[P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is there a lesson for us?

Tue Jan 15 09:29:07 CET 2013

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 <xekoukou at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is
        there a lesson for us?
To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
Message-ID:
        <CAOX4E5Ec4TvZHzeRoGe-iVqXwMQng=y4Wq7+JaY=6W9iHqUoMQ at 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.

-- 
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