Wonderful! And thought provoking. My only thought is this. Until you find a pill that makes ‘you care’ , then you will always have people who for whatever reason will not care but will whine and moan. But this is certainly a way to make life more fair, if that is even possible.
Thank you for composing such a thorough and deeply thought provoking piece!
You pose many great questions and thought experiments, while offering some insightful suggestions to offset some of the most persistent challenges.
I especially like how clearly you highlight the inherent, practical challenges with implementing systems that incentivize, regulate, and balance the tensions between equality and freedom in a desirable and doable way.
With the interest of finding practical ways to bring about changes to make these things possible, there are some acutely practical challenges that I don't think I've ever seen in these kinds of philosophical discussions:
These kinds of democratized systems put several, seemingly insurmountable, challenging burdens on each member of the society:
• Informed Inclusion: They must be well-informed about how the system works. This includes clearly understanding how to navigate it, and relative impacts of their participation in the system. How can we design the system in such a way that actively ensures informed inclusion? And how do we do this, while creating strong enough incentives for people to continue participation?
• Neurophysiological Costs of Democratized Systems: How we handle the neurophysiological cost that democratizing places on the members of the democratized society?
Example - Decision Fatigue:
Participation in such a society, with the criteria outlined in this essay, would seem to create a nearly infinite expansion of decision-points, in a highly complex system, that inherently breeds more complexity and decision-points.
The human brain has an extremely limited capacity for decision-making. Neurologically speaking, decision-making is an extremely high-cost activity. We wear our mental capacity for good, effective decision making very quickly. We need as much of this energy as possible, just to navigate our normal day-to-day activities. How do we minimize the neurobiological decision costs required for participating in such a democratized system, while at the same time addressing the challenges mentioned in the previous bullet?
• "Conversion" of Participants: How do, in reality, we create such a democratized & just system that can compete with powerful attraction of the extractive, exploitative, cult-adjacent, MLM-type systems of governance?
When done effectively, these exploitative structures provide a powerful, attractive promise of low-risk, low cost, high-payout social club. When people are already living in poverty and/or scarcity (whether physically or psychologically) they are significantly more likely to fall for these schemes. In addition to creating an functional alternative, we need to to both find a way to make it more attractive than the status quo, and do it in a way that sufficiently motivates people to enthusiastically participate. Because attractiveness and action-producing motivation are two very different things. Attraction simply creates incentive for motivation.
• Effective On-boarding: There's always a learning curve, when stepping into a new system. Folks who have had to help large organizations navigate broad, significant, systemic changes know that if the On-boarding is not carefully planned and executed well, the new system will become unintentionally altered to essentially operate in the same way, with the same problems last the old system. Possibly even worse.
How will we effectively on-board people to the new system(s), in a way that ensures the new systems are able to function as intended?
• Power Displacement: How do we do all this successfully, in a way that prevents the powerful and power-driven from usurping the system, and abusing it in such a way that puts us right back where we started, except now there's a different system for the narcissistic power-mongers to abuse for manipulation, control, and wealth? And how do we prevent the existing power-mongers from creating wars to prevent the implementation of the system in the first place?
These are at least some of the practical challenges that need to be addressed to successfully implement any new system. We desperately need systems that do a better job at empowering people to live in a way that can incentivize, regulate, and reinforce participation a system that does a better job at balancing equality, freedom, and power.
As the thought experiments begin turning an eye towards implementation, asking very practical questions like this become more necessary.
Anyway... those are my questions that arise, when reflecting on this piece.
Seriously, though. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. While I hadn't read anything else about web3 before reading this article, you are asking a lot of great questions, and have some really well-thought out suggestions, in response to the existing challenges you highlighted.
The theory of justice is beautiful and lofty, that's why is has been a movement and powerful!
However, it is hatched on a technology wagon ( crypto and tokenization mechanism) that has a disastrous environmental peril; This wagon is gonna run into ditch and take humanity down with it! The lofty ideal should be divorced from the technological irresponsibility and catastrophe. Period. Why all the Gen Z and millennials kept silent about Web3's environmental bedevil. Why everyone glaringly ignores the environmental foul-play of web3? Shouldn't they care? Web3 hasn't been gone any further, cos the emperor has no clothes on. You can hatch the ideal into a benign technology, not the one that enables terrorists, drug lords, and gun violence.
Web 3.0 all hype and most likely will lead to more unfairness. People have a way of using something to their advantage and not the greater good.
Wonderful! And thought provoking. My only thought is this. Until you find a pill that makes ‘you care’ , then you will always have people who for whatever reason will not care but will whine and moan. But this is certainly a way to make life more fair, if that is even possible.
Thank you for composing such a thorough and deeply thought provoking piece!
You pose many great questions and thought experiments, while offering some insightful suggestions to offset some of the most persistent challenges.
I especially like how clearly you highlight the inherent, practical challenges with implementing systems that incentivize, regulate, and balance the tensions between equality and freedom in a desirable and doable way.
With the interest of finding practical ways to bring about changes to make these things possible, there are some acutely practical challenges that I don't think I've ever seen in these kinds of philosophical discussions:
These kinds of democratized systems put several, seemingly insurmountable, challenging burdens on each member of the society:
• Informed Inclusion: They must be well-informed about how the system works. This includes clearly understanding how to navigate it, and relative impacts of their participation in the system. How can we design the system in such a way that actively ensures informed inclusion? And how do we do this, while creating strong enough incentives for people to continue participation?
• Neurophysiological Costs of Democratized Systems: How we handle the neurophysiological cost that democratizing places on the members of the democratized society?
Example - Decision Fatigue:
Participation in such a society, with the criteria outlined in this essay, would seem to create a nearly infinite expansion of decision-points, in a highly complex system, that inherently breeds more complexity and decision-points.
The human brain has an extremely limited capacity for decision-making. Neurologically speaking, decision-making is an extremely high-cost activity. We wear our mental capacity for good, effective decision making very quickly. We need as much of this energy as possible, just to navigate our normal day-to-day activities. How do we minimize the neurobiological decision costs required for participating in such a democratized system, while at the same time addressing the challenges mentioned in the previous bullet?
• "Conversion" of Participants: How do, in reality, we create such a democratized & just system that can compete with powerful attraction of the extractive, exploitative, cult-adjacent, MLM-type systems of governance?
When done effectively, these exploitative structures provide a powerful, attractive promise of low-risk, low cost, high-payout social club. When people are already living in poverty and/or scarcity (whether physically or psychologically) they are significantly more likely to fall for these schemes. In addition to creating an functional alternative, we need to to both find a way to make it more attractive than the status quo, and do it in a way that sufficiently motivates people to enthusiastically participate. Because attractiveness and action-producing motivation are two very different things. Attraction simply creates incentive for motivation.
• Effective On-boarding: There's always a learning curve, when stepping into a new system. Folks who have had to help large organizations navigate broad, significant, systemic changes know that if the On-boarding is not carefully planned and executed well, the new system will become unintentionally altered to essentially operate in the same way, with the same problems last the old system. Possibly even worse.
How will we effectively on-board people to the new system(s), in a way that ensures the new systems are able to function as intended?
• Power Displacement: How do we do all this successfully, in a way that prevents the powerful and power-driven from usurping the system, and abusing it in such a way that puts us right back where we started, except now there's a different system for the narcissistic power-mongers to abuse for manipulation, control, and wealth? And how do we prevent the existing power-mongers from creating wars to prevent the implementation of the system in the first place?
These are at least some of the practical challenges that need to be addressed to successfully implement any new system. We desperately need systems that do a better job at empowering people to live in a way that can incentivize, regulate, and reinforce participation a system that does a better job at balancing equality, freedom, and power.
As the thought experiments begin turning an eye towards implementation, asking very practical questions like this become more necessary.
Anyway... those are my questions that arise, when reflecting on this piece.
Seriously, though. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. While I hadn't read anything else about web3 before reading this article, you are asking a lot of great questions, and have some really well-thought out suggestions, in response to the existing challenges you highlighted.
Thank you for writing this!
The theory of justice is beautiful and lofty, that's why is has been a movement and powerful!
However, it is hatched on a technology wagon ( crypto and tokenization mechanism) that has a disastrous environmental peril; This wagon is gonna run into ditch and take humanity down with it! The lofty ideal should be divorced from the technological irresponsibility and catastrophe. Period. Why all the Gen Z and millennials kept silent about Web3's environmental bedevil. Why everyone glaringly ignores the environmental foul-play of web3? Shouldn't they care? Web3 hasn't been gone any further, cos the emperor has no clothes on. You can hatch the ideal into a benign technology, not the one that enables terrorists, drug lords, and gun violence.
انني ارى
مازالت العداله بعيده ولا انكر ان الانترنيت له نقله
قويه ونوعية باتجاه الديمقراطيه والمساواة
طبعآعلى كافة الصعد العلميه والاقتصاديه وغيرها
شي جميل ان
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Great article!
While we’re reflecting on the crash, we can recast what we want to build.