Suggest edit — manifestos.world

Title

Name

Note

---
confidence: high
related:
- wiki/projects/ideaflow.md
- wiki/themes/vision-for-the-world.md
sources:
- raw/transcript.md
title: manifestos.world
type: project
visibility: public
---

# manifestos.world

The **Vision Charter** Jacob built. A repository of all the visions people have for the world.

## What Jacob says about it

> "I made a website. It's got two parts, but the part is called Vision Charter — by going to manifestos.world. And the point is, I want to remember a database of all the visions that people have for the world."

The two-part structure isn't fully explained in this transcript; only the Vision Charter half is described.

## Why it exists

> "I want to see which visions you want to use my taste to curate and decide which ones I like. And we can use our collective taste."

Two purposes braided together:

1. **Inventory** — make explicit the actual variety of visions humans hold for the world. Most policy debates assume narrow defaults; making the variety visible reveals hidden options.
2. **Taste-curation** — Jacob's "philosopher kings" instinct. The right visions, curated by the right taste, become more visible and easier for others to adopt or refine.

## The "philosopher kings" framing

Jacob is explicit about his bias here:

> "I'm a philosopher-kings kind of guy at some level, where I think people with really good taste — the world would be best if people with actually good taste have the power to exert that taste. And I don't know if I have the best taste, but I've got good taste, I think — so maybe I can nominate a better-taste person."

The framing is uncomfortable in egalitarian register. Jacob pre-empts the discomfort by:
- Not claiming to be the philosopher-king himself
- Framing it as **using one's taste to nominate**, not as ruling
- Treating it as a stage, not a final structure (collective taste eventually scales)

## Connection to David's question

David asked the question that prompted this:

> "Let's say you have 100,000 of the most intelligent humans on the planet, and they each come from different personal experiences... and therefore they each have first-principle'd their way to a different vision they see in the world. What vision after 100 years actually gets built?"

Jacob's answer: **manifestos.world** is the surfacing layer. Make all 100,000 visions explicit and queryable; let collective taste differentiate; let the best ideas propagate.

## What's missing from the Vision Charter alone

The Vision Charter inventories visions. It doesn't yet do:

- **Debate graphs** — which would model agreement and disagreement explicitly. Jacob mentions this as a target: "you can have a debate graph of human-human debate as well, on top of that."
- **Issue tracker** — the [[World Issue Tracker]] is a separate project for known *problems* (vs. desired future states).
- **Progress bars** — the [[World Progress Bar]] is the measurement layer.

Together, these four would form the substrate for the **collective sense-making** half of [[Humanity 3.0]] (the other half being collective action — see [[Accretive Collective Action]]).

## Status

The transcript doesn't describe usage / scale / who's contributing. The site exists; how active it is would need verification.

## Related

- [[World Issue Tracker]] — companion project for problems
- [[World Progress Bar]] — measurement layer
- [[Vision for the World]] — the larger frame
- [[IdeaFlow]] — the substrate technology

## Inspirations & adjacent thinking

### Great User Interface Cures Scarcity — Fry & Lieberman

[whycantwe.org/great-user-interface-cures-scarcity](https://www.whycantwe.org/great-user-interface-cures-scarcity)

Christopher Fry & Henry Lieberman (~2017, part of the *Why Can't We All Just Get Along?* essay series, [whycantwe.org](https://www.whycantwe.org)).

**Thesis:** Material scarcity is mostly the residue of complex top-down supply chains, not an innate feature of human nature. Tools like AI, automation, and 3D printing have the raw power to end it, but **usability** is the bottleneck — if the means of production stay locked behind technical complexity, they stay centralized. When UIs become intuitive enough that anyone can simply *tell a machine what they need* and have it design and fabricate, the means of production get democratized, traditional supply chains get bypassed, and the scarcity-driven Prisoner's Dilemma loses its grip.

**Why it belongs on the Vision Charter:** This is a foundational vision for *what post-scarcity actually requires* — a counterweight to visions that assume the technology alone is enough. It pairs naturally with manifestos.world's premise: surface the variety of visions, then make the missing infrastructure (great UIs) actually cheap to build.

### The Justify lineage (same authors)

Fry & Lieberman's MIT Software Agents Group also built **Justify** — an interactive end-user development environment for deliberation: hierarchies of typed points (pro / con / mathematical / aesthetic / …), inference rules summarizing groups of points, "interactive browsing modes [as] visualizers or debuggers for arguments." Public artifacts: book *Why Can't We All Just Get Along? How Science Can Enable a More Cooperative Future* (Fry & Lieberman, 2018), [whycantwe.org/mit-course](https://www.whycantwe.org/mit-course).

Justify is the prior art for the **debate-graph** layer this page already names as missing from the Vision Charter ("you can have a debate graph of human-human debate as well, on top of that").

### Realtime hierarchical debate outliner (open WIT issue)

[worldissuetracker.com/issue/ff959aa4-5ede-45ef-84cf-6579d39ef65a](https://worldissuetracker.com/issue/ff959aa4-5ede-45ef-84cf-6579d39ef65a)

Filed 2026-05-08. Modern LLMs can do **live, audience-facing** argument structuring on any debate stream — finally closing the loop Justify's research argued for, since Justify always required participants to author structure manually. Audience-facing visualization on top of a typed-points + fallacy ontology, deployed during a live political/council/podcast debate. Companion to manifestos.world on the deliberation side.

### Related entries to follow up on

- **Other essays in the same series at whycantwe.org:** *No Income Housing*, *Preventing Pandemics*, *Village Justice*, *A Science of Language*, *How to Invent a Language* — each maps to "what post-scarcity infrastructure looks like in domain X."
- **Fry & Lieberman MIT course:** [whycantwe.org/mit-course](https://www.whycantwe.org/mit-course) — public curriculum form of the book's argument; useful primer when introducing the framing to others.
- **Henry Lieberman's homepage:** [web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/](https://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/) — full bibliography for adjacent commonsense-AI / human-centered-AI work.