By referencing voting, I was referring to one possible input into a decision-making process. I wasn’t considering the notion of electing human representatives. Rather, the outputs of that collective decision-making process could be any number of things, and would be determined by the nature of the collective effort. In the post I suggest one possible such decision making body that controls the purse of a charitable organization. In such a case, the output of the process could include decisions around funding determinations, rule or policy decisions, the creation of a lobbying effort, etc.
GG
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The post is very much about reinventing the wheel and that makes specifying a vision difficult because it is impossible to know what experimentation and invention will produce. -There are indeed a number of efforts to apply software to decision processes (or to improve voting). Some are good and have proven success. Most have not had great reach. The vision I intend to get across in the post is for a system that is accessible, provides the possibility of growth via feedback systems, and allows the best ideas to be promoted. I’ve seen academic work that investigates processes toward collective intelligence. The post attempts to make the point that it may be wise to move that to practice before state or corporate efforts contain the space and make something in the commons less possible.
Agree with these points. In the post, I give a toy example of a possible system in which various forms of contests can be used to assess a member’s ability to contribute. It seems as if identifying good generalists might be an easier task than identifying subject matter experts. I would imagine any process to identify expertise would include credentials and track records but I think it may be more important that a community of people that have already established trustworthiness are willing to take bets on a given individual. I think it’s very likely true that being a good generalist is a prerequisite to being an effective subject matter expert. But, yeah, lots of questions.
Replacing existing state institutions (or functional aspects of them) with digitally native systems will almost certainly have many benefits. That’s not really what I’m getting at here. I’m saying that it makes sense find better ways to govern and coordinate in general. The process of designing a software system with the general goal of focusing coordination could produce novel ways of doing that and/or it could leverage good ideas we already have around successful collaboration structures, focusing collective intelligence, etc. If there exists a subversive path in which we build such a system, for instance, to run a charitable organization and that process is successful enough to influence how other things are governed, then that is a win. My primary point is embarrassingly unfocused: getting better at coordination, given impending risks, is important and it might be good to start building experiments toward that goal.
Decentralized systems are attractive in that borders (of many varieties) inhibit coordination. I have some worry around the idea of using a crypto ecosystem as the basis for a something of this type. Whether the reasons are good or bad, the perception of cryptocurrency is divisive. I also worry that financial aspects around running a DAO could provide barriers to entry or could pervert incentives. I’m not really deep in that world so maybe my worries are overblown.
I am now wishing that this article had been written before I submitted my post. It points to new and existing efforts to put collective intelligence toward coordination and governance. It also makes the case for what I was trying to get across in a much more persuasive and rigorous way:
https://www.wired.com/story/collective-intelligence-democracy/
I suppose that if I could have seen this before submitting, I would have changed the spirit of my post to be something along the lines of “make use of collective intelligence systems to broadly manage EA giving, providing an example of efficient governing”, or something similar. I still think it makes sense to find a way to engage a large number of people committed to working together in new and experimental ways toward more coordinated and more useful outcomes.
I’d say that the spirit of the post is less to suggest a solution than to point out the perhaps fruitful process of experimenting toward a solution. The idea of weighting a decision-making process toward more qualified decision makers (however that is determined) makes sense to me, as does experimentation with untried formal systems of managing collective intelligence and cooperative mitigation of catastrophic risk (some academic examples of which are cited in the post). Also, I’d say that the proposal is less about replacing aspects of governments than it is about providing a clear example of more effective governance, one that could perhaps influence existing means of governance in a number of ways.