I, Vo Viet Anh, should be admitted to the Global Solutions Program 2016 at Singularity University

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I, Vo Viet Anh, should be admitted to the Global Solutions Program 2016 at Singularity University by Mind Map: I, Vo Viet Anh, should be admitted to the Global Solutions Program 2016 at Singularity University

1. My project PropMap can positively affect billions of lives and change the world

1.1. PropMap can replace most form of knowledge transfer media such as books, and make ALL content fact-based.

1.1.1. PropMap can replace books.

1.1.1.1. Instead of writing a book, which is a flat, fragmented presentation of knowledge, you can create rooms propping each other and group those rooms under your book's name.

1.1.2. PropMap can replace news articles.

1.1.2.1. Journalists can simply post their new findings as rooms, and link them/cross-reference with existing rooms to make further deductions.

1.1.3. PropMap can replace presentation slideshows.

1.1.3.1. I don't have to present my ideas in separate slides anymore. I can walk my audience through my interconnecting rooms. Every idea is propped. I can easily "step back to look at the big picture" by going High, trace back to a point of talk, or switch topics easily (switch from one branch of rooms to another) with my audience losing the context.

1.1.4. PropMap can replace research papers.

1.1.4.1. No need to list anything in your reference/bibliography section anymore. Prop any of your conclusions, research results with existing rooms.

1.2. PropMap can solve large scale problems of the society.

1.2.1. PropMap can solve the "crisis of truth" that we are facing when there is so much information from so many sources and people that there's no way to consolidate all information to find out how much true something is.

1.2.2. PropMap can solve the problem of leader discord - leaders are holding too many different opinions about how things should be done that they cannot unite.

1.2.3. PropMap can help solve the following problems: no coherent knowledge tree structure for academic research and massive collaboration, no strategic profiling platform, leader discord, lack of awareness of existential risks, negligence of macro-vulnerabilities, “language” barrier to pure knowledge and redundancy of knowledge.

1.2.3.1. Academic research and massive collaboration: Web users can only look at one piece of knowledge at a time (at Wikipedia or other Google search results) rather than a big picture containing all pieces of the collective human knowledge and their relations. I grew dissatisfied with what I could find during online research with Wikipedia and Google. It was not because there was too much knowledge on the web but because a single coherent tree structure for all knowledge was nonexistent. It was easy to get lost trying to figure out all foundations of a complex multidisciplinary knowledge (e.g. cloud robotics) or all applications of a theory (e.g. general relativity), the highest level philosophical insights of experts in a field (e.g. “Bitcoin will be bigger than the internet”) or the deepest level technical tips (e.g. algorithms measuring Levenshtein distance between two strings), or in which intellectual direction I should explore in order to ultimately invent new knowledge, i.e. original research or novel technology. At the same time, scientists lack an optimal tool that integrates the tree structure of knowledge for massive collaboration in solving hard problems. To address these problems, I envisioned a futuristic Wikipedia that surpasses the conventional concepts of all knowledge bases, make it easier to research systematically, navigate intellectually, collaboratively solve hard problems to arrive at original and/or profitable ideas.

1.2.3.2. Strategic profiling: There are too many credentialed people out there to decide who to listen to, partner with, or hire. Every person is represented by a long list of achievements, companies, publications, public profiles, questions and answers, social network, status messages scattered across multiple sources on the web, which take too long to research. On the other hand, what we are concerned the most with when gauging someone’s skill depth, wisdom, and mindset/logic, are (1) his deepest technical knowledge, (2) highest level conclusions, and (3) how one jumped from assumptions to conclusions (in an extreme case, Deepak Chopra’s logic was so flawed he made long shots to inane conclusions outside of his fields). By treating each user as an object on the 3rd dimension (together with other group objects) comprised of pointers to all pieces of knowledge he has created, endorsed, learned, and connections he has drawn between these pieces, PropMap allows each user to maintain a singular profile on the web including the most meaningful information about that person’s mind—basically what matters most to find or be found by like-minded partners, employers, or benefactors.

1.2.3.3. Leader discord: It’s very common to find experts in the same field with glaringly contrasting positions and there’s no way to verify their conclusions in order to decide which one is correct . For example, Dr. Kurzweil complained in [Kurzweil 2012] about Paul Allen’s lack of point-to-point critique that preluded any constructive argument. Each of them stood for a unique set of data, facts, life experiences, influences, and disciplinary knowledge that simply doesn’t overlap with the other’s enough to convince the other. There’s no platform for them to map their “knowledge set” to serve as the basis of their argument. In other cases, I often encountered intellectual leaders who were apparently smart with deep expertise in their respective fields but somehow naïve or even ignorant regarding worldly matters. Some were too clouded by their ego (inability to admit one's own fault lest losing face) or emotion (traumatically forged reaction) to reason beyond their jelled assumptions, to unlearn and relearn. A constant question in my mind was “What exactly made this person assume that? Does he know a crucial piece of knowledge that may change my mind, or simply have a ridiculous Deepak-Chopra-esque logic? Where is he stuck?” Without such knowledge, there’s no way to pinpoint the root of their assumptions and hold a constructive conversation. As a result, I had been thinking of a platform to help mitigate bias and close the gap between subjectivity and objectivity—where experts can exhaustively trace their current positions back to assumptions that constitute their fundamental differences, and verify these assumptions in order to reach a consensus.

1.2.3.4. Unawareness of danger: A level of awareness high enough to perceive existential risks requires a high amount of the right knowledge. Since any knowledge has a price-tag, there is just not enough resource to pursue all kinds of knowledge. However, only a limited number of people at this level of awareness (e.g. those at CSER and FLI) are concentrating their resources on acquiring the core body of scientific and technological knowledge that may help us avert these risks, while the majority of the world (even smart people) is ignorantly squandering resources (including their brainpower ) on knowledge that doesn’t directly translate to our long-term survival. A series of frustration had led me to the conception of PropMap: When I became conscious of climate change and other environmental issues, my peers in university hadn’t, so I joined the environmental movement alone. When I became conscious of the limitations of purely environmental solutions and approaches, my fellow activists and scientists hadn’t, so I engaged in the Singularitarian community to explore knowledge in various fields alone. When I realized that the community, in their fixation on disruptive technologies, had lost track of the big picture where politics and public ignorance largely affect the pace of their progress towards the Singularity, Singularitarians didn’t seem to heed, so I conceived PropMap.

1.2.3.5. Negligence of weaknesses: Everyone in the computer sciences knows how much damage bugs or deep technical vulnerabilities may cause to rapidly expanding information systems. However, very few are aware of how much threat larger-scale and more abstract vulnerabilities pose to our survival against the odds of existential risks from Nature or even our own exponential technological revolution. To ensure our survival, we must learn to identify vulnerabilities (called “weaknesses” in this paper) from the smallest to the largest scale—every bit and piece of information we miss, the content of what you eat or breathe, any possibility we fail to take into account in our plan/theory/algorithm, or any failure to acknowledge and insulate our own biological limitations, and the very population of people that carry such weaknesses. With a knowledge map, it would be possible to circle where weaknesses might be most damaging if exploited in order to contain them with layers of high-level security plans, or concentrate resources to eliminate them once and for all—a process called weakness management. Against the prospect of future crime, PropMap is meant to be worth millions of words on security.

1.2.3.6. Language barrier and knowledge redundancy: Wikipedia is written in the most human-friendly language—human language, which is not optimal for knowledge representation. IBM’s Watson and most AIs have to derive knowledge through crawling and parsing countless data in this language, which might take indefinitely long for them to achieve human-level intelligence. So, why is there no Wikipedia for AIs, written in more machine-friendly languages? Humans expect machines to understand them and yet so few (mostly programmers) can make their thoughts clear-cut enough to be understood by machines in forms of code and algorithms. There are code crowdsourcing websites such as Stack Overflow, TopCoder, and Kaggle but their solutions are so disconnected and limited to very deep technical problems, while there is an enormous amount of high-level knowledge that can be translated into more machine-friendly languages by just anyone (not just programmers) so that machines can help us solve higher level problems. Another problem with our reliance on human languages, which are a barrier to pure knowledge, is the explosive redundancy of knowledge, e.g. “bin Laden might be dead” and “bin Laden was killed.” If there is a platform to crowdsource systematic codification of hierarchical knowledge, we can accelerate machine learning (a top-down approach to complement current bottom-up approaches), all while downsizing the collective knowledge, and teaching users algorithmic thinking to think in first order logic and rigorously define actionable high-level knowledge, e.g. an algorithm to allocate resources and determine actions taken against specific populations within a time frame that guarantees existential risks lower than a threshold. The 4th dimension is a future project to upgrade PropMap into such a platform.

1.3. PropMap is a beautiful framework.

1.3.1. PropMap can capture the collective body of knowledge in its entirety

1.3.2. With the Singularity placed at one end of each dimension as the ultimate goal, these dimensions give you a sense of direction in learning/creating knowledge

1.3.3. PropMap can answer all of my lifelong questions.

1.3.4. PropMap is a tool that I myself have always coveted to use in planning, decision making, risk management, and resource allocation. Main characters in my sci-fi novel have been using Propmap for those purposes.

1.3.5. The “theory of weaknesses” based on PropMap has the potential to change your worldview forever.

1.3.6. The model of knowledge for PropMap featuring 4 dimensions of knowledge is the result of my lifelong attempts to make sense of all knowledge I had stumbled upon. It is the ultimate culmination of all of my intellectual and emotional experiences to date, the answer to all of my questions, and the tool to solve every future problem.

1.4. We have realistic roadmap to achieve the final form of PropMap under any circumstances

1.4.1. Even if I cannot go to Singularity University, my project can still succeed. We will launch in our home country Vietnam before going global

1.4.1.1. I have assembled a strong team to execute our project.

1.4.1.1.1. We have a strong salesman, Khoa, who is working for UNESCO Vietnam and several stealth startups. He has relocated from a remote city to Saigon since in 2014 and in one 1 year he has established a massive personal network and credentials in this city. In 2015 alone, he raised almost 1 million dollars for various UNESCO projects.

1.4.1.1.2. We have a strong product guy, Tien, who is also working for UNESCO Vietnam and various startups. He single-handedly made KiotViet.vn the best POS solution in Vietnam, as its representative in Saigon. He is the one who demonstrate the potental of pivoting PropMap into a feedback analysis service.

1.4.1.1.3. We have a strong developer, Binh, who is working for the 2nd largest software outsourcing agency in Vietnam, TMA Solutions. He has been a developer for 8 years, started up once, and is thirsty for a really meaningful project like PropMap.

1.4.1.1.4. We have the insane ME! Who will cross mountains to achieve the final form of PropMap!

1.4.1.1.5. We also have a strong biz dev, designer, and AI researcher who are eager to change the world by starting with something small.

1.4.1.2. We are working on a pivoted version of PropMap that targets a painful demand of large corporations in our country, which is the need to collect, analyze feedback from hundreds of thousands of customers per month in order to make efficient decisions and create a "positive feedback loop" between these corporations and their customers.

1.4.1.2.1. One of our potential customers, Golden Gate Group (ggg.com.vn), spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to collect customer feedback but failed.

1.4.1.2.2. Our PropMap F2D (feedback-to-decisions) includes a customer feedback analysis service and a decision-making tool that incorporates the analysis results and any other sources of corporate/personal information to help decision-makers make more fact-based decisions.

1.5. Using PropMap changes the way one thinks and behaves and over time one can absorb what I call "PropMap's philosophy"

1.5.1. https://spyramid.quora.com/PropMaps-philosophy

1.5.2. The society is getting too Soft, indulging in conducting easy and fun activities and learning useless knowledge. Using PropMap help one become aware of the difference between Soft and Hard knowledge, so that one would minimize Soft knowledge, maximize Hard knowledge. In particular, they will find it more rewarding to invest more time and money in science and technology.

1.5.3. Humans' mental resolution is so birany - true or false, existing or not existing, happened or not happened. That's why it sucks. PropMap can raise the mental resolution beyond binary values, namely to probabilities (0 to 100).

1.5.4. Most people have a protective ignorance of quantifying things - humans, values, emotions, chances, history, etc. They deem many things too valuable, spiritual, or incomprehensible to evaluate or quantify. PropMap forces users to put down everything in numbers, even emotions and karma.

1.5.5. People are to fixated on only one direction in knowledge creation, either bottom-up or top-down, while it's optimal and most efficient to alternate both. PropMap lets you go Deeper and Higher faster by alternating going Deep and going High.

1.5.6. People are too obsessed with either contrasting options (e.g. good/bad, Republic/Democracy, etc.) and being all protective about their ill-founded choice. However, the truth is, whenever two (or more) contrasting theories are both half-right and half-wrong, there exists something which is harder to comprehend yet unifies both of them. On PropMap, if two opposite things seem right, both are wrong. You can go Deeper to find Deeper materials (e.g. more fundamental mathematics or programming languages) for Higher theories that unify opposite theories.

1.5.7. Human languages are plagued with ambiguity. PropMap promotes translation to languages that are more readable to machines, laying the path to truth.

1.5.8. People just can't see "holes" in their mind and body, holes that they have to fill. And they just can't accept the process of hole filling, namely crime or war, as inevitable. Instead, they "adore" their holes, name them "humanity" and such, and try to break the balance of hole filling, just to have their own holes exposed and "filled for a profit" by others. PropMap lets people realize that wherever there are weaknesses, weakness exploitation in form of violence, crime, conflict or war is inevitable. Humans are full of weaknesses. Hack, fill them or perish.

1.5.9. Knowledge costs. Any knowledge has a price tag and no one can pay for all. The time you read "Wuthering Heights" could have been spent reading "Rocket and Propulsion." It's fine in peace time though, except that "peace" doesn't exist. Humans are in an eternal war with nature. When there's finally "peace," there's nothingness. PropMap reminds people that in times of crisis (resource deficiency), one must prioritize what to know or perishes.

1.6. PropMap can solve the gravest problem our generation is facing today that is the misallocation of attention, which leads to the misallocation of resources, on a global scale, which poses existential risks.

1.6.1. The gravest problem our generation is facing today that is the misallocation of attention, which leads to the misallocation of resources, on a global scale, which poses existential risks.

1.6.1.1. https://bit.ly/PMImportant

1.6.1.2. “We have arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up our faces.” – Carl Sagan

1.6.1.3. “I don’t think we are doing a good job as a society deciding what things are really important to do.” – Larry Page

1.6.1.4. “…These are all good things. Why aren’t they doing this? It’s mad.” – Elon Musk

1.6.1.5. "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." – Peter Thiel

1.6.1.6. “You have as much computing power in your iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions. But what is it being used for? It’s being used to throw angry birds at pigs; it’s being used to send pictures of your cat to people halfway around the world; it’s being used to check in as the virtual mayor of a virtual nowhere while you’re riding a subway from the nineteenth century.” – Peter Thiel

1.6.1.7. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher

1.6.1.8. "I believe that so many super-talented / creative people going into the law is a market failure. It's a market failure because many of these people don't understand what their alternatives are and are irrationally risk averse." - Marc Bodnick

1.6.1.9. Albert Wenger put it best: “Investable capital [exceeds] the capital required to operate the economy by 2x. [But] the overall allocation of investible capital is still way of. [This misallocation of capital is attributable] to the more fundamental problem: we are misallocating our attention.”

1.7. PropMap can help Singularitarians track the progress towards the Singularity, and may even become part of the Singularity.

1.7.1. With knowledge mapping, Pichutz provides Singularitarians with a bigger picture to realize the roadmap towards the Singularity while seeking to address numerous problems that are impeding their progress

1.7.2. The intuitive (easy to memorize, visualize, and contribute) and functional (designed for practical uses) structure of PropMap makes it a candidate for the brain of the Singularity Superintelligence (SS).

2. I have what it takes to realize PropMap.

2.1. I'm a die-hard missionary of my causes

2.1.1. I have persevered with the ideas of PropMap for a long time, since 2010 and will continue to pursue them till the end of my life.

2.1.1.1. Since 2008, my goal to make the world a better place has never swayed

2.1.1.1.1. In 2008, I went to 5th Microsoft Student Conference to present my project eHub, an education and lifestyle center for students to live healthily, learn about what to do to change the world, and take first steps by learning and applying their knowledge in local businesses.

2.1.1.2. Since 2010, I've been writing a science fiction novel, where my characters were developing a futuristic version PropMap to solve all kinds of intellectual problems.

2.1.1.2.1. Chapters in my novel GBW (since 2011): https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/358062-w-a-god-bless-war

2.1.2. I'm willing to learn whatever it takes to achieve my goals

2.1.2.1. In researching for my science fiction novel, I have dived into physics and a wide range of social and natural scientific fields and managed to draw a connection among all fields

2.1.2.1.1. I came up with the "pyramid of knowledge" bit.ly/shapeofknowledge

2.1.2.2. On Coursera, I have taken CS101, Startup Engineering, and Machine Learning. I'm reviewing these vital courses and taking CS50.

2.2. I have enough business knowledge, experience and relationship to build sustainable businesses around PropMap

2.2.1. I have a bachelor of business administration from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University.

2.2.2. I was the finalist at APU Business Case Challenge in 2010

2.2.3. I received an 100% scholarship to take the Sprout e-Course by TakingITGlobal, Pearson Foundation and Microsoft

2.2.4. I worked at Lotus Food Group and Toridoll Corporation as Assistant to Board of Directors. I counseled the Board of Vietnamese and Japanese Directors on strategy and operation, supervised the design, construction, and handing over of Japanese restaurants, did networking and external relations with business partners and government authorities.

2.2.5. I worked at The Body Food as Deputy director. I co-founded an F&B start-up to promote regular healthy eating habit among young professionals, supervised all activities of a start-up/restaurant—design, construction, finance, marketing, PR, HR, etc.

2.2.5.1. All documents about project The Body Food (2013): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9m3vlnxsulx9gzq/AADCgmVFuhKjMN-Xvq2cIQSBa?dl=0

2.2.6. I worked at Viet Youth Entrepreneurs Program/fundraising officer, interviewer. I co-founded an annual entrepreneurship bootcamp for university students, garnered nationwide coverage, generated $30,000 in sponsorship in 2011 and 500 applicants every year.

2.2.6.1. All documents about project Viet Youth Entrepreneurs (2011): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6p64ntlrs7cjsw3/AAA_u_dXTfORRaRFSSBIpc5wa?dl=0

2.2.7. I have been involved in many intellectual communities

2.2.7.1. I have been working at Saturday Coffee as Assistant to Director. I have been holding weekly talk shows featuring top intellectuals in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh (scholars, architects, lawyers, executives, journalists, professors, artists) on physics, engineering, architecture, and economics .

2.2.7.2. I was selected as one of the first XPRIZE Vanguards and was leading the XPRIZE Think Tank in my city.

2.2.7.2.1. Presentation about exponential technologies to XPRIZE Think Tank HCMC (2015): http://www.slideshare.net/mastertek/xprize-think-tank-meeting-april-26

2.3. I have been progressing steadily since early 2015

2.3.1. The documented progress and all documents about project PropMap: https://bit/ly/PMProgress

3. My PropMap can positively impact America and Americans, who will positively impact the world.

3.1. PropMap can be used to effectively "prop" presidential candidates.

3.1.1. Normally, each citizen can only vote for one candidate with faith. Meanwhile, anyone on Earth can "prop" any candidate with facts.

3.2. A very likely outcome of voting with PropMap is that people will prop presidential candidates with their policies and then in turn prop those policies to determine how beneficial each policy is to the country, or more generally, what is beneficial to the country. This way, after the election, no matter who is elected, everyone can see clearly which policies and what are beneficial to the country.

3.3. People can prop possibilities that don't exist otherwise, such as people that are not running for president such as "Elon Musk should become the president", or the conclusion that "Americans need not president."

3.3.1. Elon Musk, more than anyone else in the US, should become the President of the US.

4. My strongest GGC expertise area was [environment]

4.1. I worked for YOUNGO - UNFCCC’s Youth Constituency - as a Bottomlining Team officer. I bottomlined activities of environmental activists worldwide, coordinated with regional partners, raised EUR10,000 annually (2009~2012) from Norwegian, Netherlands government, and NGOs

4.1.1. Documents about Youth Climate fundraising (2010): http://www.slideshare.net/mastertek/norwegian-funding-proposal-by-youngo

4.1.2. Documents about activities at YOUNGO until 2010 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vaddg1vn1trg1wi/AAAELxKamS9Q1VTBoolPXRt9a?dl=0

4.2. At 5th Microsoft Regional Innovative Students’ Forum, Malaysia, 2009, I presented about eHub, an environmental project

4.2.1. http://www.slideshare.net/mastertek/first-draft-of-presentation-slideshow-for-ehub-project-paper/

4.2.2. http://www.slideshare.net/mastertek/ehub-paper-2008

4.2.3. http://www.slideshare.net/mastertek/sleep-peeper-ehub-ver-1-business-plan-2008

4.3. At 5th Global YES Summit Rework The World, Sweden, 2010 and 1st World Youth Summit, Italy, 2010, I presented about educational and social strategies for high environmental impact

4.4. At 10th Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, 2010, I presented about a monetary mechanism for passive carbon mitigation

4.4.1. Proposal about CAFECOM, a passive mechanism to mitigate carbon emission (2010): http://www.slideshare.net/mastertek/capital-flow-based-emission-control-mechanism-cafecom http://www.slideshare.net/mastertek/0-efbecm