Cause Exploration: Governance Design & Formation
TLDR:
Governance Design and Formation (GDF) is about using theory and empirical experiments to design and form governments (at multiple levels of society in public and private spheres) which work better, i.e, which have high legitimacy and make high-quality decisions in pursuit of human flourishing in the short and long run.
It seems more tractable than one might first imagine.
Notes:
This is a submission for the Open Philanthropy Cause Exploration Prize (https://www.causeexplorationprizes.com/)
This is a rough draft full of bullet points, because I was short of time (scrabbled this together in a day). But have been thinking about this stuff for years.
There’s obviously prior work on political and institutional governance. However, as Holden noted in his piece on Ideal Governance, this topic doesn’t really exist as a field. (“Ideal governance seems like the sort of topic for which there should be a ‘field’ of ‘experts,’ studying it.”). Below I lay out a potential definition of this field, sketch its importance/neglectedness/tractability, and discuss how it could be launched.
What’s Governance Design & Formation?
Here’s a concrete example: James Madison designed a possible means of governance for the US state of Virginia. It was called the Virginia Plan and it looked like this (don’t worry about the details in the picture):
The plan ended up forming a major part of the US Constitution.
In short: GDF is figuring out how a governance mechanism should work, and then getting it implemented.
We’re talking here about governance mechanisms that:
hold some plenary power (or eventually will) that people actually care about
ultimately have to contend with the messy stuff like politics, capture, manipulation, etc
act in service of a large number of constituents
By analogy to economic mechanism design:
Economic mechanism design asks the question, “What market rules would result in desirable market outcomes?”
Likewise, we ask, “What governance rules would result in desirable governance outcomes?”
Overall goal of GDF is to use theory and empirical experiments to design and form governance (at multiple levels of society in public and private spheres) which works better, i.e, which has high legitimacy and makes higher-quality decisions in pursuit of human flourishing in the short and long run.
Really want to emphasize the “empirical experiments” bit. There’s some room for pure research/theory here, but in order to be productive I think it quickly needs to meet reality in the form of experiments, both to iterate on design and to gain legitimacy and adoption.
In this day and age, it probably ultimately look like product and software engineering (open source) to make tools that can be grabbed and used.
Note: there’s large overlap with Holden’s https://www.cold-takes.com/ideal-governance-for-companies-countries-and-more/ — I loved that piece. I arrived at this stuff independently of Holden’s piece, so we should take this submission as a piece of consilience rather than a dependent phenomenon. (Have been thinking about this stuff in a mental background thread since ~2014.)
GDF seems sufficiently specific and different approach from IIDM (Improving Institutional Decision-Making) that it’s probably helpful to think of it as its own thing, even if there’s lots of overlap and GDF is technically a subset of IIDM or something like that. I don’t know enough about the IIDM area to comment.
Note that GDF isn’t focused on reforming existing institutions (at least at first) — there’s some truth to the whole “The best way to predict the future is to design it” thing.
Importance, in brief
I’m going to handwave here for now. Do have a rough more involved analysis, but a handwave feels sufficient for now.
In short:
As blast radius of tech increases, we’re increasingly all in the same boat together, so we need powerful actors to make high-quality decisions or we’re in trouble.
If we could somehow get a large portion of government-type power at various levels in various societies to make very high-quality decisions, it would be very important, in ways that are kind of obvious — huge mitigation of various x-risks, etc. (Not to mention quality of life)
This would be robustly good — i.e,. even if we’re wrong about which challenges will arise or the ways in which they will come or how they might need to be handled, it would be good to have the powerful actors making high-quality decisions.
(Note: there’s a slightly more quantitative take on this in the “Cost Efficacy” section towards the end)
Tractability
This submission will mainly focus on tractability because neglectedness and importance are easier to think about.
What I’m claiming about tractability
First of all: I have a lot of uncertainty here.
At first blush, tractability might seem quite low. (How, one might ask, will you institute your fancy new governance mechanisms? You and which army, exactly?)
Surprisingly, though, I think tractability is actually lowish-to-mediumish. (And that it only recently became so: I think tractability was a lot lower in 2010.)
Some causes seem less tractable the more you dig into them and think; this one seems to go the other way.
This area is so neglected that we haven’t seen many attempts at it. As a result, the evidence for tractability looks more inside-view-y sketches of what might be possible rather than outside-view-y “here’s a list of past initiatives in this area and their base success rate”.
Summary of the case for lowish-to-mediumish tractability
There’s tons of stuff that would be good to try and might work
There are ways to try things, i.e. to run governance experiments
If something tried works well, it can quickly lead to greatly increased adoption amongst new orgs (there’s some empirical evidence of this!)
There are plausible paths to significant worldwide adoption
1. There’s lots of stuff that would be good to try and might work
Structural advantages of being new
Greater knowledge
We simply have more history now; more democracy-years under our belt. We have more examples of what can go right or wrong.
We have better tools than the governance designers of yore (e.g. James Madison didn’t have Google Search)
Can stand on the shoulders of giants
Changed world
The world changed in scale (an order of magnitude more people than 400 yrs ago). Often when you scale something by 10x, things break unless you redesign them (existing govts mostly haven’t been redesigned).
There’s far more complexity in the world now than before, and things move faster.
Technology changes things
it changes how governance can work
it changes what needs to be governed — governing technology just seems pretty different from governing other stuff, and also seems very important.
Advantages of youth
Not being sclerotic/bureaucratic (can thus attract a different type of person)
Doesn’t start out captured
Legitimacy of many existing things is so low that many might actually find that new alternatives could have more legitimacy in limited circumstances, even if not battle-tested yet
There’s a rich design space of governance “lego blocks”
Note: I’m not being a technosolutionist here. I don’t think technology alone is the answer. Nor do I think people alone are the answer. I think you need both great governance design (which may involve some tech, this is 2022 after all) and great people operating within that government.
Here’s a list of some “lego” blocks (there are more in the appendix):
Group-informed consensus (e.g. Polis https://pol.is/): use computational methods to discover clusters of people and their views, in order to grok people’s complex multifaceted values and discover points of consensus. Avoids tyranny of the majority/minority type issues.
Computational value pluralism TODO
Representative deliberation: bring together a representative “mini-public” for a fixed period (h/t Aviv Ovadya); pay them; educate them on a topic; learn from their conclusions. Has been used globally to positive effect I think (confidence: low)
Machine learning (applied to governance)
Machine learning is quickly becoming powerful and versatile, a trend which seems likely to continue swiftly
Mental model is that ~ML will be able to greatly improve whatever it is applied to
There’s power in deciding which things to really seriously apply it to first
One thing we should seriously apply it to first is improving governance.
We’re running an AI capabilities vs. AI alignment race — we should keep running that race.
But there’s also an AI capabilities vs. General Collective Decision Quality race — we should start running that race, and (ironically) use AI to help us win it.
Have some specific thoughts around how ML could be used to improve governance
Ultra-fast courts (very excited about this one, actually)
Existing courts were designed pre-internet and proceed at a weird paper snail mail “this judge has to ride their horse to the next district” type pace
Can make sloppy decisions in lower courts and have really quick/fast appeals processes instead
Works well digitally. Can be used both inside and outside the government.
Epistemic networks:
everyone has some secret opinions stored away in their mind about how good/accurate/effective/ethical other people are.
These almost never become public; they’re sometimes shared in limited form in backchannels during job interviews or the like. People keep this information private to keep the peace, avoid conflict, maintain their own reputation as a kind person, etc.
However this information is actually extremely valuable to the world. It might be possible to use cryptography to build a way for people to safely share their views about others such that no one’s feelings get hurt by anyone else in particular, and also globally the government can learn about its workers.
There’s about a million ways this could go wrong, but might be good to experiment with.
Guard against narcissists/sociopaths/power-maximizers
These people really spoil the world for everyone else (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LpkXtFXdsRd4rG8Kb/reducing-long-term-risks-from-malevolent-actors)
I think it’s deeply under-appreciated how big a problem these actors are. Setting aside the obvious problems with them, they manipulate people en masse and cause a ton of flow-on problems.
There are people that can reliably detect these kinds of folks; could have a nexus of them which can ban problematic people. (Would need to be designed carefully, since that’d be quite a power)
There are lots of possible governance design lego blocks. I’m going to put some more in an appendix. It’s probably the most fun part of the submission — do check it out!
Info rich vs. info poor
New governance mechanisms can be info-rich, that is, they could drag waaay more information out of people. The world and value is insanely complex, so it’s important to work with lots of information.
An example of an info-rich mechanism: market economies in which people reveal information through their purchasing decisions which flow through price signals)
An example of an info-poor mechanism: traditional democracy, which pulls a tiny amount of information from people (votes) and has narrow power structures at the top w/ few inputs
Traditional government has informal means of pulling information such as surveys/polls, but these are ad-hoc and haphazard and not necessarily integrated into an actual governance process.
2. There’re ways to run governance experiments
There are ways to run meaningful governance experiments without getting anyone’s permission first
There’s demand from new and nascent orgs for governance experiments, even for mechanisms that are new and untested
There’s demand from larger players for good well-tested governance
There’s demand from massive players (e.g. even nation states!) for seriously battle-tested governance mechanisms
There are people whose job it is to help nations write new constitutions!
Ways to try stuff out without needing anyone’s permission
City council ballot initiatives
Can set up a new governance mechanism whose purpose is to decide what ballot prop to propose.
could do as a one-off, or as an ongoing parallel innovative governance structure that plugs into the traditional one
could involve randomly sampling voter roles and sending invitations to participate in the mail
only a vanishingly small number of people realize this is a possibility (possibly just me and people I’ve discussed it with)
Omnibus state ballot initiatives
Like city ballot initiatives, except at the state level. State props are expensive, but some states allow more than one topic in a single ballot prop, so the innovative governance mechanism could propose an omnibus prop.
Haven’t really investigated the technicalities to know if this would work
Creating new DAOs
Creating civic non-profits that execute atraditionally
E.g. could make a city org that aims to beautify a city by keeping its sidewalks clean, generating more gardens, murals, etc in a way that is pleasing to its residents, and which is governed in new kinds of ways.
Demand from new/nascent institutions
There’s demand for less well-tested stuff that might work well. In particular, there are nascent that would to try new stuff and experiment with governance, but whose main focus is elsewhere, so they don’t really “get” to. They’d love a high-quality option they could grab off the shelf.
DAOs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization) — they’re super into experimenting with this stuff
Charter cities (total speculation that they’d want this)
(Coming soon) Games/VR — this is probably going to be much bigger much more influential and happen much faster than people are expecting — VR products are nearing a point where there will be mass adoption for various reasons. Governance of virtual worlds is an ideal spot for experiments.
Demand from existing institutions
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc actually want this stuff
Twitter is experimenting with group-informed consensus inspired by Polis (https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspectives/)
Know of one person (https://aviv.me/), who in less than a year of part-time work, got multiple digital platforms (which govern communications of more people than most countries) putting resources towards governance experiments and some even running successful pilots (nothing public yet).
Civil servants in government sometimes are excited to delegate an area to a new governance method
Partial delegation from regulatory agencies or legislatures
Especially power vacuums due to hot-button topics no one wants to touch
EA itself? — wouldn’t want to consign the whole movement over to an untested gov structure, but could assign a chunk of money to be directed according to the decisions of an experimental governance mechanism
There’s demand for mature, battle-tested, well-designed governance
AI companies that need to govern their tech
New constitutions (there are actually people whose job it is to help design new national constitutions — it’s a thing!)
Note: Running a governance experiment does require someone who “gets it” and knows how to execute. These entrepreneurial/builder-y/organizer-y folks might be in short supply, which could be a bottleneck in the space. (Not a positive for tractability)
3. If something tried works well, it can quickly lead to greatly increased adoption amongst new orgs
The world actually seems fairly hungry for better governance mechanisms — there’s demand out there.
And there’s an empirical example: at one point in the web3/DAO space, there was a protocol called Compound (https://compound.finance/governance) which made an easy off-the-shelf governance solution.
It was actually an extremely problematic design (it worked on coin voting aka plutocracy) and was/is vulnerable to various bribery attacks.
But it stood out by being in Actual Usage, and was easy for others to adopt. Many other protocols ended up adopting it; it was kind of the go-to for a while.
Maybe we can pull off the same except with a way better design!
4. There are plausible paths to significant worldwide adoption
New and nascent orgs (which have adopted new governance) may end up holding a large portion of world power
technology shifts are generally arriving faster, and existing institutions that fail to navigate them may become obselete faster than in the past. As examples, Facebook and Twitter rose to significant power pretty quickly. I’d say there’s maybe a 25% chance that this trend does or will apply to power and institutions broadly (low confidence here)
Great governance might help a new entity grow faster, and thus end up with more power
There may “stochastic” adoption from large incumbents due to particular unexpected moments, crises in legitimacy, etc where there may be sudden/deep adoption if there are high-quality battle-tested governance mechanisms lying around already
Neglectedness
As best I can tell, it’s almost no one’s job to do GDF.
It’s the consummate public good, so is under-provided by market economy
Many nascent orgs are probably in a frustrated state of, “ahhhh I’d really like to try out better governance, but:”
“we can’t afford the split focus / resources to put together a really cool experiment”
“there isn’t anything off the shelf we can trust enough”
There are a couple of meaningful experiments, e.g. https://community.optimism.io/docs/governance/
There’s a fair bit of work going into reforming existing actors/governments by slipping in some new methods, but very little in trying out radically new stuff.
Cost efficacy
Blunt estimate
This is perhaps a cliche, but:
(smallish odds of getting great governance widely adopted) * (absurdly massive impact from having that happen) --> great expected value
I’d put P(our efforts could be instrumental in getting great governance adopted widely) = maybe 0.5% or 1%
And I’d put the impact if that occurred at, ummm, err… something so huge that this whole endeavor becomes kind of obviously worth it.
This ‘simple’ gut-ish analysis is actually pretty valid here I think, given reasonable wide/well-calibrated estimates of the odds and impact. This is the framing I’m most comfortable with.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of thinking this way in general
Often in an area like this, the first dollars & attention make the biggest difference, so I think initial cost effectiveness is likely to be quite high.
BOTEC
Here’s a BOTEC which is broken down a bit more (with very sketchy estimates. to emphasize, I really would not stand by these numbers without thinking about them a bunch more):
P(average decision quality of new/nascent institutions increases significantly contingent on investing $100m + attention + people in this cause area) = 2%
P(within 20 years, >1/3rd of world power is held by institutions which today don’t exist or are nascent) = 25%
P(within 40 years, there is an x-risk which would clobber us but for >1/3rd of world power having significantly higher decision quality) = P(there is a dodgeable x-risk) * P(we dodge it thanks to the increased decision quality) = 20% * 3% = 0.6%
Multiplying through, we discover a ~0.3% chance of averting an x-risk in the next 40 years.
If accurate, seems fairly absurdly good — to make this outcome more intuitive, if we value each of the 8B people at $10k/person (~amount it costs to save a life), works out to 500B, or a 5,000x return (exclusive of future people, which is where some would argue most of the value lies)
I’m a little uncomfortable focusing this BOTEC so much on x-risk, because I think improved government would be robustly good in ways not captured by this analysis.
Are there grants to make? What’s a grantmaker to do?
Because a modern version of the field is so nascent, I doubt there are a ton of low-hanging passive funding targets. It might require the grantmaker to take on a bit of an active role in spurring things. (Sidebar: I actually think this is a powerful role for grantmakers to play)
Some off-the-cuff grantmaking possibilities, in rough order from passive to active:
Fund people who are already working in this area, e.g. Aviv Ovadya https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-democracy-policymaking-beyond-corporate-ceos-and-partisan-pressure (He just told me he’d be up for being funded for a year to explore the cause area and potential grantmaking opportunities)
Fund organizations that are already working in this area, e.g. Polis https://pol.is/
Ninja edit after OP submission deadline: adding this item: Aaron Goldzimer is an EA who has also been thinking about this for years and envisions something similar to what the Hewlett Foundation is doing around rethinking economics—but instead for democracy/government. He imagines funding workshops, deep research, working groups, conferences, empirical work, etc., all around re-thinking human self-government for the future, with a special eye towards catastrophic/existential risk and explicitly trying to counteract human cognitive biases like short-termism; tribalism; and susceptibility to disinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and demagoguery.
Crawl social graph to find other such examples of people already working on this, make sure they have the funding to focus on it.
Reach out to people who are interested in this space on Twitter and recruit them to the conference, to submit ideas, to collaborate with each other, offer grant money
Try to start the field ‘for real’: fund someone to run a Governance Design & Formation conference that pulls together everyone interested in this area. I think there are actually probably a fair number of such folks, some of them quite talented.
Invite people like this https://twitter.com/divyasiddarth/status/1556349384425705473
This one feels high-leverage, actually — I suspect there’s a lot of energy for GDF but pluralistic ignorance about the existence of that energy/desire to go for it.
Crawl the social graph to see who is already thinking about this stuff, but not working on it directly. A bunch of them probably actually want to work on this. Fund them to work on it directly.
Ask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang what to do
Ask Vitalik Buterin what to do (he’s thought about stuff, e.g. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html)
Ask Colin Megill what to do
Ask radicalxchange what to do
Fund someone to design a novel governance mechanism for directing an effective altruist initiative, and give that governance mechanism a bag of money to work with.
Fund a DAO governance shop
A non-profit that consults with new web3 protocols, figures out governance for them specifically, builds up knowledge over time from diff experiments, tries new things
Potential pitfall: getting rabbitholed in the academic/ the theory side of things. To avoid, consider things like:
Run a call for empirical experiments, give big awards for it to try to pull in interested entrepreneurs.
Matchmake practitioners who have experience running governance exercises(e.g. deliberative democracy facilitation people) w/ governance designers who want to test out new methods
Matchmake good governance design theoriests with with innovation-minded cities; fund them to run an experiment
Open a fund that supports governance experiments that plan to plug into city/state ballot initiative processes in order to be meaningfully connected to power
Can offer money to get initiatives on ballots
Appendix
About the author, in case relevant to evaluating his epistemics
Name = Ted Suzman
YC Founder. In 2018 took on a project to protect US democracy by defeating Trump; ended up accounting for 5% of the vote margin in the most pivotal swing states (the states in which you have to flip the least number of votes to flip the election outcome). Partial writeup: https://ted.suzman.net/2020/06/08/yc-methods-applied
Have a verifiable track record of making very early weird / “out of the money” predictions that end up coming true, across many domains
Good at strategy (was top 100 US Starcraft player during beta), reached 1 dan in Go as an adult in two years
Was at the first ever EA Global in 2013 (was called the EA Summit back then!)
Don’t really have a resume or website that’s accurately reflective of me. The open phil contest lured me out of lurker mode to write this up! Hoping the contest gets some attention/eyes on the cause area.
Fun stuff: more governance design lego blocks
Apologies for the TODOs in this section — ran out of time! If you’re curious about any of them just ask.
Open participation
Some stuff might need to be private
Could have internal bounties for any information marked private which doesn’t actually need to be private.
Beyond that, there are huge benefits to running things in the open, and letting anyone who wants to wander in and start participating in some way. (DAOs in web3 sometimes work this way, and it’s a great means of recruitment and building trust)
Well-being/flourishing surveys
Actually design these well; run them consistently on a wide basis
Actively ferret out problems early; actively work to solve; actively measure to see if solutions are working
Forecasting TODO
Futarchy/pseudo-futarchy type stuff
Forecasting outcomes of policies during policy formation
Sortition: randomly sampling the population and engaging with the sample
Economic mechanism design TODO
This is a super powerful toolkit
Capture resistance (Designed for continual legibility / swappability of people)
Defeating the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy TODO
Chaos monkey TODO
Complexity limits (e.g. maximum line counts of all laws)
Productive means of combining regular folks with experts (you want/need input from both)
Understandability requirements (e.g. randomly selected folks of a certain reading level must be able to read and then accurately re-articulate each policy)
Pay government workers better (hard to reform existing govts on this front, easier in new ones)
Epistemic escalation games: make it so anyone can purport claims like, “That line of that strategy doc isn’t true”, or “This person isn’t acting with the public interest at heart” or the like. Forecasters can anticipate which claim will win; things can be appealed up if there are disagreements (people might have to crowdfund bounties to get stuff appealed). Inspiration: https://kleros.io/
Process control (PID controllers — think home thermostats that try to keep the temperature at the right level)
Lots of things to process control. For example, want some minimum % of your smart/empathetic/ambitious people to be come teachers, or you’re screwed long term. As a result, continually automatically adjust teacher salaries / teaching school subsidies (up or down) until you’re on track to hit your desired percentages
Actually model out different groups’ directed “goal graphs” / theories of change; seek out a shared graph on which there is group-informed consensus (h/t Colin Megill)
Plus deliberate model combination on varying approaches
Quadratic mechanisms (a means of value pluralism) TODO
Various solutions to people not being engaged TODO
Solutions to the “it’s worked for so long we started taking it for granted” problem: Competitive simulations / redteaming / etc where people try to capture, take power, seek misaligned goals, etc. Could give everyone involved in the government direct hands-on experience with all the known ways things can go wrong; working knowledge of the purpose of everything.
Open state/execution TODO
Can also systematically prevent certain kinds of corruption, e.g. https://twitter.com/LisaBraganca/status/1488903119224328192
Proofs of computational integrity TODO
Closes some loopholes, prevents certain kinds of corruption. like Jan 6 was literally interrupting a sum() process.
Doesn’t close every angle of attack, of course, but the fewer the angles of attack, the more eyes/awareness/attention on each one
Magical tech, feels like it shouldn’t exist https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046
Anti-goodharting module — could have people predict whether, after the fact, people in the future will decide that some important metric was goodhardted. If these predictions go over a certain bound, it could set off various alarms that pull in people to check out what’s going on. The hope would be for people to use their common sense to avoid hacking metrics.
Examples of some lego pieces snapped together
Forecasting + Economic escalation game + Polis:
Could be a cheap way to discover areas of consensus in many different areas.
People could predict (and stake some money on) what the consensus outcomes of a Polis conversation would be if the conversation were actually run.
Others could challenge those predictions, or let them stand.
If challenged and ultimately appealed enough, the actual Polis conversation could be run
If the original prediction goes unchallenged, then after a time it could earn a reward.
Computational value pluralism + Machine learning
Human value is really complex and remarkably easy to crush by accident.
Ran out of time to write this one up :D
Epistemic networks + Guards against sociopaths
Could discover people who are good at predicting which other people are good at a skill (such as detecting malevolent actors). That way, you can maintain and grow your network of sociopath-detectors.
Thanks to David Slifka for giving feedback an early outline of this, and a few other people for last-second comments. Wish I had time to run it by more people!
Great post! My take on this is that we need trustworthiness and interoperability in these systems, this means they will need a single underlying crypto infrastructure. Once we have good scaling properties (cheap txs and high TPS, with the possibility for at least >10^5 but rather >10^7 TPS, with ZK rollups/Validiums (after all there are ~10^10 humans)) within a single ecosystem, we can start to lay down on-chain primitives, such as secret voting and proof of humanity/identity systems (although one can argue that identity is a governance problem, and so it should be solved in parallel with governance). Once we have all of this, we can start the experimentation of what the governance design should look like.
When it comes to the governance question I don’t think any of us have final answers, but I think that liquid democracy is also a great option, it has a local-to-global property, meaning people can assign their votes locally (this is what people are good at, evaluating people, and not complicated technical questions), and the votes can then be further reassigned. This means the system is simple, and understandable, while still allowing complex structures to emerge.
Thanks for your comment!
Agree that ultimately on-chain execution would be useful. For practical purposes (e.g. scaling which for now is limited, and UX problems, and development speed), it may be wise to engage in lots off-chain experiments — perhaps until it becomes a real issue that people don’t trust whoever is running the server. (There are also hybrid approaches where you use a centralized server which could censor, but which cannot manipulate beyond that)
Agree that proof of humanity / identity themselves require high-quality governance! I and another person actually started working on such a system (https://hackmd.io/@zorro-project/zorro-whitepaper) before deciding that it wouldn’t be possible to defeat bribery attacks without killing most of the upsides of the system. Good governance though could help fix. It’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem I guess!
I like liquid democracy as a lego block, but I also expect that it wouldn’t stand well on its own. E.g. Alex Jones would end up with a ton of votes delegated to him...
In the spirit of governance experiments, I made a liquid reputation system.
The idea is simple: you have a position in a binary tree of voters, and can give reputation upwards to any number of people (within a certain proximity, so the Alex Jones scenario can not happen), or get reputation from below (within a certain proximity). Unlike in liquid democracy, giving does not decrease your own reputation, so this is not a voting solution, but a reputation system (the reputation could be fed into smaller voting systems, as needed). It also means that it is not a zero sum game. If your reputation is larger than your parents, you can switch places (so the system is not frozen, and it is hierarchic, but in a competitive way).
The frontend and backend are still a bit rudimentary (and processes txs quite slowly), but check it out: https://anthilldao.dev/ The smart contract code is open source, there is a link to it on the website.
What do you think about this direction/general idea? I think it has some nice properties:
- local to global, people allocate reputation locally but affecting the global hierarchy.
- representative. People cannot be expected to constantly vote on everything.
- governance oriented. In standard liquid democracy, votes are assigned to make decisions, so the system is legislation oriented. In practice, people/groups have to be assigned roles where they can perform certain functions. This system can help with role allocation and can assign voting power to individuals in smaller groups if voting is required inside the group.
Thanks for this! I strongly believe in this pursuit, even if I would argue for it and go about it slightly differently. A few random thoughts, fwiw:
- I think you’re throwing a lot of different kinds of governance innovation into the same bucket. For example, sometimes (but not always!) I get the sense that your mental model is that governance/democracy consists of detecting a group’s (e.g., citizenry’s) views and translating that into governance. That is the mental model that most people have. I think the evidence suggests that people’s views adjust to the cues they get from their tribal leaders (e.g., Republicans increasingly anti-FBI and pro-Russia) -- and so this may not be the right/best/only mental model (and not saying it’s your only one!). I think a truly next-gen democracy might not necessarily take as its premise (as many people do) that citizens have independent views that just need to be accurately detected, aggregated, and translated into policy—but rather it should take greater account of the ways in which opinion-formation probably flows the other way—and should be designed to “nudge” both mass publics and elites against tribalism, against short-termism, and towards evidence and reason. This tension (which is a tension at the heart of all democratic theory) appears when you justify this cause area on the basis of wanting “high-quality decisions” but then a lot of your legos are really just fancy, teched-up ways to aggregate views/interests (but, obviously, a lot of people don’t seem to be very interested in ‘high-quality decisions’!). Both are necessary, of course (aggregating interests/views and nudging things in prosocial directions), but it helps to be aware of the tension and to be intentional about it.
- Relatedly, the crux of our governance/democracy problems are informational and epistemic. No amount of governance design/innovation is going to get very far without really innovating around how human societies can/should handle information and speech (can’t be censorship, but also can’t be a free-speech fundamentalist free-for-all, where everyone can pollute the public square as much as they want and get rich off of it). It would help to explicit about this.
- I’ve actually explored whether there are any opportunities for state-level experimentation with more fundamental governance/democracy reforms (for example, proportional representation) -- via, for example, (state) constitutional conventions. I came away from my initial exploration extremely discouraged, fwiw, though it would be good to explore more.
- I think there’s a fair amount of experience that’s not included here (which makes sense given that you did this in 24 hours!). Things like participatory budgeting, etc.
Thanks for the thoughts!
Yup agree with this. Ideally information flows in from constituents, and then there’s some synthesis with expert views, with information/influence flowing both directions. Agree that this didn’t come through in the essay.
I also think there are lots of different kinds of information that could flow in from citizens, rather than just their views as we traditionally think of views. For example, the way constituents are feeling (lonely, disenfranchised, purposeless, etc) all seems like really useful information that could help steer decisions. (It might be that constituents have instinctive first-blush ideas about what changes would help with those things, and those ideas might often not be very good. But they would contain information!)
I think of it kind of like product design. Generally, in product design, it’s a mistake to give people exactly what they ask for. Usually the game is to figure out what they really want, and why, and then figure out a way to give it to them. The answer might look like something they never would’ve thought of. But, critically, after you show them a draft of the answer, they should hopefully go, “Yes! That would do what I want!” — i.e, it’s important that they participate the whole way along. (That way, you’re not imposing unwanted stuff on them.)
Agree that this is a crux
Undoubtedly! If a list of things happens to jump to mind, would love to see it. The more lego blocks in the set, the better.
Would Governance Experiments and Scaling be a better name?
I’m curious if this is essentially taking on what I allude to here: https://aviv.medium.com/building-wise-systems-combining-competence-alignment-and-robustness-a9ed872468d3
Yep I think almost entirely overlapping!
RE: the name: I like “Governance Experiments and Scaling” but just asked around and some other people said they liked “Governance Design & Formation” better 🤷 I don’t have any strong feelings about the names.
The solution I’ve been thinking of is competitive governance: Allow total freedom for new systems of governance wherever land owners opt in to it. Then, people vote with their feet.
Founders can raise money with a vision for their own ideal society. If they can offer an attractive set of laws and regulations that citizens like, from tax policy, social safety nets, education, policing, etc., then they can grow as more move in or more land owners opt-in to those rules.
This is actually how businesses work. The crucial part is not the corporate governance structure of shareholders and a board of directors IMO. It’s that 1. businesses have wide leeway to govern as they please and 2. customers opt-in to paying the business and employees opt-in to working there. If a business stops being effective, customers and employees can switch to a competitor.
The freedom to create and the freedom to opt in are important features of many successful mechanisms. E.g. This is how Manifold Markets works. Anyone can create any question, and you opt-in to bet on it. If someone resolves a question in a way you disagree with, then you just stop betting in their markets. Vote with your feet.
Markets are the ultimate opt-in mechanism: you and another party mutually agree to a transaction. It works because mutual agreement is positive-sum, otherwise at least one side would decline the exchange.
Utilitarians most of all should approve these positive-sum exchanges. The world could do worse than apply this mechanism everywhere. And the one place it’s very obviously missing is in governance!