Save all grass roots efforts by using modern internet tools to enable rapid consensus building and measuring.

How to Save the DAO

And all Grass Roots Efforts Wanting to Scale

by Brent Allsop

Daniel Larimer, the founder of Bitshares, in his highly referenced “Is the DAO going to be DOA” steemit article said: “Smart Contracts cannot fix Dumb People”:

“BitShares had all of the tools, the talent, and the money to do great things if only the BTS holders could agree on what should be done, who should be paid, and how much should be spent. So what lessons have we learned from BitShares’ experiment and how is The DAO doing anything meaningfully different to address it?”

Many articles in the popular press have cited this article and also are similarly critical of the chances of success of the DAO including:

All of these articles, in many diverse ways, point out a particular problem I’ll refer to as the Large Consensus Problem. People think that Bitcoin’s problems are a governance problem, but when you think about it, the only problem is when there is any kind of lack of consensus when things start to scale. This more general problem is what is really facing all grass roots bottom up, self organizing efforts attempting to scale. History is littered with plenty of examples of grassroots efforts failing to scale including the recent “99% movement” and the “Arab Spring.” Where there is any kind of significant consensus, especially if it is definitively measurable and quickly buildable, there is no governance problem.

The Large Consensus Problem.

The Large Consensus Problem is a specific problem where any time a large number of people get together to form any kind of consensus, they fail to scale without going hierarchical. This is because any time two or more people get together trying to accomplish something, they quickly find one or more things, usually of lesser import than the main issues joining them, which they disagree on. The focus, all dialogue and effort quickly is taken away from what anyone may agree on. Political party lines are drawn, everyone polarizers on the issues, and wars ensue destroying any possible large consensus on anything. The result is the modern polarized problems tearing apart and neutering all large political institutions any most important significant consensus idea is usually lost as a casualty..

A typical example is the issue of sex education in society. Any time governments attempt to address this issue the kind of highly motivated polarized sides of society that can get things done quickly show up: The liberals and the conservatives. Most people are very familiar with the vitriol that quickly emerges between these two often willing to fight to the death sides. Everyone assumes these to parties can’t agree on much of anything. Any elected officials and political parties are afraid to do anything for fear of offending one side or the other, resulting in them becoming a casualty of this war.

The modern social internet has enabled methods that can solve these problems. Some of them have been prototyped at Canonizer.com. The most important method being employed is Hierarchical Consensus Building.

Hierarchical Consensus Building.

When a system using this method is employed, the debate is quickly self organized into a natural hierarchy of camps. This enables the disagreeable issues, instead of becoming the focus, polarizing and tearing things apart, can be pushed out of the way into lower level sub camps. This enables the usually much more important issues to remain the at the top and the focus of any growing consensus, in larger parent supper camps, without losing track of and the support of different things that are also important to everyone in the growing supper camp supporting sub camps.

When this Hierarchical Consensus Building technique is given to any crowd ripping itself apart over such issues surprising things happen. We quickly realize that THE most important thing that both of these sides strongly agree on is the education of our youth is important. The only difference is the much less important issue where one side is OK with the education taking place in public institutions, while the other would prefer it to be done in more private and personal family centered settings.

Without hierarchical camps, things like the education of our youth becomes a casualty of this war. With hierarchical camps, these lesser important issues can be pushed into lower level camps where they can be tracked and dealt with, without destroying the higher level, near unanimous consensus camp in which everyone agrees that education of our youth is important. As you can see at Canonizer.com the “Education is important” camp naturally rises to the top and has unanimous consensus support of all participating parties so far no matter how things are prioritized or “canonized” (see below).

Infinite Delegation on all Issues.

Another issue facing all grass roots efforts is expecting everyone to vote on every issue. Both Bitshares and the DAO are depending on something like this with obvious problems being pointed out by most of the critical articles mentioned above. Izabella Kamanska pointed this problem out in the Financial Times Alphaville: “More Decentralized DAO mysticism” article referenced above where she concluded with:

“Capital organisations (in this case the capital of Metropolis) must be structured both from the bottom up and from the top down, whilst being intermediated by a compassionate/moral mediator who can empathise with both ends, if they’re ever to be effective. Balance. Also known as the only long-term politically stable system we’ve ever come up with: democracy. A political governance structure which depends on a top-down executive function being routinely — albeit not continuously — kept in check by a bottom-up process.”

Today, we have the tools to easily take this balanced solution to the extreme with infinite and instantaneous delegation. We would all be fine with having our personally most trusted experts make these decision for us, with a potentially different sets of experts being trusted on every issue. For example, my children that are too young could delegate their votes to me. I could delegate my family's and friend’s tree of votes to a friend I trust more than myself, who could in turn delegate her even larger tree of votes to the best world class experts on the particular issue. This is another method being prototyped at Canonizer.com and elsewhere on the internet. In this way, when one expert who has more than half the delegates jumps to a new camp, the entire organization can make drastic changes on a dime - knowing concisely, quantitatively, and in real time how much support will remain (or be lost) after any instant significant delegated change. And if such trusted experts ever screw up, their delegated support could vanish, instantly. Are you listening people on both sides of the “make the block size bigger” war, ripping bitcoin apart? I bet, using the right consensus building, measuring, and documenting system, it could be shown that there is a significant consensus, on one side or the other, of any issue currently troubling Bitcoin. It’s just that nobody can see or measure for such, let alone work to build such, now. At Canonizer.com not everyone is required to participate. In fact things scale much better when there is only a small percentage of the crowd most interested in a particular issue that participates. It is almost always very easy to show a significant consensus, and how fast it is changing, on all issues that are big problems in other organizations.

Let everyone filter/prioritize things any way they want.

Another obvious problem is, one person’s so called “expert” is another’s “devil worshiper”. So let everyone prioritize or filter everything any way they want to. Everyone needs the ability to choose their own trusted experts any way they want. This is another method being prototyped at Canonizer.com. The idea is, anyone can prioritize, filter, or if you will “canonize” things any way they want. Anyone can propose a canonization algorithm which can be used to organize any hierarchy in the system from camps to who are the best experts. Some religious people might prefer an algorithm that only recognized the authority of the leadership of their particular chosen religious institution. Others may chose a myriad of other techniques to trust. Any combination should be easily possible. One of the more successful algorithms being employed at Canonizer.com is so far turning out to be enabling the “experts” on any particualr issue vote on who of their piers in any field are the best experts. (see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/53/11 )

With such techniques, instead of filtering everything in a body of text on the way in, the way all “peer reviewed” journals and most everything else work today, you let everyone submit everything. Then you let each reader filter things any way they desire. If you are interested in how the other side views things, you can filter things the way your competing camps do, so you can better know how to talk to them, and who in the opposite camps needs to be converted, and what minor things need to change, to get them on board with your camp's most important proposal.

Conclusion

Notice that I called the primary problem facing large grass roots efforts “The Problem of Large Consensus”, rather than the problem of unanimous or even majority consensus. We’ve all been bred to think in hierarchical ways, and that unanimous consensus is always required. We tend to think you’re with us or you're against us, resulting in all hierarchies warring to destroy or convert all other hierarchies. But this should not be the case. You can do anything you want once you build a large enough consensus. Once you have enough clear supporters on board, the rest is easy. The only hard thing left, once you have enough capital supporters on any issue, is that you concisely and quantitatively keep track of what everyone else wants so you can avoid getting in their way, and thereby prevent all war and casualties.