I am quite sceptical regarding evolutionary psychology as well, which seems a very speculative discipline to me, and a new 'reductionism', but I would be equally critical of mathematical or 'technocratic' reductionism any algoritm that would govern human social processes is a protocol and subject to human power struggles, you are displacing the locus of that struggle to which mathematical model to use, see http://p2pfoundation.net/Protocollary_Power that is not to say it is useless, but it's not a miraculous solution to human fraily, Michel xxx Message: 1 Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013 12:14:30 +0200 From: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is there a lesson for us? To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Message-ID: <CAOX4E5Ec4TvZHzeRoGe-iVqXwMQng=y4Wq7+JaY=6W9iHqUoMQ@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Michel, I want people to engage in politics. But we should not view reality through our own political prejudices ,as many actually do. Every social structure has internal properties that can be analyzed mathematically. To avoid messy sciences, like evolutionary biology, you would have to be as general as possible. This makes the problem harder to solve but also more difficult to contradict, if proved. I wouldnt use biological studies unless I was really desperate. I dont think that the power law applies to every structure. ex. Lets say that we randomly select 300 people as representatives of a society. The probablity that half of them are corrupt can be precisely computed from the average probability a person is corrupt. The messy thing here is that we believe that an average threshold of probable corruption will never be reached. We cant easily find that probability. But this system has certainly more guarantees than representative democracy. ex. Bitcoin can only work if the majority(in computation power) is not corrupt. This is a technical solution and it is precise. ex. There has been a paper here in the p2p-f mailing list a year ago that described proxy voting and was looking into possible ways that someone can game the system. The difficulty to game a system is also a property of a good social structure. With the advent of the internet and computers, social connections can be more easily formalized in a way that more precise technical social structures can emerge that have stronger guarantees on their ability to protect themselves. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/