FAQ#

A plain-language tour of the most common questions about this site, in rough order from “what is this?” through “how can I help?” to some “harder questions.” Nothing here asks you to believe anything — the whole project is offered to be tested, not believed. Hence #AuditTheMath. All answers are open by default — use Collapse all to scan the questions, Expand all to reopen them, or jump to any question from the list just below.

Getting oriented#

The problem#

The proposed solution#

What is the ~$8 ask and cap of “~$8 per year per person per stadion” about?

~$8 is a deliberately chosen ask as a recommended voluntary buy in. It is a request to buy into one of ResearchCity’s 1600 research “stadia”. For one year. By one person. The cost is a little over two cents a day. New year new stadion, or maybe not. The allocation of funds is tentative; it is meant to be respected and recorded by ResearchCity, but it is not binding in the sense that ResearchCity stadia can reallocate funds received as they see fit in order to keep the overall integration work balanced. Not all stadia are necessarily glamorous enough to attract the funds they need to best serve all of ResearchCity and thereby all of the world. Hence reallocation. The ~$8 are the official limit for everyone /year/stadion, meant to eventually be adjusted up or down with the median income in the world’s poorest nation, precisely so that anyone on Earth can afford to buy into “their” stadion to be fully represented in ResearchCity — and moneyed special interests are kept at arm’s length to ensure they cannot buy influence that exploits others.

~$8 is not a claim that the initial ask of ~$8/person/year is enough for everything. It cannot run all of LLoL’s ResearchCity as envisioned. The real budgets are to be worked out stage by stage. The ~$8 are the entry point, posing the question to the world, whether (i) enough people are actually interested, and (ii) moneyed special interests and who-knows-which nefarious organizations will actually allow this to happen. It’s a proof of principle that such a system working for the common good can in practice be funded by a world as heterogeneous as ours. In that sense it is a historical experiment in bridge-building through an effort that is funded by a great many people barely noticing the cost rather than by a few who could then expect a say (beyond speaking for truth gentle kind reasonably). Theory suggests strongly that a multitude of small contributions can accomplish what several equivalently large ones cannot. Hence, general principles of complex systems design are the driving reasons behind the ~$8/year/person/stadion cap and the annual ~$8 recommendation.

More to give? You can back more stadia, not by paying more per stadion. ResearchCity is envisioned as a network of 1,600 research stadia (its structure), and you may back as many as you like, up to all 1,600. So the regular annual cap for any billionaire is about $8 x 1,600 ~ $12,800, and no one — however wealthy — may exceed it in a normal year. The cap is the feature: it is designed to stop anyone from buying too much undue influence.

Start-up exceptions (temporary, launch only). Two real-world frictions get a one-time allowance, so an initial moment of change is not wasted:

Catch-up: LLoL’s work is roughly 7 years late (the marathon began in 2020), so during the start-up phase you may also buy in for those earlier years — up to x7.
Sponsoring the excluded: only about 1 in 8 people worldwide even has a credit card, so you may also cover the buy-in of up to 7 others who currently cannot — x8 (yourself plus seven).
How you give is up to you: some may wish to only buy in with $8 initially but may then decide to opt in with more. That’s OK. However, please, keep track of the limits for the time being until ResearchCity can set up an infrastructure to automate that.

Together these set the absolute start-up ceiling for maximal buy-in at about 448x an All-Stadia Backer’s level ($8 x 1,600 x 7 x 8 ~ $716,800) — a temporary maximum (56x the normal cap) that returns to ~$12,800/year afterwards. The full arithmetic is on the Buy-In page.

Where the number came from (for those who care). The ~$8 is scaled up from the two small coins of the widow in the Gospel (Mark 12 / Luke 21), who gave her last two cents while wealthy people gave large sums — and of whom Jesus said she had given more than all of them, because she gave out of her poverty. In fact she literally gave more than all of them, because she inspired LLoL’s idea of using this crowd-funding strategy for ResearchCity. The 1,600 stadia are an echo of Revelation 14:20, reinterpreted as LLoL’s prayer — that instead of filling 1,600 stadia (like that one in ancient Laodicea) with the blood of ~8 billion people (roughly the volume — the arithmetic comes startlingly close), Reality may relent instead and grant the grace that this world needs to gentle kind reasonable scale up instead 1,600 research stadia to avert “Armageddon”-disasters. Take or leave the inspiration, like you may take or leave Kekulé’s snake that inspired his chemistry. The ~$8 ask, the cap, and the small-contributions principle stand on their own. (The volume coincidence behind the 1,600 — where the modern forecast and the ancient prophecy meet — is laid out on the 1600 Stadia page.)

How you can help#

About LLoL, and the harder questions#

What is a “MADI” and how is it related to the Mahdi or a messiah?

A MADI is a Mutually Assured Destruction Inhibitor — someone who works to effectively defuse paths to mutual annihilation. It is a function, not a title. LLoL is openly seeking to be a MADI to avert accidental nuclear winter. How such a MADI function may possibly relate to other prophetic roles is genuinely hard to determine — a question LLoL defers to dedicated eschatological work in ResearchCity (see below) rather than pronouncing on it himself.

Read on only if you care about details of eschatological complexities.

The Mahdi is a prophetic role in Islamic eschatology, expected to bring peace to the world by fighting the Dajjal, the greatest deceiver. In that sense the Mahdi is a messiah, but not the Messiah. According to Islam and Christianity that is Isa = Jesus = YhowShua (see Yas).

Figuring out reliably who instantiates such prophetic figures will likely require no less than at least one dedicated research stadion for eschatological studies in ResearchCity (like the STa4-REV stadion I envision). Any of these prophetic roles could be anyone, including you not yet realizing it’s you. But this should not make a difference to what we do if we stay gentle kind reasonable because the latter is the key to everything in any case.

Any responsible student of eschatology realizes eventually how hard it can be to reliably identify actual persons with prophetic roles predicted by ancient scriptures. Some even think it’s impossible or futile and give up altogether (as LLoL did long ago). However, it’s complicated because humans are wired to be “pattern-matchers”, whether they want to or not. And some of the patterns in ancient prophetic writings are derived from such long-standing observations and deep insight into how the world works, that they are only dismissed at one’s own peril. Therefore, these eschatological questions will not disappear because some think they are inconvenient, incomprehensible, or irrelevant. The future of any group lies in its eschatology and visions of the apocalypse keep shaping official policy decisions. In fact, it doesn’t take much surveying to realize that a significant fraction of many people’s work, worry, and wealth continues to be invested into resolving relevant eschatological questions and fears. The miners of old had a canary in the coal mine to placate their fears. For as long as the canary was alive, they knew that they were safe from invisible toxic gases that they knew could kill them. Once the canary was dead they knew they had to evacuate the mine. What LLoL proposes to become is such a “Canary in Earth’s Mine”, allowing anyone to easily check if ResearchCity is still on track to solve the world’s hardest existential challenges. These include averting accidental nuclear winter as well as developing a mathematical theology for gentle kind reasonably reconciling the various eschatologies that are otherwise set to blow up the world by mistaking those for enemies who in fact are allies. The story of godly King Josiah is a lesson in point. He died in a needless battle by “friendly fire”, because he failed to see that the real enemy was in the wrong assumptions he had been making about some other king. That battle near Megiddo arguably gave Armageddon its name. LLoL eventually summarized it as this: Every Armageddon-disaster is triggered by a Datageddon failure to connect the dots that matter most. One may as well say: every failure is a failure to understand. Such considerations have brought LLoL to strongly doubt that it will be possible for any individual or small group of scholars to reliably resolve any of these endtime riddles unless the world’s leading experts, supported by everyone else, work together on these questions in a ResearchCity stadion like STa4-REV. LLoL envisions it to create the most complete memomics alignment of all ideas about the end-times that can be constructed (a technical challenge and design-test for Evolvix). This enormous alignment (leveraging the tools of meta-genomics) may hold important clues about which patterns were seen by whom, how they have been playing out repeatedly in history, and what we can learn from them to avert the mistakes of the past.

Hence, the complexity of eschatological identifications precludes simple answers, because many sages agree that anyone could make the ultimate difference in the fate of the world. For example, what if the following fascinating account expresses some deep truth by claiming that, in effect, everyone is some form of a messiah, called to improve the world in unique ways? See at Ancient Jewish Wisdom: The True Identity of Moshiach.

LLoL can neither confirm nor deny many of the claims that are readily made in eschatology, not because he doesn’t have some suspicions of his own, but simply because his mathematical theology hasn’t caught up yet. That is why he is calling for a ResearchCity to #AuditTheMath for studying these questions. To ensure that LLoL doesn’t derail the good ideas in that effort, LLoL applies openly for the job of MADI, asking to be watched, because he realized how easily any mis-analysis in “us-vs-them” discussions can descend into nefarious suspicions made up by nothing out of nowhere. LLoL has been called by nothing to stand against such nonsense.