Sometimes people genuinely oppose a policy, but often they just distrust the people implementing it.
This gives at least four choices:
1) Abandonment: stop pursuing the policy 2) Coercion: force distrusters to obey, boosting their distrust 3) Subsidiarity: find someone the distrusters trust to implement the policy 4) Cryptoification: reduce the need for trust in the first place
Discourse today mostly focuses on (1) and (2). Should the policy be junked, or should it be forced through?
However, in theory you could use some combination of (3) web-of-trust and (4) trust-minimizing computation to attain consensus around at least a subset of policy problems.
You could run computational policy on social networks.
Quantify how much trust a given participant has in another via web-of-trust.
And identify participants within each tribe that have sufficient technical expertise to diligence any proposed trust-minimizing algorithm.
Here's a sequel someone did to Quantifying Decentralization, titled Quantifying Trust-Minimization.
This is "just" game theory, but it's useful to quantify just how trust-minimized a system is. This is a superset of what decentralization solves. ethresear.ch/t/quantifying-…
Why do I trust the code?
Because I audited every line myself?
Because I audited some lines, and outsourced others to security firms I trust?
Because I trust that DNS isn't spoofed?
Because I trust that the devs aren't malicious?
Useful to enumerate these premises.
An OS built for "total cyberwar" might enumerate as many of these premises as possible, put them into unit tests, and make them visible in a local dashboard.
Sort of like an anti-virus 2.0 that crypto people run when moving funds.
The borders between nation states are visible, but the overlap between social networks is not.
We can see the physical border between France & Germany on a map. We can't visualize the border between Twitter & Facebook. Which people are on the border, with accounts on both sites?
It's not just digital borders that are invisible, it's digital citizenship.
States can list the dual citizens of the US and Germany, but no one has the list of all dual holders of BTC and ETH.
This is how the pseudonymous economy leads to an encrypted world.
Old maps had genuine terra incognita. Places outside the ken of the civilization mapping them, mysterious places supposedly marked by "here be dragons". The phrase is apocryphal [1], but the concept is not.
We might systematize this to measure the relative effects of luck-vs-skill.
Pick N random people each year and give them X. Compare their outcomes to N people selected by a purported meritocratic mechanism, and also given X. And see how the latter do versus the former.
One of the more interesting kinds of US parochialism is the refusal to accept that other cultures detest wokeness — and recognize it as the next iteration of American imperialism.
@DanielLarison is antiwar, so he should understand why this is a meme — and why the global pushback against Woke America will only grow from here on out.
Others across the political spectrum have also noticed this is old wine in new bottles.
Imagine an NBA game where players imagine they're playing for the same team, but only see their own points. That's how ideological movements work on social media today: only individual profiles, no team dashboards.
DAOs change this. Number go up means movement goes up.
DAOs are also a potential resolution to the long-running argument over whether corporations only have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders — or if they should be run by the "community", which in practice usually means the state.
A third way between (a) a small group of possibly societally-disaligned shareholders and (b) de facto nationalization by a dirigiste state is (c) many DAO coinholders with governance rights related to their skin-in-the-game.
Meanwhile, Iran has just been admitted as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a sort of China-centric version of NATO and the EU. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_…
"The SCO is probably the biggest international organization that you’ve never heard of, and that’s likely because the West is being expressly excluded. However, the SCO is increasingly influential and is set to only become more well-known in the West." speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/09/03/the…
The oddest thing about SCO is the membership list, as many others have observed. India is in there, alongside Pakistan, in a "security" alliance, and admitted on the same day. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_…