Writings and conversations on trust, technology, and building better platforms
We asked our trust engine to predict a public record of who trusts whom, from evidence that never contained the answers. Run over every topic at once on positive evidence only, it landed at chance on the pooled comparison. Run separately inside each topic, from each observer's own point of view, it carried real signal.
Kubernetes publishes both who is permitted to approve changes and who actually does. Seven people hold approval rights over more than half of the core repository's directories. Covering half the work actually approved took at least twenty. Every number reproduces from public records.
If fact checking could get us out of this mess, wouldn't Wikipedia have solved it? The issue was never truth as some platonic object out there. It is sorting our opinions about the facts, and trust is how we already do that everywhere else.
Two future histories running from 2026 to 2029: one where engagement optimization takes AI and social media, and one where trust does. Written a year before UpTrust's current form.
A four-part series on the ways of seeing that might let us turn the hardest global problems into something we are proud of: no villains only unconsciousness, self-organizing systems and incentive landscapes, vision married to pragmatics, and the whole developmental stack.
Social media today is dominated by algorithms that prioritize engagement above all else. UpTrust was built to fundamentally reshape the incentives behind online interaction, offering a new model that prioritizes trust over attention.
The Embodiment Coaching Podcast, Hosted by Mark Walsh
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Illuminated Life, Hosted by Tucker Walsh
The Container, Hosted by Sigh and Jonathan
Episode notes and platform links live on the podcasts page. Want to discuss UpTrust on your show? Get in touch.
“In an echo chamber, no one calls anyone out on bias. No one can even see it.”
“Karl Popper's idea of conjectures and refutations is how we figure out what's not true, which turns out is the only way you actually get to truth.”
From Hey Wait, a series of recorded conversations held on the platform, with Tim Urban, Eric Ries, Liv Boeree, Nate Soares, John Mackey, and others.