I like everything you say, but I am not hopeful that we can quickly implement this on a large scale. It will require experimentation and so it’s important that we don’t take too ambitious of a step in the process. Voting with democracy and the principle of “1 person = 1 vote” sounds good and fair until social media campaigns enter the race that do nothing but fearmongering and before you know it brexit happens. For us, it would mean that simple voting mechanisms allow fearmongering to instill a fear of slow progress where a majority then rules for a faster less rigorous approach. So voting does not just work on popularity, but also on fear, something humans are very sensitive to.
What bears repetition is that I am not against representation and I don’t believe a plutocracy can properly represent a society or organisation. When it comes to governance, in blockchain projects, we need to be brave enough to ask what solutions exist, not excluding technology light solutions where a vote is no longer the sole judge of the outcome.
I suppose my belief in democracy lies in the idea that while voting might not always bring the optimal result the first time around, and the majority can make the ‘wrong’ decision, that it still provides the opportunity to self correct, to learn from our collective mistakes, and make better decisions next time around. Hopefully we can collectively learn from our mistakes quick enough to build a sustainable peaceful society that doesn’t self destruct.
Then the challenge remains, how to create a system for resolving disputes and decision making, where parties can disagree, but both parties will accept the system/methodology for resolving those disputes. And the first dispute is about how does this voting system work. But do we really need to agree to accept the system? Or do we just need a majority to accept the system? I like to imagine in 50 years blockchain governance systems will be similar to todays nation state governments, where netizens can choose the governance model they wish to exist within.
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
What interests me about technology solutions, is the ability to experiment on multiple forms of governance quickly and in parallel. Now we have multiple DAO’s, Daps and crypto projects, and eventually we will even have AI powered Neural nets running billions of simulations on billions of different configurations and types of government, that will help us test hypothesis about governance without the side effects. (war, rebellions, etc.) We may never find a perfect solution that we all agree on, but I’m optimistic we can make vast improvements to what exists today.
We definitely can make vast improvements, but pure technological solutions restricts the options we have. Some things cannot be simulated, human behaviour being one of them. The speed of iterations that you mention is certainly valuable, but when we exclude valid options from the experiments you have no guarantees about finding the most optimal solution. You might find the most optimal solution from within the subset of options you have selected.
In my opinion we are dumbing down decision making and judgement calls which are as much an emotional decision as they are rational and both make valuable contributions to the decision making process (and sometimes they don’t). In technology, at the moment, we can only capture part of that equation.
There is a place for the decision making processes that you mention and there is a lot of value in your positioning. I can see those processes work well when we interface technology together and decisions need to be negotiated between them. An example would be predictions by 5 oracles where the majority decides on a binary choice prediction. But please keep talking to me when making decisions that affect me.
Regarding fear influencing voting, I’m not sure I follow your point here. This is kind of a well known human/emotional aspect of voting. I’m not sure it’s even something we need to ‘fix’… If the majority of humans fear something, we should be able to exercise our voting rights to enable our (decentralized?) institutions to deal with and mitigate whatever it is we fear. If you’re talking about misplaced fear, based on false propaganda and logical fallacies, this is more likely a centralized media problem, not a voting problem. (decentralization may help with the media problem as well though)
Care to explain what you mean? I see Cardano using technological solutions to determine what is the true desire of the individual humans that are voting. I don’t really see the restriction you mention, unless you mean removing the humans from the equation and letting some A.I. make all the decisions.
Obviously democracy requires as a pre-requisite, an informed and educated public, and an honest, unbiased, and uncorrupted media to inform and educate the voters. (or at least biased media from both or all biased perspectives, so the voters can explore the differing opinions)
Emotion is not considered as part of the solution while allowing emotion is not always a bad thing and can improve the quality of our decisions.
We can’t do away with fear. But we should at least prevent that our voting mechanisms does not allow a majority vote out of fear to happen where the cardano protocol is updated in a way that is harmful. I agree with you that that fear should still be addressed, however, it should not become law. We should talk about ways to validate the sanity of a vote before it passes. One option would be to allow a majority to implement a solution only if a minority does not block it. In this case a minority can “not like” a solution but still not block it at the same time. When a solution is blocked, the majority would retain the right to implement, but the minority has the power to implement amendments to make the vote pass. All human opinion is at least partially emotional in nature and so it cannot be completely automated when decisions affect others.
hmmm… I think you’ve lost me. I can almost follow your logic, but I can’t really envision how this idea will work efficiently. I’m scared it will lead to a dysfunctional bureaucracy, with the minority consistently blocking the majority vote, therefore I’m going to block this idea. It shall not pass!
We can obviously not completely describe a governance mechanism here. For that, a forum is not the right format. And your point is a valid concern. The ideas I represent come from the world of sociocracy where they do work and have been for many years. The downside is that they can’t be automated mathematically. Humans remain part of the machine, which is good imo. The way a consistent blocking is usually resolved is to validate the objection that needs to follow certain rules. So “I just don’t like it” would be immediately invalidated and cannot block progress. Sociocratic organisations are usually built in multiple levels and if a proposal cannot advance after a set number of days it bubbles up to the direct superiors in the chain. If it cannot be resolved there it keeps bubbling until it reaches the top circle of founders, board members, etc. There a regular majority vote can still be the deciding factor. For Cardano such a board of deciding judges could be selected based on their authority in scientific circles, but also according to other parameters. What such a final panel of judges does is it promotes a fast decision amongst peers because nobody want the proposal to go to the judges.
Another comment that I want you to consider is that it is sometimes good that minorities block majority votes. It allows them to amend the proposal in a way that it doesn’t hurt them while it still provides the majority an opportunity to change items relevant to them. In my opinion, slow and thoughtful decisions should prevail over fast decisions. Fast decision making is not in our favour for a system as critical as Cardano. We want Cardano to rule our finances, society, organisations, etc. Right? Why would you want an agile decision methodology for something that so many other things depend upon? Slow and steady would definitely be better. New experimental features can still be built “on the side” where they can be vetted before integration into the main software. We don’t need fast decision making on Cardano’s governance, quite the opposite actually. Governance of community funds is a different matter though.
Just found this very interesting thread! Concerning Cardano that is a topic, I am also interested in for a long time. But I cannot really find good information what shall be the idea for Cardano.
Charles talked in his AMAs several times about the wisdom of the crowd. This sounded very visionary to me, and I thought that it is really the plan to give the complete governance to the community (= ADA holders?).
But I always wondered which role IOG will play in that game. They still own a major stake, and they still clearly govern the development. I cannot imagine that IOG has the intention to give up that role, or even to solely depend on the voting decisions. No idea how that will go on…
What was finally very interesting to see, and what gave me a changeing impression going more in the direction of your Voltaire ideas, was the fireside chat with Frederik G.:
It seems both share the opinion, that a blockchain needs governance by centralized entities. Otherwise, partners will have nothing and noone to rely on. So I understand the treasury fund as a measure to release and channel the full creativity of the crowd. On this way also the Cardano adoption in general is pushed forward. But it seems not to be the idea that the blockchain voting will be involved in strategy and development decisions.
During this early start up phase, the primary concern for governance (project catalyst, as a first step) is how to distribute and effectively use treasury funds and get community support/consensus. Major strategy and development changes are pushed further into the future, and are not part of the founders immediate strategy, but this will come later on. A little bit of centralized leadership is required to get things going in the right direction, than down the road the community will take over. Eventually all major strategy and development decisions will be proposed, selected and funded by the community. You can see an example of this in how they slowly phased stake pool operation from IOG to the community stake pool operators.
