Sea vs Boat Mindset

Imagine two kindergartens:

(1) In the kindergarten "Sea", kids copy each others: if one kid comes up with something novel and useful, others quickly copy him, and take this to their advantage, without giving any credit to those who originally came up with it.

This social set-up incentivizes kids to keep their novel and useful things to themselves, and form closed groups of trust to keep the secret advantages, and trade carefully.

(2) In the kindergarten "Boat", kids give credit to each others: if one kid comes up with something novel and useful, others praise the kid, and gives him/her credit, in that, if someone else uses their ideas, they are remembered, and if someone succeeds big way as a result of publicly shared innovation of another kid, the rest of the kids force the one who succeeded big way to give reasonable support back to the kid who publicly shared the innovation.

This social set-up incentivizes kids to share their novel and useful things as soon as possible with the public, in the expectation of social validation, and future returns, when someone else succeeds as a result of it.

Transfer a kid from one kind of kindergarten to another, and the kid's behavior will have to change, adapting to the social norm, not because the ethical views of the kid himself or herself, but because of the phenomena similar to prisoner's dilemma with respect to expected returns with respect to the given society's social norms.

So, which kindergarten would you like to be raised in?

In most cases, I would like to be raised in the kindergarten (2). This is because I don't have time to implement all the ideas that I come up with, yet I want to profit (both financially and in terms of social return) from all of my ideas without having to patent, hire an army, or work individually on every one of them to have this return to happen. I want the society be the army, that, as described in (2), praises and protects its contributors, that publicly shared ideas generate financial returns by default.

Status Quo and Prospects

I think, this kind of society will happen sooner or later, because technology allows to track, and prove increasingly many facts about events, their dates, identities and authenticity, and therefore, it is just a matter of time before those facts will be increasingly intelligently recognized, and credit given where it is due, therefore, it is sufficient to start recording those proofs now using various standards (one of the possible ways I described here), writing them to various data storage systems, as those records will get increasingly recognized regardless of particular way in which people have made those records, as long as they are probabilistically credible.

Cultural norms needed

This may happen just because technology allows to tokenize and trade ideas or to have enough evidence to sue someone for patenting a publicly shared idea. In this case, we'll still be living in the wild (1) type world. Technology alone does not fully solve all problems.

To achieve the comfortable and fun (2) world, people have evolve a culture of caring about tracing origins. People don't put down the guns because blockchain exists. They do so, because others show care about them socially and economically.

I think we should try to evolve and facilitate such culture as in the kindergarten "(2)".