Idea Machines

In a world where there are many wealthy people, then, and many more types of wealthy people, there are also more idea machines, and a more liquid idea marketplace. If you’re an “idea operator”, instead of having to beg one of two funders to take your idea seriously, you now have many more potential options to shop around to.

The modern Idea Machine better reflects how people self-organize today. They are decentralized, more closely intertwined with public dialogue, and work symbiotically with a community that anyone can join: many individual nodes operating in a loosely-organized network, instead of a monolithic organization.

The federal regulation of foundations didn’t mean the death of idea machines, however. It just meant that that foundations were no longer the best place to house them. It’d be like if the government decided to heavily regulate Delaware C Corps: if it were bad enough, founders would stop using them for startups, but they’d eventually find some other... See more

Effective altruism’s strength lies in its infrastructure, which we can use to better understand how other idea machines work, what their impact will be, and what’s needed to make them more effective.

Until recently, idea capital in tech was constrained, and mostly only accessible by startup founders. If you had an idea for improving public society that required money and talent to execute, and you didn’t do it as a startup, you either had to get the EA community to care about it, or – as the old joke goes – convince Peter Thiel to fund it.

Idea machines are different from movements, which are focused on achieving a specific outcome and are therefore self-limiting (if they succeed, the movement winds down). For example, YIMBYism and climate change are movements that attract operators with shared values, but on the basis of wanting to address a specific problem, rather than a philosoph... See more

An Idea Machine is a self-sustaining organism that contains all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes:- It starts with a distinct ideology, which becomes a memetic engine that drives the formation of a community- The community’s members start generating ideas amongst themselves- Eventually, they form an agenda, which articulates how the ideo... See more

Because foundations can exist into perpetuity [4], they can even be usurped and weaponized towards other goals.

On the other end of specificity, idea machines are less broad than paradigm shifts, which are widespread, headless, decentralized shifts in cultural norms and attitudes due to changes in systemic conditions. For example, web3 is a paradigm shift, but it’s too big and distributed to be an idea machine.