Datocracy: In Search of Generative Governance: Recent Episodes
Ernest Prabhakar, Ernest Bruce
Two ex-Apple employees brainstorm and argue about the best way to replace our current institutions with more humane, community-oriented alternatives.
The Three Big Ideas
- The best way to promote more humane, decentralized, and empowering versions of civilization Is to define a metric (eg, The Generative Governance Index) to act as a status game for social architects
- The easiest, most numerous, and most lucrative social systems to prototype this system is crypto communities
- Decentralizing both the rating with and updating of the Index is a perfect use case for crypto ($GENRUS?)
References
- Proof of Humanity
- Open Source Initiative
- LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)
- The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce (Wait But Why)
- The Laboratory for Complex Problems (Not Boring)
After several videos with Tom Gilb (See https://youtu.be/8yEtL3KSfzY), the two Ernests stop to work out how and whether our current "Plan" of Datocracy is aligned with the initial vision of Smart Documents + Open Ecosystems as the building blocks of HumaneKind.
Our conclusion is that "Corporate Datocracy" (as represented by ValPlan and Planguage) is a useful stepping stone. In particular, it pushes us to clearly articulate the "Value Objectives" needed to enable a "Public Datocracy," such as:
- Open Format
- Public Content
- Ease of Adoption
Our belief is that iterating on this "Datocracy 0.1" exercise will both force and enable us to identify the requirements needed for a "Datocracy 1.0" platform, as well as a community to help us build it.
Free Resources from Tom Gilb (@imtomgilb)
Searchable Index of Publications
- Clear Communication: Logical Language Logistics for Replies and Phrases (Book)
- Systems Enterprise Architecture (Book)
- 12? (Twelve Tough Questions Booklet)
- QUANTeer: The Art of quantifying your value ideas (Book) (Video)
- PLanalysis (Booklet)
- Specifying Quality Requirements With Planguage (ModernAnalyst.com)
- PLanguage: A Software and Systems Engineering Language, for Evaluating Methods, and Managing Projects for Zero Failure, and Maximum ‘Value Efficiency’ (PDF)
- Value Requirements (Book) (Video)
- Governeering: Government Systems Engineering Planning (Book)
- Knowledge Education Nurture (Book)
- [UN] Sustainability Planning (Book) (YouTube)
Other References
- ValPlan, the ValueFirst Tool (7-day free trial)
- Abrahamic Unification (breaking bread together in the Middle East)
- Intelligibility vs Readability/Understandability (PDF)
- Deliberative Democracy (Wikipedia)
- Arrow's Paradox / Condorcet Paradox (Wikipedia)
- The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (Jerry Pournelle)
The Coherency Manifesto: Towards Communal Data Platforms
Special thanks to Aneesh Karve of Quilt Data for joining the Ernests in this special mini-series on Datocracy. Tune in for our wrap-up next week to discover what happens next!
Next week: how can we encode the semantics of a community's (company's) values into a syntax rich enough to enable Rational Trust?
The Coherency Manifesto: Towards Communal Data Platforms
Draft 5 adds point #8:
- We will never do this perfectly, but the better we understand and document our decisions, learnings and failures, the more rapidly the next generation can improve on them
Notes from August 20th, 2021 Datocracy Podcastcf Revolutionary Transparency
Human Intelligence Augmentation vs Artificial General Intelligence
Rational as a subset of the Real
The Legal System is the execution engine of Legal Code (cf US forking from English Common Law)
Trust is the irreducible element of systems
- Transparent History
- Transparent Incentives
- Voice vs Exit (“take my data and go home”) eg BATNA
Equal data power (despite unequal real power and resources)
Datocracy is agreement on the ‘mechanism’ (protocol?) of data, with the policies being subject to debate and forking.
Q: Datocracy Constitution as both concrete “protocol” agreements and aspirational “cultural” values?
cf The Coherency Manifesto
- Memes are transmitted via imitation (mimesis/memesis)
- Enables/requires consumers to become producers (cf editing Wikipedia)
- Solves the Datocrat's Conundrum (sticky semantics)
- The most generative system (reproduction + diversity) wins
- Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well
- No more silent failures!
- Well-formed (syntax)
- Fungibility
- "The most reliable system [longest history] is also the most maladaptive."
- Cardano cryptocurrency
For next week:
- Machine-assisted context reconciliation (cf reconciling schemas)
- Constitution as syntax: what is the constitution of Datopolis?
- cf RTFM: The Revolutionary Transparency Manifesto
- Elinor Ostrom “non-tragedy-commons” and Governing the Commons
- bitcoin-paves-a-way-for-evolution-of-the-species and neal-stephenson
- history-of-the-stock-market and history of money
- The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar and richard-stallman-epstein-scandal
- International Standard (History) and List_of_technical_standard_organizations
- Overview of ITU's History
- benefits and pitfalls to the startup model of ‘scratching your own itch’.
An ordered list of Hard Things, for next week:
- Developing a shared semantic understanding within a local context
- Encoding those semantics in a syntactic system that functions in that context
- Scaling that to other contexts -- especially via bottom-up voluntary adoption
- Honoring the original intent without becoming limited by it
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Chip Heath)
- Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, and Shape the Path (Sources of Insight)
- Easily Confused (Seth's Blog)
- Humanekind Posts (Ernest Bruce)
How to create a global culture that responsibly empowers local innovation for greater humanity
- RTFM: The Revolutionary Transparency Manifesto (Radical Centrism)
- Datocracy (Twitter)
- Rohit Khare (LinkedIn)
- Robert Fiskin (LinkedIn)
- The ZigZag Project
Can reducing information asymmetry via cryptographic security cure what ails both capitalism and socialism?
https://blog.ted.com/the-zigzag-project-lauches-from-the-ted-audio-collective/
Inspired by the massive overhaul of our lives due to COVID-19, The ZigZag Projectoffers a six-step boot camp that’s been beta-tested by listeners and features insights from luminaries who have helped Manoush Zomorodi stay the course throughout her career. The interactive experience combines audio storytelling with written exercises and a companion newsletter to align listeners’ personal values with their professional ambitions.
"I hadn’t fully appreciated how those times in the NeXT/Apple transition — building towards 10.0 — were so critical in our lives and perhaps in the industry’s evolution as a whole." -- Peter G.
Automated Transcript
- Allan Nathanson
- Andrew Moon
- Andrew Stone
- Andy Belk
- Bertrand Serlet
- Blaine Garst
- Brett Halle
- Eric Hermanson
- Kevin Enderby
- Kevin Koym
- John James
- Mark Dadgar
- Paul Lambert
- Peter Graffagnino
- Ted Goldstein
- William Parkhurst
Bruce reaffirms and doubles down on his commitment to develop an artistic vision that can inspire generations to pursue a more human-centered world order.
Prabhakar suggests that Bruces still faces the same challenges as in building a business, except instead of Product-Market fit he needs "Vision-Community" fit. He also still needs to cross the chasm by offering something 5-10x better, even if it is competing on ideas rather than products. For example, many of those dissatisfied with capitalism are already satisfied to Marxism, and therefore would not be early adopters of anything new.
Prabhakar challenged Bruce to write out his vision in full, then boil it down into something that at least person would like enough to share. First make it compelling, then make it plausible. The best candidate Bruce came up with was "A World Without Bureaucracy."
We agreed to make this the final Episode of Season 2, with Season 3 being focused on actual documents (or other artifacts) as Bruce writes them.
References
- Automated Transcript
Bruce reiterates his vision of a world not controlled by profit-driven entities such as Facebook. Prabhakar counters that profit isn't the problem; Facebook succeeded in displacing the open web because it solved problems that the altruistic W3C didn't, because it lacked the incentives and empathy to solve the problems of "real-world identity" crucial to Facebook's success.
In fact, Prabhakar went further and claimed that the key problem with most non-market solutions is that they tend require political acts of consensus-building (monolithic "Cathedrals") rather than enabling bottom-up experimentation (decentralized Bazaars). This isn't to glorify markets, but to point out different types of problems require different types of solutions.
In particular, any non-coercive solution (whether market or political) requires at least some use case that delivers 5-10x the benefit of existing alternatives in order for somebody to adopt it. Prabhakar argued that Bruce hadn't identified any "early adopter" market that would benefit from his vision before it was already large-scale and cost-effective.
Bruce then pointed out that he wasn't interested in early markets or incremental progress. His dream was to bring people into a new kind of world, even if it took multiple generations.
At that point Prabhakar pointed out that we are no longer talking about entrepreneurship and technology, but about narratives and art. Which doesn't require funding, or customers. All it requires is the discipline to cultivate the craft of telling compelling stories.
Bruce conceded the point. But if that is true, then where do we go from here?
References
- Automated Transcript
- Billionaires Build (Paul Graham)
- Facebook's Motivations (Stratechery)
- Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? (2-Bit History)
- Eric Raymond' The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Wikipedia)
- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore)
- Moral Authority (Episode 15)
- The War of Art (Steven Pressfield)
Bruce talks about Nerd Brawn, his high-minded vision of vertically-integrated computing infrastructure for helping local producers compete against giant multi-nationals. Prabhakar pushed him to be more specific about a) what tradeoffs he (and others) should make for the sake of local control, and b) what value proposition would entice producers to work with him before he had overwhelming scale. In particular, Prabhakar argued that if Bruce really wanted to help local retailers, he would need custom solutions for each community, rather than assuming technology itself would suffice.
In that vein, Bruce suggested homelessness is an urgent issue for his local community that would be worth addressing. The biggest challenge is perhaps nobody really "owns" the problem, only specific solutions that are often unworkable for those most vulnerable. Hopefully next week we can at least figure out how to think more clearly about the problem...
References
- Automated Transcript
- Nerd Brawn (Facebook, Twitter, Gust)
- Walmart Bans (New York, California)
- Effect of Wal-Mart on Rural America
- Understanding Homelessness in America (CityLab University)
Bruce responds to last week's question by coming firmly down on the side of local communities as the primary unit of autonomy, with the proviso that individuals have the freedom to move among communities. Prabhakar concurred, and again suggested Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age as a useful starting point for imaging a world of tight-knit tribes ("phyles") embedded in a Common Economic Protocol to coordinate coexistence.
This led to the question of what values Bruce would want to build his Phyle around. Bruce started with a commitment to avoid orphaning users. Ernie conceded that is a noble goal, and is similar to the idea of companies serving customers rather than exploiting them.
That said, the real challenge is actually building something that lives long enough to even have those concerns. Perhaps next week we will find out what that might be...
References
- Automated Transcript
- Until the end of the Internet (Basecamp)
- Long-Term Stock Exchange: A Principle-Based Approach
- Public Benefit Corporation
- Benefit Corporation
- B Corporation (Certification)
- Thick versus Thin Moral Frameworks
- Thick versus Thin Descriptions
The Ernests pick up the conversation about how to test whether we are living up to our values by focusing on Bruce's recent tweet about Trump. Bruce mentioned that while he tries to love everyone, he has no love for haters, and hates Trump. Prabhakar pointed out this makes him a hater, which implies he doesn't love himself!
More generally, this raises an issue Prabhakar has been wrestling with on his other podcast: the tension between wanting our viewpoint to be validating and serving a higher purpose. In particular, we humans have evolved sophisticated (if imperfect) heuristics to identify whether people are truly willing to sacrifice their personal desires for the welfare of the group.
When Bruce proclaimed he would never want to be part of a society that forbade rape victims from getting abortions, Prabhakar warned him that he had to choose what kind of world he was seeking:
- Universalist, where all cultures in a society abided by the same rules
- Atomist, where every subculture was free to set their own rules (a la The Diamond Age)
- Something New, which would then become the hard problem he had to solve
Bruce admitted he desires the ability to pursue large-scale collective action. But Prabhakar cut him off before he went any further, so we can save that topic for next week.
References
- Automated Transcript
- Death to the King of the USA (Ernest Bruce)
- I Can Tolerate Anything but the Outgroup (Slate Star Codex)
- S5E5 Better Next Time (The Great Reset on YouTube)
-
- Untying Loads (The Great Reset Podcast)
- Origin of Language (Wikipedia)
- Initiation (Wikipedia)
- The Diamond Age (Neil Stephenson)
- Female Genital Mutilation (Wikipedia)
This week the Ernests attempted to build up a list of which core values should guide our decisions, e.g:
- Universal Justice (versus Tribalism/Elitism): everyone should be subject to the same rules
- Accountable Authorities
- Healthy Trust (versus Blind Faith)
- Appropriate Consequences (neither Cruel nor Lax)
- The Truth (versus Privacy, at least for the Powerful)
While it may be difficult to make these value absolutes, we generally agreed the world would be better if there was more of this and less of their opposite.
Bruce then questioned how we would create "unit tests" for these values, which Prabhakar suggested would be an excellent question for next week. Stay tuned!
References
- Automated Transcript
- Core Beliefs (Positive Psychology)
- What the Hell are Values (Joe Edelman)
- The Sensation of Being Somebody (Maurice Wagner)
- The Tale of Killer Sally (NY Daily News)
- Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (Peer-to-Peer Foundation)
This week we riff on last week's acknowledgement that Bruce's desire for self-expression overwhelmed his anti-Facebook principles. Prabhakar asserted that this is a fundamental problem in the design of social systems. In the short-run, everything is simpler if people comply with pro-social principles. But in the long-run, if people aren't free to be their authentic selves, both individuals and societies become extremely unhealthy.
This highlights the fact that no individual fully expresses the values we aspire towards, so we must appeal to some kind of transcendence. As well as someone we all trust to speak on behalf of that transcedance. Examples include:
- Ancestors (via Elders)
- Animistic Spirits (via Shamans)
- Pagan Deities (via Priests)
- Monotheistic Gods (via Scriptural Scholars)
- Dialectical Materialism (via the Dictatorship of the Proletariat)
Prabhakar then pointed out that America in the 1960s shifted moral authority from WASPs to the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Count. Once that become our highest standard of morality, is it any surprise that politicians sacrifice all other values in order to influence that?
Bruce then attempted to propose a variety of principles, only to retract them when Prabhakar pointed out they conflicted with others of his values. Bruce initially criticized religion for relying on unprovable beliefs, until Prabhakar pointed out Bruce's core beliefs were equally unprovable. In fact, Prabhakar claimed formal religion (for all its many flaws) at least made its core beliefs public where they could be analyzed and argued over. Prabhakar then challenged Bruce to similarly write down his own principles, for us to discuss next week.
References
- Automated Transcript
- Strict Constructionism (Wikipedia)
- Scientific Method (Wikipedia)
- The Warren Court (ThoughtCo)
- Fetus Rights (Wikipedia)
- The San Jose Declaration: Ending the Abortion Wars (Radically Happy)
Bruce penned his article out of outrage at sexism and Trump's moves towards autocracy. The title was chosen to affirm female sexuality for pleasure and connection, rather than just procreation. It also captured his anger at people who believe in a deity, which he considers equivalent to "fake science" and complicit in the subjugation of women and the election of Trump.
To avoid loaded terms like "science" and "religion", Prabhakar suggested the terms "good faith" and "bad faith" -- or "adaptive" vs "maladaptive" beliefs -- to reflect the core virtue of adapting our beliefs to address the data, rather than rejecting data that contradicts our beliefs.
He also pushed Bruce to clarify how much of his anger against Trump was due to his quest for power, versus the values that Trump used that power for. In particular, was he similarly disgusted by prior expansions of presidential power, or did he consider them justified because of the noble ends?
Bruce countered that what really angered him was that Trump didn't really believe any of the things he stood far. After, he hardly seems to do or believe any of the things that Christians are supposed to. Prabhakar pointed out that:
- Nobody knows what Trump really believes (probably not even him)
- Since the moral majority, conservative Christians have found social engagement, identity, and even a kind of unity (e.g. with Catholics) by focusing on a small set of political issues
- Trump has shown surprising devotion to those core issues, even when contrary to rational political calculation
We both agreed that there is nothing we despise more than people who talk loudly about certain principles, yet act in ways completely contrary to them.
Then Prabhakar asked Bruce why, despite his long-standing principled disdain for Facebook and its business model, he initially posted his article solely on Facebook. Bruce explained that he just needed to get his message out as widely as possible, and Facebook was the only place to do that.
Then Prabhakar asked Bruce why he needed to that, and Bruce had no answer.
Which led to a discussion of grace. How all of us at times fall short of our principles for reasons we can' t explain. And this is a core part of the human experience we have to figure out, both as individuals and society, in order to succeed in truly making things better.
Welcome to Season 2 of Too Earnest: Two Ernests Forking Humanity.
References
- Automated Transcript
- Mthrfck*r (Ernest Bruce on Medium)
- Mthrfck*r definition (Urban Dictionary)
- Sexist rules for women on Arctic expedition (E&E News)
- Trump goes full dictator, vows to stay in office regardless of election results (Vanity Fair)
- Pseudo-science (Wikipedia)
- Drawing the line between science and pseudo-science (Scientific American)
- Adaptive behavior (Wikipedia)
- Power and the Presidency, From Kennedy to Obama (Smithsonian)
- Moral Majority (Wikipedia)
- Anti-Catholicism in the United States (Wikipedia)
On his birthday, Prabhakar shares his attempt to found a community where moral authority doesn't require assuming moral superiority. Most societies and institutions seem to rest on the illusion that those at the top are intrinsically more "right" than those who follow, typically due to status games based on birth, wealth, education, or expertise. Surprisingly, even followers seem as dependent to the illusion as leaders, perhaps because it allows them to avoid responsibility for many choices.
The alternative is to apply the same sort of "hackability" to leadership as Bruce wanted for systems, by creating a status game around adaptability to new information, and a willingness to publicize immutable records of past decisions.
The interesting question for Bruce was whether we can apply this to non-religious communities. Come back next week to find out!
Resources
- Automated Transcript
- The Great Reset
- Ultrasociety
Last week we discussed the tension between loyalty and mobility within communities. This week we talked about moral authority as the key factor in helping communities evolve, especially when facing a crisis. This is especially poignant for us, if we are trying to start a movement to live out these ideas.
We identified four phases in the birth of a movement, using the American Revolution as a role model:
- Artists: Original thinkers who introduce inspiring ideas (Montesquieu. Thomas Paine)
- Men of Letters: Like-minded communities who build a shared vision of the future (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson)
- Men of Action: Decisive leaders who make that vision a reality (George Washington)
- Men of Systems: Organizers who build processes to ensure the vision's survival (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison)
Interestingly, the basis of moral authority shifts between phases:
- Artists: Being true to their convictions
- Letters: Generosity in helping the community build consensus
- Action: Willingness to sacrifice and take great risks
- Systems: Pragmatic effectiveness in getting things done
This poses a conundrum for us as we are trying to shift from "Art" to "Letters", which requires us to focus on building bridges to others rather than merely being true to ourselves. Can we cross that chasm? Stay tuned...
- Automated Transcript
This week Bruce opens the episode talking about the importance of mobility: the freedom to leave a community if the leaders start violating the original principles. Prabhakar agrees, but adds that a) too much freedom to exit discourages people from resolving conflict, and b) sometimes the original principles no longer reflect what the community needs to thrive. Bruce suggests that we should instead focus on the larger Purpose of the community (what Prabhakar calls Vision) more than the current Principles (or Values). Prabhakar likes that formulation, but suggests even more important is developing the skill of learning how to evolve those, in order to:
Adapt Vision without compromising it
Refine Values without betraying them
References
- Automated Transcript
- Omni-Culturalism
Last week we discussed Seth Godin's claim that "industrialism" (the drive to make everything cheaper) is the main cause of modern misery, and in fact underlies our obsession with race, caste, and class. In particular, Seth calls on us to make industry subservient to culture, rather than cheapening our culture for the sake of industry.
This week Bruce builds on that to outline his vision of a "hackable and forkable" world, where everyone has the ability (at least in principle) to maintain and customize the essential systems they depend upon. Bruce adds that people should be free to outsource production to others, especially where scale matters, but only if we can preserve transparency and autonomy. The goal is to create a universal system of multi-dimensional reputation and reward that encourages cooperative, pro-social behavior.
Prabhakar describes this as abstracting away the mechanics of our systems, while still communicating the values. He then argues that, if you squint really hard, global financial capitalism did in fact create a crude version of that reality; especially after the 1970s, when consumer activism created pressure for companies to embrace safety and environmental sustainability as part of their "brand." This is not to excuse the many sins of capitalism, but to illustrate how humanity at scale requires compressive tools like "brand" and "price" to cope with information overload.
This highlighted a tension between enabling communities to become self-sustaining, without them becoming self-contained tyrannies. Prabhakar argued that required local ownership of critical infrastructure, but a global culture of shared learning. Bruce argued that the key to preventing tyranny was mobility, so people could easily leave or fork a community that was failing to achieve its stated goals. Prabhakar countered that high barriers to exit are essential to encourage people to build long-term reputations.
In the end, we agreed to table the discussion about loyalty versus mobility for next week. Hope you will join us then!
References
- Automated Transcript (Google Sheet)
- Hydrogen Economy (Wikipedia)
- Toward Abundant Systems (Seth Godin)
- The Price System as a Mechanism for Using Knowledge (Friedrich von Hayek)
- Why Omniculturalism, Not Multiculturalism, Is the Solution (Psychology Today)
People invested in the current Caste System vote against their "selfish" interests in order to propagate the system, even if on a lower rung. Why?
- The risk of losing status from critiquing the system
- Revolutions often fail
- Even successful revolutions rarely improve most people's situation
- Is the likely benefit greater than the likely cost, especially given great uncertainty?
How do we get people to view their selves and their group identity differently? Coercion? Argument? Persuasion? And how do we guard against the risk of us accidentally making things worse?
- Automated Transcript (TBD)
- IGWET (www.igwet.com)
- Hope and Change for Humpty Dumpty (Gary Sweeten)
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
- Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Joseph Ellis)
- Industry and its Discontents (Seth Godin, Akimbo)
- Groupthink (Wikipedia)
- The Science of "Muddling Through" (Charles Lindblom)
Prabhakar affirms Wilkerson's thesis that caste is a richer framework for explaining America's troubled history of racism; especially post-Civil Rights where strict pigmentation-based racism has been replaced by more nuanced forms of discrimination. However, he argues that America is actually now a dual-caste system.
The original "nativist" caste system that harkens back to the Founding Fathers is alive and well. That focus on race, religion, and riches has become the backbone of the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan.
However, he claims the Democratic Party is just as wedded to a second "cosmopolitan" caste system, which obsesses over redistributive economics, education, and elitism. Democrats may sincerely believe they are helping the poor, but are blind to how their policies fragment families and funnel people into a zero-sum educational rigged in their favor.
Conservatives don't understand irony.
Liberals don't understand sincerity.Republicans value adherence to abstract principles over the welfare of real flesh-and-blood human beings.
Democrats value the welfare of idealized, hypothetical human beings over that of actual flesh-and-blood human beings.
Stay tuned for next week to hear Bruce's response!
- Automated Transcript
- The Legacies of Slavery and Serfdom — Two Personal Encounters (David Gleason)
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Amazon)
- It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System (NPR)
- Our reactions to odor reveal our political attitudes, survey suggests (Science Daily)
- Researchers find stench of sweat and rancid butter can influence our views (Daily Mail)
Last episode, Prabhakar shared the manifesto for www.igwet.com, his new platform for transformational communities. This week Bruce asks a number of pointed questions about those bold claims...
The IGWET EAQ
- "communities seeking positive change"
- what is positive change?
- what is negative change?
- who decides?
- "ad-hoc groups build up trust"
- how is trust built-up? in each persons mind?
- how does a community or an individual keep track of the trust it has on each trusted entity?
- "relational practices" -> "open source spirituality"
- how do shared practices reflect spirituality?
- how do values and ideals translate into code-based practices?
- "scaffold to demonstrate competence"
- so competence is a function of how many entities adopt the practices that an entity authors?
- "networked communities have not been able to win against hierarchical institutions"
- hierarchical entities still have the advantage of resource accummulation and concentration; can IGWET help with that?
- "IGWET provides a low-cost, easy-to-use platform designed to promote bottom-up innovation"
- "IGWET solution for the problems (slow information transfer from the bottom to the top, expensive and slow innovation) of top-down hierarchies?"
- "community-curated practices"
- similar to Ethereums contracts?
- what is the language used to code this practices?
Automated Transcript
For this episode, Prabhakar announces IGWET, his long-awaited website (and manifesto) that he claims will save civilization from itself. He frames this as a platform for emergent decentralized networks to outcompete the top-down hierarchies that have created -- and corrupted -- the world we live in.
References
- Automated Transcript
- IGWET: Interconnecting Groups for Whole-Earth Transformation
- The End of Bureaucracy, Again?
- Freedom, Permissionless Innovation, and a Successful Internet
- Original Position (John Rawls)
In order to create a more humane civilization, we need people to voluntarily enroll in decentralized pro-social status games. That appears to the only way to avoid the extremes of either fragmenting into atomic tribes or being enslaved by corrupt institutions.
Prabhakar notes how the nodejs package manager (npm) has enabled the JavaScript community to (mostly) avoid the "religious" wars that have plagued other open source projects. The key was to standardize on a modular interface and culture for sharing functionality, rather than a monolithic and opinionated process for delivering a final product. This focus on fine-grained peer-to-peer relationships rather than large-scale membership mirrors that of Zero-Trust Security Models.
He argues that we could apply that same thinking to create an open platform where groups gain status by documenting and living up to their values. The atomic unit of this is a "relational practice", collections of which from a "code of conduct" that could be evolved and remixed by other groups, just like source code in a package manager. The hypothesis is that pro-social groups who are serious about living their values would welcome this scrutiny, enabling them to out-compete groups whose internal behavior diverges from their public claims.
- The Iron Law of Oligarchy (Wikipedia)
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Eric Raymond)
- "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." (The Lord Acton)
- "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." (Andrew Fletcher)
In an ironic twist, Prabhakar suggest that Bruce's formal specialty at Apple -- creating technical documentation -- might actually be the key to saving civilization!
We have been wrestling with how to bootstrap scalable pro-social behavior (aka positive-sum status games) in the absence of a top-down authority to set and enforce standards (which often starts out well, but always ends up corrupted by self-interest, even if unconscious).
Prabhakar experienced the pain of this first hand when his 7/28 pitch to The Great Reset devolved into unproductive arguments over the term "system." On the one hand, he was elated that everyone was taking ownership of the meeting instead of deferring to him as an authority figure. On the other hand, many of them expressed frustration that they weren't making any concrete progress.
The breakthrough came from replacing "system" with the more organic term "relational practices." Instead of setting up rules and authorities to enforce them, the objective is for the group as a whole to help each other identify and adapt practices that help them achieve their common mission. In a very real sense, the goal is to make culture into 'hackable open source' where everyone has a fair shot and understanding and improving how we relate to each other.
This is not a panacea. The best-case outcome is also the worst-case failure mode: where this process works so well that people end up trusting it too much, and stop being vigilant. The most we can do is create a transparent enough ecosystem that a single well-meaning individual of average ability can rally others to stop a skillful player with malicious intent (but not vice versa). But in the end, nothing can stop the heat death of the universe.
References
- Auto-generated transcript (Google Sheet)
- Systemic Redemption (The Great Reset, S3E4)
- Deliberate Practice (James Clear)
- Open Sourcing Culture (Wikipedia)
To create a new system encompassing all of humanity, we need a platform that allows people to experiment with a wide range of ideologies, yet makes it easy to reward pro-social behavior (and discourage the opposite). This is even more challenging when we are trying to build a completely-open, decentralized system that anyone can participate in.
The best we can hope for is design interfaces and governance that make it easier to do things that help people, and harder to do things that harm them. In particular, it requires striking a balance between, e.g.:
- Anonymity vs Consequences
- Historical vs Current contributions
- Transparency vs Privacy
- Freedom to leave vs a Responsibility to stay
- Staying informed vs Information overload
Bruce made the critical point that trust and reputation (what Prabhakar calls "cred") depends on the person. Prabhakar sketched out a system where cred accumulates on different scales of time (immediate, seasonal, lifetime) and place (individual, community, server). He also proposed a tricameral system of cooperative governance between members (one person one vote), communities (one customer one vote) and servers (one administrator one vote), where money was transparently tracked and acknowledged but not directly given a place at the table.
References
- Auto-generated transcript (Google Sheet)
- Human Systems Development (The Swan Factory)
- Why do competitive multiplayer games have seasons? (Reddit)
- Recommendation system based on content, not creator (TikTok)
- The Internet of Teams (The Great Reset, S3E4 unused Draft)
This episode marks an inflection point. Philosophy -- "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly" -- is essential when contemplating a new enterprise. But at some point we must stop thinking and start doing. And the only thing worth doing, for a shift this radical, is: Revolution!
In particular, every revolution starts with a small group of people inspired to work together for a better future. Prabhakar outlines four possible paths to take -- Politics, Art, Religion, Commerce (PARC) -- as well as the downsides associated with each. He also invited Bruce to a Design Review with his religious collaborators next Tuesday, July 21st, where Prabhakar will outline his plan for bootstrapping a revolution. Stay tuned next week to get Bruce's reaction!
References
- Auto-generated transcript (Google Sheet)
- Political: A Radical Centrist Manifesto (Ground Rules of Civil Society)
- Artistic: Ten Years into the Analog Revolution (QuantOps 2030)
- Religious: The Great Reset (Designing the Future of Christianity)
- Commercial: The Swan Factory (Bringing Humanity to Technology)
In our conversation around how to create a more humane civilization, we discussed the important of creating status games that promote pro-social behavior within and between communities. However, we still have to ensure people in other communities are playing fairly. We ended last episode discussing how Masnick's Impossibility Theorem implied it was impossible to have perfectly effective oversight, but better Information Technology could help us do far better.
In this episode Bruce articulates his vision of how technology should serve users -- not just creators; and Prabhakar discusses his startup that attempted to do just that.
References
- Free Software Foundation
- The Swan Factory (Prabhakar's startup)
- Homoiconic C
- Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences
- Decentralized Systems (compared Top-down and bottom-up design)
- Tangled Hierarchy (Heterarchy)
- Delegated Voting (Revocable Proxy)
- Information Architecture
- Masnick's Impossibility Theorem (Why Content Filtering Always Sucks)
Once we acknowledge that relationships are part of what make us human, we must deal with the reality of status games.
The best we can hope for is for a culture that rewards the creation, recognition, and normalization of the most positive-sum games over neutral or negative ones.
https://radicalcentrism.org/manifesto/