Difference between revisions of "User:Woozle/My Left Wing/Revolution 2.0 Outline RFC/consensus"

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* how well the decisionmaking process is protected against hostile takeover
 
* how well the decisionmaking process is protected against hostile takeover
  
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==The Old Ways==
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Two ways we don't want to do things:
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===No. 1: Religion===
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* '''Religion''': top-down dissemination of ideas, little to no criticism going the other way; highly asymmetrical and centralized
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Religion is a powerful force because everyone in a particular religion has agreed, more or less, to support (at least outwardly) certain ideas. When those ideas are ostensibly threatened, the religious leadership knows that they can count on a certain amount of basic support from the membership, plus a core of more zealously active supporters, and little or no dissent most of the time.
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* '''US Democracy 1.0''': designed around 18th century communication and transportation technology, with design goals that have demonstrably failed
  
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Religions, unfortunately, are based on an idea that "you must believe that these things are true, and you must believe them without any real evidence, and any evidence you may present which contradicts them is off the table for discussion" (i.e. dogma).
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[[Collaborative technology]] throughout history has tended to evolve away from centralized, top-down (master-servant, command-structure-driven) modes of organization towards symmetrical, decentralized, spontaneous interaction.
  
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I don't think any of us here want to do things that way. We may say "you can't be one of us if you don't believe certain things", but we are happy to argue the evidence for the truth of those things -- and to update our belief-requirements if new evidence seems to shift the balance in favor of altering our beliefs. (This is part of why we need the "library" in the Revolutionary Bar & Library: so we have a public fact-base for our beliefs.)
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There are obviously some benefits to this.
  
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Centralized authority comes with a built-in single-point failure mode: you may not be able to corrupt a thousand people, but you can certainly corrupt{{footnote/link|1}} a dozen -- or one -- if the stakes are high enough.
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Mass collaboration projects like [[Wikipedia]] are able to exceed the effectiveness of staid institutions such as the [[Encyclopedia Britannica]] -- delivering content that is both comparably accurate and far more comprehensive, with no access fee -- using relatively shallow hierarchies and almost no interposition of bureaucracy between the end-user and the system. Email is delivered for free, typically in under a minute, without ever passing through a central sorting facility or being examined by a human anywhere in between sender and destination.
  
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It also comes with the built-in inefficiency of a few people trying to work out what's best for hundreds or thousands (or more), when often those individuals have been trained not to provide too much feedback (at the risk of being seen as "troublemakers" or "deviant").
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There are also some disadvantages.
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===No. 2: US-style Democracy===
 
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US-style [[democracy]] -- which I will refer to here as "democracy" for the sake of brevity -- has two major shortcomings in its design... which might be seen as part of a single design philosophy which might be stated thusly: '''people are dangerous'''. I'll come back to that.
 
  
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'''Flaw #1''' is the one-binary-vote-per-issue voting system we use. If you measure a voting system's effectiveness in terms of the net error between [what people want] and [what they actually get], this is probably the worst system possible. This large degree of error makes it particularly prone to manipulations such as [[gerrymandering]], and seems to be the largest force behind maintaining the "two-party system" duopoly we have now.
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'''We have no general way for large groups to make good decisions'''. We have online polls which are little better than toys (easily gamed, totally non-auditable), and that's about it. As yet, there are no generalized tools (that I am aware of) for arriving quickly at a collective decision which a known number of people will be prepared to comply with regardless of their individual preferences.
  
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'''Flaw #2''' is the "electoral college".
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Despite this, it's becoming clear that peer-driven organization ''can'' be used for very serious and time-sensitive real-world operations. Individuals using decentralized collaborative tools [http://irevolution.net/2011/04/03/icts-limited-statehood/ put out a forest fire in Russia], and carried out revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and other places. ''When it was clear which direction to push'', enough people pushed in the same direction to make things happen.
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{{draft}}
 
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==New Ways==
 
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First there came the mailing lists and newsletters and groups with local chapters. The mailing lists became emailing lists, from which came MoveOn and its inheritors, which created web sites that were mostly auxiliary to their main activity.
 
  
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Then there came the BBSs, which became newsgroups, which became online forums.
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This has traditionally been the excuse for imposing centralized leadership and rigid rules of compliance: the need for a small number of decisionmakers who can act quickly and decisively.
  
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Then there came the wikis, which spawned Wikipedia and other reference sites. The wikis enabled new technologies like "semantic markup" which are still being used largely on an experimental level.
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With the ubiquity of terminals (web browsers, smartphones) capable of complex interactions between individuals, with rules mediated by software, it should be entirely possible to provide a way for group decisions to be made with whatever degree of speed is needed. There will need to be some structure, because 100 million people can't be aware of all the important information in every single decision that needs to be made -- but the ''lines of trust'', the delegation of authority (which is essentially what political power is), can be completely dynamic. The bones of the structure should be emergent and quickly modifiable, not clumsily laid in place by central control.
  
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Then there came the meet-up/events planning services, like meetup.com and Facebook's "events" feature.
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'''We also don't yet have good intelligence delivery systems''', though we're a lot closer in that area than in the decisionmaking department. We do have many, many sources of news, and ways of aggregating news, and ways of notifying people of news, and ways of categorizing news. What we don't yet have is any rigorous way of aggregating all the most relevant and reliable news that individuals should be aware of before making a decision on a given topic.
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==Footnotes==
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==Notes==
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<small>
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An earlier, somewhat inconsistent version of this page is [[/v1|here]].
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{{footnote/target|1|I'm stretching the word "corrupt" here to include the idea of ''replacing'' a non-corrupt person with someone who is corrupt via otherwise-legitimate succession processes; it's not necessary to posit that good people can turn bad. Maybe the way to talk about it is to refer to the ''position'' or ''role'' becoming corrupted.}}
 
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</small>
 

Latest revision as of 01:35, 25 April 2011

The question of how we make decisions is at the core of... pretty much everything. The nature of the decisionmaking process determines:

  • how satisfied individuals are with the outcome of each decision
  • how sane the actions of the group are
    • ...which greatly affects how well the group succeeds, economically and politically
  • how well the decisionmaking process is protected against hostile takeover

Two ways we don't want to do things:

  • Religion: top-down dissemination of ideas, little to no criticism going the other way; highly asymmetrical and centralized
  • US Democracy 1.0: designed around 18th century communication and transportation technology, with design goals that have demonstrably failed

Collaborative technology throughout history has tended to evolve away from centralized, top-down (master-servant, command-structure-driven) modes of organization towards symmetrical, decentralized, spontaneous interaction.

There are obviously some benefits to this.

Mass collaboration projects like Wikipedia are able to exceed the effectiveness of staid institutions such as the Encyclopedia Britannica -- delivering content that is both comparably accurate and far more comprehensive, with no access fee -- using relatively shallow hierarchies and almost no interposition of bureaucracy between the end-user and the system. Email is delivered for free, typically in under a minute, without ever passing through a central sorting facility or being examined by a human anywhere in between sender and destination.

There are also some disadvantages.

We have no general way for large groups to make good decisions. We have online polls which are little better than toys (easily gamed, totally non-auditable), and that's about it. As yet, there are no generalized tools (that I am aware of) for arriving quickly at a collective decision which a known number of people will be prepared to comply with regardless of their individual preferences.

Despite this, it's becoming clear that peer-driven organization can be used for very serious and time-sensitive real-world operations. Individuals using decentralized collaborative tools put out a forest fire in Russia, and carried out revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and other places. When it was clear which direction to push, enough people pushed in the same direction to make things happen.

This has traditionally been the excuse for imposing centralized leadership and rigid rules of compliance: the need for a small number of decisionmakers who can act quickly and decisively.

With the ubiquity of terminals (web browsers, smartphones) capable of complex interactions between individuals, with rules mediated by software, it should be entirely possible to provide a way for group decisions to be made with whatever degree of speed is needed. There will need to be some structure, because 100 million people can't be aware of all the important information in every single decision that needs to be made -- but the lines of trust, the delegation of authority (which is essentially what political power is), can be completely dynamic. The bones of the structure should be emergent and quickly modifiable, not clumsily laid in place by central control.

We also don't yet have good intelligence delivery systems, though we're a lot closer in that area than in the decisionmaking department. We do have many, many sources of news, and ways of aggregating news, and ways of notifying people of news, and ways of categorizing news. What we don't yet have is any rigorous way of aggregating all the most relevant and reliable news that individuals should be aware of before making a decision on a given topic.

Notes

An earlier, somewhat inconsistent version of this page is here.

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