Feynmann said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

The central idea of the Negation Game is this: all the conflict in the world is due to individual dogmatic commitment to ideas. All the conflict in my world is due to my dogmatic commitment to my ideas. And the path to both peace and greater prosperity is through curiosity about how we might be wrong, and flexibility over our preferences.

Of course, our existing systems of governance seem to be tuned to exactly the opposite. What seems to much more easily predominate is tight and narrow identity ("I am this kind of person, and I only care about people like me"), simplistic and rigid beliefs ("the problem is X ideology or group of people"), and aggressive seizure of power ("if I don't get my way, in exactly this way, then there's going to be a problem").

The real and durable path out of this trap is to soften our sources of identity and belonging in order to give ourselves more latitude for choices that lead to mutually satisfying outcomes.

However, changing ourselves is actually quite hard, even individually. Ask anyone in a relationship.

Short of changing ourselves each individually, the next best thing we can do to circumvent destructive conflict is to listen more intently to people who do exhibit these beneficial characteristics. Characteristics one would like to elevate are capabilities for accurate foresight, for intellectual honesty and integrity, for broad care and consideration, for credible neutrality, and for sensitivity to new information. With these behaviors elevated, the decision landscape can come to favor positive sum outcomes and skirt away from negative sum games and self-destruction. This is exactly what the Negation Game hopes to do.

One Single Simple Idea

The key idea of the Negation Game is extremely simple: design a governance context where when you offer credible reasons that you might change your mind, you are rewarded with additional influence.

That simple idea originates from the insights above: that the policy of open handedness is the path to peace and prosperity. But self-invalidation is not just a moral principle, it's also the foundation of science and the scientific method and has brought us all the medical advances of the 21st century. In this form the key idea can once again be stated succinctly: find out you're wrong about your ideas as quickly as possible.

In this kind of domain, a new kind of identity must be forged, one which doesn't rest on any particular proposition being right, but rather that takes on the identity allocates its beliefs according to what it currently understands. A stable identity in this context is "I am the kind of person who is good at changing their mind."

The key idea of the Negation Game is extremely simple: design a governance context where when you offer credible reasons that you might change your mind, you are rewarded with additional influence.

In order to achieve this kind of outcome inside the mechanism of the Negation Game, the Negation Game provides a move players can make called epistemic leverage. Epistemic leverage gives players more influence in exchange for for the player identifying what they would be willing to change their mind about. Here's what this looks like:

An example of epistemic leverage implemented in the Negation Game.

An additional mechanism (called doubting) ensures that the player gets additional influence only when the rest of the network believes that the player really will change their mind if it turns out they're wrong. For average players of the game, the details of the mechanism don't matter nearly as much as the high level idea of the game: being known as someone who is good at changing your mind, and offering reasons why you'll change your mind, will tend to grant you more influence.

But there can be a problem if you create a context where you get the most influence when you're known for changing your mind: why wouldn't someone just become entirely unmoored to any principles or beliefs, and change their beliefs with the changing of the wind?

The way this is accounted for in the Negation Game is by making it expensive to change your mind. This action is called self-slashing, and it means that you give up some of your currency whenever you assert that you were wrong. Its purpose is to ensure that if someone changes their mind they'll gain or maintain their fearsome reputation for mindchanging, but they do so at the expense of their position on this issue and their overall financial situation.

You can see the kind of dynamic this creates: not only does this mean that on average the system will listen to the people that are moderate, nuanced, unbiased, neutral, epistemically sensitive participants, because those are the kinds of people capable of changing their mind, but it also creates an incentive for others to try to emulate the same behavior.

And broadly, that's what we're trying to do with the Negation Game, is to nudge players to be more moderate, nuanced, unbiased, neutral, and epistemically sensitive. To be more open handed. To direct energy and attention to the experiments most promising or likely to be informative, and to foster the broader, peacemaking self-identity, of "I am the kind of person who is good at changing their mind." It's these principles of softness that we think leads not just to better governance for DAOs, Corporations, and communities, but for the world in general.