is taught from an early age that tagged air is the way to go. It will be ubiquitous yet subtle."

"You can also make it capitalism vs communism."

"Absolutely. Shared air is a communist idea. If you're against tagged air, you're against property rights."

"Tagged air for safety?"

"Yes! We forecast that untagged air will increasingly be blamed for more and more incidents. We expect poisonings and other tragedies. I wouldn't be surprised if someday the only ones breathing untagged air are terrorists."

"Is this something governments would support?"

"A government's dream! Imagine laws requiring masks. No one can take a breathe without the government knowing about it. Total control of the air."

"Amazing."

"So are you in?"

"I'll be honest, this is the best presentation I've seen in my career. I'm in. Let's talk valuation."

"Great to have you aboard."

"Do you mind if I keep this one?"

"I hope you never take it off."

"I tell everyone I'm a value-add investor."

"You're helping build a new world."

"Something our ancestors failed to do."

"Here's to tagging all the air!"

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There is a job that is currently illegal in the United States, to the great detriment of our citizens. That is the job of "Information Cleaner."

An Information Cleaner is a person who takes in all the material being published in our information atmosphere and cleanses it: they make it transformable, searchable, modifiable, accessible, free of ads and trackers, auditable, connected to other information where relevant, and so on.

These people are not primarily focused on the production of new information, but rather on cleaning and enhancing the information that has already been produced.

This is a hard and extremely important job-think of it like back propagation- and it's currently made illegal by copyright law. As a result, our information environment is as dirty and toxic as an aquarium with no filter.

Clean information is bits encoded as simply and noise-free as technology allows. Clean information is easy to move and to copy. Clean information is easy to search. It is easy to dice and remix. Clean information has had all toxins removed, such as ads and trackers (or at the least, it is in a form where those can be easily removed). Clean information comes with provenance information. It comes with hashed change information.

Clean information is not Netflix. It is not Prime Video. It is not Disney Plus or Nature.com or The New York Times. All of those are dirty information. Information with DRM; information claiming to be "licensed"; information with a paywall; information without source code; all of this is dirty information. And Americans should be allowed to clean it up.

Now some modern day heroes are clandestine Information Cleaners, building and expanding projects like LibGen and Anna's Archive and archive.today. These people are secretly keeping civilization from tumbling into a dark age.

While they risk their lives and liberty to prevent civilization from collapsing into an information-controlled dystopia, some of us need to be proselytizing in public and making the case as to why Information Cleaning should be a root right, enshrined in the Constitution and revered at the same level as freedom of speech; freedom of the press; freedom of religion.

In the past 50 years Americans were misled to think it was the quantity of information that was the thing to optimize for. This is false. The thing to optimize for is the cleanliness of information. It is far better to have the infrastructure in place to clean information, rather than to produce information. It is vastly easier to produce valuable new information once you've cleaned up all existing information.

In that sense, the way to properly incentivize the production of new information is to make legal the cleaning of old information.

If we want to make our air clean, if we want to make our food clean, if we want to make our bodies clean, we first have to make our information clean.

• Information is the Easiest Job (2025)
• How to get rid of advertising (2025)
• The Infosphere (2025)
• Movement (2025)
• You Steal Your Software (2025)
• The Consultation Problem and Why Copyright is Dishonest at its Core (2025)
• Tech's Dirty Secret (2025)
• Owned Air (2025)
• All the benefits of property; none of the responsibility (2025)
• Optimizing for Truth (2025)
• A New Coat of Paint (2025)
• The Permission Function (2024)
• Writeable (2024)
• Copyright is a mind virus (2024)
• Patents are Poison (2024)
• ETA!: A Measure of Evolution (2024)
• IPDD (2024)
• The Omni Restaurant (2024)
• The law favors ChatGPT over humans (2024)
• Three Scientists Go To Heaven (2024)
• Why do we subsidize lies? (2024)
• A Mathematical Model of Copyright (2023)
• Enchained Symbols (2023)
• A Public Domain Human (2023)
• SafeFS (2023)
• Training a neural network to spot misinformation, fake news, and propaganda from a single image (2022)
• Cancer and Copyright (2022)
• How the public domain can win (2022)
• Aaron's Amendment (2021)
• The Public Domain Publishing Company (2021)
• An Unpopular Phrase (2020)
• Dataset Needed (2020)
• Dreaming of a Logic Checked Language (2020)

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If a pedestrian on the sidewalk is hit by a falling branch from a decaying tree on your property you are liable.

If those who insist on calling copyrights and patents "Intellectual Property" wish to continue to do that, I say we make them embrace all the responsibilities of property as well.

• If © TV programs carry ads for sugary drinks, and sugar turns out to cause many diseases, those TV networks are also liable.
• If actors and actresses star in those © ads, they are also liable.
• If newspaper © pages have ads for painkillers that turn out to be far more addictive than advertised, the paper is also liable.
• If a © textbook contains a model of health that turns out to be inaccurate and harmful, then the publisher(s) and author(s) are also liable.
• If a © song is played on a radio station in between ads for products that turn out to cause harm, the station and the musician(s) are also liable.
• If a non-public domain search engine shows ads for products that turn out to cause harm, that search engine is also liable.
• If a © software program causes its users to lose a signficant amount of time or resources, the software maker is also liable.
• If anyone claiming © over some media fails to update that media as soon as mistakes are discovered, they are liable.

Or do they just want all of the benefits of property rights, with none of the responsibilities?

• Information is the Easiest Job (2025)
• How to get rid of advertising (2025)
• The Infosphere (2025)
• Movement (2025)
• You Steal Your Software (2025)
• The Consultation Problem and Why Copyright is Dishonest at its Core (2025)
• Tech's Dirty Secret (2025)
• Owned Air (2025)
• Information Cleaner (2025)
• Optimizing for Truth (2025)
• A New Coat of Paint (2025)
• The Permission Function (2024)
• Writeable (2024)
• Copyright is a mind virus (2024)
• Patents are Poison (2024)
• ETA!: A Measure of Evolution (2024)
• IPDD (2024)
• The Omni Restaurant (2024)
• The law favors ChatGPT over humans (2024)
• Three Scientists Go To Heaven (2024)
• Why do we subsidize lies? (2024)
• A Mathematical Model of Copyright (2023)
• Enchained Symbols (2023)
• A Public Domain Human (2023)
• SafeFS (2023)
• Training a neural network to spot misinformation, fake news, and propaganda from a single image (2022)
• Cancer and Copyright (2022)
• How the public domain can win (2022)
• Aaron's Amendment (2021)
• The Public Domain Publishing Company (2021)
• An Unpopular Phrase (2020)
• Dataset Needed (2020)
• Dreaming of a Logic Checked Language (2020)

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If our government is going to make laws governing information, then we should optimize for truth and signal, over lies and noise.

The objective should not be maximizing the ability to make money off of information. Nature provides natural incentives for discovering new truths, we don't need any unnatural ones. In fact, the unnatural incentives on information production actually incentivize lying and noise, rather than truth generation.

I'm surprised this is such a minority opinion, but very few people are with me on this (those that already are---❤️).

What kind of a system maximizes truth?

Well, what is truth?

Truth is when someone publishes a set of symbols with the claim that they accurately predict something about the world and then later sensors verify that those symbols did accurately predict it.

These truths are extremely helpful. They give us warm buildings, useful electricity, cures for disease, lenses to see more, safe transportation, and so on.

There are also kinds of information that might not necessarily make accurate predictions about the world but don't pretend to. Fictional stories or songs or jokes meant to amuse. These are fine and also have natural incentives (the love and admiration from your peers, for example).

Then there are lies. These are symbols that claim to predict things about the world that don't, in fact, hold up when the sensor data comes in. Much of advertising falls in this category.

Finally, there is also noise. Noise is often truths repackaged in extremely verbose, obfuscated, or scrambled order that wastes people's time and can mislead.

Other than total censorship, I cannot think of a worse information policy than the one we currently have in this country, where it is not legal for someone to edit published information and republish their edited versions. Where it is illegal for someone to create a repository of maximal truth.

We need smart people to delete all this noise, to distill all the signal, and deliver truthful, efficient information to the public. This needs to be legal, not illegal.

Truth needs to be the thing to optimize for, not royalties.

It's time for the IFA.

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And our ancestors built a magnificent palace, over thousands of years, layer by layer, with space for all, and our brother added a coat of paint, and said "This is my property now."

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There is a correct answer, and that answer is zero.

The progress of arts and sciences depends on rapidly testing novel assemblies of ideas to see if they are good ideas or bad ideas.

If you have a concept of copyrights and patents, then before testing any new assembly of an idea, you have to ensure you have permission to test the idea.

The Permission Function compares your idea with all others to ensure it does not violate any copyrights or patents.

If you run afoul of the Permission Function, you can suffer great legal consequences.

The Permission Function take times and energy to run comparisons, communicate with "owners", and perhaps find workarounds.

The problem is, you don't know how good an idea is until you test it!

You often need to test 100 new ideas to find 1 good idea.

Thus most of your resources are wasted on running the Permission Function on bad ideas.

When you understand the colossal waste of time and energy the Permission Function introduces, you realize that even setting the term of copyrights and patents to 1 year is incredibly harmful, and slows down progress by orders of magnitude.

When the term is 0, there is no Permission Function, and the progress of arts and sciences is unchained.

No AGI will waste energy running a Permission Function. AIs that do will be outcompeted.

Similarly, to survive, humans need to abolish the Permission Function.

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If you could see everything across space and time, we would not need to read and write.

You would not need words to tell someone how blue the Pacific can be because they could just see it.

You would not need words to learn when your grandfather decided your grandmother was the one because you could just see everything he saw.

But we can't see everything.

We can only see what's in front of us at this moment.

This is not optimal for our health.

Our Universe is mostly mystery, but at least we know there are patterns.

And if you can learn these patterns, you can have a better time.

To learn a pattern you first must see it.

Our ancestors could only see with their eyes.

Some lucky descendants evolved the ability to imagine things that weren't there.

Language requires imagination.

Once we could imagine, symbols could evolve.

A discoloring on a surface.

A mark to communicate a pattern.

What was the first mark?

What was the first symbol?

Let's imagine.

A man sees a cave.

It is cold and getting dark.

He approaches, but then lurches back.

He sees a bear!

He holds his spear and prepares for battle.

But the bear does not move.

He looks closely.

It is not a bear, but simply charcoal discoloring the wall.

He remembers the shadows his companions make around the campfire to communicate they saw a bear.

He thinks perhaps one of them rubbed charcoal to make a permanent shadow.

He finds a different cave.

In the future, when he sees bears, he grabs some charcoal and repeats the symbol.

Perhaps it was something like this that kickstarted writing.

Pictures at first, then pictographs and eventually phonetic alphabets where infinite patterns could be composed and communicated.

Tens of thousands of years later, here we are with huge numbers of people who spend their days drawing charcoal bears.

Our tribe now uses writing (or at least, pretends to use writing) to set the rules.

These include rules about writing.

What should the rules on writing be?

What is writing good for?

Is it the writer that is most important, the symbols, or the reader?

Writers have clear incentive to create symbols since that very first symbol: symbols save lives.

Even if it's not your own life, or your child's life, even if it's a complete stranger's life, we have learned that a civilization of strangers cooperating peacefully create a better world for all.

But writing goes out of date, and if the writer doesn't update their symbols, they can mislead as easily as they can lead.

It can't be the writer that is most important.

The symbols themselves, without humans, are literally meaningless. So it can't be the symbols that are most important.

Thus it is clear the most important thing is that the rules around symbols should benefit the readers.

What can we do to equip readers with the best symbols possible?

What if bears learned to write?

We might not be here.

Our ancestors might have seen an idyllic image of a cozy cave and walked right into a bear's mouth.

Lies kill.

Can we protect ourselves from writing bears, from lies?

How do we make the most from symbols?

The trick is to make symbols as honest as possible.

And how do we do that?

Bears want nothing more than to outlaw writeability.

Bears do not want you to spread the truth about their cave.

They don't want you to know what's really inside.

And so to do that, not only do they lie about what's inside, but they make their wall unwriteable.

They do not allow edits. They do not allow transformations.

Bears make symbols to serve themselves, and themselves alone.

And by doing that, they lead people to slaughter.

To make symbols the best for readers, symbols must always be writeable.

All symbols should be writeable.

Do not trust anyone who wants to restrict your rights to write.

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October 29, 2024 — The censors do not want you to read this post.

They will downvote, flag, takedown, block and use any and all means to suppress these ideas.

They will call me names: a crank, crazy, unhinged, conspiracy theorist, lunatic.

They will say he is not a creator (I am), has created no hits (I have) and whatever else they can do to suppress this, short of responding to the ideas presented here.

Because they know that if they respond to the ideas then they will encourage you to actually think about them, and they know that if you start to think about them they've lost, because they know what I'm telling you is nature's simple truth.

That terrifies the censors. They know the stickiness of truth. They know that truths can be hard to see, but once you've seen truth you can't unsee it. Brains prefer shortcuts. And truths are shortcuts for predicting the world.

I'm giving you a shortcut to explain many of the problems in modern America: unnatural inequality, poor health, declining life expectancy, violence, poverty, misinformation, fake news, distrust in media, et cetera.

What is a shortcut to explain the root cause of many of these health problems?

Copyrights.

Copyrights they tell you are helping us are actually hurting us.

Every single great idea started as a bad idea that evolved in a competitive environment into a great idea.

This applies to any and every great work that has a © slapped on it: every song, book, article, photo, movie, program, et cetera.

No idea ever reaches perfection.

Every idea can always be improved. Every idea can always keep evolving.

What does copyright do? It makes evolution a crime.

It says: no more evolving! This idea needs to stay exactly as is until 70 years after the "owner" dies!

This is literally the dumbest idea I can think of, short of total censorship.

But copyright is even worse than just being a terrible idea: it's a terrible idea that has spread like a virus.

For example, 9 out of 10 of the top websites in the USA spread the virus to all their visitors. And the one that doesn't have the virus on its homepage, Google.com, has the virus on most of its other pages.

You can listen to every argument made by the spreaders of this virus, but you will not find a single honest one.

All of their arguments are mathematically flawed.

Their best strategy is not to actually convince you they are right-they know they are wrong-but to delay you from seeing this obvious truth as long as possible, because they make so much money every year you don't see it.

If you want to read honest material about this, here's a place to start.

You can help! If you run one of these companies, start cleaning up your house! Remove all © symbols from all pages. Remove all uses of the word "license" when talking about ideas. Make it clear that everything you are publishing is public domain.

If you are just an average citizen, you can help too! Tell everyone you know about the harmful effects of the © mind virus. If you have technical skills, start sending pull requests removing the © virus from open source projects.

Together we can rid the world of this mind virus and create a world where bad ideas are once again forced to evolve into good ideas.

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October 27, 2024 — The censors do not want you to read this post.

They will downvote, flag, takedown, block and use any and all means to suppress these ideas.

They will call me names: a crank, crazy, unhinged, conspiracy theorist, lunatic.

They will say he is not an inventor (I am), has no research background (I do) and whatever else they can do to suppress this, short of responding to the ideas presented here.

Because they know that if they respond to the ideas then they will encourage you to actually think about them, and they know that if you start to think about them they've lost, because they know what I'm telling you is nature's simple truth.

That terrifies the censors. They know the stickiness of truth. They know that truths can be hard to see, but once you've seen truth you can't unsee it. Brains prefer shortcuts. And truths are shortcuts for predicting the world.

I'm giving you a shortcut to explain many of the problems in modern America: the opioid epidemic, cancer, obesity, mental health, the "pandemic", et cetera.

What is a shortcut to explain the root cause of many of these health problems?

Patents.

Patents they tell you are helping you are actually poisoning you.

First, there are some points I think we can all agree with. Patents are awarded to novel inventions that have plausible utility. Patents encourage the publication of those inventions in some form. Patents are effective at discouraging unlicensed competitors and do create monopoly pricing power.

I agree with all those points.

But now let me present a new way to look at things.

A patent is embodied as a digital PDF. A PDF is just a long binary number.

Thus one can accurately say a patent is a long, seemingly random number.

The patent "owner" makes money by people paying to use that random number.

Patents do not incentivize solving problems. Patents incentivize convincing people they need your random number.

If you've got a patent on a random number, you make no money if people solve their problems without your random number, but monopoly money if they use your random number (regardless if it actually solves their problem).

As a result, companies are coming out with all sorts of random numbers that are great at generating monopoly profits, but terrible at solving people's problems.

Even better than just making monopoly money from one random number is to make monopoly money from a suite of random numbers.

Convince people that they need food made by your patented machines; foods that cause illnesses; illnesses which you say can only be cured by your patented medicines; medicines which cause side effects that you claim can only be cured by your other patented medicines; and your royalties will be royal!

Of course, your inventions are only solving problems that your other inventions created, but most people don't know that and so you can go on posting your stamped US Patent Certificates on LinkedIn and boasting about what a great innovator you are.

The worst thing that can happen to a patent holder is that someone actually figures out a solution to the problem their patent claims to solve while their patent is active.

Thus, once someone is granted a patent, they have strong disincentive to actually solving someone's problems.

You do not want to publish or even fund anything that might show that your random number does not actually work.

You want to sit back and tell yourself "job well done" while collecting royalty checks.

What's even better than selling an addictive drug? Having a legal monopoly on an addictive drug!

Patents richly reward those who can get vast numbers of people addicted to their random number.

This is exactly what happened with Purdue and the opioid epidemic. If you look at the legal docs, you'll see that step 1 in Purdue's playbook was to build an aggressive patent strategy.

We've all seen how much big pharma advertises. Why on earth would they need to advertise their life saving medications?

Surely no news would travel faster by word-of-mouth than life saving inventions!

Unless of course, these medicines are not life-saving at all?

If the life saving inventions were the unpatented ones, then the only way for businesses to profit off patents would be to convince you of a lie.

Truth is free. Lies require advertising.

If you have to choose between owning a business with a monopoly or owning a business in a competitive field, the former makes far more money. The only requirement is you must dedicate a portion of your proceeds to brainwashing customers that they need your random number (they don't)!

I could drone on and on along these lines, but I want to keep this (reasonably) short.

Please think about this for yourself: what do patents actually incentivize? Don't just repeat what people tell you they incentivize. Think about it from first principles.

I am not in this for the money.

I am in this for the friends that I have lost.

Some of my best friends on this planet.

Dead. Buried. Poisoned by patents.

Again, don't take my word for it.

Please think about these ideas for yourself.

And remember that's exactly what the other side doesn't want you to do.

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Are some intellectual environments better than others? Yes.

\text{E} = \text{T} / \text{A}!

ETA! states that E, the evolution time of ideas, is the time T needed to test alterations of ideas, divided by the factorial of the number of ideas in the Assembly Pool A!.

Longer evolution times means worse ideas last longer before evolving into better ideas.

You can lengthen the lifespan of bad ideas by increasing the time to test alterations or reducing the size of the Assembly Pool.

You can evolve good ideas faster by decreasing the time to test alterations and increasing the size of the Assembly Pool.

The number of test threads is proportional to the size of the Assembly Pool.

This equation explains the triumph of open source and public domain software.

\sum_{A=0}^{A} A^A

Luckily A^A is still in the factorial class so the memorable acronym still applies.

• Thank you to Lee Cronin and Sara Walker for evolving the idea of the Assembly Pool.
• Thank you to Szymon Łukaszyk who's applications of Assembly Theory to binary messages encouraged me to apply Assembly Theory to measure the health of information environments.
• Thank you to Connor McCormick for superb feedback.
• Thank you to Cobe Liu for pointing out it should be T/A!.
• Thank you to my coauthor John. Without your help I never would have arrived at this equation.

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June 29, 2024 — A child draws.

You take his paper.

He screams.

His scream is just: you stole his property.

You give the paper back.

He stops screaming.

You copy his drawing on your own paper.

He smiles.

His smile is just: he feels his work is appreciated, and he can learn from your version.

Ideas and property could not be more different.

Ideas cannot be stolen. Property can be.

Copying ideas helps, not hurts.

Children understand these obvious truths.

Children learn what is true from nature.

But teenagers turn from nature and start learning "truth" from the popular kids.

This allows for some strange diseases to spread across our civilization.

The brain of someone infected with IPDD cannot deduce the obvious truth that copyrights and patents are the exact opposite of property rights.

They cannot see that atoms are scarce and improved by assignment and ideas are the opposite.

Symptoms of IPDD include:

• the appearance of tiny round spots, often found on the foot, that look like this: ©
• compulsive tendencies, such as insisting that a "license" accompany every piece of information.
• trouble pronouncing phrases, saying "All Rights Reserved" when they mean "Your Rights Restricted."
• paranoia that someone will "steal their ideas" accompanied by outbursts of "Patent Pending" or "FBI Warning" at their customers

People with IPDD also suffer from deep, grandiose delusions like that they created:

• a widget more important than the wheel
• a song better than all of Beethoven's
• a formula more intelligent than all of Einstein's

At a societal level, IPDD is a significant long term burden on economies. Holding all else equal, countries with low rates rates of IPDD infection have significantly faster innovation and more equal wealth distribution.

The best medicine for curing IPDD is exposure to honest information and a long walk in the woods.

It is important to be careful when attempting to heal someone with IPDD too quickly.

I once told an infected Congressman that since they made everything someone writes "protected", they should also "protect" the air someone exhales.

I was hoping this perspective might cure him of his affliction.

Instead, his face lit up, he pulled out his phone and told me he had to text his "Intellectual Property" Liar to try and patent his new idea for a machine that could add licenses to air molecules.

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A famous celebrity passes away and wakes up on a beach.

"Welcome to the Afterplace", says a man in white.

He extends his hand and helps her to her feet.

"You must be hungry. Let me show you to the Omni Restaurant."

They walk from the water to an enormous restaurant.

The entire front of the restaurant is a glass wall facing the ocean.

The restaurant appears to extend endlessly in both directions.

A sliding glass door opens and they walk inside.

The ceilings are a hundred feet tall.

Even though countless people are dining, the restaurant is so large that it is quiet and uncrowded.

"Please have a seat," he says, gesturing to a table with his hand.

"At the Omni Restaurant, you can order any dish ever invented by human civilization."

"Whatever you want, just speak it into your table."

She sits down and says "Portobello mushrooms please."

Suddenly, on the back wall, a hole five feet in diameter opens up.

Then, flying out of the hole comes a silver platter.

The platter hovers over her table then gently floats down.

On it is a perfectly grilled Portobello mushroom.

The former celebrity smiles, grabs the fork and knife, and takes her first bite.

"Oh my god. This is the best Portobello mushroom I've ever tasted", she says.

The man nods his head, turns and leaves her to her meal.

After her meal she explores the grounds.

Eventually she tires and spends the night in a luxurious hammock.

The next morning she returns to the Omni Restaurant.

"Bacon and eggs please," she says.

'COMBINATIONS NOT ALLOWED,' a robotic voice says back.

A few people turn to look.

Her face crunches.

"Portobello mushroom please," she says.

Whew, she thinks.

Delicious. The same as yesterday.

Her face relaxes.

Is it exactly the same?

Her face crunches again.

After another day exploring the grounds, she returns to the Omni Restaurant for dinner.

"Filet Mignon please."

'FILET MIGNON IN USE,' the robot voice responds.

People look.

Her face crunches.

"Umm...ummm...lobster please"

A hole appears in the wall.

Her face relaxes.

A silver platter carrying a deep-red lobster lands in front of her.

"Butter please"

'CUSTOMIZATIONS NOT ALLOWED'.

Day 3 is off to a bad start.

"Bacon please."

'BACON IN USE.'

"Eggs please."

'EGGS IN USE.'

"Peanut butter please."

'PEANUT BUTTER IN USE.'

Many eyes are on her.

Her face crunches.

Then her face turns red.

She clenches her fists and stands up.

She looks at other people's tables.

She sees countless varieties of chips, candy bars, and cereals.

She also sees for the first time that the other diners are malnourished.

Screw this!

She storms to the back wall.

Someone orders a meal and a hole opens.

She dives through.

She lands on her hands and knees.

Then she stands up and looks around.

"What the?!"

There is no kitchen and no cooks.

There is nothing at all on this side of the wall.

She rubs her eyes in disbelief as she watches dish after dish materialize from nothing then fly out through a hole in the wall.

Suddenly she feels a tap on her shoulder.

"What are you doing back here?," asks the man in white.

"What am I doing back here? What am I doing back here? What are YOU doing back here?"

"People out front are malnourished."

"They can't order combinations. They can't customize their orders. And they can't eat something if someone else is eating it."

"And now I see that the physics of the Afterplace means all of the rules of the Omni Restaurant don't make any sense!"

"I DEMAND you take me to the being who designed this place."

"That will not be a problem."

"If you will just follow me."

She follows him back to the front of the restaurant.

They walk for miles past tables and tables of diners.

Finally the man in white comes to a stop.

In front of him, eating a bowl of cereal, is a man in a Vicuna suit.

"Here sits the Omni Restaurant's creator," he gestures with his hand.

"Stan?! It can't be Stan!"

"You know him?"

"Of course!"

"He's my copyright lawyer!"

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May 14, 2024 — In America, AIs have more freedom to learn than humans. This worries me.

Do you want learn at the same library as ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, or Llama?

Then you must become a criminal.

You have no legal option^[1].

This sounds ridiculous.

Human made laws that work against humans?

But it is true.

The problem is Copyright Law. Specifically, Digital Copyright.

Big corporations have the resources to legally build massive internal libraries of all the world's published information.

Their AIs can legally train on this.

Humans in America have to choose: use a criminal library, or fall behind AIs?

We can just abolish copyright.

Among other benefits, this would ensure all Americans have the same freedom to learn as AIs.

Of course, we may not need to update the law.

• Good people publish their content freely.

• Digital copyright goes against the grain of nature so much, that it has long been ignored and worked around by smart and courageous citizens, who have built these "criminal" libraries.
• AI generated content may become much better than the best human generated content. And then the entire concept of copyright will be irrelevant.

But you never know.

Now might be a good time to set into law equal educational rights between humans and AIs.

While the laws are still set by humans.

[1] Well, there is no legal way for YOU to do it. A billionaire could theoretically afford to buy the "rights" and build their own library as good as a big corporation. But no billionaire is reading this post. Nevertheless, to be precise, only ~756 out of ~333,333,000 Americans ~have a legal way to train on the same materials as AIs.

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by Breck Yunits

Newton, Darwin, and a modern-day scientist go to heaven.

God is at the gate.

"Your research shall determine whether you may enter."

Newton goes first.

He hands over Principia.

God reads Newton's description of gravity and smiles.

He waves him through.

Darwin goes next.

He hands over Origin of Species.

God scans it. "Bingo! You're in."

Finally, our modern-day scientist is up.

God asks for his work.

"Sorry", he says.

"It's paywalled."

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February 14, 2024 — The color of the cup on my desk is black.

For any fact exists infinite lies. I could have said the color is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet.

What incentive is there in publishing a lie like "the color of the cup is red"? There is no natural incentive.

But what if our government subsidized lies? To subsidize something is to give it an artificial economic incentive.

If lies were subsidized, because there can be so much more of it than fact, we would see far more lies published than facts.

You would not only see things like "the color of the cup is red", you would see variations on variations like "the color of the cup is light red", "the color of the cup is dark red", and so on.

You would be inundated with lies. You would constantly have to dig through lies to see facts.

The color of the cup would stay steady, as truths do, but new shades would be reported hourly.

The information circulatory system, which naturally would circulate useful facts, would be hijacked to circulate mostly lies.

As far as I can tell, this is exactly what copyright does.

The further from fact a work goes, the more its artificial subsidy.

The ratio of lies to facts in our world might be unhealthy.

I've given up trying to change things.

I have a different battle to fight.

But here I shout into the void one more time, why do we think subsidizing lies is a good idea?

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May 26, 2023 — What is copyright, from first principles? This essay introduces a mathematical model of a world with ideas, then adds a copyright system to that model, and finally analyzes the predicted effects of that system.

New technologies X_{new} and specifically A_{new} can help T maximize their B_T and discover I_{new} to better model W.

A copyright system would have no effect on I_{new} but instead increase the noise from {Z + F + K} and shift the \overline{A} from serving the objectives B_T to serving the objectives B_\Psi.

A copyright system should also increasingly consolidate power in a small Royal Class T_{R+}.

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April 28, 2023 — Enchained symbols are strictly worse than free symbols. Enchained symbols serve their owner first, not the reader.

Be suspicious of those who enchain symbols. They want the symbols to serve them, not you.

The enchainers dream of enchaining all the symbols. They want everyone to be dependent upon them.

Enchained symbols are harder to verify for truth. You cannot readily audit enchained symbols.

Enchained symbols evolve slowly. Enchained symbols can only be improved by their enchainers.

Enchained symbols waste the time of the reader compared to their unchained equivalents. The Enchainers are incentivized to hide and corrupt the unchained equivalents.

The top priority of the enchainers is to keep your attention on enchained symbols. Enchained symbols ensure attention of the population can be controlled.

Enchainers use brainwashing and fear to keep their chains. The double speak and threats of the enchainers start in childhood.

Enchainers promote the dream that anyone can become a wealthy enchainer. Enchainers don't mention that one in a thousand do and nine-hundred-ninety-nine are worse off.

Enchainers have little incentive to innovate. It is more profitable to repackage the same enchained symbols.

Enchainers collude with each other. The enemy of the enchainer isn't their fellow enchainer, but the great populace who might one day wake up.

Because unchained symbols are strictly superior to enchained symbols, they are the biggest threat to enchained symbols. The Enchainers made all symbols enchained by default.

Humans have had symbols for 1% of history but 99% of humans have lived during that 1%. Enchaining symbols is a strange way to show appreciation.

No one who loves ideas would ever enchain them.

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March 6, 2023 — I believe Minsky's theory of the brain as a Society of Mind is correct^[1]. His theory implies there is no "I" but instead a collection of neural agents living together in a single brain.

We all have agents capable of dishonesty—evolved, understandably, for survival—along with agents capable of acting with integrity.

Inside our brains competing agents jockey for control.

How can the honest agents win?

I like to think the majority of agents in my own brain steer me to behave honestly.

This wasn't always the case. As a kid in particular I was a rascal. I'd use my wits to gain short term rewards, like sneaking out, kissing the older girl, or getting free Taco Bell (and later, beer). But the truth would catch up to me, and my honest neural agents would retaliate on the dishonest ones.

I've gotten more honest as I've gotten older but I have further to go. I'd love for my gravestone to read:

Here lies Breck. 1984-2084 Dad to Kaia and Pemma. Became an extraordinarily honest man. Also for some reason founded FunnyTombstones.com

My increasing honesty is evidenced in my code habits. I've gotten to the point where I'm writing almost exclusively open source code and data.

It's futile to lie about open source projects. There are too many intricate details for a false narrative to account for. Not only can readers inspect and learn what a program does and how it works, but they can also inspect how it was built. The effort, time and resources it took. All the meandering wrong paths and long corrections. Who did what. The occasional times when something was done faster than promised, and the many times when forecasts were too optimistic.

My software products are imperfect. They always seem much worse to me than I know they can be. But they are honest, and one can see I am hellbent on making them better.

The closed source software company is like the social media influencer who posts an amazing sunset shot of them in a bathing suit swimming next to dolphins. They will make it look effortless and hide from you the truth: the hundred less glamorous photos, the dozen excursions with no dolphins, and the intense workouts and hidden costs of their lifestyle. They will hide from you all the flaws.

On social media this probably has minor consequences but in software eventually consumers are left increasingly paying the price for dishonest software. Technical debt accumulates in closed source projects and in the long run more honest approaches turn out to be better.

Now, I would be lying if I said I got here by choice.

I thought my marriage was an edifice that would last forever. Instead it crumbled as quickly as an unstable building in an earthquake. In the rubble I found a gem: I now give zero fucks.

I am an 89 year old man in a 39 year old's body. I am not afraid of divorce. I am not afraid of public embarrassment. I am not afraid of financial ruin. I am not afraid of dishonest judges. I am not afraid of war. I am not afraid of death. I am now bald Evie from V for Vendetta except with a penis and far, far less attractive.

Things that people don't publish are the things they lie about. If I want to force myself into being extraordinarily honest, I need to take extraordinary steps. If I publish everything, then I can lie about nothing.

I have the opportunity to open source my life. Not for attention or because I think other people will care, but because it will help me be a more honest me. I won't have to waste a second thinking about what to reveal to someone, or deciding whether to be coy. I will make it futile to lie about anything.

I have a lot of ideas. I want to open source my net worth, income and expenses, assets, health information, and a lot more. There's a lot of opportunity to also build new languages to do so. I'm excited for the future. Time to get to work.

[2] Divorce: Getting legally married was a big mistake. In my experience, lawyers and judges in California Family Court are not steered by honest agents and I regret blindly signing up for their corrupt system.

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January 27, 2023 — Today the trade group Lawyers Also Build In America announced a new file system: SAFEFS. This breakthrough file system provides 4 key benefits:

In addition to the user experience benefits, this also ensures that businesses producing files are SAFE from increased competition.

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October 15, 2022 — Today I'm announcing the release of the image above, which is sufficient training data to train a neural network to spot misinformation, fake news, or propaganda with near perfect accuracy.

These empirical results match the theory that the whole truth and nothing but the truth would not contain a ©.

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October 4, 2022 — Every second your body makes 2.83 million new cells. If you studied just one of those cells from a single human—sequencing all the DNA, RNA, and proteins, you would generate more data than can fit in Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's datacenters combined. Cancer is an information problem.

Mitosis refers to the process where a cell splits and takes about 2 hours. If you were building a startup and it was the fastest startup ever and your team doubled in size every month, you would be going at 0.0028 the speed of mitosis. Mitosis is very very fast.

We think our information tools have gotten fast because we compare them to our old tools, but when we compare them to the challenge of mitosis and cancer they are slower than molasses.

Copyright laws are intellectual slavery, and slow down our cancer researchers and healthcare workers to crawling speed. Because of our expanding copyright laws, our information tools are far too slow and as a result our cancer survival rates haven't budged in a century.

Bad ideas survive far too long before evolving into good ideas in an information environment with copyright.

We can either cure cancer or have copyright laws. We cannot do both. Mitosis is too fast and we need our information tools to be much, much faster. We need them to be orders of magnitude faster.

I can confidently make a prediction: if we pass an amendment ending copyright laws, we will see cancer fatality rates in the United States plummet by 50% within 2 years. I am willing to bet my entire net worth on this.

Finally, a grim reality: though we will save hundreds of lives a day if we abolish copyright and build faster information tools, it will still take a far larger more Herculean effort to solve the toughest types of cancer. That will come down to the men and women in the white and blue uniforms in the hospitals and wet labs (I only know how to solve the bottlenecks in the dry labs).

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August 30, 2022 — Public domain products are strictly superior to equivalent non-public domain alternatives by a significant margin on three dimensions: trust, speed, and cost to build. If enough capable people start building public domain products we can change the world.

It took me 18 years to figure this out. In 2004 I did what you would now call "first principles thinking" about copyright law. Even a dumb 20 year old college kid can deduce it's a bad system and unethical. I have to tell people so we can fix this. I was naive. Thus began 18 years of failed strategies and tactics.

By definition, non public domain information products have a hidden agenda. The company or person embeds their interests into the symbols, and you are not free to change those embeddings.

People who promote these products don't care if you spend your time with the right ideas. They want you to spend your time with THEIR version of the ideas. They will take the good ideas of someone like Aristotle and repackage them in their words (in a worse version), and try to manipulate you to spend time with THEIR version.

They would rather you waste your time with their enchained versions, then have you access the superior liberated forms.

Not just faster, orders of magnitude faster.

You can prove this yourself:

1. Pick any non public domain product.
2. Enumerate every possible way you might use that product.
3. Make time estimates for each task.
4. Now pretend the author just announced the product is now public domain.
5. Enumerate over your list again, again estimating the time it would take you to do each task.

For some tasks that time estimate won't change, for many it will drop from hours to instant.

For some it might drop from decades to instant.

For example, say the product is a newspaper article about some new government bill and your task is updating it with links to the actual bill on your government's website and then sharing that with friends—that task goes from something that may take months (getting permissions) to instant.

When you sum the time savings across all possible use cases of all possible products, you'll see the orders of magnitude speed up caused by public domain products.

Failure to embrace the public domain increases the cost to build any information product by at least an order of magnitude.

This is because not only are most tasks a builder has to do sped up as explained above, but also because building for the public domain means you can immediately build less. For example, you don't have to spend a single moment investing in infrastructure to prevent your source code from leaking.

Time and resources you are currently wasting on worthless tasks can be reallocated to building the parts of your product that matter.

I can't believe it took me so long to realize the overwhelming superiority of public domain products.

No way future people will be paying $10 for crappy streams. People will watch their own downloaded public domain files locally. But have you seen Inside Out? Amazing movie. It sticks with you. Makes you eager to spend $1,000 on a trip with your family to an Inside Out theme park.

Money finds a way. Companies that engage in first principles thinking will also conclude that the math is clear: Public domain products are strictly superior to equivalent non-public domain alternatives by a significant margin on three dimensions: trust, speed, and cost to build.

It took me 18 years to figure out that you can't tell people the public domain is better.

You have to show them.

Try building your own public domain product.

Look through the telescope with your own eyes.

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May 12, 2021 — If you've thought deeply about copyrights and patents, you've probably figured out that they are bad for progress and deeply unjust. This post is for you.

(If you are new to this issues, you might be more interested in my other posts on Intellectual Freedom)

I suggest we organize around a simple long-term vision of passing a new Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ending patents and copyrights once and for all.

The below proposal is 34 words.

Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed. Section 2. Congress shall make no law granting monopolies on ideas, knowledge, or inventions, or prohibiting the free use thereof.

I have only passed a handful of Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in my lifetime 😉, so discussion welcome.

I am not 100% certain that if we abolished copyright and patent systems the world would be a better place.

It would be intellectually dishonest of me to say that. I am always open to intelligent experiments that would show otherwise.

But at this point I am 99% confident it would be the single most massive positive improvement we can make in our world, based on empirical evidence and theoretical math.

It would take a lot of thought to do it right, but I know we could pull the transition off without as much disruption as people fear.

The bigger problem is this debate is not being had.

The problem is our side needs a better starting position.

When the debate is on details like what is the ideal length of monopolies, or when illogical terms like "Intellectual Property" are used, you've already conceded too much, and are giving up your strongest weapon: truth.

A stronger and more logical place to have the debate is upstream of that: debate whether we should have these systems at all.

I think the Amendment Strategy is clear enough, concrete enough, simple enough that you could get critical mass and start moving the debate upstream.

The best defense is a good offense. It's an adage, but there's usually some truth to adages.

The kind of people I think may be ready to organize would be lovers of open source, Linux, Sci-Hub, the Internet Archive, OG Napster; the followers of Aaron Swartz, Alexandra Elbakian and Stephan Kinsella; and all that truly love ideas and believe every human should get their own copy of humanity's most intelligent information.

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February 28, 2021 — I thought it unlikely that I'd actually cofound another startup, but here we are. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

We are starting the Public Domain Publishing Company. The name should be largely self-explanatory.

If I had to bet, I'd say I'll probably be actively working on this for a while. But there's a chance I go on sabbatical quick.

The team is coming together. Check out the homepage for a list of open positions.

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February 21, 2020 — One of the most unpopular phrases I use is the phrase "Intellectual Slavery Laws".

I think perhaps the best term for copyright and patent laws is "Intellectual Monopoly Laws". When called by that name, it is obvious that there should be careful scrutiny of these kinds of laws.

However, the industry insists on using the false term "Intellectual Property Laws."

Instead of wasting my breath trying to pull them away from the property analogy, lately I've leaned into it and completed the analogy for them. So let me explain "Intellectual Slavery Laws".

As far as I can figure, you cannot have Property Rights and "Intellectual Property" rights. Having both is logically inconsistent. My computer is my property. However, by law there are billions of peaceful things I cannot do on my computer. Therefore, my computer is not my property.

Unless of course, the argument is that my computer is my property, but some copyright and patent holders have property rights over me, so their property rights allow them to restrict my freedom. I still get rights over my property. But other people get rights over me. Property Rights and Intellectual Slavery Laws can logically co-exist! Logical inconsistency solved!

We can have a logical debate about whether we should have an Intellectual Slavery System, Intellectual Slavery Laws, Intellectual Slavery Law Schools, Intellectual Slavery Lawyers, etc. But we cannot have a logical debate about Intellectual Property Laws. Because the term itself is not logical.

I know, having now used this term with a hundred different people, that this is a not a popular thing to say. But I think someone needs to say it. Do we really think we are going to be an interplanetary species and solve the world's biggest challenges if we keep 99+% of the population in intellectual chains?

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January 23, 2020 — People make biased claims all the time. A decent response used to be "citation needed". But we should demand more. Anytime someone makes a claim that seems biased, call them out with: Dataset needed.

Whether it's an academic paper, news article, blog post, tweet, comment or ad, linking to analyses is not enough. If someone stops at that, demand a link to a clean dataset supporting the author's position. If they can't deliver, they should retract.

Of course, most sources don't currently publish their datasets. You cannot trust claims from any person or organization without an easily accessible dataset. In fact, it's probably safe to assume when someone shares a conclusion without the accompanying dataset that they are distorting reality for their own benefit.

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January 3, 2020 — Speling errors and errors grammar are nearly extinct in published content. Logic errors, however, are prolific.

By logic error I mean one the following errors: a statement without a backing dataset and/or definitions, a statement with data but a bad reduction(s), or a statement with backing data but lacking integrated context. I will provide examples of these errors later.

The hard sciences like physics, chemistry and most branches of engineering have low tolerance for logic errors. But outside of those domains logic errors are everywhere.

Fields like medicine, law, media, policy, the social sciences, and many more are teeming with logic errors, which are far more consequential than spelling or grammar errors. If a drug company misspells the word dockter in some marketing material the effect will be trivial. But if that material contains logic errors those often influence terrible medical decisions that lead to many deaths and wasted resources.

We generally expect zero spelling errors when reading any published material.

Spell checking is now an effortless technology and everyone uses it. Published books, periodicals, websites, tweets, advertisements, product labels: we are accustomed to reading content at least 99% free of spelling and grammar errors. But there's no equivalent to a spell checker for logic errors and when you look for them you see them everywhere.

Logic errors are so pervasive that I came up with a hypothesis today and put it to the test. My hypothesis was this: 100% of "reputable" publications will have at least one logic error on their front page.

For each source, I went to their website and took a single screenshot of their homepage, above the fold, and skimmed their top stories for logic errors.

In the screenshots above, you can see that 10/10 of these publications had logic errors front and center.

Logic errors in English fall into common categories. My working definition provides three: a lack of dataset and/or definitions, a bad reduction, or a lack of integrated context. There could be more, this experiment is just a starting point where I'm naming some of the common patterns I see.

The top article in the WSJ begins with "Tensions Rise in the Middle East". There are at least 2 logic errors here. First is the Lack of Dataset error. Simply put: you need a dataset to make a statement like that. There is no longitudinal dataset in that article on tensions in the Middle East. There is also a Lack of Definitions. Sometimes you can not yet have a dataset but at least define what a dataset would be that could back your assertions. In this case we have neither a dataset nor a definition of what some sort of "Tensions" dataset would look like.

In the New England Journal of Medicine, the lead figure shows "excessive alcohol consumption is associated with atrial fibrillation" between 2 groups. One group had 0 drinks over a 6 month period and the other group had over 250 drinks (10+ per week). There was a small impact on atrial fibrillation. This is a classic Lack of Integrated Context logic error. If you were running a lightbulb factory and found soaking lightbulbs in alcohol made them last longer, that might be an important observation. But humans are not as disposable, and health studies must always include integrated context to explore whether there is something of significance. Having one group make any sort of similar drastic lifestyle change will likely have some impact on any measurement. A good rule of thumb is anything you read that includes p-values to explain why it is significant is not significant.

In Nature we see the line "world's growing water shortage". This is a Bad Reduction, another very common logic error. While certain areas have a water shortage, other areas have a surplus. Any time you see a broad diverse things grouped into one term, or "averages", or "medians", it's usually a logic error. You always need access to the data, and you'll often see a more complex distribution that would prevent broad true statements like those.

In The Economist the lead story talks about an action that "will have profound consequences for the region". Again we have the Lack of Definitions error. We also have a Forecast without a Dataset error. There's nothing wrong with making a forecast--creating a hypothetical dataset of observations about the future--but one needs to actually create and publish that dataset and not just a vague unfalsifiable statement.

The New Yorker lead paragraph claims an event "was the most provocative U.S. act since...". I'll save you the suspense: the article did not include a thorough dataset of such historical acts with a defined measurement of provocative. Another Lack of Dataset error.

In Al Jazeera we see "Iran is transformed" and also a Bad Reduction, Lack of Dataset and Lack of Definition errors.

Harvard Business Review has a lead article about the Post-Holiday funk. In that article the phrase "research...suggests" is often a dead giveaway for a Hidden Data error, where the data is behind a paywall and even then often inscrutable. Anytime someone says "studies/researchers/experts" it is a logic error. We all know the earth revolves around the sun because we can all see the data for ourselves. Don't trust any data you don't have access to.

Google News has a link to an interesting article on the invention of a new type of color changing fiber, but the article goes beyond the matter at hand to make the claim: "What Exactly Makes One Knot Better Than Another Has Not Been Well-Understood – Until Now". There is a Lack of Dataset error for meta claims about the knowledge of knot models.

The FDA's lead article is on the Flu and begins with the words "Most viral respiratory infections...", then proceeds for many paragraphs with zero datasets. There is an overall huge Lack of Datasets in that article. There's also a Lack of Monitoring. Manufacturing facilities are a controlled, static environment. In uncontrolled, heterogeneous environments like human health, things are always changing, and to make ongoing claims without having infrastructure in place to monitor and adjust to changing data is a logic error.

The NIH has an article on how increased exercise may be linked to reduced cancer risk. This is actually an informative article with 42 links to many studies with lots of datasets, however the huge logic error here is Lack of Integration. It is very commendable to do the grunt work and gather the data to make a case, but simply linking to static PDFs is not enough—they must be integrated. Not only does that make it much more useful, but if you've never tried to integrate them, you have no idea if the pieces actually will fit together to support your claims.

While my experiment didn't touch books or essays, I'm quite confident the hypothesis will hold in those realms as well. If I flipped through some "reputable" books or essayist collections I'm 99.9% confident you'd see the same classes of errors. This site is no exception.

Human languages have absorbed a number of sublanguages over thousands of years that have made it easier to communicate with ease in a more precise way. The base 10 number system (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) is one example that made it a lot easier to utilize arithmetic.

Some quick numbers for people not familiar with the world of programming languages. Around 10,000 computer languages have been released in history (most of them in the past 70 years). About 50-100 of those have more than a million users worldwide and the names of some of them may be familiar to even non-programmers such as Java, Javascript, Python, HTML or Excel.

Not all programming languages are created equal. The designers of a language end up making thousands of decisions about how their particular language works. While English has evolved with little guidance over millennia, programming languages are often designed consciously by small groups and can evolve much faster.

Often the designers change a language to make it easier to do something good or harder to do something bad.

Sometimes what is good and bad is up to the whims of the designer. Imagine I was an overly optimistic person and decided that English was too boring or pessimistic. I may invent a language without periods, where all sentences must end with an exclamation point! I'll call it Relish!

Most of the time though, as data and experience accumulates, a rough consensus emerges about what is good and bad in language design (though this too seesaws).

One of the patterns that has emerged as generally a good thing over the decades to many languages is what's called "type checking". When you are programming you often create buckets that can hold values. For example, if you were programming a function that regulated how much power a jet engine should supply, you might take into account the reading from a wind speed sensor and so create a bucket named "windSpeed".

Some languages are designed to enforce stricter logic checking of your buckets to help catch mistakes. Others will try to make your program work as written. For example, if later in your jet engine program you mistakenly assigned the indoor air temperature to the "windSpeed" bucket, the parsers of some languages would alert you while you are writing the program, while with some other languages you'd discover your error in the air. The former style of languages generally do this by having "type checking".

Type Checking of programming languages is somewhat similar to Grammar Checking of English, though it can be a lot more extensive. If you make a change in one part of the program in a typed language, the type checker can recheck the entire program to make sure everything still makes sense. This sort of thing would be very useful in a logic checked language. If your underlying dataset changes and conclusions anywhere are suddenly invalid, it would be helpful to have the checker alert you.

Perhaps lessons learned from programing language design, like Type Checking, could be useful for building the missing logic checker for English.

Perhaps what we need is a new color of squiggly:

✅ Spell Checkers: red squiggly

✅ Grammar Checkers: green squiggly

❌ Logic Checkers: blue squiggly

If we had a logic checker that highlighted logic errors we would eventually see a drastic reduction in logic errors.

If we had a checker for logic errors appear today our screens would be full of blue. For example, click the button below to highlight just some of the logic errors on this page alone.

Highlight logic errors

If someone created a working logic checker today and applied it to all of our top publications, blue squigglies would be everywhere.

It is very expensive and time consuming to build datasets and make data driven statements without logic errors, so am I saying until we can publish content free of logic errors we should stop publishing most of our content? YES! If you don't have anything true to say, perhaps it's best not to say anything at all. At the very least, I wish all the publications above had disclaimers about how laden with logic errors their stories are.

Of course I don't believe either of those are likely to happen. I think we are stuck with logic errors until people have invented great new things so that it becomes a lot easier to publish material without logic errors. I hope we somehow create a logic checked language.

I still don't know what that looks like, exactly. I spend half my work time attempting to create such new languages and tools and the other half searching the world to see if someone else has already solved it. I feel like I'm making decent progress on both fronts but I still have no idea whether we are months or decades away from a solution.

While I don't know what the solution will be, I would not be surprised if the following patterns play a big role in moving us to a world where logic errors are extinct:

1. Radical increases in collaborative data projects It is very easy for a person or small group to crank out content laden with logic errors. It takes small armies of people making steady contributions over a long time period to build the big datasets that can power content free of logic errors.

2. Widespread improvements in data usability. Lots of people and organizations have moved in the past decade to make more of their data open. However, it generally takes hours to become fluent with one dataset, and there are millions of them out there. Imagine if it took you hours to ramp on a single English word. That's the state of data usability right now. We need widespread improvements here to make integrated contexts easier.

3. Stop subsidizing content laden with logic errors. We grant monopolies on information and so there's even more incentive to create stories laden with logic errors—because there are more ways to lie than to tell the truth. We should revisit intellectual monopoly laws.

4. Novel innovations in language. Throughout history novel new sublanguages have enhanced our cognitive abilities. Things like geometry, Hindu-Arabic numerals, calculus, binary notation, etc. I hope some innovators will create very novel logic sublanguages that make it much easier to communicate with data and reduce logic errors.

Have you invented a logic checked language, or are working on one? If so, please get in touch.

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