Metagov Bednar Pt1
Speaker 1: Because there's a lot of low level behavioral stuff. There's also kinda big picture macro political process stuff and a lot of closing that divide that that that falls into what needs to have been done forever, but the people who identify as complex system scientists tend to actually take on. She works between pencil paper modeling, computational modeling, laboratory experiment,...
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Transcript
Because there's a lot of low level behavioral stuff. There's also kinda big picture macro political process stuff and a lot of closing that divide that that that falls into what needs to have been done forever, but the people who identify as complex system scientists tend to actually take on. She works between pencil paper modeling, computational modeling, laboratory experiment, observational data, all towards developing a big kind of multiscale view of political systems. And so I'm really happy to be able
to have her today. Jenna.
Hey, Seth. That's that's actually one of the most one of the best best intros I've ever had in the sense of, like, somebody who really gets what I'm trying to do. And so you win. Usually, people are like, God, I don't know if she's got this big mess of it, morass and we'll see what's coming out of it. But you really get it. So what I said, Thank you so much for this invitation and you seem like just a really remarkable community and community in every aspect. Like I love that you open with this let's let's celebrate what's going on and talk with one another as if you are real human beings who care about one another. It's like so phenomenal to find communities who are like that. But that also that you have found one another and I think just kudos to you for finding one another as across disciplines and being excited about the ways ideas can flow across disciplines. So I'm gonna present my work on federalism today. And, and in particular because it's a way to think about the robustness of decentralized systems, which I think many or all of you work on to some extent. But it's going to feel like a very political sciency talk, but know that I'm really interested in this bigger theoretical question of robustness of systems. And, and so before I slipped into the slides, first, thank you for your patience with my stupid Internet connection. I hope it doesn't become too distracting. And second, I'm gonna try to mush a lot because there's, you know, I just wanna make sure we're all on the same page and understanding, the design of political systems and in particular our own federal system. So there there's gonna be, you know, sort of some information that I have to get out. So I'm gonna try to keep it to twenty or twenty five minutes, but we'll see. Okay. Let me, with that,
go to
Alright. If I've done this right, you are seeing a slide. Yes? Yes. Okay. Great.
Yes.
Alright. So, what I wanna talk about is the robustness of federal systems in fraught times. And so, of course, the person that comes to mind when we think about challenges to federal systems is this man. Alright. Who is this?
Pierre Trudeau.
Who is this person a who is showing up on my screen? Who are you Canadian?
Yes.
Okay. This is Pierre Trudeau. This is, the father of the current prime minister of Canada, and I wanna share a story with you. And the story is, about something that is an important and fascinating moment in Canadian political history. The 1980 Patriation Reference as it's referred to legally, but this is a moment in Canadian history when so Canada, you know, like The United States, this British colonial heritage had a much more peaceful separation from Britain and, you know, still maintains a formal relationship. But for the first, hundred or so years of Canada's, sovereign existence, its constitution was an act of the British Parliament. And so this always felt a little funny, like how can our constitution be written by the legislature of another country? And so there was this conversation about we ought to patriot the constitution. And in the act of patriating it, making it their own, Pierre Trudeau said, you know, there's probably some things we could tweak about it. I mean, it's working pretty well, but there's some things we could remedy And including adding on to it something that was akin, you know, in some ways akin to our Bill of Rights, a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, laying out a recognition of individual rights. It was challenged by the provinces because it was going to be in direct conflict with the recognition of group rights that was embedded within the constitution. And if you have individual rights and group rights, something's got to give. It gives in the forum of a court. Provinces at this moment were very distrustful of the Canadian Supreme Court, feeling that it was really a handmaiden to the executive. And so there was a norm, a constitutional norm, where if there was gonna be a change to the constitution, the prime minister would go to all of the provincial premiers and work with the provinces saying, can we make this change to the constitution? And so since Trudeau was saying, we're gonna just do this without the provincial assent, the provinces asked the court, can he do this? And so it was challenged. And the court says, we can't stop you. Right? Meaning, we can't stop Trudeau. And, and so, so you think, great, Trudeau can go ahead and roll forward with his patriation of the Constitution. And in fact, because Trudeau was not in town when this was announced, He was off, I can't remember where, somewhere in Southeast Asia. His Justice Minister Jean Chretien was reached and Chretien says, fantastic. We're going forward. Victory for us. Right? Next day, they reach Trudeau and Trudeau says, oh, that's interesting. We won't go forward. Okay. So why? Why did he say after the court had said, you're good. We can't stop you. Why did he say, we will go back to the drawing board? Okay. Some of the things that I'm gonna be talking about, that's that's just laying out the premise. I'll tell you why later, but it takes a bit of theory to get there. So, you know, as as Seth pointed out, I'm a complex systems theorist. So when we think about complex adaptive systems, we think about agents as having characteristics that are, they're diverse, they're goal seeking, they're connected, they're interdependent, they're adaptive. At the system level, so we like to think both at the agent level, this bottom up process, and then the system level analysis. So we think about select pressures, nonlinear effects, threshold effects, path dependence. So, these are kinds of system level things that we can observe and that we like to explain. And some phenomena that is kind of the in between of the agents interacting is emergence, superadditivity, robustness, resilience, collapse. So these are some of the things that we like to talk about when we talk about complexity science. So for me, the question is how do you design a constitution to plan for human errors and change in needs? This constitution, this document that's written, in ink, at a moment in time for a country that is meant to, you know, last in perpetuity. And so how how do you do this? And how do you prevent systemic shocks or corruption from tearing the system apart? So how might some document, you know, maybe in the language that some of you would prefer, a code, be able to prevent this? Sorry, my computer's frozen for a second.
You're still coming through fine.
Okay. That's awesome. It's just my slides are frozen for some reason, so we'll just wait for my computer to catch up with me.
Sorry.
You you see this little spinning wheel of death.
Oh, I guess the yeah. The question I would ask is, yeah, how do you design a constitution
to Yeah.
Yeah. To
deal with your nerves. And the next slide will answer this question.
Yeah. That's that's where we're going. While we're waiting for my computer to catch up with me, let me just give you a sense of how constitutions, there's a general structure to them that for those of you who program, you might also recognize there's the general structure to programs, right? So in a constitution, there's generally some preamble. I'm a huge fan of preambles. Anybody who grew up with Schoolhouse Rock can sing our constitutional preamble. We the People, in order to form a more perfect union. Okay. That. That's our our preamble. I always ask my students and they can't say it, but they can sing it. So preambles are a moment to express a vision of where we might go. Right? And then there's a set of rules that define what a government can do and can't do and defines its relationship to the people. And then there's a set of procedures. And so it might look like the structure
Did we just lose Jenna?
I think we did. If her slides are still frozen, maybe have her send them to you, and then you present for her. I'm not sure about
what Yeah.
I'll email her right now. Resuming.
Okay. We lost Jenna, but we're gonna restate what we think she just said and stay in problem space. Is that a fair summary, Nathan?
Yeah.
Cool. I actually took a a screenshot of the complex adaptive system slide just because it was so provocative. I'm like, wow, look at our hubris thinking we're gonna govern this stuff, but we do somehow.
I was also struck by the effectiveness of that slide. Normally, filling a slide with jargon keywords is alienating and, like, unengaging, but but I was like, wow. That's a that's a great way of communicating the idea of complex systems with complexity.
So I found a summary of Jenna's book on the robust federation.
Nice. We
just go through that really quickly. Do it. And and we're doing the clip notes to the presentation. Let me let me just link this to you guys. It's a it's a book review, essentially, so pretty straightforward. But the kind of Jen Bednar, political scientist, approaches the subject of federalism using the tools of positive political theory. Her objective is to systemize the basic Madisonian insights about federal structures of governance. So Madison proponent of weaker centralized governments. Not so much in an elaborate formal comprehensive mathematical model. Oh, so it's that's a little bit disappointing. As in a set of clearly stated interconnected principles of sound constitutional design. So this is a little bit more of like an Ostrom type approach where I'm synthesizing certain kinds of principles. Before I go on to the next paragraph, does that is that enough to sort of start a jump start a discussion, or do we do we need more detail?
Well, what I'm keying off of is the part where the reviewer says, she let me find the spot. Basically, the problem space consists of how do I have a a system that a, solves the the likely recurring problems and b, defends itself from entropy and attack and subversion. And she seems to be saying that there's a set of predictable problems that constitutions face. And I'm like, oh, okay.
Yeah. It seems like the yeah. The particular problems here is not constitute because, like, the constitution to be for different things, but specifically federal constitutions.
Right. Federations, I should have said.
So she argues that the main difficulty posed by federalism is that and it creates incentives for various actors within the system to evade the desired allocation of authority. So it doesn't say what factors those are, but I'm assuming those are both federal and state actors, thereby undermining the system's potential to achieve its contemplated benefits. She had devised three families of potential transquestions, encroachment by the national government on state authority, shirking by states so their responsibilities to the union, and burden shifting states to others. And I it seems, yeah, like, all of those things are 100% things we're seeing, like, right now in the American federal system, like pressures that are that are existing.
Yeah. Again, I can think of an example of one of those for illustration. The there was a a federal law maybe fifteen years ago, requiring certain firearms background checks to occur. And they essentially the fed the feds were trying to mandate that, the county sheriffs would do this work, but there was no compensation for them. It was just ordered that, oh, yeah. That there's a federal law requiring that this occur and magically, these these sheriffs, they're just gonna do it for us. And that, of course, got challenged in court because you can't just order someone to do work for the feds without paying for it. Burden shifting at its at its finest.
The thing that I'm I guess I'm curious about, and this is something I guess, like, I would wanna ask Jenna is that if she's approaching this from a kind of, like, a perspective, she she but just before she cut off, she was talking about kind of the ontology of the ontology of, like, how constitutions are designed. Right? Which is, like, I I can see versions of that, like, things like, you know, like the comparative constitutions projects. They have, like, this like a fairly rigid ontologies for describing, like, you know, there's a preamble and things like that. And how that connects to, like, is that are there, like, sort of, like, ways in which this ontology design that sort of, like, offers insights into or potential solutions for this problem of essentially, like, sort of, like, the, you know, designing around incentives. And it's kinda like a similar problem that I think Seth and I have faced in, like, other like, another project that we've been doing, which is that, you know, we have this framework for how to, you know, represent a situation, but it doesn't tell us necessarily how to get around, like, how to correctly design incentives to fix the system. Right?
I'm actually in a position originally, my very, very first idea and my kinda first proposal for this meeting was that I I was reading Robust Federation, this. I had to go fetch it on middle. Oh, sorry. My background is messing with me. Oh, if I put it in front of me, it works. I I was gonna do, like, a book report while she's there and have her respond to it and with the idea that, like, I would leave everything that's of interest to us, to get her take. That didn't we we don't have to do that. But I can give a synopsis of the book more directly out of the review if people are interested in that. That might be not the worst format. Basically, what she does is she identifies collective action problems. So you have, the the federation on the top and then the states, at the bottom. And between states, or so the biggest risk that we're gonna be familiar with is the federal government encroaching on the rights of the state. And that's a dilemma, and it's a failure mode, and and things can go bad. You can lose your federation and become sort of monarchical. But you actually also have the opposite problem. You have the problem with shirking. That's that's a that's a a threat in the other direction. Every state promised to supply this many troops to some kind of, like, unified military force, but states start to to provide fewer troops because they know that other states are stepping up, and and they can step back a little bit. And that's a serious threat to a lot of, national federations. According to Jenna in your, in the very first chapter, she, states quite strongly that it's a bigger threat to federations than encroachment, which I thought was pretty bold, especially for, decentralization fetishists, of the type that, you know, so many of whom, like this community.
I know you're talking
about me, Seth, when
you say that.
I'm talking about a lot of
us here. And then then there's sort
of lateral problem of burden shifting, which is sort of state a not solving a border problem that affects state b. Maybe having externalities that affect a neighboring state b and not dealing with it. So this, like, bundle of threats, motivates, her framework, which is basically, she builds an argument for a couple properties of a good federalism. And, an important thing about this is this is sort of why it's not necessarily it's less of a mathematical theory than a framework for building mathematical theories of this bit, of that bit, of that bit. So she actually does have a good amount of mathematical modeling in the book, but it tends to be pretty honed down, narrowly to to this or that topical issue. She's asking if she can reschedule. That's fine. Yeah. I'll just keep going. I'll tell her that's fine, and then I'm gonna keep going. Unless there's another format we have in mind. Unless someone's at their fingertips got another presentation.
Oh, I think you're doing great, Seth.
Okay. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great.
Yeah. I agree. Keep going.
So what she does is she proposes basically three principles, what she calls coverage, which is basically you need you need to you need mechanisms that hit all the potential problems. That's gonna be pretty straightforward. You also need, complementarity, which is going to be, I think, different levels of solution for the same problem. So, like, maybe a state level and a national level. And then you're gonna need redundancy, which is, at the same level, solutions that yes. Yes. Sort of no. No. No. Redundancy, if I think oh, yeah. Yeah. Redundancy is different levels, different sort of severities of safeguard against each of these problems. So you need something that has a really stiff trigger and it's a very severe remedy, and you also need kind of more graduate what you might call graduate sanctions, sort of weaker triggers and warning signs that trigger quite easily. And so a big funny takeaway and and, like, it's hard to tell how much of this is, you know, intellectual maturity of looking at a complex system and how much of it is, like, sort of trying to have it all. But one thing that pops out of the book is she pretty regularly says things that contradict each other. Right? Says we need this, and we need this opposite thing. And, of course, that's right, and that's enlightened, and that's what we need. That's the kind of balanced perspective I'm always trying to seek out is that every single form of governance has severe downsides, and we need to be really upfront about those. However, when does that say but when you say that, when are you saying something, and when are you saying nothing? When she gets really into, like, this case or this specific issue that she chose to model, that those that becomes really clear, and it feels concrete, and you get a sense of, like, this precisely is where the trade off should be. But the overall discussion and framework raises so many of those that you don't always that you get that feeling that, you know, I'm twenty years used to and still disappointed by, which is that I came to this book for answers, and I just got better questions. I I mean, that that's that's our faith in a lot of social
science. But but, I guess,
to that, it does end up being a a solid framework. I'm still I came to the quest book with a very specific question, which was
she talks a lot about
the risk of of shocks. I mean, as you saw. And and I've seen
that that really drew me to
the book because I've also been concerned about shocks. It's very well documented. For example, the you see examples of this all over the world, all through history, people giving up civil liberties during wartime, the the preparedness of citizens to give up their liberties, during wartime, not just the the the proclivity of the state to do it, but the willingness of citizens to accede to that. That's an example on the encroachment side. But, again, we have her stance that the bigger threat is the fracturing side. And and the fact of it is an external shock, whether that's an environmental change or a or a conflict or an internal sort of political process or a famine. Right? Any any you know, any sudden change to the environment can do two things. Right? It can cause your delicately balanced inner middle layers of federalism to completely fracture into a bunch of autonomous entities, and it can cause you delicate balance to, like, collapse into a single authority. And she gives a lot of exam a lot of her discussion is really tuned to to keeping shocks from causing that fragmentation or fracturing, and she gives almost no attention to the risk of shocks causing centralization, again, because she evaluates it as less risky problem. And perhaps that's fundamentally true in general. Perhaps that's true of, like, nation states, but not other kinds of federations.
And
or yeah. Or perhaps it's not true. Right? When we do comparative science at the unit of analysis of nation state, it's impossible, a, to ever get a sort of n, a size of your analysis, greater than about 300. And, b, every single scholar in your entire discipline is studying the exact same n of 300. So there are data limits that that, you know, reduce our ability to sort of sample and get a representative sense of the failing modes of federalism. So I'm that's kinda where I left the book is is some better sense of of what a mathematical or formal model looks like of modeling a system's robustness to shocks at least in the fragmentation direction and sort of planting the seeds in my own head for the beginning of a more general theory of how to make, a federalism that whose middle layers are robust to shocks in either direction. Me as someone with a lot of, appreciation for decentralization, a lot of appreciation for centralization and authority, a lot of appreciation for smallness, I've really come ideologically around to the beauty of federalism, that it's a way of keeping small groups that have a lot of autonomy that still benefit in every way from a from a very centralized system. And and I I've seen the fragility of of those middle layers either as they fragment down or or concentrate up. And so it's kind of my political theory and my robust federation is is is one with mechanisms that can keep those middle layers kind of strong against threats in both directions.
I mean, I don't know how much that was
a review of the book and how much it was like a an extemporaneous essay, but maybe it's enough as a basis of discussion. It certainly took up enough time. And, John, can someone be my moderator? I it's weird to moderate this song.
I'm happy to or Joshua could.
Someone else, go ahead.
Sure. I can take the you know, it's fair enough. I think we put a lot of Seth on the spot to basically give a talk at the, literally, the last second, so I can I can sort of do last minute moderation? In that spirit, so you were just talking, Seth, about, like, kind of, like, examining the limits of mathematical models and constitutional design. Given your reading of Jenna's book, where do you think her position is? Like, you you I think you have mentioned before that there's some, like, sort of, like, narrowing of her usage of, you know, mathematical models in the in the book itself. But, like, just read the question of constitutional design. Does she give a a place for mathematical models and, like, suggesting this versus that?
Not on the design perspective. Certainly on the sir certainly representing these threats and their relationships to each other, in what, you know, with infinite resources could become some kind of CAD. Is there what's the CAD also does dynamics. Right? And CAD also does, like, stress analysis and stuff.
Some kind yeah.
So some some kind of, like, CAD stress test maybe for a computational representation. You know, I think she she she gives the the the rudiments of that for some threats, right, for some categories of of of problem.
So she's not she's not suggesting that we build like a like a whole whole simulation of a constitution rather there are specific problems identified, you know, like in this part, this fragment of constitution regarding federalism
Yeah. Regarding specific factors
that we're modeling.
Although she's very much a computational modeler in in different parts of her work, and there is room for ABM stuff here, she's using it, in a very analytic, for pencil paper model kind of way where we where we do a pencil paper model of this problem, pencil paper model of that problem, pencil paper model of that problem. We don't do the giant, hairy, ball of yarn, integrated model. Yeah. Yeah. So and and her collaborator, Scott Page, is a modeler and is in that tradition also complex system scientist. To demonstrate, one one one side one side illustration of their commitment to this modeling, is that they're not just collaborators. I think they're hitched and have kids. So, yeah, they're they're they're they're a power team. And Scott Page is, is like a one of kind of the mathematical sociology or mathematical, political science or computation like, computational modeling of political science people.
Super cool.
There's lots more questions.
Yes. So we have next Naveen. Do you wanna ask her a question?
Yeah. I was just wondering if people have looked at constitutions from a nonparticipation angle. Like, as in crypto, we talk about 33% of minors and notes being positive. Like, have constitution writers or preamble writers looked at. Okay. If the governors don't cooperate, how does this work? That sort of thing.
I I apologize. I, like, all tabs to check my email in the middle of your question to see what Jen had said. She's back up and and wants to come in, and so I invited her back in. Navin, I I really apologize. That was a stressful. Could you ask your question again?
You want me to wait for her or just ask it again?
Just ask it again.
Yeah. Alright. The question was, have constitution makers looked at constitution design from a censorship resistance framework? As we know in the crypto space, we look at byzantine fault tolerance, and we look at honest actors and not honest actors. If constitutions were written with that frame of mind of, let's say, 33% of the enactors, enablers, you know, are dishonest, how does this thing work? I was just wondering if there was a system like that designed previously.
I'll I'd take a step back from that question and say, generally, has have constitutions been analyzed from the perspective of self interested or, like, malicious agents? Actually, not malicious. You'll you're gonna kinda get more my answer than the right answer. My answer is is gonna be,
what's the damn point of that?
And so, like, I'm I'm like, why would why would you take this very specific for this very specific thing that serves this, like, kind of very specific ideology and apply it to it's not even, like, using a hammer to hit everything. It's just using using, like, using, like, a totally different class of tool, using, like, a steak knife. But but that's, like, really unfair. What I can do is I can say there's something called constitutional public choice, And this is a economist from a rational choice framework, which is basically from a self interested rational agent framework, analyzing sort of constitutional design decisions. So that gets you into the self interested component and a robustness, and checking the robustness of a constitutional design to to selfish people, which is really important. It's not the whole story because, as Jenna was about to get to, there's a role for, like, values internalization and, like, group identity that that makes it so people don't have to be self interested in order to not be taken advantage of. Taking it to the next level and getting into, like, malicious actors, this is gonna be self interested actors whose utility is maximized the more, you know, the the the the federation's performance is minimized. I where would I look for that? I guess that would be some kind of international relations. That sounds like something Rand would do. That sounds like a Rand thing. So that would be like a economist in international affairs or something. But I'm yeah. I'm not aware of that.
I mean, you could look even look in, like, the way that, like, political scientists study, like, fascism. Right? If you were to think of fascists, people who kind of over wanna overthrow a democratic government within this sort of scope of that of that government. Right? I'm I'm sure there must be, like, mathematical models or ways to sort of, like, anticipating sort of, like, these kinds of anti democratic tendencies within the scope and design democratic systems. How do you Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I I
guess I'm coming more around to it. My my, like, my gut reaction was unfair. So now that I've talked it over to myself, I'm I'm okay with it. I certainly agree with Josh. Yeah. That there's a there's an angle there. There's an entry point there. Whether anyone's gone in, I I I couldn't say with too much confidence. I just know what I would Google to try to find out. Next question.
I also wanna get Seth, if you want, you can, like, take a little bit of time and, like, answer Jenna's emails.
Oh, no. No. We're good. We're good.
I I already told her I would write her afterwards. She doesn't know I, like, took over her presentation. But are we good inviting her back?
Yeah. Of course. I think I would love to hear from her, especially given that we've already, like Got the book report. We're we've gotten the book report. Now we can hear the real deal. Maybe we should urge her you should urge her to listen to your critique. I thought it was very cogent, and it will allow her to pick up where we left off.
Oh, that would be great. Yeah. Let's let's let's let's
try that out. It'd be great to hear her responses to your critiques. Okay. Next, I believe we have I have written some questions. We can skip those. Nathan, do you wanna go for it?
I was just, you know, wanting to bring this into into conversation with, some of the online network, dynamics we've been we've been talking about more, more directly, which and wondering how we apply some of the logic of what's called federation in political science to the logic of what's called federation in in computing systems. And to what extent are those the same and to what extent is it two different things under the same word? And and, you know, finally, are there ways in which we can, draw from from her framework to design more robust federated systems in, you know, online context. I mean, the, you know, you think of, like, Mastodon versus Twitter or something. These these, you know, so called betterverse type systems have generally not been able to compete with with far more centralized systems. And and so I wonder if there are lessons there.
I I guess, that's nice to reflect on. I don't think I have anything to add. I would need a little bit more of your your sense of, the sort of different connotation or integration or direction of federation in this other kind of domain? What it hits differently?
I mean, I think this it'd be interesting just go through the exercise of, like, you know, like so the federated the the entities here are states, like, sort of, like, lower level states versus a central authority. Right? And, like, in the fediverse, the entities would be, like, things like Mastodon, which are communicating with other sort of, like, things that are also using, like, like, the activity pub or Fediverse protocol. Right? Is that the kind of, like, the analogy you would sort of, like, you would sort of start with, Nathan?
Yeah. I mean, in some ways, the Fediverse is not very federal in the sense of, like, the federalist papers emphasizing central authority. Yeah. There there's a major missing piece there. It's kind of like, it's more of the confederation logic where power emanates more from the from the local entities, than from the central entity. And, and power is generally located there. At the same time, you know, the metaverse has, the central power is protocol power, you know, which if you think of, the, you know, the the Alexander, Galloway book, on protocols, you know, suggests that protocols are actually extremely powerful, and we neglect their power. Right? So there's there's a respect to which, the, you know, digital federated networks have a kind of, have have more centralized power through than than in political systems. But at the same time, in terms of governance and in terms of other forms of operational coercive power, inform in terms of taxation is one, you know, that that, Edward mentioned. You know, often there's not financial, resources going toward the center in any way. So the, you know, the central commons becomes impoverished. You know, you have this this this way in which there's a, you know, a different map of strength and weakness in terms of the relationship between the central and the and and the kind of constituent parts. And so, you know, I wonder whether even using that term federal is, is misleading in the context of, of digital networks. For instance, in co ops, you know, one of the critical features of a cooperative federation is that the member co ops own the central body. Right? And they control it, and they're on the board. Whereas in in Mastodon, for instance, it's not like that at all. The, you know, the the, you know, the main developer is basically accountable to no one but himself, and his own goals for the expansion of the network. And so the member, you know, instances have no direct power over the development of the instance except their exit rights to, you know, go off and fork this the software which they never do. So it's a very it's it's there are ways in which I think that the relationship is misleading or the the analogy.
I still think it could be interesting to bring up maybe next time Jenna gets here is to ask her, like, you know, we've noticed there are these, like, similar tensions between, like, a protocol power, like, maybe the protocol can be thought of as, like, getting more power than the sort of individual entities, like, Mastodon entities. Maybe the Mastodon is taking more power from the protocol by sort of exiting from the pro protocol or shifting from the call from in certain ways. And maybe there is some degree of burden shifting between these, like, different elements of the fediverse. So that could be just, like, an interesting way of applying the paradigm or the framework.
Could I take on Adam's question? So Adam kinda had two questions. First, I I appreciate this effort to give a theoretical sense of how nation states are different kind of federation than other types of sort of federals that we encounter. And that's a nice angle that that, you know, they're different because they have a top and a coop federation doesn't have a top because above the coop board, there's like the law. You know, there's the a nation's law. Here's a counter example. Here's an example of a federation without a top. It's gonna be a mafia or organized crime networks. I'm sorry, with a top. They have a top because they flout the laws above them just like nations flout supranational laws. And so, nevertheless, there's division, you know, from the from the Don to the Capos to to all their street hustle, whether you wanna call that a hierarchy, like, in a bit using a business analogy or federation using a political analogy. I guess that depends how much power the CAPOs have in practice rather than just, like, on the org chart. So I wouldn't draw the line there. So you have the question of middle layers. What are middle layers? I mean, we could go, you know, nation, states, municipalities, and then individuals if we want our family units or whatever. But to really put that in a relief, let's say I really value smallness. The best way to get smallness of every decision unit, just five people, is gonna be what you might call a deep federalism. So not two levels or not two middle levels or one middle level. Let's say 20 middle levels. Let's say there are 20 middle levels between me and the president, you know, and the and the nation's executor executive. How would we make that work? 20 levels is a lot of layers of bureaucracy to for stuff to bubble up, for stuff to bubble down. Now it would have the advantage that every level would be a little bit leaner. There would be representatives from lower levels up at the next level up, let's say. I don't know. Could we do it with five people? What are the I want I'm interested in like, if we did I think this kind of extreme federalism, deep federalism with the analogy, like, deep neural networks, puts in relief suddenly a lot of the challenges facing robust federation and also a lot of the opportunities. That that that was turning your question into, like, a totally unrelated thing. Well, Josh.
I didn't I didn't have a specific question. I think the next question, Naveen, did you wanna did you wanna ask it?
Which question was that? I
think how federated would Anderson's distribution of nerds be? I've never heard of that.
Oh, okay. Oh, you asked it. Andreessen had this quote about the Internet enabling distributed tribes of people of the same mind. I forget what the actual quote is. Because we're speaking about Macedon and federation of different governance structures, I wonder what that federation of people with same similar interest groups on the Internet, what would that be? What's the MVP for the constitution of that network?
I think the first thing I would do trying to tackle that question is try to distinguish between, like, okay. You have that, you know, that that that Andreas and perspective is is definitely gonna be, like, within the framework of the Internet as a market opportunity. And so, like, you know, alliances that form are gonna tend to be treated kind of as business partnerships rather than kind of opportunities for self governing organizations to to better self govern and to and to it's yeah. It's not so much the the Internet as a new opportunity for democracy. It's a little bit the Internet is for a new opportunity for distribution of capital and resources. So, yeah, that's where I was starting to try and get my head around the question. But I'm sure someone else has a more productive angle on that than I do.
Let's give one last question. Lane, do you wanna ask it?
Hey. Sure. Yeah, hopefully, this is a a quick one. Maybe it's not a super well formed question. But as I was listening to Seth a moment ago, talk about, like, the idea of a federal system with, like, many, many, many layers, right, with with representatives of layers at the higher layer, that kind of thing. It just struck me that if you look at the systems of government of most nation states, there seem to be patterns here. Like, there seems to be a sweet spot on the order of, like, three or four or maybe maximum five layers. Like, The United States typically has three in most places. I don't know if it's different anywhere else. I think China has five, and I'm wondering, like, why how is that number calculated? Why is that's the that the sweet spot? What is it optimizing for? As a computer scientist, I can't help but think in terms of, like, logarithms. Right? So, like, we have Merkle trees and, like, how do we figure out the branching factor? And it turns out that, like, there's some ideal number here, and I wonder if something like this might apply to multilevel federal systems. Like, I I so, yeah, the the specific question I'm kind of asking is maybe someone here who has more familiarity with this than I do. Are there any examples of nation states with, like, very thick federal systems with, like, more than three or four, maybe five layers?
That sounds like an awesome question for Jenna. I think what we're gonna do that's awesome that we're planning on stopping for the holiday, next week. It creates a super clean opportunity to have her back. So I'll throw out the invitation in two minutes. Before that, maybe let's all unmute and applaud each other for tucking and rolling. And I'm gonna assure Jenna that, that her presentation was a tremendous success if you judge a presentation on the standard of leave and wanting more. So that yay, every yay, all of us.
And it's all thanks Seth also for Willie's picking up the Slack.
Alright. Literally, if the discussion continues, I have this. Alright. Bye bye.