Coordination kick-starters

We need to play kick more field goals

In economics, there's a well-known issue: inefficiencies arise in any system that involves switching costs or barriers to coordinate. For example, one reason people go to college is that everyone else goes, and it doesn’t benefit an individual much to opt out of the system unless they can start a larger movement. One person alone can’t create change if others remain committed to the current system. This is where the concept of "coordination kick-starters" comes into play.

The modern idea of Kick-starters comes from a company of the same name founded in 2009. People with an idea and a funding goal would post their project online, and others could contribute money to support it. If the project didn’t reach its funding goal, contributors got their money back. This model had two key advantages: creators could test demand for their product, and supporters could back an idea they liked with minimal risk.

I think this "no-loss" Kick-starter model could also be applied to kickstart better coordination. For instance, imagine a group of students agreeing not to attend college, but only if 1 million others commit to doing the same. Or, I commit to using an open-source ride-sharing app, but only if 1 million others do as well.

The benefits in the case of colleges would be employers having less of an incentive to prospect for perceived talent(college degrees) and more of an incentive to test for actual talent (skills). Therefore causing colleges to meet the needs of students (college reform) or employer process reform

In the ride-hauling example the benefit would be bootstrapping a peer-to-peer service that cuts out the rent-seeking middleman (uber, door dash), therefore lower cost for riders and/or increasing payouts for drivers.

Of course, the challenge(1) lies in creating reliable guarantees for these kinds of collective actions.

Where is Waldo?

Now, let’s talk about missing markets and missing utility. In theoretical economics, a "missing market" refers to something that should exist under perfect conditions but doesn't, because the real world is not perfectly efficient. Obvious examples include markets for sex, privacy, and organ trade. These markets don’t exist in modern society because of the negative externalities associated with them, such as crime.

Beyond missing markets, there's also "missing utility," a term I coined(2) to describe the untapped potential that exists not just in missing markets, but in widely available knowledge that isn’t fully utilized due to distribution, psychological or perceived barriers.

One example of missing utility is the potential benefit people could gain if they better understood the often overestimated risks of prostate cancer and early breast cancer screenings. For instance, more men die with prostate cancer than from it, as it’s usually a slow-growing cancer. Testing and treatment often cause more harm than good, leading to issues like blood in urine, incontinence, and sexual dysfunction. Similarly, early detection of breast cancer doesn’t save as many lives as people think, because the difference between finding cancer at stage 0 versus stage 1 is minimal.

In essence, missing markets and missing utility reflect the inefficiencies in how we coordinate and act, but with the right tools, like coordination kickstarters, we could unlock new opportunities and overcome these inefficiencies.

The rationale behind screening the general population is that by identifying and treating cancer early, even before it can be felt, treatments will be more effective and easier to bear. For many people this idea makes intuitive sense: surely the earlier something is caught, the better.

Yet the latest study in The BMJ adds to the evidence from a number of studies finding little benefit to routinely screening healthy middle-aged women at average risk of breast cancer. Furthermore, these same studies have found there are significant harms to aggressively screening the general population for cancer.

The recent Canadian study, involving 90,000 women followed over 25 years in a randomized trial, found that efforts to find breast cancers before they could be felt as a lump in the breast, using screening mammography, did not lead to lower death rates for average-risk women in their 40s and 50s. At the same time, around one in five of the cancers that were found through screening would not have required treatment were it not for the mammogram: resulting in overdiagnosis and overtreatment as these women underwent surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy to treat non-life threatening cancers.

Another good example of missing utility is sex. A good amount of missing utility exists because of sexual embarrassment.

Two examples

It is a biological fact that men can experience sexual pleasure through their anus. But many avoid this activity, not just because of a lack of knowledge, but due to societal associations.(3)

The female population analogous is spanking. The same types psychological barriers exist here: The idea of asking for a spanking is "regressive", "for slutty actors" etc. .

The role of intellectuals and influencers ought to revolve these missing utility problems by spreading knowledge, lifehacks, and products but as Peter Thiel once said " Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius"

Back to coordination

Coordination is a superpower, but the hardest part is getting parties without enforceable norms to come together and create them. This is where EigenLayer comes in—acting as a human coordination engine. EigenLayer is a new blockchain tool that facilitates coordination by allowing anyone to build systems where specific behavior can be rewarded or punished.

At its core, EigenLayer repurposes existing capital by allowing users to “re-stake” their assets to secure new decentralized services. Think of “stake” as collateral—an opt-in system to “promise” coordination. This creates a marketplace for trust, where developers and users can build systems requiring high coordination without needing to create new structures from scratch. By leveraging re-staked assets, EigenLayer enables the creation of previously missing or underdeveloped markets and utilities.

Current Eigenlayer is geared towards solving the coordination problems around missing markets but could one day help with missing utility by creating a platform in which people opt into a group followed around exposing and addressing the social dark matter that leaves people ashamed and underinformed. In the present moments, you can see hints of solving the missing utility problems with prediction markets (giving organizations put collateral behind their statements to lessen fake news) or the intuition systems project

This innovation opens up new opportunities for collaboration, from decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to governance systems, where coordination is crucial, but the mechanisms to kickstart it have not existed before.

The quality of life on planet Earth is directly a consequence of human beings' ability to coordinate and though we have gotten a lot of things right we have gotten just as much wrong. I hope that in this next era of coordination, we can really move the needle toward a better future. The traditional world will continue to grow but as these systems grow, the hope is that better human coordination can fill in gaps where traditional markets and perfect knowledge utility have failed to emerge, driving innovation and expanding possibilities so that in the future humans will get as close to better coordination as we can.

Atlas Aristotle

Notes and sources

1: challenges can also arise from coordination being used for evil

2: I think I coined this specific term but I imagine this is an official term for it in economics

3: and of course due to "social dark matter"(3.1) there are more men that engage in this activity than then the general population would believe but i still argue that the true population that would enjoy this pleasure is greater than the "acting" population.

3.1: Social dark matter refers to the hidden persons that exists but are not seen due to the negative perceptions that people have of those people. For example, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the same proportion of gay people that exist today in American society would have existed in 1965 but they were significantly more closeted due to the negativity of being "out and open". Similarly it is very likely that the number of women and men that are attracted to children is higher than the general population reports for similar reasons. Now it is important to not deem the latter group as immoral because an attraction to a negative thing is no the same as acting out a negative thing. In clearer terms, many men and women have sexual fantasies about participating in rape "scenes" and almost all of these people if given the chance would not do so.

Notes & sources:

Cancer - (There were some controversial cancer takes in this article, so I implore you to do your research and consult a doctor. The main thing I want you to understand is behavioral changes save 100 times more lives than early screening so focus on being healthy, eating well, and lifting weight before you start developing complex theories of cancer in your free time).

This is a great tool for research because it looks at data and finds the consensus.

Prostate cancer - (If you are at higher risk(black men) take prostate cancer more seriously

Breast cancer - (To avoid legal liability- you ought to do your research and consult a medical doctor before making any medical decisions)

Sources

Survival for prostate cancer. Survival of prostate cancer | Cancer Research UK. (2024, July 3). https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/prostate-cancer/survival

Baum, M. (2015, September). “catch it early, save a life and save a breast”: This misleading mantra of Mammography. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4582266/

Miller, A. B., Wall, C., Baines, C. J., Sun, P., To, T., & Narod, S. A. (2014, February 11). Twenty five year follow-up for breast cancer incidence and mortality of the Canadian National Breast Screening Study: Randomised Screening Trial. The BMJ. https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g366