I clicked all three links and cannot find the passage you quote. Many of the words in that quote don't even appear in any of the three links. Can you be more specific?
I think that would be like saying a bank is "FDIC insured" means, "well they have some sort of insurance."
The Open Group is not just some certifier. The Single UNIX Specififcation is a Big Deal. It certifies a level of portability and conformance that gives its administrators a level of confidence that cannot be achieved from Unix-like systems (read Linux and BSD... though I personally think these are great platforms) or Windows.
I'm sure the certification is meaningless to game developers, but it carries a lot of weight for enterprise developers.
You would think that the fact that OS X is UNIX 03 certified might be of some interest to developers as well.
Sure, maybe not as much as the reasons stated above, but... it is worth mentioning. And just the fact that it is any flavor of Unix-like OS is attractive to many.
So it will be mob justice. The first catilina, that bribes enough people with sex and drugs, will seize power, and kill your experiment.
I don't see how this follows. Nor do I see how it is any more applicable to a consensus democracy than it is to any existing majority-rule democracy.
Furthermore WHO scales this metagovernment, WHO implements it ? Because obviously they will hold the real power over government.
Metagovernment is an open community of everyone in the world who wants to participate. Like I said, you are welcome to join. And even though our software is not yet completed, we still do everything with complete transparency, and that will not change. That's our second basic principle: openness in everything.
The basics of logic look like a tool, but if you study it at the graduate level, you quickly realize that it is a philosophical pursuit.
"If A then B" might sound like simple math, but that statement makes many substantial philosophical assumptions. What is A? What is B? Does A really cause B? Can anything be said to cause anything? And so on...
Give the manufacturers another 75 years and we might even have a fully integrated lifestyle technology solution.
Science fiction authors of the 70s and 80s never would have believed we'd be this slow getting there. We can't even have discussions with our houses about their appliances. Heck, most people can't even have the lights come on when they enter the room.
Sure, there are more pressing problems in the world, but... wouldn't you think household/lifestyle integrations would be progressing faster than they seem to be?
Two answers: first, again, we intend to start in much smaller communities than even a neighborhood and very gradually scale from there.
Second, there is likely to be no geographic requirement to participate. What farmers and loggers do in the Amazon rain forest affects people in the United States. What American car drivers do with their cars affects people in Brazil. Or more directly, what people do on the headwaters of a river affects everyone downstream from them. So it is likely (and again, remember we will be experimenting and adapting, so this is still theoretical) that the residents of one neighborhood won't be the only ones who get to set policy in that neighborhood. They may have much more say, but not necessarily absolute.
Much of what is on our website is theoretical and/or not necessarily fully community-developed. Our more authoritative data store is our list server. (Yes, the wiki should be more authoritative, but such is the nature of open source projects.) Once we have our software at a basic level of functionality, we intend to use it on ourselves and start developing internal policies that way.
As it is, the statements you quoted may or may not be the case. They are assumptions the programmers may start with (those particular quotes are by one of the programmers), but are not taken as givens or absolute truths. Again, we intend to start out in extremely small communities and adapt the software based on real-world feedback. Also, as we scale, we expect the nature of problems to escalate. For example, everyone in a chess club is likely to get along, while everyone on the Gaza Strip is not necessarily neighborly. We expect many, many, many iterations of the software between the time it works for the former and the time it works for the latter.
There are always people saying we should fix the system, and they all have very different ideas of how to go about it. But it almost always boils down to: beg the people in power to change the rules on themselves to limit their own power. For some reason, this never happens very effectively.
Yes, it would be easier to work within the system, and there are a number of attempts apply Web 2.0 technologies to existing governments, which we list here.
There are several reasons the Metagovernment project takes a different approach. First, ours is not limited by any particular geography: it scales up and down a the vast network of communities without artificially being bound by current geopolitical boundaries. Given that there is only one internet, this seems to make more sense for a forward-looking governance structure.
Second, no system which gives power to individuals can ever hope to fully prevent corruption in those individuals. You can try to patch and patch all you want, but you will never find a real solution (just as default-permit systems such as Windows are never able to be secure... only patched against known exploits). Metagovernment avoids this by giving power to no one... or more precisely to everyone who wants it.
Third, any system which relies on individuals is subject to the private thoughts and meetings those individuals hold. By contrast, everything that happens in the Metagovernment is completely open and transparent. There is no secrecy in any way.
Fourth, any system which relies on one individual to make decisions is inherently subject to the flaws of that individual. See The Wisdom of Crowds.
'd be more worried when there are no politicians who are working for the rights of anyone (yes, not all politicians are in it just for themselves, some actually do good things on behalf of their constituents) then worrying about some of the politicians being corrupt or simply doing the bidding of their financiers.
The place where we disagree is on the ratio of good to bad politicians. The way I see it, almost all politicians take money from lobbyists and then grant those lobbyists private hearings. At best this tarnishes their neutrality, and I am prone to believe that very frequently it makes them act other than for the common good. We even have words for it like pork and kick-backs and... bribes.
There is a reason we say that "power corrupts." Because it does.
It is because of politicians that good legislation gets put into place. Saying that because there are some corrupt elements out there doesn't negate the fact that it is still a useful system.
Saying that it is a useful system does not negate that there could be a better system.
Representative democracy is a triumph of humanity and a great stride away from authoritarianism. But it is not the pinnacle of human achievement for all eternity. It is the best we could do when communications were limited to the speed of a horse. Now that we have vast, sophisticated, instantaneous, global communication, it only makes sense that we can make improvements on that system.
(from previous post) Well, while it maybe addresses some of my concerns, it is still very vague
The software is in early alpha. We intend to have a demo out in the next couple of weeks. At this point, it is not surprising that it is vague. We expect it to solidify very gradually as we make inroads into other communities. We are in no rush to impose our view of how the world should work, but rather want real-world communities to adapt the software as seems workable to them. You (and everyone else) are quite welcome to join us.
I thought about it and here is a problem with this idea: You are basically giving minority more power just on the basis that it is a minority.
Sorry, that's how I stated it and that's one one way of looking at it, but minority-power is simply the flip-side of consensus. To restate the third principle: without a consensus, there is no law. (And why should there be?) And note that instead of just hoping for consensus, we actively work to create consensus through synthesis. This process transforms the groups of minority and majority from static groups into components of the synthesis process. One may start out as a member of one opposing group, but our software actively works to combine those groups.
I actually believe that laws that protect (weak) minorities are somehow orthogonal to the democratic framework and cannot be provably attained in direct democracy.
Again, while consensus prevents tyranny of the majority it most certainly also prevents tyranny of the minority. In the Metagovernment system, in no way can a minority make a law. Nor can a majority. Only a consensus.
The third and fourth basic principles are designed to address these concerns.
Without consensus, there is no law. Yes, that means that a minority can stop a majority from imposing tyranny of the majority onto the minority. That sounds like a good thing to me. But it only allows a minority to have a negative impact, not a law-making impact. In the status quo, we often see minorities getting laws passed in their favor (by gaming the system). Here nothing gets to be law unless it can attain a consensus.
Also note that Metagovernment is intended to develop as a replacement system, not an adaption of the status quo. So it does not use current laws, but rather creates new laws. So only laws which can garner consensus have a chance of making it in this system. That means existing laws which cannot achieve a consensus would not make it into the new system.
Consensus through synthesis. This addresses not only problems with traditional consensus-making, but also is vastly superior to the compromise system of the status quo. Why settle for compromise, the lowest common denominator, when someone out there in the vast network of the internet probably has a synthesizing idea that can actually bring people together? Metascore software uses a system of active synthesis promotion (in the form of "synthesis scoring") which enables synthesizing ideas to replace the proposals they subsume.
As for Wikipedia's system, well Metagovernment is no Wikipedia. The latter has no mechanism for mediating disputes other than plain-text wiki entries. Metagovernment intends to evolve that concept considerably (and fluidly... intending to adapt to real-world experience) in order to make a system that does work. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a policy-making mechanism. Metagovernment is entirely driven by the motivation to make an effective policy-making system.
A chess club does not need to apply violence in order to exist. But yes, when Metagovernment scales up to the level of running a whole city, the police will have to use violence and the threat of violence to enforce the law, exactly as they do now. There's nothing undemocratic about having a mechanism of law enforcement. (Though the police themselves are not a democracy, so we do not intend to replace their organizational structure.)
But I think what you are saying is that without unanimous consent, there will be no anti-theft laws. Consensus does not have to mean unanimity (e.g., there is a consensus among scientists that global warming is real; but not every single scientist believes that). All the thieves within a city aren't going to be enough to break the overwhelming opinion among citizens that theft should be illegal.
We expect that in small organizations, consensus might be described as unanimous consent, but in larger communities it will be defined as an overwhelming majority (perhaps in the range of 85-90%). That's the benefit of gradually scaling... we can learn how to define that number as we develop, and hopefully we can make the software make it an adaptable number that will always work to push the level higher.
All of this has been discussed at length on our list server. You are welcome to explore it or better to join it. We'd love to have the input of more mathematicians... and we welcome nay-sayers as well in order to ensure that we're working through every issue as thoroughly as we can.
Have you seen Metagovernment? It is completely international and has no formal organization, no leaders, and no physical presence. How is the American Congress going to shut down something like that?
Obviously you're going to have to make something law. In other words, on a lot of issues you'll have to take a singular opinion, and use military force to kill off all other opinions (that's, after all, what law is : using military force to ensure compliance with a singular point of view.
I would recommend you look at the Metagovernment website, especially at the Basic Principles. The third and fourth ones exist specifically to deal with this. Three is: Without consensus, there is no law. Four is: Consensus through synthesis.
In other words, no, we are not as you say "going to have to make something law." If people can't agree that there should be a law, then there will not be one. That's very consistent with what you say later on about wanting a minimalist government (except ours is somewhat less static).
However, the fourth principle is intended to allow laws to develop by actively promoting synthesis. There's a lot of explanation and discussion of that on the site and in the archives.
And further, Metagovernment intends to only start in extremely small, non-governmental communities. We're talking chess clubs, office social committees, maybe even things as large as condominiums eventually. We intend to expand in that sector and develop as we go. As that sector plays more and more with the software, two things seem likely to happen.
First, the software will evolve to deal with the various problems we foresee and the ones we cannot predict. Maybe by version 4 it will be ready to run a school board and park system, and maybe by version 8 it can run a city. Maybe.
Second, people will get used to this form of governance. Instead of all governance systems being composed of a small group of leaders who tell everyone else what to do; people will become accustomed to getting involved in any decisions they think are important. We expect the actual mentality of citizenship to gradually transform as this form of governance expands throughout society.
(And to be clear, we're not entirely optimistic that it will be the Metagovernment project or its Metascore software that will be driving this process. We are just trying to set the stage, but it is entirely possible that better systems will replace us at some point.)
If they were more clever, they would still allow torrents to look like they are working... but they would always just result in a download of a two-hour Mao-Is-Cool propaganda movie.
What you describe is the status quo in politics: a small in-crowd of not-the-smartest, not-the-most-reasonable people, drowning out all other points of view. Even when there are two sides to an issue: there are *only* two sides; not the spectrum of views that exists in greater society.
The Metagovernment project hasn't made up its mind about whether or not to use user scoring. We intend to start in very small communities and see what happens. But more importantly, we intend to enable a sophisticated mesh of communities; not just one as is the case in a discussion board. A person may rise to prominence within their small community (i.e., their clique), but in larger communities, there will be outside views counteracting them. Rising to prominence in a larger community will mathematically require broad support.
And even if we do have a robust user scoring system, our mathematician is working to make the scoring flexible enough that even a brand-new user can make their voice heard within an established community.
You are welcome to join the current Metagovernment community and work to ensure that we get it right.:)
Sure, if you think about if for five seconds, that's the conclusion you would be likely to draw.
Fortunately, we're not that stupid and actually thought it through. That's why there is a detailed explanation on the linked site, supported by a year of community discussion on the particulars of how to make it work. And even so, we know that we can't possibly know all the answers, so we're starting in extremely small communities and working our way up from there.
But to take your example, no, I sincerely doubt that any community could come to consensus on the free TVs concept. There would be a significant minority (namely, all small business owners) who would prevent any such stupid law from passing. That's the point behind consensus government: counter-intuitive laws cannot possibly get consensus.
But more to the point, right now, we allow buddies of politicians to get free money and not have to pay for it. And there is nothing you can do about it. How is that better than a participatory democracy where everyone gets a say in laws? How is nepotism and favoritism and cronyism and secret government and the entire system of lobbyists better than participatory consensus government using modern technology?
There are many simple answers to that. The Metagovernment's answer is a sophisticated mesh of communities and a scoring system.
You get a lot of spam... yet you continue to use your e-mail right? Something must be working there. Most e-mail clients use statistical scoring to demote spam and promote ham. Metagovernment just uses a folksonomy type system to apply that same principle to governance.
And maybe Metagovernment isn't the answer, but I can't believe that a hundred years from now we will still rely on individual rulers to make all the decisions for our governments, when every other community uses community participation to make more sophisticated decisions.
Yeah, let's just get rid of leaders, and while we're at it, that means we also get rid of the infrastructure to enforce laws.
No, it doesn't. In every system of governance in the past that may have been true. But now we have the technology to have a community infrastructure without a formal ruler. Web 2.0 has already begin to prove itself effective at organizing communities without one person having an ultimate say. Heck, slashdot doesn't have one person decide which articles get prominence and which get demoted: that's up to the community. Why should our most basic governance functions be based on an authoritarian model when everything else clearly is evolving beyond that archaic mechanism?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a question you can ask every applicant. There is no right answer, but it would be interesting and telling to see what they do with it.
Organize these IT concepts by priority:
Uptime
Backup
Customer Service
Security
Documentation
User Experience
Fault Tolerance
Best Practices
Add/subtract terms as you see fit. You get the idea.
Exactly.
I clicked all three links and cannot find the passage you quote. Many of the words in that quote don't even appear in any of the three links. Can you be more specific?
How much of San Diego's electricity usage is from game consoles?
I think that would be like saying a bank is "FDIC insured" means, "well they have some sort of insurance."
The Open Group is not just some certifier. The Single UNIX Specififcation is a Big Deal. It certifies a level of portability and conformance that gives its administrators a level of confidence that cannot be achieved from Unix-like systems (read Linux and BSD... though I personally think these are great platforms) or Windows.
I'm sure the certification is meaningless to game developers, but it carries a lot of weight for enterprise developers.
You would think that the fact that OS X is UNIX 03 certified might be of some interest to developers as well.
Sure, maybe not as much as the reasons stated above, but... it is worth mentioning. And just the fact that it is any flavor of Unix-like OS is attractive to many.
UPS won't ship more than 150 pounds. You should have hired a courier (and told them "no signature required," so they can leave it on your doorstep).
So it will be mob justice. The first catilina, that bribes enough people with sex and drugs, will seize power, and kill your experiment.
I don't see how this follows. Nor do I see how it is any more applicable to a consensus democracy than it is to any existing majority-rule democracy.
Furthermore WHO scales this metagovernment, WHO implements it ? Because obviously they will hold the real power over government.
Metagovernment is an open community of everyone in the world who wants to participate. Like I said, you are welcome to join. And even though our software is not yet completed, we still do everything with complete transparency, and that will not change. That's our second basic principle: openness in everything.
The basics of logic look like a tool, but if you study it at the graduate level, you quickly realize that it is a philosophical pursuit.
"If A then B" might sound like simple math, but that statement makes many substantial philosophical assumptions. What is A? What is B? Does A really cause B? Can anything be said to cause anything? And so on...
Give the manufacturers another 75 years and we might even have a fully integrated lifestyle technology solution.
Science fiction authors of the 70s and 80s never would have believed we'd be this slow getting there. We can't even have discussions with our houses about their appliances. Heck, most people can't even have the lights come on when they enter the room.
Sure, there are more pressing problems in the world, but... wouldn't you think household/lifestyle integrations would be progressing faster than they seem to be?
Two answers: first, again, we intend to start in much smaller communities than even a neighborhood and very gradually scale from there.
Second, there is likely to be no geographic requirement to participate. What farmers and loggers do in the Amazon rain forest affects people in the United States. What American car drivers do with their cars affects people in Brazil. Or more directly, what people do on the headwaters of a river affects everyone downstream from them. So it is likely (and again, remember we will be experimenting and adapting, so this is still theoretical) that the residents of one neighborhood won't be the only ones who get to set policy in that neighborhood. They may have much more say, but not necessarily absolute.
Much of what is on our website is theoretical and/or not necessarily fully community-developed. Our more authoritative data store is our list server. (Yes, the wiki should be more authoritative, but such is the nature of open source projects.) Once we have our software at a basic level of functionality, we intend to use it on ourselves and start developing internal policies that way.
As it is, the statements you quoted may or may not be the case. They are assumptions the programmers may start with (those particular quotes are by one of the programmers), but are not taken as givens or absolute truths. Again, we intend to start out in extremely small communities and adapt the software based on real-world feedback. Also, as we scale, we expect the nature of problems to escalate. For example, everyone in a chess club is likely to get along, while everyone on the Gaza Strip is not necessarily neighborly. We expect many, many, many iterations of the software between the time it works for the former and the time it works for the latter.
There are always people saying we should fix the system, and they all have very different ideas of how to go about it. But it almost always boils down to: beg the people in power to change the rules on themselves to limit their own power. For some reason, this never happens very effectively.
Yes, it would be easier to work within the system, and there are a number of attempts apply Web 2.0 technologies to existing governments, which we list here.
There are several reasons the Metagovernment project takes a different approach. First, ours is not limited by any particular geography: it scales up and down a the vast network of communities without artificially being bound by current geopolitical boundaries. Given that there is only one internet, this seems to make more sense for a forward-looking governance structure.
Second, no system which gives power to individuals can ever hope to fully prevent corruption in those individuals. You can try to patch and patch all you want, but you will never find a real solution (just as default-permit systems such as Windows are never able to be secure... only patched against known exploits). Metagovernment avoids this by giving power to no one... or more precisely to everyone who wants it.
Third, any system which relies on individuals is subject to the private thoughts and meetings those individuals hold. By contrast, everything that happens in the Metagovernment is completely open and transparent. There is no secrecy in any way.
Fourth, any system which relies on one individual to make decisions is inherently subject to the flaws of that individual. See The Wisdom of Crowds.
That's just a few. Other reasons are listed here.
Really... we have given this some thought.
'd be more worried when there are no politicians who are working for the rights of anyone (yes, not all politicians are in it just for themselves, some actually do good things on behalf of their constituents) then worrying about some of the politicians being corrupt or simply doing the bidding of their financiers.
The place where we disagree is on the ratio of good to bad politicians. The way I see it, almost all politicians take money from lobbyists and then grant those lobbyists private hearings. At best this tarnishes their neutrality, and I am prone to believe that very frequently it makes them act other than for the common good. We even have words for it like pork and kick-backs and... bribes.
There is a reason we say that "power corrupts." Because it does.
It is because of politicians that good legislation gets put into place. Saying that because there are some corrupt elements out there doesn't negate the fact that it is still a useful system.
Saying that it is a useful system does not negate that there could be a better system.
Representative democracy is a triumph of humanity and a great stride away from authoritarianism. But it is not the pinnacle of human achievement for all eternity. It is the best we could do when communications were limited to the speed of a horse. Now that we have vast, sophisticated, instantaneous, global communication, it only makes sense that we can make improvements on that system.
(from previous post) Well, while it maybe addresses some of my concerns, it is still very vague
The software is in early alpha. We intend to have a demo out in the next couple of weeks. At this point, it is not surprising that it is vague. We expect it to solidify very gradually as we make inroads into other communities. We are in no rush to impose our view of how the world should work, but rather want real-world communities to adapt the software as seems workable to them. You (and everyone else) are quite welcome to join us.
I thought about it and here is a problem with this idea: You are basically giving minority more power just on the basis that it is a minority.
Sorry, that's how I stated it and that's one one way of looking at it, but minority-power is simply the flip-side of consensus. To restate the third principle: without a consensus, there is no law. (And why should there be?) And note that instead of just hoping for consensus, we actively work to create consensus through synthesis. This process transforms the groups of minority and majority from static groups into components of the synthesis process. One may start out as a member of one opposing group, but our software actively works to combine those groups.
I actually believe that laws that protect (weak) minorities are somehow orthogonal to the democratic framework and cannot be provably attained in direct democracy.
Again, while consensus prevents tyranny of the majority it most certainly also prevents tyranny of the minority. In the Metagovernment system, in no way can a minority make a law. Nor can a majority. Only a consensus.
The third and fourth basic principles are designed to address these concerns.
Without consensus, there is no law. Yes, that means that a minority can stop a majority from imposing tyranny of the majority onto the minority. That sounds like a good thing to me. But it only allows a minority to have a negative impact, not a law-making impact. In the status quo, we often see minorities getting laws passed in their favor (by gaming the system). Here nothing gets to be law unless it can attain a consensus.
Also note that Metagovernment is intended to develop as a replacement system, not an adaption of the status quo. So it does not use current laws, but rather creates new laws. So only laws which can garner consensus have a chance of making it in this system. That means existing laws which cannot achieve a consensus would not make it into the new system.
Consensus through synthesis. This addresses not only problems with traditional consensus-making, but also is vastly superior to the compromise system of the status quo. Why settle for compromise, the lowest common denominator, when someone out there in the vast network of the internet probably has a synthesizing idea that can actually bring people together? Metascore software uses a system of active synthesis promotion (in the form of "synthesis scoring") which enables synthesizing ideas to replace the proposals they subsume.
As for Wikipedia's system, well Metagovernment is no Wikipedia. The latter has no mechanism for mediating disputes other than plain-text wiki entries. Metagovernment intends to evolve that concept considerably (and fluidly... intending to adapt to real-world experience) in order to make a system that does work. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a policy-making mechanism. Metagovernment is entirely driven by the motivation to make an effective policy-making system.
A chess club does not need to apply violence in order to exist. But yes, when Metagovernment scales up to the level of running a whole city, the police will have to use violence and the threat of violence to enforce the law, exactly as they do now. There's nothing undemocratic about having a mechanism of law enforcement. (Though the police themselves are not a democracy, so we do not intend to replace their organizational structure.)
But I think what you are saying is that without unanimous consent, there will be no anti-theft laws. Consensus does not have to mean unanimity (e.g., there is a consensus among scientists that global warming is real; but not every single scientist believes that). All the thieves within a city aren't going to be enough to break the overwhelming opinion among citizens that theft should be illegal.
We expect that in small organizations, consensus might be described as unanimous consent, but in larger communities it will be defined as an overwhelming majority (perhaps in the range of 85-90%). That's the benefit of gradually scaling... we can learn how to define that number as we develop, and hopefully we can make the software make it an adaptable number that will always work to push the level higher.
All of this has been discussed at length on our list server. You are welcome to explore it or better to join it. We'd love to have the input of more mathematicians... and we welcome nay-sayers as well in order to ensure that we're working through every issue as thoroughly as we can.
Have you seen Metagovernment? It is completely international and has no formal organization, no leaders, and no physical presence. How is the American Congress going to shut down something like that?
That is precisely the philosophy driving the Metagovernment project.
Obviously you're going to have to make something law. In other words, on a lot of issues you'll have to take a singular opinion, and use military force to kill off all other opinions (that's, after all, what law is : using military force to ensure compliance with a singular point of view.
I would recommend you look at the Metagovernment website, especially at the Basic Principles. The third and fourth ones exist specifically to deal with this. Three is: Without consensus, there is no law. Four is: Consensus through synthesis.
In other words, no, we are not as you say "going to have to make something law." If people can't agree that there should be a law, then there will not be one. That's very consistent with what you say later on about wanting a minimalist government (except ours is somewhat less static).
However, the fourth principle is intended to allow laws to develop by actively promoting synthesis. There's a lot of explanation and discussion of that on the site and in the archives.
And further, Metagovernment intends to only start in extremely small, non-governmental communities. We're talking chess clubs, office social committees, maybe even things as large as condominiums eventually. We intend to expand in that sector and develop as we go. As that sector plays more and more with the software, two things seem likely to happen.
First, the software will evolve to deal with the various problems we foresee and the ones we cannot predict. Maybe by version 4 it will be ready to run a school board and park system, and maybe by version 8 it can run a city. Maybe.
Second, people will get used to this form of governance. Instead of all governance systems being composed of a small group of leaders who tell everyone else what to do; people will become accustomed to getting involved in any decisions they think are important. We expect the actual mentality of citizenship to gradually transform as this form of governance expands throughout society.
(And to be clear, we're not entirely optimistic that it will be the Metagovernment project or its Metascore software that will be driving this process. We are just trying to set the stage, but it is entirely possible that better systems will replace us at some point.)
If they were more clever, they would still allow torrents to look like they are working... but they would always just result in a download of a two-hour Mao-Is-Cool propaganda movie.
What you describe is the status quo in politics: a small in-crowd of not-the-smartest, not-the-most-reasonable people, drowning out all other points of view. Even when there are two sides to an issue: there are *only* two sides; not the spectrum of views that exists in greater society.
The Metagovernment project hasn't made up its mind about whether or not to use user scoring. We intend to start in very small communities and see what happens. But more importantly, we intend to enable a sophisticated mesh of communities; not just one as is the case in a discussion board. A person may rise to prominence within their small community (i.e., their clique), but in larger communities, there will be outside views counteracting them. Rising to prominence in a larger community will mathematically require broad support.
And even if we do have a robust user scoring system, our mathematician is working to make the scoring flexible enough that even a brand-new user can make their voice heard within an established community.
You are welcome to join the current Metagovernment community and work to ensure that we get it right. :)
Sure, if you think about if for five seconds, that's the conclusion you would be likely to draw.
Fortunately, we're not that stupid and actually thought it through. That's why there is a detailed explanation on the linked site, supported by a year of community discussion on the particulars of how to make it work. And even so, we know that we can't possibly know all the answers, so we're starting in extremely small communities and working our way up from there.
But to take your example, no, I sincerely doubt that any community could come to consensus on the free TVs concept. There would be a significant minority (namely, all small business owners) who would prevent any such stupid law from passing. That's the point behind consensus government: counter-intuitive laws cannot possibly get consensus.
But more to the point, right now, we allow buddies of politicians to get free money and not have to pay for it. And there is nothing you can do about it. How is that better than a participatory democracy where everyone gets a say in laws? How is nepotism and favoritism and cronyism and secret government and the entire system of lobbyists better than participatory consensus government using modern technology?
There are many simple answers to that. The Metagovernment's answer is a sophisticated mesh of communities and a scoring system.
You get a lot of spam... yet you continue to use your e-mail right? Something must be working there. Most e-mail clients use statistical scoring to demote spam and promote ham. Metagovernment just uses a folksonomy type system to apply that same principle to governance.
And maybe Metagovernment isn't the answer, but I can't believe that a hundred years from now we will still rely on individual rulers to make all the decisions for our governments, when every other community uses community participation to make more sophisticated decisions.
Yeah, let's just get rid of leaders, and while we're at it, that means we also get rid of the infrastructure to enforce laws.
No, it doesn't. In every system of governance in the past that may have been true. But now we have the technology to have a community infrastructure without a formal ruler. Web 2.0 has already begin to prove itself effective at organizing communities without one person having an ultimate say. Heck, slashdot doesn't have one person decide which articles get prominence and which get demoted: that's up to the community. Why should our most basic governance functions be based on an authoritarian model when everything else clearly is evolving beyond that archaic mechanism?