Rxcvoice Metagov
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Top Keywords
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Transcript
Okay. Great.
Alright. Thanks. Thank you, Divya. Thank you so much for for having us. Why don't I I I think it makes sense for, me and Alex and Jen to introduce ourselves quickly. And then, I will do a quick intro to I'll I'll explain a little bit about what RadicalxChange is for those who are not familiar and jump in a bit to, jump into a bit of background on quadratic voting because I think it's important to, like, have a general sense of what that is to understand the rest of, of what we'll talk about. And then I will hand it to, to Alex to present the, the work that we've done recently on what we've called what we're calling radical exchange voice. So okay. So start with quick introduction. My name is Matt Pruett. I'm president of Radical Exchange Foundation. Jennifer and I run Radical Exchange Foundation as essentially co executive directors. I've been doing this work for two and a half years roughly. Before that, I was an antitrust lawyer. And the I like to say that the theme that runs through my career really is worrying about problems of power concentration. So that's, you know, this sort of, observation of the way that different economic systems could kind of collapse into extreme power concentrations and and my, you know, general worries about the social consequences of that were what led me to, you know, down the path of becoming an antitrust lawyer. I then got interested in how to use technology to address these similar kinds of power concentration problems and, you know, went down all kinds of different, rabbit holes with with blockchain and mechanism design and and, you know, lots of other fun stuff. Got connected with with Glenn Weil in 2018 and started working together on on Radical Exchange Foundation. So that's that's a bit about me. I'll hand it to Jen and then Alex, and then and then circle back.
Hi, everyone. I was actually just joining to to listen in and see the responses of everybody. I wasn't planning to to talk, so I'll let mostly Alex and Matt lead the way, but I've been really keen on this seminar. I haven't been able to join as much as I've liked to, but there are a lot of overlaps in aligned values. I joined RadicalxChange basically from the beginning. I met Glenn in 2018 to start a data union that we did with James Felton Keith who's kind of taken it the direction on that since then. And my background is an artist and a speculative designer, And I started out with Radical Exchanges, the arts and culture. It used to be arts and communication lead. And I'm really interested in different ways that we can basically live collaboratively and cooperatively and, you know, share in the the effort and the fruits of what we can build together. And I will let Alex speak next. Nice to meet you all.
I'm Alex. I'm a project developer at RadicalxChange. I I joined RadicalxChange after I graduated from school in 2020. I'm doing a lot I'm sort of like a software developer plus. I is how I would describe myself. So I've been working on the software side of the RxC voice project all year, and I'd say that I I share I joined RadicalxChange because I share Matt's concern about centralized processes and making the making digital organizations and communities democratic. But and I would add that I have a special interest in updating the way that deliberation is conducted in digital spaces. So for both of those reasons, I'm super excited to be, finishing up our first major experiment with RxC Voice, which kind of addresses both of those concerns, and to be here presenting what we've learned to you all. So nice to meet you all.
Thanks, Alex and Jen. Okay. So, just to just, again, just a little bit of context setting. Radical Exchange Foundation is a nonprofit. We've been around since 2018. We sort of got started building on some of the momentum and some of the, you know, conversations going on in different clusters of people around the world, that grew out of the, the book Radical Markets, which, some of you probably heard of. And, the basically, what what inspired us to get started on this project was the idea of taking a really basic look at some of the most fundamental institutions in democracy and markets and figuring out how to how to make them better and how to sort of bring some of these, bring some of these improvements in in basic institutions, into into practice as society like transitions, you know, goes through new sorts of technological revolutions that, you know, create like openings for for us to rethink, rethink institutions. So, you know, our work is is focused on
improving the improving the ability of groups to take democratic decisions and also of improving the improving the
ability of markets to facilitate exchanges and interactions and collaboration in in ways that that don't, you know, collapse into into monopoly or into into some, you know, centralization or extreme inequality or or or related problems which are not only, you know, not only issues of of in injustice, but also issues of of of efficiency. So we're, you know, we're constantly looking to sort of bridge sort of, you know, synthesize what, you know, left and right perspectives on these these basic problems that emerge in in markets and democracy and, you know, looking for for ways of of of reframing them as as problems that we can all sort of agree on and and work together to to improve. So for the past, as as Alex was saying for the I guess I guess we really got started on this sort of like late late twenty twenty. We've been working on a project called radical exchange voice, which is kind of, as Alex will describe further, sort of like an like an end to end democratic process that stitches together a number of different ideas that we have worked on about how to how to facilitate more flexible, more nuanced democratic decision making. But I think that in order to in order to sort of fully appreciate it, it's important to have a little bit of background in in the idea of quadratic voting to basically understand what what quadratic voting is is because it's that's one of the sort of centerpieces of of the RadicalxChange voice process. So, let me share my screen real quick. Oh, and I see there's some questions popping up here.
Matt, yeah, feel free to address questions as they come up if that works for you. Otherwise, we can also get to them at the end if that's easier.
Okay. Yeah. I think it's more this is a great question, which I'd love to get into, but it's probably going to derail me. So let me let me kind of first forward. So sharing screen.
Okay. Visible?
Yep.
Visible. Okay. So okay. So quad quadratic voting is a long story short, a sort of like a new collective decision technology, like a new way of structuring collective decisions, new way of designing a ballot. And what it does is it it solves it's it solves some really old problems in in democracy or I shouldn't say solves, but it, you know, mitigates some really old problems in democracy in the following sense. So what one way of thinking about it is that is that voting systems like traditional sort of, you know, one person, one vote, normal democratic voting systems have have certain well known shortcomings. So the the great thing about them is that they're, like, totally fair. They give everybody the the same amount of say, and for that reason, kind of lead to a feeling of legitimacy once the once the decisions are made. But, the problem with them is that they capture they capture very little information, very sort of coarse grained binary information, and they can also lead to the very well known problem of tyranny of the majority. So you can get, you know, 51% of people oppressing 49%. Similarly or or relatedly you can I mean there are situations where you might have 51% that cares very weakly in a certain direction and 49% that cares very strongly in the other direction? Traditional voting allows, you know, a apathetic 51% to prevail. So this is this is probably not a good thing. Yeah. Another you know, now another way of under of that groups can sometimes make decisions is markets. So I think it's kind of interesting to think about markets or auctions as, like, another, kind of sort of, like, a cousin of of democracy as, like, a a way for groups to make decisions. Auctions auctions or, or or markets are, have certain advantages over democracy. They they capture more rich and more dynamic information. They make fast decisions, make fast dynamic decisions. But they have other problems, which is that they they can they're they're plutocratic. The people with the most resources have a disproportionate say in the decision. And also in in, like, an auction, the people who care most radically about any particular issue tend to tend to get their way. They tend to control the outcome of the issue. So if you're trying to make a decision that, you know, has externalities that impacts the entire group, it may not be good to for the for the most passionate, most radical faction to sort of control the outcome on every particular sub issue. So quadratic voting in a sense is like a clever way of combining some of the features of both of these systems, And it's really pretty simple. It's just a way of, of structuring a ballot. And, here's how you can think about it. It's like you just take a, if you have a a number of, like, options that you'd like to prioritize or that you'd like to make a collective decision between, you you lay out all those options on a ballot and you give everybody voting a a set of like voting credits, like an equal sized set of voting credits, which they can allocate between the different options, however they want. The what this means is that you can sort of effectively, you know, put more voice credits on on options that you care more about, which so that it, you know, captures information about how about, you know, stronger versus weaker preferences. The catch is that this sort of counted votes in quadratic voting are the square root of the root of the number of voice credits that you allocate to a particular option. So basically, if you wanna vote for an option twice, you have to if you wanna vote for an option once, you allocate one of your voting credits to it. If you wanna vote for an option twice, you allocate four of your voting credits to it. If you wanna vote for it three times, you have to allocate nine voting credits to it and so on. So it allows it allows you to express strong strong ideas where they or strong preferences where they have stronger preferences, but you pay sort of an, you know, a non one yearly increasing quote unquote cost for doing that, which leaves you with less say over the other, over the other issues. So it's sort of like I I think it's helpful to think of it as just striking a balance between this the, the sort of, you know traditional democratic way of decision making, or it's not a balance but you know incorporating some of the best features of traditional democratic decision making and markets because it has this egalitarian, all of the egalitarianism of of of democracy because everyone starts out with the same number of credits. You know, nobody comes in with a with a bigger, you know, pile of of votes or whatever, at least in the variance of quadratic voting that we're, you know, that we work with and are most interested in. And and yet on the on the other hand, it allows people to, like, express more nuanced preferences and and give more and and and lets the group make, like, a more take a more nuanced collective decision. So what, you know, one one just quickly, like, one example of kind of a problem this might solve is you can imagine, like, in an election between dogs and cats. It might be that, you you know, if 45% of the voters prefer dogs and 45% prefer cats in traditional voting, the decision will ultimately decided by will ultimately be decided by the 10% in the middle who might be, like, completely indifferent. Quadratic voting captures more information. It captures information about how strongly the dog people prefer dogs and how strongly the cat people prefer cats. So it avoids that scenario where the most apathetic voters are deciding for everyone. So why don't I stop there and hand it over to to Alex who will describe this sort of more more end to end comprehensive system
that we have designed and and and piloted with the RadicalxChange community. So, basically, you know, we've covered the advantages of quadratic voting, and what we wanted to do with the RxC Voice project is to build an end to end democratic process around quadratic voting that would allow us to kind of capture all the benefits of quadratic voting effectively. So RxC Voice is an end to end decentralized democratic process for digital organizations or communities that combines QV with some other innovative democratic mechanisms to make decisions collectively. So we built RxC Voice because, first of all, because we wanted to make radical exchange governed in a decentralized way by the radical broader radical exchange community. And we also wanted to our longer term goal is to facilitate other organizations and communities doing the same. So let me start by explaining some of the main problems that we were trying to solve with RxC Voice. So we've already kind of covered that quadratic voting. It
some
of the things that it does really well, it captures a lot more detailed information about the preferences of the electorate because people can vote for more than one item, and they can express the magnitude of their preference for each one. And, also, as such, it kind of structures the it's it structures the the contest or the election in a way that reduces polarization and encourages compromise because you can settle on something that may have not been your first choice but have been your second choice similarly to, standard ranked choice, but with a a lot more detailed information. And then it also gives passionate or passionate minorities, a a lever to combat tyranny of a of a dispassionate majority like Matt alluded to. But something that quadratic voting doesn't cover alone is the fact that all of these benefits are totally dependent on how the ballot itself is constructed. So we're looking at a ballot of items, and we're, you know, making a decision on those. We're gonna get a lot more detailed information about people's preferences across those items. But the, you know, the the the decentralized and democratic nature of the decision is it can is totally dependent on the whoever constructed the ballot. And I can if I'm the one constructing the ballot and we're doing a a quadratic voting election, there's a lot of things that I can do to influence the outcome and and undermine all of those benefits. I can strategically include or exclude certain ballot items. I can manipulate the phrasing of of the proposals and or the order of the proposals. There's all kinds of things I can do that can just completely undermine all of those democratic benefits. So we wanted to that's that's one of the problems that we wanted to address with the RxC Voice project. We need some mechanism to bring the voters into the process of constructing the ballot and ratifying the ballot. There's also, you know, the possibility that if I'm constructing the ballot alone, there's obviously maybe ideas or perspectives or proposals out in the community that other voters have that I might not include on the ballot, even if I'm even if I'm composing it in in total good faith. So we also want to have a mechanism for voters to be able to make proposals. Finally, there's the simple question of who gets to be a voter. How how do you define the borders of of a of a community, so to speak? So we are we built RxC Voice in in an effort to address each of these problems so that the democratic process is decentralized from end to end. So we have a a video that we'd like to show you that kind of walks through Rxy the Rxy voice interface in a in a detailed way. So if we could show that video, afterwards, I'll tell you a bit about our recent experiment with this democratic process. Matt, do you have the video available, or should I do it? I was a bit worried about my Internet. I've got it here. Yeah. Great.
Okay.
We're not really getting the audio right now.
Uh-oh. Okay. I think there's a way to do this.
I think I can probably do it if I just share my screen from YouTube. I think it'll be okay. Should we
do that? Yeah. Sure. If you to avoid me fumbling around, Alex, if you know how to do it,
let's just do it. Yeah. Let's try that.
I'm impressed with the high quality production here across our experience.
Okay.
Love the trailer concept.
Today, I'll be walking
Can everybody see that? And let me know if you can hear it. Yeah. Whenever
you hear our latest public good called RxC Voice, an in house creation using quadratic funding that makes democratic decision making accessible participatory. As a user, my experience begins when I receive an invitation containing a private I access the site by clicking that link and creating an account after which I'm ready to participate in the decision at hand. Every decision making process on artsy voice has three stages, delegation, deliberation, and election. Over the course of the three stages, we will determine who gets a say in the decision. Collectively compose a ballot valid proposals. And we'll start with delegation. In this stage, we'll collectively determine who gets to participate and how much influence each participant should have. Each participant or delegate begins with 99 voice credits. As a delegate, I have the option to send some of my voice credits to anyone who I think should have say. An interesting feature of the delegation stage is that each voice credit transfer is matched according to the quadratic funding formula. This awards delegates who receive a broad base of support with increased influence over the decision. In addition to boosting the influence of existing delegates, I also have the option to invite someone new to the delegation by sending them some of my voice credits by email. At the end of the delegation stage, we will have determined who gets to participate in the decision in a fluid, decentralized way. After the delegation stage, we move into deliberation. In this stage, we'll use a survey tool called POLICE to collectively compose a ballot for proposals. Each delegate has the opportunity to submit proposals and express ideas or feelings to the other members of the delegation. I can submit my own proposals to the ballot here. Looking at the interface, I can also see a stack of all the proposals submitted by the delegation so far. As I read them, I have the ability to agree or disagree with each one. As each delegate agrees or disagrees with the comments in the stack, Polis analyzes that data and provides us with detailed information about where opinion groups are forming and which comments are generating broad consensus. This information is published at the end of the deliberation stage to provide transparency to the ballot curation process. The final stage is the election stage where we will vote on the ballot we just collectively generated. With the voice credits they have left over from the delegation stage, each delegate will signal their preferences across the proposals on the ballot using quadratic voting. As I allocate votes to each proposal, I can see the cost in voice credits rising quadratically. On the right hand side of the screen, I can see how many voice credits I have left. It's important to note that the ballot I see here may not be identical to the final stack of comments from the deliberations stage. This is because the final ballot was curated by election officials to consolidate redundant proposals and remove proposals that were not useful. As a check on that centralized aspect of the process, the ballot contains a special proposal for ballot ratification, which allows delegates to express their approval or disapproval of the choices made by the ballot curators. I can check the work of the ballot curators by clicking this link where they have published a report of any changes they deemed necessary to the proposal submitted by the delegation.
If I feel that
the ballot does not accurately reflect the submissions from the delegation, I can now vote the ballot ratification proposal. If I do approve of the ballot, I have to contribute some votes to this proposal to ensure that it passes. When the election stage is over, we can see the results here. If we see here that the ballot ratification proposal received a negative number of votes, this means that the ballot has been rejected by the delegation. If this is the case, the ballot must be recurated, perhaps by a different group of the delegation, and the election stage must be repeated. Alternatively, if the ballot ratification proposal received a non negative number of votes, the results stand as shown here with the proposals ranked by number of effective votes received. This concludes the RxC Voice democratic process. Not only did we rank the proposals democratically, we also generated the ballot and determined the constituency using decentralized mechanisms. We hope that other organizations will join us in making decisions more democratic from end to end.
So as you can see there, we addressed each of those questions that I raised, earlier. We started out with this delegation stage where the, you know, the the constituency can kind of grow in, like, a liquid and democratic way. Any of the voters can invite someone new into the process, but there's a cost associated with that because they have to give them some of their own voice credits. But then there's this quadratic funding mechanism that's boosts these transfers in a really interesting way that kind of increases the democratic nature there. And and when I say that, what I mean is if, for example, if more than one person contributes voice credits to the same other person in the delegation, then that unlocks a match of bonus voice credits to that person, and the match grows as the number of people who contributed to that one person grows. That is to say that if there's if if one person like, if Matt has a a broad base of support in the RadicalxChange community and he receives two voice credits from me and two from Jen and two from a bunch of other people, then that's gonna give him a a bigger boost because more people support him as a as a decision maker. So that allows the delegation to grow in a kind of fluid way, and it's a sort of a partake on liquid democracy. And then we move into this deliberation stage and we compose the ballot collectively. And then we curate the proposals from the deliberation stage into a coherent ballot, but then we give the community the opportunity to basically vote down that ballot and start over. So at each point in the process, we kind of have decentralized checks on some of the more centralized aspects of the process, like the ballot curation. So we just finished our first kind of major experiment with this process in which we sort of dogfooded it with our community where we asked the community the question, what activities should the Radical Exchange Foundation prioritize over the next year? And we sort of we advertised this process on, like, all our media channels, and we just added anyone who asked to be included in the process. We added them to a list of initial delegates, and we gave them all an equal number of voice credits. And then we opened up this process where they were able to invite whoever they wanted. So out of around a 150 people who were initially invited, we ended up with seven around 70 participants. 16 new people were invited by members of the delegation, and four of those signed up or participated. And then what we ended up with oh, let me share my screen again so I can just show you this real quick. So what we ended up with was, like I was describing, this this sort of fluid delegation with all different numbers of voice credits depending on the transfers that people will send to one another. And then in the deliberation stage, we end up with this really interesting Polis report where all these people submitted proposals, and we get to see where opinion groups are forming, and we get to see which proposals generated the highest level of consensus. And then to explain the curation process briefly, we looked over this report and we tried to stay really true to the text of the comments, but we just sort of condensed redundant comments and eliminated ones that were kind of not relevant. And then, in the end, we ended up with this great information about the preferences of the community for each of these proposals. And each of them was a very kind of clear, actionable proposal for the Radical Exchange Foundation to take. So I just wanted to share with you that the the results of that experiment, and I'd I'm happy to take any questions that you guys have about that or just about the sort of underlying mechanisms of RxC Voice. But our our plans for the project going forward are we're we're super excited to kind of continue experimenting with this. We're hoping to encourage other organizations and other communities to experiment with this with us, and we're hoping to kind of grow sort of, like, an open source community around this as, like, a governance as a service platform. So, yeah, that's that's what we have in the way of a presentation, and super excited to take your questions about this.
Great. Thank you so much. That was perfect. And there's a super exciting discussion already happening in the chat that I'll just try to channel into the main space now. So I think the first question before we get to the back and forth between Zargan and Seth is on, you know, in an effort to understand the goal, do you make an effort to define good or better improve with respect to collective decision making processes? So how do you know when something is good or it's improved? Is it a property of a process of how that process is used or of the outcome? And to what extent is it qualitative versus quantitative, how you define those things?
I think this gets at a very fundamental philosophical thing, you know, which is how do you what is the good? And I the, you know, the the way I look at all this stuff that we're doing is that is that we're we're trying to build systems that better conform to democratic values, whatever those may be. And those are that that that's, of course, contestable. Like, so I I think that, you know, the way that the way that you define good, whether you define good or better is, like, always itself a matter of of dispute. And I don't I don't we haven't, like, you know, closed the loop on, you know, this this, you know, ancient philosophical conversation or anything. It's but it's what we're what we're trying to do is take the take the values of, you know, take some values that, you know, we associate with democracy and, build systems and institutions that just, you know, like embody them a little bit better. And then the the outcomes that we, you know so in other words, just like an attempt to improve the process. Whether the outcomes themselves are good is a is a qualitative question that, you know, I have nothing to say about how to quantify, if that makes sense.
Just to clarify though, I wasn't asking that you solve the the ancient philosophical question. I was asking for, you know, your your guideposts. You're like, you're doing something, like, real world. So you have to choose a representation of those concepts or a set of representations of those concepts to use as measuring sticks to try to decide what to do or what not to do or how to iterate or to say measure one thing against another. And when you say quadratic voting is better in this context for this reason, but maybe worse than this other context for this other reason, you say that under some metric. And so I wanna say I was just curious what metrics you guys were using, not trying to dictate that there is a set of metrics that is somehow capable of fully capturing those questions. And and yeah. So so it's fine if you don't have an answer. I just I I did wanna clarify. I didn't mean it to be a philosophical trap. I meant it to be a I'm genuinely curious how you're judging your your progress.
Yeah. I mean, I think that I I think that the the answer is is it's qualitative. I don't really think there is, like, a quantitative way to say, oh, we're we're we're fixing things. Like so in in other words, you know, we we've done a number of things with with quadratic voting that have that have worked well. Right? Where where I'd I'd be people who participated in it have have enjoyed it and understood it and felt like it allowed them to reach a Nuance conclusion, which is, like, you know, one one way of interpreting a success. You know? And, you know, this includes, like so we've we've we've done quadratic voting pilots with in with groups in the Colorado government in several different sort of parts of the government, which have which have gone well, right, which have which have allowed people to you know, groups of people to sort of quickly, you know, and app following deliberation, get a sense of where where the support lies, where the sort of aggregate support in the group lies for for different different proposals, and allow them to reach prioritization. So, you know, I think that as a matter of, you know, assessing, like, empirical progress, I don't think there's a I don't think I have a better answer than than that.
Does that make sense?
I mean, it's that's sort of ethnographic in nature. You're saying the people who participated in the process that was administrated by quadratic voting felt as though outcomes fairly reflected the opinions of the people within the process and thus the sort of, you know, this as a kind of measure of legitimacy, it is a sort of again, these no. Maybe we'll just place that. I don't wanna dig into that term, but suppose we we say that, like, people feel good about the process, then legitimacy extends from the process. And as long as there's some persistent history of this, people will come to trust that it that it reflects that. So that would I would yeah. I'd bundle that in the qualitative, but it's still outcome driven, really. It's just outcome driven at the level of how the people who used it felt about the experience of using it.
Yeah. And I agree that's not that you know, you it's there's a reflexivity there that doesn't that that will never be fully satisfying. But I think you could say the same thing about about basically any any system of making decisions. And, you know, from a sort of a non empirical point of view, I think that or at least, you know, I'm persuaded that that quadratic voting, you know, if you have a well constructed ballot, basically, I'm persuaded that that quadratic voting enables groups to to give themselves more nuanced, more precise information about about the sentiment within the group with respect to the to the ballot items. So, yeah, I mean, you know, to me, it's like it's like a process of of experimentation and and iteration that is is worth pursuing, and that's what we're doing.
So I'll make one last comment and then I'll yield is just, you know, one thing that I have done quite a bit of work with in terms of decision making and and multi agent decision making systems. I'm a signal processing and controls engineer, PhD, formally. So there are, formal mathematical properties of this mechanism when it comes to the input information. And some of the other questions that I was poking at relate to, quite literally the the things that are irrespective of the particular instance and that just sort of acknowledging what kinds of things it amplifies and what kind of things it attenuates. And so recognizing that one of the things that it amplifies is, again, very much intentionally. Right? It's the lots of small voters scenario. But in a system which is open, that where there's sort of media in play and influence at play tends to magnify that, and thus, there's some risks there. And, actually, I've I've used it. We've done some test deployments in some orgs that I've been in where we've actually made some decisions using it and very positive in small groups, but you can already start to see the places where the influential people, regardless of maybe how much voting points they extend, actually, they exercise outsized influence because they swing a large number of small voters, and the effect of that is actually amplified under this mechanism.
Yeah. Totally. I think that's you know, I I'm I totally agree, and I think that that's why it's important to sort of, like, start couching quadratic voting in in a richer institutional structures, right, which is sort of what we're starting to do with with RadicalxChangeVoice, I think. In other words, like like, maybe we don't wanna have a nationwide quadratic vote, you know, on a thousand issue ballot because, you know, you're right. If we did, then probably some some influencers would, like, you know, get would would inspire disproportionate support for for a couple items or something. So there probably needs to be some sort of, you know, some some tearing and some texture and some and some, institutional structure.
I think on that, Seth also had a comment on this, and I won't read it out because he'll probably say it more eloquently. But broadly in this group, we sort of talk a lot about these decentralization technologies and can, you know, in the process of facilitating decentralization in one space, is it possible that they're also allowing for more concentration of power in other ways or or just creating centralization in parallel? And so I think that's my understanding, Seth, of your comment, but feel free to add on. And then, given that that's related, maybe we'll talk about that a bit before going on to, I think, Thomas's question.
That does it, Divya. Thank you.
So I think the specific question is, is there something about this approach that's sort of less vulnerable to that kind of capture, that kind of parallel centralization that has happened in other decentralization technologies like markets, which you mentioned, as well as the Internet and crypto and other things that we talk about a lot in this group.
Yeah. So I think that what we're what we're hoping to do with with RadicalxChange Voice is to is to basically build a process around the the the new, you know, kind of sites of centralization that the quadratic voting could create. So, like, quadratic voting enables more, you know, more like, enables larger groups to make to make decisions in a certain sense, but then, you know, it shunts some power, some more power to the to the ballot constructor. So that's, like, that's kind of, like, exactly what we're trying to to deal with. We're trying to sort of, like, keep following that that centralization down the line and and and build build institutions around it. We're never gonna, you know, we're never gonna, like, fully consume the tail of the dragon.
But Could I could I try to so maybe maybe to restate, you're kind of building out from the mechanism. Because the more you build out from it, the kind of the more things potentially a a powerful, like, entity has to has to take over and has to exploit in order to control the outcome. Is that kind of the premise?
I think so. I think I think I agree with that. You know, it's although I'm not I'm not sure I would reduce it to to to, like, saying that you know? I mean, I I I I guess I just need to think about that exact formulation of it, but but I think that's right. And the the you know, so for example, I think that what we've done with the ballot ratification process is interesting in this respect because what it does is it is sort of a function important function for exercise of careful centralized judgment in the sense of at at the stage of taking the kind of big messy deliberation and and and curating it curating it down to a, to an actionable ballot in a in a in a faithful way. And, you know, I I don't I don't know of a of a way of doing that fully in a, like, a fully decentralized way. If you do, let me know. The so what we so instead, you know, we're sort of admitting this the the dysfunction for centralized judgment, but then subjecting that judgment to the, to approval by the by the Democratic voters. So, you you know, one of the one of the ballot items on the final quadratic voting stage is whether you approve the curation of the conversation into the ballot. And if if the group gives that proposal net negative votes in the quadratic vote, then it gets kicked back. And you could imagine, you could imagine building more institutional, structures around that. Like, maybe maybe the the ballot constructor is, like, randomly chosen from their group each time, or maybe there's a separate, you know, vote on, you know, who gets to construct the the ballot or something like that. So I think that I think that those you know, that is kind of a a promising direction for, you know, enabling, yeah, kind of, I don't know, couching couching the these, like, necessarily centralized functions within within the democratic process.
Can can I get a can I do a follow-up, Divya?
Yeah. Go ahead, and then we'll speed run Thomas's question.
Thank you. So kind of along the the same lines. So you have you know, there's things you control, things you don't control. You control the mechanism. You don't control necessarily the values or or or the culture of the group using the tools. If you did have if if you could include in the toolkit a magic wand that that boom boom boom, I I instill these values in the head of the users. So now you have control of values and mechanism. Are there some that you would instill to ensure the the healthy functioning of the system? Are you conceiving it more as a a kinda more value free or culture free that you can paste in to lots of different communities?
I probably like like I guess a little bit more the latter in the sense that we're kind of motivated by this by the idea of, like, building tools that can be used in different ways. So for example, like, if there was some if if there was some community that wanted to, like, you know, if if there was some community that wanted to, like let's, like, let's say, like, enforce a more egalitarian decision process so that, you know, to making sure that, you know, so that, you know, people couldn't send their credits around and everybody was gonna, you know, use the same number of credits to vote. Like, great. If there's another community that want that wants to, you know, open open up the possibility that some people have a larger say than others, fine. You know, I mean, I might have my own view about, like, how to strike the balance between those those two things, but I think it depends on the context. It depends on the what community we're talking about and what kind of things they're deciding. And so, I mean, I hope we've built a a tool that, you know, has dials that can be tweaked for these different sorts of contexts. Does that make sense? Does that answer the question?
That does. Thank you. And that helps me kind of I think that places us in different places, but I'm, I'm eager to, but I'm happy to hear about.
So before we get to Thomas' question, just wanna say, I will definitely invite both of you through all three of you to the Slack because there's a lot of conversation happening that I think we will likely not get to in this session. Adam mentioned that there are lots of ways to that these outcomes can be measured in a controlled way, and maybe that's a discussion we can take forward. There are comments from Daniel on on the tallying of votes, all of which I think are really rich comments that I wish we had time for. Briefly, Thomas, if you wanna talk through your concern, and then we'll
Oh, I I I live in Oregon where we do ballot initiatives all the time, and it's become this sort of escalating war around how to tweak and manipulate the process. So I now have been trained to think about, oh, how can I manipulate this process? So sorry, Matt. And I wanna say I love what you're doing. Alright? I I love having more ways to try to find the consensus of a group and how to give collectives to schools. So yay. And I'm thinking, oh, great. How can I how can I break math system? So and I thought, I know. I'll put on an abortion question or something I don't care about particularly because I'm a special interest group, and I get everyone to burn all their tokens on this hot button contentious thing. And then there's no tokens left to talk about the thing I care about, But my allies and I, we throw our tokens at that. That that's one fun thing to do. Now there's a flip side to that, and that is like, if I wanna vote for the power of two, I gotta burn four tokens. Or Seth could send one of his tokens over, and I'll say, dude, I'll spend one of my tokens on your thing if you'll spend one of your tokens on my thing. And then I get my power of two. He gets his power of two, and I've I've saved some tokens. And I'm like, oh, it's coalitions. Oh my god. We're talking together. We're creating community. Maybe. Or it's, you know, the secret, Illuminati power mongers. I don't know. But there's there's fun ways this is gonna play out, and I can't wait to see it, in action even more, because, boy, there's cool stuff going on here. Thank you, Matt.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, we're not like, the the possibility of collusion and quadratic voting is is is is clear. I mean, this is this is something that we've
One man's collusion is another man's partnership.
Yeah. Exactly.
You know? It's like 60%, you know, 60% of us collude. Isn't that just consensus? So
Right. So, I mean, you know, in in you would have to like, for example, in the in the Radical Change voice pilot that we just did, you know, we we, like, sent the sent the message to the you know, we set a norm at the beginning of the process that, you know, you're you know, you will, you know, there won't be sort of, like, off out of frame deals with, you know, how people are voting and these kinds you know? So it's like that's, like, the norm of the of the community that we're
Yeah. Social compact. You'll you'll screw up the you'll you'll screw up the game if you go outside of these boundaries. So let's all agree. Just, yeah, totally cool.
Yeah. And so, you know, there's there are yeah. It's just it just depends on the on the context and on the stakes, like, how much you should worry about that.
Yeah. The more cohesive people are with their values, the more likely they are to uphold the social compact like that.
It's tragically my job as moderator to end this conversation. So I'll ask everyone to unmute and applaud for our great presenters. We'll definitely send you invites to the Slack because I think there's a lot to discuss and a lot we can learn from, the pilot and and all of your work. So thank you so much for for being with us. If we can applaud on one, two, three, unmute. Thank you again.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Divya, for facilitating, and thanks for the questions. And, nice to great to be here.
Yes. Hope to see you with us again.