New Beginnings
So far my steemit experience has been very informative. There are so many creative people on here, that I must say says a great deal about the positive future of human potential.
Instead of a gate-keeper like Facebook to share stories, ideas, and sometimes 'fake-news', we have in steemit a nexus of creative idea-makers looking to build useful things, perspectives, ideas, and build shared community.
Our Old Pal Pareto and Fair Trade
Everyone has a voice that is visible. And those who contribute things that others may find of value, can even find rewards in the form of cryptocurrency. As mentioned in my opening post, the law of creative distribution does seem to concentrate rewards unequally. The old 'Pareto Principle' (80-20 rule) whereby 20% of people seem to produce 80% of things is a general saying in our corporate culture. This applies to both productive endeavors, as well as customer complaints (i.e. the 'squeaky wheel gets the grease'). Another way to look at this could be that the square root of any population number produces about 50% of the total result. So we have a team of 10, roughly 3 people will produce about 50% of the final product. Inequality rises rapidly as population grows - a group of 1000 people working towards a goal may find that 10 individuals within the group produce about 50% of the impact. The way I see it, two main reasons explain this:
- any given trait is normally distributed among people ('the Bell Curve')
- momentum feeds the network effect
Thus, as the individuals with the most interest, passion, and skill in a given task become known to the group, they start to get a reputation and ideas start to flow through them. Perhaps people do a subconscious comparative advantage analysis for their time-production trade off, and essentially 'trade' their influence to those who will result in more production. In the end, the whole group benefits because the output is maximized (many economists use a similar theory to explain Free Trade benefits).
Even something like Bitcoin - the posterchild for the movement to mainstream decentralized banking via crypto-currency, shows signs of mining power concentration by a handful of big mining operations. It seems that if we want a system that avoids the natural process of inequality, we need to 1) understand that it occurs naturally, 2) determine what is both good and bad about it, and 3) develop protocol to bypass the negative effects, and keep the positive ones.
Mind Melds and Ruffling Feathers
Enter the human brain in the modern era of connectivity. Collectively individuals can achieve different and often much larger scale things. A theoretical genius cannot contribute their full potential without a social infrastructure that is comprised of millions of average individuals each contributing to (or at least not actively destroying) society. Innovation is very difficult to manufacture. In fact, the 'manufacturing culture' of Six-Sigma employed by corporations to 'lean' out and optimize their workflows, is the antithesis of creativity and innovation! Clearly we need the individual spark that can think outside of the corporate box to help progress forward. 'They' say creative types are great at inventing businesses, and conservatives are great at running them.
I believe we are not robots - and even if we someday merge with AI, we will remain highly complex individuals. Therefore, everyone can claim multiple aspects of disparate personality traits. The passions we chose to follow tend to align with our personal mix of varying shades of multiple traits. Our life experiences act as a lens to either magnify those unique aspects, or sadly burn them out like sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. It is difficult to learn to be passionately creative if that is not your nature. It quite easy to crush creativity through years of conformist oriented institutions. Entry level positions at any professional organization by definition will require you to conform to the norms and values of the place. Despite the various HR buzzwords of openness and diversity, creative problem solving will ruffle many feathers when you're at the bottom of the organizational pyramid.
A Call to Contest Ideas
One of the main goals of this blog will be to foster creativity, shared growth in useful knowledge in pursuit of human fulfillment.
I plan on hosting simple accessible contests of discovery (in future posts that are much less verbose than this one).
And even though the creative process itself is a great reward, I would like to give out small STEEM token prizes to winners.
I would love to hear any thoughts or suggestions for contest ideas.
The first contest will probably be a puzzle type post, with a value being awarded to one of the correct solutions (if any) via reply to the original steemit post for the contest. In future contests I would also like to see creative submissions that will align with the aims of encouraging creativity and strengthening a sense of positive purpose through truth.
Congratulations!
You've made it to the end of this post! Stay tuned for future posts and initiatives.
