Thread by @EpistemicHope

It sometimes strikes me how primitive it seems that we elect INDIVIDUALS into positions of power, instead of some other kind of institution or epistemic process that might be better suited for making complicated decisions.

If feels silly that we have this hugely complex world, but governance is still mostly a matter of deciding which monkey should be the one in charge.

What if instead of electing a person to be president of the united states, we elected teams that are known to work well together and integrate into an effective whole, or even companies with all of their internal hiring and decision making practices?

To be fair, there are clear advantages to having a single person with whom the buck stops, who is responsible for the decisions that need to be made. And the bandwidth within a head is much higher than the bandwidth between heads.

And while there are lots of interesting proposals for other ways to make decisions as a group (from decision markets to Holacracy), it is still the case that the most successful organizations in the world are structured as a conventional hierarchy, with a leader at the top.

So there are advantages to electing individuals.

But still... “picking a person to be in charge”, seems so limited.

When I mentioned this to Daniel Filan, he pointed out that, to the extent that we have something like this, in the form of presidential and vice presidential candidates being bundled, it’s mostly used for political maneuvering.

Presidential candidates pick a VP who will help them get elected, rather than one that will make them more effective while in office.

Plus, there’s the problem that a team that works well together under the “training distribution” might start acting differently under the “test distribution” of having lots and lots of power.

Though that seems like it is better addressed by a more gradual ascent to more responsibility than conventional elections offer.

…Actually, that’s an interesting idea.

What if instead of presidential campaigns, we had presidential "tournaments", where all of the candidates govern some smaller unit than the whole country, and then after a year, we asses how they did, and vote on which ones should move on to governing a larger political unit.

In principle this seems like it would give voters more feedback (in the world where voting was about good delegation instead about tribal politics.)

I expect that if we actually tried something like "electing teams, instead of people", in practice it would degenerate into something quite like what we currently have: de facto one person would make the decisions, plus...

...a number of advisors that he/she defers to in specialized circumstances.

But I look forward to the day when elections are between DAOs with verifiable decision making procedures, with “this one guy makes the calls”, as a special case.

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