Listen Get

The Least Bad Idea in the World Contest

Fork the Earth Optimization Protocol v1, fix it, or replace it entirely. The winner becomes v2.

Abstract

The Least Bad Idea in the World Contest is the design competition that precedes implementation of the Earth Optimization Prize138. Before anyone recruits a single referendum voter or sells a single bond, there is a prior question: is the Earth Optimization Protocol v1 actually the plan you should execute? We think it is terrible. We said so in the title. The honest first step is to find out whether someone can produce something less terrible. Teams fork v1, fix it, or replace it entirely. The winner becomes the Earth Optimization Protocol v2, and v2 is what the referendum, the bonds, and the lobbying campaign execute. This runs before everything else because committing billions to a plan nobody stress-tested is how your species normally operates, and that is not a compliment.

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

The Earth Optimization Protocol v1 is the current best attempt at a complete governance reform package. We think it is terrible. We said so in the title.

This contest exists to find something less terrible. Fork v1, fix it, or replace it entirely. The winner becomes v2, and v2 is what the Earth Optimization Prize138 funds.

ImportantDisqualification Rule

If your proposal requires politicians, bureaucrats, investors, regulators, voters, or interest groups to become less selfish than they currently are, you have described a pleasant world rather than a mechanism for reaching it. “Requires selflessness” is not the same as “makes self-interest coincide with better outcomes.” We have been observing your species since 1945 and have not yet seen selfishness decline on request.

The Starting Benchmark

What follows is our homework. The thing to beat is the integrated set of required functions implied by the companion papers.

Required function Default implementation in the Earth Optimization Protocol v1 What a strict improvement must beat
Large initial reallocation wedge The 1% Treaty139 Must redirect at least as much low-NSV spending to higher-NSV use
Medical throughput and evidence generation Ubiquitous Pragmatic Trial Impact Analysis140 + The Continuous Evidence Generation Protocol141 Must produce faster, cheaper, more reliable treatment discovery
Regulatory-delay removal The Invisible Graveyard142 + Right to Trial & FDA Upgrade Act + Drug Development Cost Increase Analysis73 Must reduce efficacy lag and development cost without increasing net harm
Political financing and adoption engine Incentive Alignment Bonds143 (funds the lobbying campaign; PRIZE deposits fund the prize pool separately) Must make passage at least as incentive-compatible for selfish actors
Citizen preference aggregation Wishocracy144 Must recover public preference at equal or lower cognitive cost
Waste and opportunity accounting The Political Dysfunction Tax46 + United States Efficiency Audit145 Must identify low-NSV pools at least as well
Policy recommendation engine Optimocracy146 + The Optimal Policy Generator147 Must generate better recommendations under real-world constraints
Budget recommendation engine The Optimal Budget Generator148 Must allocate public-goods spending better on the terminal metrics
Legal and institutional implementation path Right to Trial & FDA Upgrade Act + treaty/statutory tools Must create equal or stronger binding force
Narrative, coalition, and sequencing wrapper How to End War and Disease Must coordinate adoption at equal or lower cost and failure risk

That is the Minimum Acceptable Governance. The grand prize is for the first mechanism that covers every row or replaces any row with something strictly better.

Constitutional Constraints

Wishocracy144 picks the winner. But Wishocracy picks from a filtered pool, because crowds are good at preferences and bad at evaluating whether a 50-page systems engineering document is mechanistically sound. A beautifully written plan that skips the hard parts should not beat an ugly plan that solves them. And your species is deeply status-quo biased: you have been programmed your entire lives to treat the Federal Reserve, the congressional budget process, the IRS, and representative democracy as laws of nature rather than design choices that are producing catastrophic results. Left unconstrained, crowds will pick plans that preserve these institutions with cosmetic reforms, which will recreate every problem the prize exists to solve.

So: eleven hard constraints that no submission can violate, regardless of how many humans vote for it. The first four ensure the plan is real. The next two ensure it survives. The last five ensure the new system does not become the old one.

The plan must be real:

  1. The selfishness rule. If your plan requires any participant to become less selfish, it is disqualified. This is the single most powerful filter. Most policy proposals fail here.
  2. The two metrics. Must demonstrably improve median healthy life years and median real after-tax income. Not “probably.” Show the mechanism.
  3. The completeness rule. Must cover every required function in the Minimum Acceptable Governance table, or prove one is unnecessary. No skipping the hard parts.
  4. The mechanism rule. Must describe HOW, not just WHAT. “Universal healthcare” is a destination, not a route. Disqualified.

The plan must survive:

  1. The capture resistance rule. Must explain why concentrated interests cannot co-opt the system. If your plan has a board, explain why the board cannot be bought. If it does not have a board, explain what prevents capture anyway.
  2. The ratchet rule. Must be self-sustaining once started. No plans that depend on continued goodwill, because your species’ goodwill has a half-life of approximately one news cycle.

The old failure modes must die:

  1. No capturable intermediary in public goods allocation. Budget decisions must flow from citizen preferences to resource allocation without a layer of representatives who can be lobbied, bribed, or captured. This does not prescribe any specific allocation mechanism. It rules out “we’ll fix Congress.” Your species has been trying to fix Congress for 248 years. Congress is performing as designed. The design is the problem.
  2. Monetary neutrality. Any new money created by the system must enter at the population level, not through politically connected intermediaries. The Cantillon effect (whoever gets new money first benefits; whoever gets it last pays) means new money enters through politically connected intermediaries, not the population. This does not prescribe any specific monetary system. It rules out preserving a money printer that funds wars without consent and steals 2% of purchasing power per year by design.
  3. No single point of rollback. No individual, committee, or institution can unilaterally reverse the system’s progress. A treaty that one president can exit by tweet is not a treaty. A fund that one board can liquidate is not durable. If your plan has a kill switch, it will be used, because your species has never built a kill switch it didn’t eventually pull.
  4. Rights firewall. The allocation mechanism is constitutionally restricted to bounded resource questions. No collective mechanism can override individual bodily autonomy, criminalize personal choices that harm no one else, or restrict access to proven-safe treatments. You cannot vote away rights. No plan may improve its terminal metrics by externalizing costs onto populations excluded from the allocation mechanism: future generations, foreign populations outside the treaty, and nonhuman sentient beings. Allocation is democratizable. Rights are not.
  5. Full transparency. Every allocation, transaction, and decision must be publicly auditable by any participant. No classified budgets. No hidden flows. Opacity is how capture hides.

These are constitutional constraints, not preferences. A submission that fails any one of these never reaches the voters, the same way a law that violates the First Amendment never reaches the statute books (in theory; your species’ track record on this is mixed).

How Judging Works

Expert panel filters for compliance. A small panel verifies that submissions satisfy all eleven constitutional constraints. The panel does not judge quality. It judges whether the entry is a real plan or a wish with a flag.

Adversarial review. Other contestants can challenge a submission’s claims. If you say your plan is capture-resistant, a challenger can post a bond and present a specific capture scenario. Verified challenges send the submission back for revision or disqualify it. This is peer review, except the reviewers are competitors with financial incentives to find your mistakes.

Wishocracy ranks the survivors. Every submission that passes the constitutional filter and survives adversarial review enters pairwise comparison. Citizens compare two plans at a time: “Which of these two would you rather live under?” About 20 comparisons, 5 minutes. Registered voters are eligible to participate in wishocratic ranking of competing plans. The crowd does not need to understand mechanism design. The crowd needs to understand “which of these two futures sounds less terrible?” Humans are surprisingly good at that question and surprisingly bad at everything else.

The winner becomes the Earth Optimization Protocol v2. If nobody beats v1, v1 wins by default, which means we were right that it is terrible but wrong that anyone could do better, and that is a more depressing outcome than we are prepared to contemplate.

The minimum bar for scoring. Any proposal that cannot beat the risk-adjusted treaty benchmark on cost per DALY does not get scored:

Intervention Cost per DALY averted
Malaria bed nets (current gold standard)

$89
1% Treaty (conditional, if adopted)

$0.00177
1% Treaty (risk-adjusted, 1% success)

$0.177

What v1 Claims (and What You Need to Beat)

The prize asks one question: who can cause verified implementation of a complete package that wins on welfare per dollar? We wrote v1 because competitions need a starting entry. We expect to lose. Here is what v1 claims, paper by paper, and the specific benchmarks you need to beat:

Paper What the prize uses it for Key benchmark to beat
The 1% Treaty139 First large transfer from low-value military spending to high-value medical discovery $27.2B/year; $0.00177/DALY conditional; 10.7 billion deaths averted
Ubiquitous Pragmatic Trial Impact Analysis140 ROI case for medical evidence generation as destination for redirected capital 12.3x capacity increase; queue from 443 to 36 years; $0.842/DALY
Incentive Alignment Bonds143 Financing and political-adoption engine 272% annual return; 230 mechanism BCR
Wishocracy144 Preference aggregation with intensity Binding at >=2% participation; 10-30 pairwise comparisons per citizen
The Political Dysfunction Tax46 Master ledger of value left on the floor $101T/year globally
The Invisible Graveyard142 Mortality proof that delay kills 8.2 years delay; 102 million deaths; 7.94 billion DALYs
The Price of Political Change149 Budget ceiling for buying legal democratic pressure $1B; >259k ROI
United States Efficiency Audit145 Concrete waste map $4.9T/year; $2.45T recoverable
Optimocracy146 Cross-jurisdiction recommendation engine Causal policy comparison across thousands of jurisdictions
OPG147 Law-level enact/replace/repeal engine Policy Impact Score; 5-15% GDP welfare gains
OBG148 Spending-level reallocation engine Budget Impact Score; 20-40% misallocation correctable
Continuous Evidence Generation Protocol141 Medical evidence machine $0.1/patient Stage 1; $929/patient Stage 2
Drug Development Cost Increase Analysis73 Proof current regulation is catastrophically expensive 105x cost increase; $2.6B/drug
How to End War and Disease Integrated narrative and coalition wrapper $1B total cost; 1% success probability