Hello, and welcomed to Cause-Oriented Efficiency, Episode 2. Today, we are talking about the tagline and the iterative process of getting the tagline, where it is, and where it’s going to go in the future.
Check Out the Website and Subscribe
If you would like to learn more about Cause-Oriented Efficiency, the best way to do that is to visit our website at www.coefficiency.org, where you can contact me, you can read our blog posts and see some of the cases, causes, and solutions that are on the site. I will say it’s pretty bare at the moment and we’ve got a lot of work to do, but that is where I plan to house things that we’ll be referencing on the podcast and in other places throughout the building out of the idea. Remember to go to the website and also subscribe because I will be doing a lot of the announcements and future discussions through podcasting.
If you find the concept interesting and want to be a part of the conversation. be sure to subscribe. I will be posting podcasts regularly to give updates and to discuss the fundamental ideas around the system and changes, the philosophy, and the theoretical pieces, as well as covering news solutions to interesting causes that people will undoubtedly be very curious to learn about. All that to say, you can look forward to more episodes and I’m excited to hear from you guys. We will work together to make this realization come to fruition.
About the Book
What I’d like to cover today is the tagline just to give you an update on where I have been in the past month or so. I’ve been gathering feedback from some of the people who’ve read my book, C.O.E. Cause-Oriented Efficiency, and what I’m getting so far is really good. I tend to agree with the feedback, that the book does a good job of laying out some of the basics and the structure. I call it more of a manual or something with a lot of definitions and examples. It’s not the narrative-driven style that a lot of people find useful when they’re trying to learn a new concept. That is a criticism which I am not taking lightly, but in order to address it, some problems need to be refined further, so that we can use examples in the narratives to describe how the solutions would best be presented in the world. That would be an interesting way to demonstrate the concept and would probably draw more people in. The current layout is extremely helpful for people who want to bookmark certain areas, reference the definitions, and remember the formula. However, there will be so much more to add to the book once we’ve refined things like the weights, depending on the context, as I’ve only covered rough guesses of weights. There are so many potential ways to represent them.
The factors are similar, and there are a lot of factors that I’ve probably left out that might require further discussion. I have notes upon notes upon notes of things I need to cover and discuss and think through.
So, there is a backlog of things to get through. I find it’s mostly important to figure out the best way to describe the concept to people as we are trying to recruit people to be part of the process, to make this a reality.
Refining and Simplifying
To that end, I’ve been working on a presentation that simplifies and distills the way the book is written into a more streamlined narrative style. It’s still very much definition-oriented with one example and a lot uses of structure and definitions. I’ve carved the books’ one-and-a-half-hour read to thirty minutes. Over time, I’ll get it down even further. The goal is to have a pitch that’s closer to 30 seconds to a minute. I’m not sure that would sufficiently cover everything, hence the necessity of having long-winded discussions about the value of the system itself.
The reason for today’s episode is a component of my thought process over the past couple of weeks, simplifying and distilling everything down. That’s hard for someone like me who’s very focused on the big picture and the long-term goals of this and knowing that a lot of it is going to change and the details will be flipping around. It’s going to be contingent upon the different contexts within this all exists.
Evolution of COE’s Tagline
The problem is trying to figure out which of the taglines work best. I’ve been working on different versions of the tagline. I’d like to discuss where it start and the iterations of where it’s been, where it’s going, and what we’ve landed on for today. It seems like anytime I get in the shower and have a couple of minutes of free time to think, the tagline tends to change a little bit.
This is going back to when the book came about a year ago. It was originally something along the lines of, “Cause-oriented efficiency is an easy way for anyone to understand solutions to problems.” It is an easy way for people to understand solutions to problems, but that doesn’t emphasize the realized utility of the system and the value that it would create if it was adopted in a mass way. It doesn’t stimulate any vision of how the system can crunch through the problem/solution relationship and come up with insightful, meaningful takeaways.
While this tagline is not incorrect, it is a bit bland in describing the value. Some of the changes that I’ve made since then are—and you’ll see this on the website—right now is “human progress measured.” Those of you who’ve read the book know that the key element of cause-oriented efficiency is the efficiency score and some of the other pieces around that. It gives you a very clear indication of how effective or efficient the solution is to a given cause. That is the power of the system as a whole. It makes sense to think about progress being the causes that we’re accomplishing and being measured, being the score that we come up with using the efficiency formula as the measurement of the progress.
“Cause-oriented efficiency is an easy way for anyone to understand solutions to problems.”
It sounds accurate, but it doesn’t have the extra-punch of great value and why we absolutely need this. When you read the book, you know that this is something we need and this is something, that if adopted, would be great. But for someone who is new to the idea, I need to figure out a way to get that across quickly.
What About this Tagline?
One tagline—and it’s not refined—but it’s the best so far:
“Cause-oriented efficiency mechanizes the arguments of truth to solutions for the use of speeding up human flourishing.”
I don’t really like any of the wording that I’ve used there but I want get across that it’s mechanizing, it’s utilizing, or putting into a system the arguments of the truths. So, the arguments are the cases; the truths are the factors with the weights to the solutions, so it’s mechanizing those things in order to spend up our human flourishing. It’s harnessing the power of the arguments and the discussions that we’re having and mechanizing those. So, it’s putting them into a system where they can distill a number and maybe that’s what I say.
The only thing about the way all of this works is that the implication which has to be spoken to is that it takes people who will understand the score and use that information to some way in their life to make the world a better place. The way I see that playing out would be something like where you have to vote on a complicated piece of environmental legislation that you don’t understand, but you know you could look up on Cause-Oriented Efficiency, you could understand the arguments for both sides of this debate using the factors and the weights, and you would see what solutions are best, or are most valid to be implemented or to generate human flourishing from. In every context, you’d be able to make decisions of what to vote for. Should you vote for this thing or not? In that sense, you are directly impacting the future of the way everyone lives their lives. The beauty and vision of this is that it takes off and everyone uses something like this, which is supposed to be the most trustworthy way of gathering this information and presenting it in a way that people could see easily.
Think of a Zipper
The metaphor that goes along well with this tagline, which I’ve been playing with as a visual—I’ve been saying with other taglines is bridging the information gap from complex information to average, ordinary people. Instead of thinking about two pieces of land that need to be bridged together so that you can cross over, it’s more like a zipper. Cause-oriented efficiency is that metal piece in-between that brings the teeth together. In the middle, you see complex information on one side and average understanding of the issue on the other side and there’s this big whole in-between. As the zipper moves across and as we gather more cases, it’s sort of like zipping up the zipper to the problem. There are some technical reasons that the metaphor wouldn’t work, but I think it’s a much more accurate way to think about the way this is working. It’s sort of like sewing together the pieces of reality. On one side, you have complex information, which is chaotic and untamed, and on the other side, you have people that have to receive this information in a way that is digestible and also easy to uncover if it’s true or not.
Trust is Necessary
The entire problem is not just that people don’t understand, but there’s also the idea that once you understand, how do you know that the information is trustworthy? And that touches on a whole other piece of the Cause-Oriented Efficiency movement, which is that we need a trusted community and people to buy into this idea. We have to check biases at the door, that sort of thing.
Let’s Talk!
I would love to hear more of your questions and comments about the idea. Feel free to reach out. Visit my website, www.coefficiency.org and contact me there. I’d be happy to a podcast with you to discuss further and spread the word.
In the future, I’d like to get this to be a much bigger project, something that we could get people behind and sink our teeth into some real issues to resolve and see what it takes and see what that means. There’s a lot of refining to do.
Reach out, let me, give me feedback, and we’ll go from there.
This is David Blane. I’m the author of Cause-Oriented Efficiency and the host of this podcast, Cause-Oriented Efficiency.
I will talk to you guys during Episode 3.
[End of Recording 00:17:41]