notes.md

https://www.netinterest.co/p/from-co-ops-to-daos-a12

In the capitalist imagination, promising a financial return is supposed to turn on rigorous thinking and skin in the game style incentives. It seems in reality it more often turns off thinking entirely and unleashes wishful striving

your reputation/voice should be harmed if you bump something that ends up being divisive or noisy or untrue, even if you didn't realize. rewarding rigor and caution is the whole point. if you aren't sure about something, you shouldn't support it.

economic activism, fixing our economy without first waiting for legal permission, member cooperatives and the labor/capital divide

cooperatives as an institutionalized form of mutual aid

power comes from getting things done. solving problems and improving people's welfare capitalist culture lies about doing that in many ways, since it is inherently adversarial.

we don't need profit-seekers as much as we think we do member cooperatives shift profit-seeking away from the supply side in the form of a monetary margin, and toward demand side in the form of increased consumer surplus. with the member cooperative model in hand, only "uncertain" economic domains really make sense as the realm of profit-seekers. the very first portion of economic progress, the part that involves charting completely new and entirely unknown territory, need be left to them. everything after that, all the relatively boring management, can be left to member cooperatives. We don't need de-regulation, we need democratic regulation. if regulation is actually democratic, and rooted in consistently defensible frameworks of rights, then it will be efficient in regards to social welfare, which is more important than being efficient in regards to growth or wealth. Member cooperatives are the model that can make a world with less regulation sane, since the business itself is owned by its customers there isn't as much need for the government to protect them.

it should be obvious that any improvements we can make to our society without having to change the government we should attempt to make. we don't have to get anyone's permission, and we don't have to wait around for everyone to agree with us. we can build a lot of civic power and get a lot done. but we have to watch out: we can't just fall back on profit-seeking, and not just build new systems of extraction and inequality. and of course, private action isn't going to be enough, we'll have to tackle the government at some point. in this section, we include discussions of the internet and robust software.

• member cooperatives as a way to take back economic power from capitalists, be a perfect synthesis of markets and cooperation, and slowly build societal competence for democratic cooperation and institutions, allowing us to in the limit have a post-scarcity society where jointly owned assets form the basis of an incredibly solid standard of living floor. it seems cooperation is always more efficient than competition when the costs of cooperation are outweighed, and the costs are lower than people think. if you can form a company to cooperate on some task, then inherently that cooperation is worth it. why should that company compete with others? ironically, capitalists have always understood this, which is why monopolistic mergers, oligopoly, regulatory capture, and other forms of capitalist collusion have existed for such a long time. (capitalists don't just have their interests aligned by more obviously "rational" material concerns, but also by cultural and idealogical ones. capitalists believe that their class is superior, and they share an emotional dislike of the labor class. that aligns them to collude just as much as the profit motive, since they identify each other as members of an ingroup). a method of "componentized generalization" can always be more efficient than pure duplicative competition (and when it's controlled democratically and therefore non-antagonistic the consolidation isn't a problem), since even if two groups are working towards slightly different final goals, finding the components of their systems that can be generalized to serve all compatible needs and then used flexibly to achieve the incompatible needs can always in theory be more efficient. the principle of competition in markets isn't really about efficiency, it's about non-coercion. the presence (or theoretical presence) of competition implies non-coercion. the other thing about markets that makes them powerful is that seemingly by definition they include mechanisms that are dynamically self-balancing. an equilibrium is always maintained. non-coercion and dynamic equilibrium are the actual things that make markets what they are. market fundamentalists incorrectly subsume the profit motive into the virtues of markets, creating the greed is good mindset, but they haven't considered that a group's desire to prosper and cooperate is itself a form of "profit". By conflating incentive (which can come from innumerable sources) with the profit-motive they've formed a blindly narrow idea of how our economy can work.

• co-housing as a way to both increase the efficiency and utility and abundance of housing and all domestic utility in general (enabled financially by the democratically owned cooperative credit unions above), as well as increase social cohesion, heal social wounds, decrease loneliness, and give everyone the option of joining and thriving in a tribe.

• "nomad mortgages" and frictionless property sales, allowing people to move around while still building equity and wealth.

(If I was to come up with a comprehensive economic theory, it would probably be called Cooperative Economics or something)

• creating a fully logical assembly language that enables us to create technology that is truly robust enough to be used for these essential societal functions.

• decentralizing the internet, but in a more pragmatic way then requiring fully blockchain-enabled abstract computers. better/more reliable languages enable a host of simple devices like small home servers that can act as the new backbone of a decentralized web. a consensus algorithm based on social trust rather than only cryptography. a public cloud company owned as a member cooperative to fill that gap. a universal typed messaging protocol with proof capabilities built in that enables arbitrarily powerful linking of everything. intentionally low-tech mobile devices that are open-source and were created by the crowdsell mechanism, enabling them to be fully in our control, and they use the universal typed protocol to have fully capability while still being very low-power and undistracting.

• using member cooperatives and the above decentralized internet to bring data sovereignty rather than dignity (which is just taking the current status quo as a given). machine learning algorithms should be deployed by the people in order to create value for them, not by some corporation seeking to extract value.

• maybe solving the disinformation problem with a more decentralized internet + data sovereignty + creating democratically controlled aggregation networks (or something) that use the same quadratic principles to limit noise and increase the quality of information and almost certainly therefore massively decrease the quantity of information. this one's tricky because we want to slowly reward people for doing good work and espousing reasonable things, and give them more voice, but it's difficult to figure out how this can happen without enabling demagogues. this is interesting, but I can't help disagree with it a little bit. in a way he's saying something obvious, that we should be aware of and engage in all levels of information, but in way that we're in control of. I do think he understates how much the firehose is the fault of corporations though, since part of the reason there's too much information is that they've made it so easy and low friction not just to create low quality information but to spread it world-wide. information can be both low latency and important, like important current events, or a fast-moving conversation between interesting well-informed people about something useful. the genuine usefulness of some low latency information doesn't justify the existence of the rest of the garbage low latency information, just like low-quality high-latency information like garbage books don't get a pass just because they're high-latency. also, the simplification of the global internet computer is anti-humanist. we don't need a weird metaphor, we can say the real thing. when people inhale information and exhale useful information, they're doing the same kind of knowledge work that has formed the basis of human knowledge acquisition forever. it's a connected peer network, just like it always has been. just because it's faster doesn't mean its suddenly subsumed the intrinsic value of each person. https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/against-waldenponding

  also https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/orthographic/ and https://platforms.fyi/

  weights can be used to lower the cost of inducting someone or to harvest ephemeral points used in burning actions or to place weight on documents instead of more scarce things like people or namespaces contextual scaling factors, essentially a way to allow reputation to gather in a subcommunity the cost of "posting" in a space should increase with the number of people following that space, and increase as the moderation capacity goes down. a "global" space like a hashtag has no moderators, it's inherently a commons, so it's different than something like a namespaced "message board" where some group controls it. I still can't quite unravel exactly how should people be able to use their weights to control the scaling factor of a shared commons like that above? or should each follower simply be able to set their own personal scaling factor? how does decentralized reputation work in a democratic market like this? we're basically trying to create some kind of democratic market layer on top of ipfs. ipfs allows for documenting editing and linking, so this is about moderating the commons of public attention in a fair democratic way layering in ideas about a universal typed protocol makes this even more powerful. people can create arbitrary linked applications simply by producing datatypes, actions that manipulate those datatypes, and prices/mechanisms that moderate those actions

  one of the things we're really trying to do with an economic system like this is merely mirror the effective aspects of trust in human societies, while allowing them to scale up and have a computational measure. keeping that kind of simplicity and naturality is important to making it really catch on and for normal people to bother. also it has to be useful so that people care about joining.

A social network is mostly working when the reputation and trust embedded in the real life peer network is simply replicated by the application. We do have the chance to go a step further though and add corroborative tools The faster something is spreading, then possibly the slower we should allow it to Unlimited network spread of information is likely harmful for these reasons Commodification of social ties, especially through the influencer dynamic, and the psychological hijacking of tools that are supposed to be mundane and are best when they're mundane into tools of personal brand creation and fame fishing Misinformation obviously The hard part is to allow intentional networks without still allowing out of control memes

How do we fix everything?

All of these problems are unacceptable, and many of them are of existential importance. But they're all secretly the same problem! They're all problems related to our ability to cooperate with each other and make group decisions. We can think of our group decision making ability as a piece of technology we use. Voting is just a piece of technology, a mathematical tool we use to boil down the complexity of each person's wants and needs and preferences into simple numbers that can just be added up.

Framing the book and talk as the series of questions, can we fix everything, how do we fix everything, who wants to help?

If any group of people wants to cooperate with each other, the most important decision they must make is how they will make decisions! We have many different systems to do this, but they all fall short in some way.

We don't need to subvert our governments, we need to fix them: How crypto-libertarianism has coopted decentralization, and why that is a bad thing.

Talking about political party, we don't need to subvert government we need to fix it financialization is a bad thing

With most definitions of capitalism, it's an inefficient and bankrupt ideology, (and when it isn't, that's because it's actually socialism)

or at least the irrational warriors of capitalism would say it is if we design our society to have perfectly efficient and rational markets, and to most effectively achieve the one thing markets are actually for (allowing each participant greatest possible ability to maximize their welfare), then we inevitably push more and more towards things that modern "capitalists" would never actually call capitalism. this reveals that the people who defend capitalism don't really care about societal efficiency, they care about their continued ability to unfairly capture public resources and use them to maximally extract wealth from others so they can concentrate that wealth enough to occupy a position of untouchable power and status.

Plotting a course to a global mega-cooperative: it's time to take it all back

cooperatives don't have a bootstrapping problem, they have a scale of control problem if there were a large mega cooperative that had democratic methods to allocating funds to community valued projects, then we wouldn't have any problem at all bootstrapping cooperatives. however, that mega cooperative itself must be bootstrapped

I know it doesn't feel as good, but we really should be thinking about how to make a single mega-cooperative that absorbs basically all the ones already out there. the rise of mega-corporations has proven that integration has a ton of institutional benefits, the only problem was that that integration wasn't democratically controlled and explicitly existed to adversarially extract value from others. we need to retake science, retake technology, retake industry, retake big

Plotting a course toward verified ethical foundations for rights and governance

I need more formally define the theories of welfare and universes and predictions

There's a lot of improvements and changes I'm intending to make, mostly relating to more specificity for adaptive voting (things like "filling the consensus bucket", how that works, and more ideas about what "update intervals" a group has to choose) and integrating conviction voting into the adaptive commitments concepts. After you asked about the strategy conjectures I was planning of giving the answer I more or less sketched in the book (I don't really know, I need to do research about if there are cycles, etc), but I slowly agreed with you that the claims I was making weren't very convincing yet, and so I've been chewing on all this for the last week or so, and have finally come up with something I'm willing to say ha I think part of the problem here is that the existing theory around strategy and voting are all very discrete. even infinite games probably don't really concern themselves with real adaptive continuousness, so I'm not aware (as a self-taught newcomer to the field) of any existing tools that can think in this way. If I was going to prove all of this, here's what I think I might do to avoid arbitary dimensional preference spaces It's nice that adaptive democracy is truly direct democracy, and that every single decision in the societal cooperative can possibly be made directly. This means we can represent each voters preferences with a simple "total" decision document, one that specifies everything this voter cares about with some arbitrary "social function", possibly with "null" or "identity" spots where this voter simply says "I don't care, delegate to everyone else". then we can understand their degree of satisfaction with the current status quo as some kind of "behavioral diff", or the amount of changes or edits required to make the current status quo behave exactly like their internal ideal. this is kinda fuzzy, and probably should focus more on outcomes on the "universe" vector rather than the actual "code" (the logical idea of functional extensionality can be applied to these diffs) I would want a theory of universe vectors and rounds of mutation actions to reason from first principles. so their internal ideal is a social decision function that they predict is most likely to follow some trajectory they most prefer.

Again all of this is very vague and in my head! I'm not an expert in this field, and have been deeply working on Magmide like I said. I've found it very difficult to make progress on these very tricky philosophical and game theoretical ideas while also holding a normal full-time software job and being a father ha. Hint hint, if any of you

1. At this point I haven't even tried to prove any of the conjectures I make in the book, . The conjecture I make isn't that it will "reduce" strategic voting per-se (Gibbard' theorem tells us it's impossible to completely remove), but that it just helps to reveal voters' real preferences more quickly, and allow each voter to choose the strategy of their vote that is satisfying to them given the entire collection of decisions they could choose to participate in. The original mathematical statement of QV also doesn't say that it removes strategy, but As for building a proof,

I'm now thinking that adaptive voting doesn't actually reduce strategic voting, but merely makes it inconsequential. the real problem with strategic voting is that it produces "incorrect" votes that the voter ends up regretting, or where they could have made some other choice that would have served them better. in real elections those kinds of problems are very deeply concerning, since their vote is set in stone and the decision has been made. with adaptive voting they can simply adjust their vote to be more competitive after getting more information. this is why it seems very very important to use an expressive and monotonic inner voting method. that monotinicity itself seems like the very property that will prevent "cycles", since it will allow the durable expression of the most sincere preferences while the more "strategic" ones are allowed to fluctuate somewhat with the competitive landscape. conviction voting is probably the most correct thing to use for any irreversible commitment, it's become very clear to me after the last little while that intelligently blending adaptive and conviction paradigms is the best way to achieve this balance. probably the real true shift of perspective is merely saying that direct democracy is the thing we should be striving for! all of these different mechanisms are just ways of trying to scale direct democracy so it actually works. in general I think I'm also trying to design all of this so that instead of thinking about conflict between different candidates in any decision, we're thinking about negotiation as the adaptive mechanism promotes discovery of new options that have the power to quickly gain approval from all concerned parties. we're trying to find a system that quickly adjusts to discover the best acceptable option. I'm conjecturing the presence of some equilibrium state in the preferences of the voters, one where each person has allocated their vote in a way that maximizes their satisfaction with its allocation, even if that allocation isn't perfectly representative of their real preferences. this equilibrium is one in which all votes are attaining their highest "return on investment" based on the competitiveness of the decision they're in compared with how concerned the voter is. it's the "likelihood of being pivotal" and besides and very importantly, probably the real thing that makes adaptive voting stand out above other paradigms is that it maximizes the amount of control a group has over their cooperative mechanisms, since they directly control every single aspect in some way or another. the cooperative rules are a real representation of their current consensus

Yeah, I haven't spent much time finding concrete evidence for those claims, likely a future version of the book should do so!

if you use a monotonic voting method, then voters will never state a higher preference for some "strategic" candidate vs their favorite one. this means that "favorite" preferences will always be fully revealed, and possible best outcomes always discovered maximally quickly.

if some set of coalitions have a favorite candidate who is also a welfare consensus candidate, they will quickly win as those coalitions discover the possibility of that candidate's win and demote strategic candidate's

my hunch is that if there's any property that can guarantee a adaptive vote will always converge to some optimal state, it's monotinicity.

if a voting method forces to choose between fully and accurately expressing preferences and finding the highest welfare choice, we should prioritize finding highest welfare choice. this means we're not really concerned with the presence of strategy, but really between a mismatch between the truly most strategically fit vote and voters' predicted most strategically fit vote.

adaptive democracy is likely a welfare optimal construction because it is a direct representation of the concept of focus and welfare concern across time, which is the thing we're trying to maximize.

There's an entirely equivalent stabilization mechanism at play in common resource taxes, since the handover period gives the current owner time to make a higher counter offer! Just because they're the current owner doesn't mean they can't still make offers

the saas model allowed private companies to seize control of the internet: here's how we take with back using with adaptive democracy and compute cooperatives landlords are purely extractive middlemen who add no value to society: here's how we get rid of them with adaptive democracy and common resource taxes fixing the global housing crisis is easy, we just need to completely reform how we think about voting, public goods, and property ownership (sigh)

humble modernism (or perhaps a name that isn't so referential is better? compassionate rigor? humble ambition?) engineers have to be careful to be humble, the act of engineering, of bending the world around you to your will, is inherently intoxicating, and it can fill you with a dangerous self-important arrogance about what you can and should do in the world I wanted to call it new modernism, but we might as well emphasize the humility right? what distinguishes this thinking from previous modernism is that the young people espousing this version have at least become aware of their privelige, and are operating from a perspective of inclusion and legitimate cooperation modernism emphasized mathematics, logic, science, engineering, and largely ignored the humanities and the arts. old modernism was very white and male and rich, and ignored the wishes and concerns of others. for me one of the main tenets of my personal modernism is understanding the logic of cooperation itself! that's part of what has energized me to believe things can change, that we've stumbled across a better mathematical understanding of how to cooperate. humble modernism is grounded in the core values of compassion, inclusion, and democracy (these are what make it "humble"). but it attempts to pursue those values through the rigorous application of logic, mathematics, science, engineering, and technology. this is a good place to talk about the "cart-horse-driver" metaphor. the cart part has always been a little clunky so I'll deemphasize it here, but the "horse-driver" part is perfectly apt. humble modernism recognizes that the arts/humanities are the driver, they tell us what to even pursue, but the rigorous disciplines are almost always what will actually get us there facts don't care about your feelings is certainly true, despite the obliviousness of the douchebag logic bros who always say it. but the critical correlary is that facts only matter because of our feelings.

... a socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology. From this perspective, modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end.

how to fix everything essays get summary and survey books, blinkist, and sparks notes to get through political theory and philosophy and history books faster to get the ideas, include these "summaries of summaries" as the first versions of some of the first book references how to fix everything website theories of voting theories of democratic consensus theories of democratic attention market proofs of philosophy and rights system write thorough outlines of how you want to describe project in readme and site home get design and aesthetics good enough to share get functionality working to list page summaries on index pages write outlines of overviews of all sections finalize all writing enough to share

social network member cooperative journalism member cooperative the member cooperative social network/bazaar thing a house-exchange/couchsurfing/airbnb member cooperative, with fair/efficient democratic governance alliance of member cooperatives has been formalized and created, along with the charter for an attached for-profit (or non-profit if that is possible) "strike-force" organization whose purpose is to produce technology innovation in ways that enhance the social mission but also potentially can extract wealth from and compete directly with large corporations a credit union capable of enabling rent-to-own mortgages, housing cooperative projects, social ventures, etc has been created

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_land_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Estonia#Land_Value_Tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax_in_the_United_States https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2019/04/henry-georges-single-tax-could-combat-inequality/587197/ https://transportist.org/2013/08/17/altoona-pennsylvania-adopts-land-value-tax/

https://www.brookings.edu/research/whos-to-blame-for-high-housing-costs-its-more-complicated-than-you-think/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/ownrate.html

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/Plassmann_Tideman_MCP-and-Quadratic-Voting.pdf

https://www.opensourceecology.org/

humane architecture should be included here https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/2/we-should-be-building-cities-for-people-not-cars https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/6/college-campuses-as-a-model-for-urban-planning https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/02/10/the-happy-city/

trials to prove facts could be called corroboration trials It's confidence that spreads, not the truth

automating rigor, why coding ate the world and why proof checkers will democratize academia the interference/dependency field: a tentative theory of rights (say in that post that you want to go deeper into ethics) the universe wager: a theory of optimal secular meaning nihilist, psychopathic, and saintly universes: a tentative theory of ethics my dream for a mainstream verification language. platinum is to coq as rust is to java you're most helpful to the world when you're happy, health, stable, and productive we're not here to sound smart, we're here to create and explain useful ideas

The Shapley Value, a way of determining the compensation to a member of a group for their contributions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcLZMYPdpH4&list=PLeY-lFPWgBTif4PmLSN8eJsfOhFv_QUPl&index=3&ab_channel=GameTheoryOnline

when you create some work of political argument, ask yourself what might happen if you sent it to a religious conservative. would they be moved closer to you, not at all, or even further away? then ask yourself who this is for and what it's trying to accomplish.

constitutions describe the boundaries of when violence will be used to enforce decisions and values, what kinds of decisios are allowed, and how they are made.

Voting reform is required to save our democracy, but not the voting reform actually being considered Our biggest problem isn't that our democratic mechanisms are poorly designed, it's that a big chunk of our population has been converted to fascism it is foolish to assume a single top-down index measurement can forever measure a society's prosperity. the important thing is that the people are truly in control, and can add new metrics as their values change, and leave interpretation to a diversity of philosophical voices in the community

financialization of everything seems toxic to me, likely because it almost entirely focuses on ownership and investment instead of useful labor

A regulation is just a clarification of the boundaries of some rights, and how those boundaries are enforced in practice

There are no big or small governments, only correct and incorrect ones

Science is good, but big corporations aren't. We have to remember they aren't the same thing. Our bad system of patents has tied them together, but it doesn't have to be that way

Figuring out the best ways for small groups to coordinate is almost entirely emotional, about understanding what individual people want and what will make them feel good. And smaller groups tend to be more specific, have greater need for high context. But the bigger and more abstract a group becomes, the more we have to rely on math and logic and theory to guide us, and simplified models of what people want, because that's the only way we can manage that complexity. The most important and difficult question for humanity to answer as we grow is how can we best coordinate. That's how we've achieved everything we have so far, and that's how we can overcome the obstacles we face today

Democracy isn't broken, plurality voting is

scarcity is rooted in the cold reality of atoms. trying to either create scarcity where there isn't truly any or pretend there isn't scarcity even when there is will lead to eventual problems

Two way surplus, when both supply and demand are comfortable and have enough. Buyers get much more value from the good than it costs to buy, and sellers get much more money than it costs to make. This almost always happens when our collective technological leverage is very high, and the cost to provide something is simply so low that it's a tiny percentage of buyers purchasing power. Profit seeking companies don't have an incentive to create this situation, but instead to package goods both physically and psychologically in a way that allows them to artificially and irrationally raise their price to the maximum tolerable level. Cooperatives and nationalized companies can use these situations combined with subscription pricing and quotas to create situations like these, where people have goods and pay little in taxes or membership fees, but more than strictly necessary for the goods, allowing the institutions to create increased public good value with their side of the surplus

the book is targeted at a general audience, and points to rigorous and fully formal theories and one-off posts that examine questions and applications that are too specific for the book.

so there should be a small number of quite deep chapters that point to theories and posts if people want to dive deeper.

chapters:

• introduction

  • problems in the world, how I discovered hope
  • humanity's power comes from cooperation, and the methods we use to cooperate are just like a technology we can improve
  • we improve technologies with logical and scientific rigor, so it's reasonable to be more confident in one system of cooperation than another
  • but we still have to persuade people to cooperate and use these methods! we hope that them being more logically rigorous is good enough, but it frequently isn't, so we need to be pragmatic
  • this is the goal of this book, to propose better methods of cooperation, and get people all working together to improve them, rigorously verify them, and build real world movements and organizations that use them.
  • here are the main ideas, and hints about how they could help us end corporatism and consumerism, create shared prosperity, dissolve all monopolies including ones of intellectual property, create a more cohesive and emotionally harmonious culture, allow us to respond to the climate crisis, deradicalize fascists and fundamentalists,
  • the chapters aren't strictly categorized, and are just in the order we felt it was most natural and understandable. but there are a few broad themes: are there any obvious changes we can do right away? how can we take action in the economy in ways that don't require achieving political change? what should our government look like?
  • this is an open source book

• score voting systems: approval voting is an obvious change we can make right away. points to other resources, a talk about why approval is better than ranked choice.

• resource voting systems and quadratic scaling: handling different levels of concern and shared costs

• adaptive democracy: the principle of adaptive weights, using adaptive voting to solve common cooperation problems. this goes over the obvious and easy to explain ones, and hints at more involved uses

• democratic funding

• provably correct software

• computable governance code

• cryptographic transparency

• coordination theory

• economic cooperatives and economic activism

• adaptively democratic member cooperative: building an economic institution to fight on our behalf

  • economic foundations, starting as an online-first credit union
  • journalism and media
  • internet, computing hinting at separate essay about misdirected blockchain enthusiasm, hint at public forum
  • housing
  • education

• democratic public forum

• adaptively democratic political party: building a political institution to fight on our behalf

• minimum necessary rights

• markets and rights

• common resource taxes

• wealth taxes

• crowdsell intellectual property

• democratic districts

• free borders

• adaptive logistics

• democratic adjudication

• misinformation rights

• universal voluntary constitution

• universities and coworking

• sustainability and anti-consumerism

• cohousing and urban planning

• climate action

  • especially nuclear power
  • already discussed externality and common resource taxes, so discuss carbon cap-and-trade, just like with sulfur-dioxide

• persuasive action

posts:

• waiting out the blockchain hype

formal theories:

• welfare theory
• progress theory
• proof of social trust

footnotes that actually have text suck. better to have a collapsible element, or just use parentheses! true footnotes would just be possible links someone might find interesting after they're done reading your stuff

Retaking scale Rigor and realism

There's no such thing as socialism or capitalism, only rights and public goods and rights are only just another public good!

A noise and bot resistant public forum Chaotic noise is inherently dangerous https://onezero.medium.com/redirecting-the-techlash-74065169b352 We must absolutely destroy consumerism, but we can't live without industrialism

Giving profit incentives to do something positive is just allowing middle men to make money without doing anything real. They're just going to hire labor so all they can possibly do is make choices. we should just make choices directly with adaptive mechanisms

It's important to understand how we know things. Mathematical proof is one way, experience through experimentation is another. Whether our knowledge is persuasive is another matter we'll address later

Part of what makes corporations so powerful is that they don't require they much coordination. All the buyers just make simple self interested decisions and that powers the system forward Member cooperatives inherit most of that advantage. Most members don't have to be super involved or vote that much, they just pay dues and get value in return The big difference is in activation energy. For profit businesses get started because of greed, so again very little coordination is ultimately needed. Member cooperatives can be just as self sustaining, but they need activists to get the ball rolling

Ethical values vs organizational values ethical values Democratic ownership and control Compassionate humanism, people are an end in themselves Empirical humility

organizational values Embracing and reclaim scientific rigor and industrial scale Using empathetic persuasion, but be rigorous and detailed and show our work

Climate actions Nuclear power Cloud seeding Methane control Reforestation and rewilding Cities with more plants

Wealth taxes can be thought of as a necessary way of avoiding market power, since a massive concentration of wealth creates market power in ALL markets. These players can exert market power by overwhelming the marginal utility function of key competitors and making their potential competition moot

main ideas coordination is our superpower, and at large scales our coordination systems are a piece of technology rather than an intuitive part of our psychology mathematical logic is the science behind improving our coordination systems, so we must use and trust them when doing design but mathematical logic isn't effective at persuading people of the efficiency of these systems. we have to understand effective persuasion and aggressively pursue it

move logic chapter to blog, replace with the general initiative of first rigorously proving our ideas before verifying them, in order to be more confident when we try to persuade. first chapter instead talks about proof assistants as the prelude to the ideas and tools section, merely describing how rigorous we expect this to be Make a correct government chapter and somehow split or merge the markets and rights chapter with the main rights chapter and wicked externalities Principles They only way out is through, we can't roll back industrialism, only reorient and redesign it Democratic ownership and control. The only way to have any confidence new scaled or automated systems or civic systems are actually just is for all those concerned to have real power The moral welfare motive instead of the profit motive

In rights chapter need to replace exclusion concept with rivalry An ownership must necessarily deal with something rivalrous, since otherwise ownerships would collide

We can fix everything, a total plan to realize true democracy and prosperity, and solve the big problems of our age.

Many people are chipping away at our problems in isolation. Although they're doing good work, we think this strategy won't be successful for a few reasons:

• The problems are woven together, so the solutions can't work if they aren't as well.
• Different people take different approaches to the problems, and get in each other's way rather than pull in the same direction.
• It's difficult to get people excited or persuaded by a single solution to a single problem, not when they're aware of everything else that remains.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FTE9HS2/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079HL9YSF/

top of mind

We have to fix everything: my harebrained scheme to solve the big problems of our age with a new political party. By forming a comprehensive and unified platform with which to improve our world, I feel we can actually make progress instead of chipping away in isolation.

This is an extremely rough broad sketch of what I have in my head. A lot of it isn't fully formed yet, and I'll be honest about how confident I am about any particular idea, and honest about my emotional state about them. I realize a lot of this is probably extremely naive, but it's burning a hole in my mind, and I would love some kind of reality check. Is there anything here? Am I completely off the mark?

Our collective problems are intertwined and urgent, and our isolated efforts to solve them don't seem to be working. It seems that we have to first address our basic societal mechanisms, since those are the most foundational structures we use to achieve all other forms of coordination. We can't solve real problems if we don't have a way of efficiently making group decisions. The gordian knot, hope, and confidence. My idea for a democratically run political party with an open source book at the center.

Here are the other things the organization could do: member dues quadratic funding pool experiment with holistic administration and a harm-reducing constitution democratic forum for ideas/posts/initiatives

We already commit to use violence to defend people's rights, but now we do so without a consistent and rigorous definition of what those rights are. Forming a provably consistent foundation would give us a strictly better situation than the one we're currently in.

The Book

since we're attacking such a complex tapestry of problems, our solutions aren't going to fall into neat categories. rather than having all our ideas categorized and ordered in sections such as "governance" or "economics", we instead merely order them according to the most intuitive order to encounter them. many of these ideas build on each other, and so they are presented in order of dependency. since complexity/dependency and tractability tend to go so hand in hand, the sections are also therefore roughly ordered by how immediately we can start applying the ideas, and then to have a "theory/application theory/application" pattern.

the near future, what can we do right away?

theories and mechanisms, what foundation are we building on? what tools can we use?

cooperative economics, what institutions can we build without needing to change the government? applying theories and mechanisms to the "private" sphere.

a new holistic constitution, applying theories and mechanisms to the "public" sphere.

climate change, and a new human ecosystem, what we think the best path forward is and how the mechanisms can get us there.

de-radicalizing the right: resisting fascism and unifying our culture

---

Perhaps the right way to frame this movement isn't to focus on the problems, but on creating a truly democratic world. Blog posts and things can detail how these ideas solve the big problems.

A truly democratic society, where the rights of all are complete and fully protected, and fairly balanced where they conflict. That leads to a society where prosperity is enjoyed equally, while still providing incentive to do valuable work.

We can fix everything, and we have no choice but to try.

As a global society, we're facing a lot of very serious and very difficult problems.

• Government inefficiency and corruption. Almost no government is truly representative and democratic, many are outright authoritarian, and basically all have serious problems with waste and graft. Good governance is a tricky problem, and we haven't solved it yet.

• Police unaccountability and systemic injustice. Crime and punishment in almost all societies is an expression of class power structures rather than the democratic will to defend everyone's rights.

• Economic inequality, consumerism, corporatism. Our economies are dominated by massive corporations, who instead of creating prosperity, derive much of their power from exploiting weaknesses in various systems, such as those in political institutions, human psychology, or markets that can be easily made into oligopolies.

• Climate change, environmental destruction. Erratic and severe weather patterns are already beginning to disrupt communities and create increased resource uncertainty and scarcity. We routinely destroy natural resources that both underpin our planet's economic value and are irreplaceably beautiful.

• Misinformation, disinformation, surveillance capitalism. It is now trivially easy for any group with spare resources to pollute our shared information ecosystem with misunderstandings or outright lies. The structure of attention capitalism rewards these kinds of behaviors and increasingly addicts us all to a world of shallow entertainment and consumerist indulgence.

• Resurgence of fascism and authoritarianism. The success of various social justice movements around the world and increased economic instability have empowered a new wave of fascist movements, and many governments have eagerly adopted technological methods of surveillance and control. Violent and irrational forms of market and social fundamentalism have been deeply inculcated into many populations.

These are serious problems! Each of them individually would be incredibly dangerous and destructive, and together they threaten to permanently destroy our species hopes of prosperity, dignity, and freedom.

It's also important to notice that each is interrelated to all the others. They reinforce and exacerbate one another, tying the whole collection into a paralyzing Gordian knot.

So what should we do?

I routinely encounter young and idealistic people who simply throw up their hands when confronted with these big problems, and I can't help but sympathize. This is an unfair burden to be placed on any generation, and thinking of fixing it all is overwhelming.

But here's the thing: we don't have any choice. If we don't solve these problems, they will steadily dismantle our societies, and possibly even destroy us entirely.

We have the obligation of hope. If we don't (perhaps arrogantly) assume that we can figure it out, that we can overcome all these challenges and make a better world, then our failure is a foregone conclusion. We have to stare these hard realities in the face, and do the difficult work to find real solutions.

We're determined to discover and implement those solutions.

We believe that with rigorous philosophical, scientific, historical, cultural, and mathematical thinking, we can discover ways to organize our governments and social institutions that make them truly democratic, fair, efficient, and compassionate.

We don't just want to discover solutions in an ivory tower however. If our solutions are going to be moral and effective, they have to be deeply convincing and inspiring to a broad range of people, from many different cultures and viewpoints.

To do this, this project itself must be democratically controlled, and therefore committed to constant evolution and synthesis of different opinions. Only then can we hope to unify the efforts of all those already diligently working in areas such as democratic reform, justice reform, environmental justice, social justice, internet freedom, and anti-fascism. These efforts must be coordinated with each other if they're really going to be effective. The problems are woven together, the solutions must be too.

This book represents our best attempt to clearly state our shared beliefs and values, and discover a unified set of solutions to these big problems. We hope to then build a movement that can gradually and democratically improve the book, and coordinate the work necessary to implement the solutions.

This is a huge goal. How can we do it?

History is littered with movements with grand visions who were undermined by unrealistic expectations, insufficient resources, infighting, corruption, or sabotage by opponents. To give ourselves the best chance of success, we have to hold ourselves to high principles while at the same time not letting them bog us down and keep us from achieving our goals.

To do this, it helps to make a distinction between mission, principles, and values.

Mission

This is the long term goal we're trying to achieve. Our mission clarifies the work we care about versus what we consider a distraction.

Find solutions, persuade the others, do the work.

• Find solutions. We want to find solutions to our world's biggest and most important problems. The solutions we find have to be as close as we can manage to being perfectly correct. Doing this will require a lot of concerted effort, research, and experimentation.
• Persuade the others. We can't implement solutions alone, and we can't do so against everyone else's will. We have to be consistently persuasive and open. Our solutions must inspire confidence and action. They must be moral and inclusive.
• Do the work. It isn't enough to write papers. Real things have to change, from governments to companies to individuals, and we have to make that change happen.

Principles

These are hard constraints that we expect to be adhered to in all circumstances. These are the source of our community's integrity.

• Democracy. No organization is truly open and inclusive if all its members aren't in control. All decision-making authority flows from members. Top leadership positions are selected democratically, and if a decision can be made democratically directly by members it should be.
• Transparency. Secrets are basically never necessary, and are poison to communities. If something effects others in any meaningful way, they should know about it. Only individual private matters should remain so.
• Honesty. Lies destroy trust and harm others. There is never any reason to lie or be misleading.
• Humility. We don't know everything, and never will. We must clearly state the limits of our knowledge.
• Decency. Everyone is expected to behave considerately, and treat all others with dignity and kindness.

We have a community code of conduct to enforce these principles. https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct https://github.com/stumpsyn/policies/blob/master/citizen_code_of_conduct.md

Values

These are qualities we aspire to in our work, but that may sometimes conflict with each other or be imperfect. We are always trying to get better.

• Rigor. Honest people should consider our arguments to be empirically and logically unassailable. When we stand behind a claim, we should do so with the reinforcement of detailed, specific, corroborated evidence, or provably logical argument. We believe our ideas will be more successful and believable the closer they are to the real truth.

• Inclusivity. We believe rigor speaks for itself, and we do everything we can to clearly document what rigor looks like and how we measure it, as well as using repeatable automated tools. This means that anyone, from any background and with any education, can make just as valuable contributions as a recognized scholar. We also have collected resources to help people advance their skills and become a stronger member of our movement. Lists of useful learning materials, opportunities, and productivity/wellness advice are all available. This allows anyone to improve themselves and therefore their contributions.

• Persuasiveness. What we say should not merely be rigorously true, but must also successfully convince people who don't already agree. We should endeavor to make our arguments compelling and undeniable even to the most staunch detractor.

• Candor. We are compelled to speak the truth, even when it is difficult. Objectivity is for academics, and being rigorous isn't the same as being objective. We have specific beliefs, and we will clearly state them, and call out those in the world who act in ways we consider unacceptable. However we choose to attack the actions, not the person, and leave open the door for that person to do the right thing for the right reasons. We don't have to water down our beliefs to maintain the moral and civic high ground.

• Synthesis. When we encounter new ideas that seem to contradict ours but could be compatible, we do our best to distill our understanding to include those new ideas. We hope to unify many different perspectives with philosophies and solutions that comfortably accommodate them all.

• Comprehensiveness. We hope to find a coordinated plan to solve all the biggest problems, so we try to be thorough. Everyone who identifies with our mission should find what they need to go forward. we want this to be a single place people can look to know how to help or what we should do. it should be complete enough to be adopted as a party platform. it should be navigable enough that people can find answers to their questions. in situations where someone else is doing the real useful work, we can simply point to them, but we should strive to either contain or point to all the aspects we think will be necessary to fix everything.

• Clarity. Say precisely what you mean as briefly as you can. Don't use unnecessarily academic or flowery language.

• Pragmatism. We want to make real changes in the real world, and we must be honest about what can realistically be achieved, by who, and on what timescale.

• Idealism. Things can get better! It's difficult to be hopeful sometimes, but we have the obligation to try.

Let's get this done together.

There are a few places you can go from here, depending on what you'd like to learn and how you'd like to help.

• The Book. This is an "evergreen" description of our beliefs and proposals.
• The Actions. Some of our ideas are ready to be implemented or tried, and the action area describes groups or institutions doing concrete work you could choose to join.
• The Blog. These are more "one-off" articles exploring our ideas in ways that are too narrow to be included in the book, such as reacting to current events. We do this mostly to give people entry points to understand our ideas and how they could make things better.
• The Codex. To support our resolution to be rigorous, we compile summaries and references of valuable works by different experts, such as books, papers, and documentaries. The codex summarizes these works, and describes how their conclusions relate to our goals.