Thank you for your comment! You’ve clearly spent time thinking about what holds civilizations together and what causes them to unravel. I respect that, and I’m so happy to have you here to be a part of this conversation.
You raise a hard but important point about the vote. I’ve wrestled with it myself: should the franchise be available to anyone who happens to be present and breathing? Or should it require more—skin in the game, civic knowledge, personal investment?
Your emphasis on contribution—on taxation, independence, earned stake—is not lost on me. That’s the right instinct. When someone pays in, when they carry risk, when they’re not just a consumer of public policy but a contributor to its costs, they’ve earned their place at the table. That isn’t gatekeeping. That’s accountability.
The problem, of course, is that we’ve allowed voting to become unmoored from responsibility. The political class prefers it that way. A disconnected electorate is easier to manipulate than an educated, invested one.
But rather than restrict the vote from the top down, The Fatal Hubris proposes something more radical: rebuild political legitimacy from the bottom up. In a decentralized model—one grounded in community, trust, and relationship—the vote regains its meaning because people vote among those who know them. Stakeholding becomes visible again. Consequences become local again. Voting becomes a function of earned trust, not distant paperwork.
We agree on the core: the system is broken because there’s no cost to being wrong. No stake, no skin, no consequence. Kudos for what you said.
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it — in a decade, a century, or a millennium — we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?” - John Archibald Wheeler The Society of Problem Solvers Presents: BUILDING GENIES (book title) How to build Genies everywhere and change the world. As described by Tim Urban in his book “What’s Our Problem?”
Welcome to the most interesting place you’ve ever visited; a place where we're mastering and exploring the science of building Genies. Yes, you heard that correctly: Genies. The term “genie” comes from Tim Urban’s book “What’s Our Problem?” It describes the new entity that emerges when people solve problems together in groups, in just the right way. Imagine 10 or 100 or 1 million people forming into an almost magical new being - a cohesive force. Or, picture a brain of brains, where each person is one node of a new, larger, super brain that is exponentially more powerful than the sum of the individual people that make it up.
That’s a genie. And even though there are many examples in human history where groups of people did things together that seemed like magic, creating genies isn’t magic at all. It’s science. Anyone can learn how to create a genie, including you.
The evidence of genies is already all around us. When people collaborate together using well thought out systems, we have the ability to change skylines, conquer harsh environments, form nations, harness energy, explore outer space, save lives (medical), build systems that connect humanity in beautiful ways, and even lift most of the world out of extreme poverty. Genies can be amazing. BUT – like all powerful forces such as nuclear or electricity - there is also danger to navigate. Sometimes when humans assemble into groups we do horrible things. Tim Urban calls these powerful bad groups of people “Golems.”
The question is: Why? Why is it that sometimes groups of people can be amazing genies and make innovations that help so many people, while other times we form into golems such as Witch hunts, wars, mob mentality, cults, tyranny and more? Today, we face several modern golems in the form of our corrupted political and corporate systems. If we fail to corral these golems, humanity could be in great danger. The good news is that humanity has the knowledge to control golems. It is actually not that hard to do. The answer is to build bigger, better, and more genies - everywhere. Then link them together. Here at Swarm Academy, we’re gonna break down exactly what it is that we know so far about how to turn groups of people into genies. And how to avoid golems. We look forward to showing you about a little known branch of science known as “collective intelligence” or “human swarm intelligence,” which is built on an amazing and testable phenomenon called “the Wisdom of Crowds.” The entire premise boils down to a simple theory: that there is powerful wisdom, creativity, and problem-solving ability to be extracted from groups of people, but doing so requires the right kind of process and high-trust systems in order to optimize them, and to avoid turning the groups into golems. In this emerging field of science, any group of people working together to solve problems is called a “swarm.” This is not our term, this is the scientific term. A human swarm can be either bad like a golem or good like a genie. Understanding why swarms sometimes become golems and sometimes become genies is the key to safely harnessing this powerful force. Right now humanity as a whole has a group problem-solving crisis. Our ability to solve problems in large groups has been hijacked. We were on the right path for a while, but currently most of the systems that people use to collaborate on have become corrupted. Systems of government, media, academia, and even science have all lost the trust of the people. Our systems are no longer getting good results. This corruption not only prevents humanity from reaching our potential, but it actually sets us backwards.
By building and using new systems to form genies, we can fix our corrupted world, and upgrade how humanity works together to become more intelligent, more creative, more empathetic, more self-aware, more open to criticism, more optimistic, and more powerful, together.
We have the knowledge, technology, and ability to make better, hard-to-corrupt systems right now, and build powerful genies all around us.
How?
We aim to explain all of this and more in the following free video series. This fascinating new area of science needs more people here exploring it and studying it, so we are glad that you are here. Think of this as a call to adventure. Do you want to explore something with us? We can right now explore together immensely powerful new tools for humanity by combining our intelligence and creativity together.
You don’t have to believe us. You can see for yourself.
In our next video you will witness the power of collective intelligence and what humanity has already used it for. By changing the way we interact with each other in groups, we can change everything.
For billions of years on this Earth all that existed were single celled organisms. Then one day they learned how to cooperate with each other to make complex multi-celled life such as plants, animals, and people. That same evolution is possible with people when we connect in just the right way. We can form genies.
Welcome to Swarm Academy, the world’s first completely free collective intelligence training center.
I love where you’re going with this—it reminds me of what we’re already seeing in open-source communities, crypto DAOs, and liquid democracy experiments. These are all early prototypes of what’s possible when coordination, trust, and decision-making are distributed rather than centralized. They’ve shown us that when people are empowered to contribute directly—without needing permission from a gatekeeper—whole ecosystems can emerge, self-regulate, and innovate faster than any traditional hierarchy.
But they’ve also revealed the limits: open-source can fragment, DAOs can be hijacked by whales, and liquid democracy can devolve into popularity contests. The next step, I think, is learning how to combine their strengths while correcting for their weaknesses—how to build systems where the “swarm” remains both intelligent and accountable.
That’s where your work feels crucial: designing the social protocols and trust layers that make human swarms act more like genies than golems.
Astute observations! What is The Fatal Hubris? Need to google that….
We want to create new systems. Decentralized systems that are high trust as a place where people can go build trust and solve problems with each other. That simple.
First, voting is not the best way to solve problems in large groups. Using collective intelligence systems is much better. When trying to solve problems in large groups a collective intelligence system beats a voting system 10 out of 10 times.
When it comes to skin in the game and having a say, this is also a testable theory. Groups of people where the people have skin in the game will try harder to solve the problem together than groups of people that have no skin in the game. Where is the ethical line here in a society? Hard to say. It would require testing.
But a group can simply add a code or ethical rules to establish that just like a constitution.
The decentralization of all systems is the way we stop corruption. But we must use the right epistemology. Decentralize everything, like this: https://joshketry.substack.com/p/decentralize-everything-in-1776-america
Here is why I call it the Fatal Hubris: https://open.substack.com/pub/marniekhaw/p/why-the-fatal-hubris-title?r=29b1i&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Thank you for your comment! You’ve clearly spent time thinking about what holds civilizations together and what causes them to unravel. I respect that, and I’m so happy to have you here to be a part of this conversation.
You raise a hard but important point about the vote. I’ve wrestled with it myself: should the franchise be available to anyone who happens to be present and breathing? Or should it require more—skin in the game, civic knowledge, personal investment?
Your emphasis on contribution—on taxation, independence, earned stake—is not lost on me. That’s the right instinct. When someone pays in, when they carry risk, when they’re not just a consumer of public policy but a contributor to its costs, they’ve earned their place at the table. That isn’t gatekeeping. That’s accountability.
The problem, of course, is that we’ve allowed voting to become unmoored from responsibility. The political class prefers it that way. A disconnected electorate is easier to manipulate than an educated, invested one.
But rather than restrict the vote from the top down, The Fatal Hubris proposes something more radical: rebuild political legitimacy from the bottom up. In a decentralized model—one grounded in community, trust, and relationship—the vote regains its meaning because people vote among those who know them. Stakeholding becomes visible again. Consequences become local again. Voting becomes a function of earned trust, not distant paperwork.
We agree on the core: the system is broken because there’s no cost to being wrong. No stake, no skin, no consequence. Kudos for what you said.
See if this means anything to you:
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it — in a decade, a century, or a millennium — we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?” - John Archibald Wheeler The Society of Problem Solvers Presents: BUILDING GENIES (book title) How to build Genies everywhere and change the world. As described by Tim Urban in his book “What’s Our Problem?”
Welcome to the most interesting place you’ve ever visited; a place where we're mastering and exploring the science of building Genies. Yes, you heard that correctly: Genies. The term “genie” comes from Tim Urban’s book “What’s Our Problem?” It describes the new entity that emerges when people solve problems together in groups, in just the right way. Imagine 10 or 100 or 1 million people forming into an almost magical new being - a cohesive force. Or, picture a brain of brains, where each person is one node of a new, larger, super brain that is exponentially more powerful than the sum of the individual people that make it up.
That’s a genie. And even though there are many examples in human history where groups of people did things together that seemed like magic, creating genies isn’t magic at all. It’s science. Anyone can learn how to create a genie, including you.
The evidence of genies is already all around us. When people collaborate together using well thought out systems, we have the ability to change skylines, conquer harsh environments, form nations, harness energy, explore outer space, save lives (medical), build systems that connect humanity in beautiful ways, and even lift most of the world out of extreme poverty. Genies can be amazing. BUT – like all powerful forces such as nuclear or electricity - there is also danger to navigate. Sometimes when humans assemble into groups we do horrible things. Tim Urban calls these powerful bad groups of people “Golems.”
The question is: Why? Why is it that sometimes groups of people can be amazing genies and make innovations that help so many people, while other times we form into golems such as Witch hunts, wars, mob mentality, cults, tyranny and more? Today, we face several modern golems in the form of our corrupted political and corporate systems. If we fail to corral these golems, humanity could be in great danger. The good news is that humanity has the knowledge to control golems. It is actually not that hard to do. The answer is to build bigger, better, and more genies - everywhere. Then link them together. Here at Swarm Academy, we’re gonna break down exactly what it is that we know so far about how to turn groups of people into genies. And how to avoid golems. We look forward to showing you about a little known branch of science known as “collective intelligence” or “human swarm intelligence,” which is built on an amazing and testable phenomenon called “the Wisdom of Crowds.” The entire premise boils down to a simple theory: that there is powerful wisdom, creativity, and problem-solving ability to be extracted from groups of people, but doing so requires the right kind of process and high-trust systems in order to optimize them, and to avoid turning the groups into golems. In this emerging field of science, any group of people working together to solve problems is called a “swarm.” This is not our term, this is the scientific term. A human swarm can be either bad like a golem or good like a genie. Understanding why swarms sometimes become golems and sometimes become genies is the key to safely harnessing this powerful force. Right now humanity as a whole has a group problem-solving crisis. Our ability to solve problems in large groups has been hijacked. We were on the right path for a while, but currently most of the systems that people use to collaborate on have become corrupted. Systems of government, media, academia, and even science have all lost the trust of the people. Our systems are no longer getting good results. This corruption not only prevents humanity from reaching our potential, but it actually sets us backwards.
By building and using new systems to form genies, we can fix our corrupted world, and upgrade how humanity works together to become more intelligent, more creative, more empathetic, more self-aware, more open to criticism, more optimistic, and more powerful, together.
We have the knowledge, technology, and ability to make better, hard-to-corrupt systems right now, and build powerful genies all around us.
How?
We aim to explain all of this and more in the following free video series. This fascinating new area of science needs more people here exploring it and studying it, so we are glad that you are here. Think of this as a call to adventure. Do you want to explore something with us? We can right now explore together immensely powerful new tools for humanity by combining our intelligence and creativity together.
You don’t have to believe us. You can see for yourself.
In our next video you will witness the power of collective intelligence and what humanity has already used it for. By changing the way we interact with each other in groups, we can change everything.
For billions of years on this Earth all that existed were single celled organisms. Then one day they learned how to cooperate with each other to make complex multi-celled life such as plants, animals, and people. That same evolution is possible with people when we connect in just the right way. We can form genies.
Welcome to Swarm Academy, the world’s first completely free collective intelligence training center.
Click here
I love where you’re going with this—it reminds me of what we’re already seeing in open-source communities, crypto DAOs, and liquid democracy experiments. These are all early prototypes of what’s possible when coordination, trust, and decision-making are distributed rather than centralized. They’ve shown us that when people are empowered to contribute directly—without needing permission from a gatekeeper—whole ecosystems can emerge, self-regulate, and innovate faster than any traditional hierarchy.
But they’ve also revealed the limits: open-source can fragment, DAOs can be hijacked by whales, and liquid democracy can devolve into popularity contests. The next step, I think, is learning how to combine their strengths while correcting for their weaknesses—how to build systems where the “swarm” remains both intelligent and accountable.
That’s where your work feels crucial: designing the social protocols and trust layers that make human swarms act more like genies than golems.
Astute observations! What is The Fatal Hubris? Need to google that….
We want to create new systems. Decentralized systems that are high trust as a place where people can go build trust and solve problems with each other. That simple.
First, voting is not the best way to solve problems in large groups. Using collective intelligence systems is much better. When trying to solve problems in large groups a collective intelligence system beats a voting system 10 out of 10 times.
When it comes to skin in the game and having a say, this is also a testable theory. Groups of people where the people have skin in the game will try harder to solve the problem together than groups of people that have no skin in the game. Where is the ethical line here in a society? Hard to say. It would require testing.
But a group can simply add a code or ethical rules to establish that just like a constitution.