[top-politics] An FA/DP project.

AbdLomax — 2006-09-13 05:38:58+0200

Today, I had to drive a long distance, and had a lot of time to think. It suddenly occurred to me that, while Delegable Proxy is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and it is essential in large organizations, it is not necessary in small ones, but standard proxy is. By attempting to explain DP I’ve been unnecessarily complicating matters.

In a Free Association, DP need not be formally implemented, because if there is standard proxy, anyone can use the proxy list to develop expanded votes in order to measure expected consensus. What is missing, actually, is standard proxy. Many small organizations simply do not use the device. However, it could be useful from the very beginning. And it is a standard, traditional, well-understood concept, if I write “proxy” many people will pretty correctly have a first-order understanding of it, though not necessarily of the deeper implications.

So I’m thinking of announcing locally the formation of an association. The purpose of the association is to improve communication between the citizens of our town and the town government, but, most specifically and immediately, with the police. The situation is actually pretty bad. Since my wife was stopped last week for an expired registration tag (by one business day), and the police put her and our two small children out on the street and had the car towed, I’ve been talking with people and what I’ve discovered is that practically nobody has a good opinion of the town police. One man, who owned a substantial business here for years before he sold it, who is retired except he volunteers for a sheltered workshop that employs people with handicaps, told me that the real motto of the police here was not “protect and serve,” but “harass and humiliate.” Many others told me stories of how they or their friend suffered this or that indignity at the hands of the police. And these are not counterculture people. These are pretty much mainstream here. And, at the same time, the police told me that they were seriously understaffed, that they could provide better service — which in this case was merely bringing the confiscated license plates into the station so I could get them to recover the car from the storage facility, which took them about three hours when they were confiscated about three minute’s drive from the station — if only they had two or three more officers. And they don’t have more officers because they can’t afford them, and they can’t afford them because the citizens of the town won’t vote to authorize the expenditure. And why should the citizens vote more money for the police when they don’t feel sympathy for them, they don’t like them?

So there is a wedge here, I suspect. I can hold an organizational meeting — I certainly have not worked out the details of exactly what the organization would be about, but grievances over routine police towing of cars, which has hit many people and which just may be illegal, might be the excuse. Now, most people will not go to such a meeting, but this would be the twist, in the announcement: “If you can’t come, or can’t spare the time, ask a friend to go and let you know if there is anything you should do.” I still would not expect a large number of people to show up, just a few. However, these few might represent a few more, and when someone goes to talk to the mayor, that person — or those persons — may be able to correctly claim that they represent not just themselves, but quite a few more as well. In other words, we start to get some political traction.

[top-politics] Re: Tree of issues

AbdLomax — 2006-09-13 05:18:33+0200

At 04:53 PM 9/11/2006, echarp wrote:

> > If there is a separate proxy named for some issue, I’d prefer to > > think of this as a separate organization…. > >Because you consider one proxy per participant per organisation.

That is correct. One can consider, to be sure, more complex organizations, but it is hard enough to examine the consequences and likely characteristics of the simplest DP organizations. In a sense, the proxy defines the organization. If I name a proxy who happens to be active in X organizations, I am a short step away from being a member of all those organizations. Indeed, my proxy may suggest that I join them. It adds proxy rank.

In a sense, the proxy is the most important element, the organization is secondary.

Read more… / Lire plus…

>"Issues" are effectively a very broad term, in my software I just speak >of elements (elts), each one of our posts in this forum is an elt onto >which we can vote. And in time, for which we can delegate our vote. > >Each user can: >- propose elts, >- vote on the proposed elts, >- delegate their vote on those elts.

Practically speaking, I don’t think this is very far from what I have in mind. It is just approaching it from the issue direction rather than from the personal connection direction.

> > FAs, indeed, may spin off non-FAs; in some cases the non-FA might be > > larger than the remaining FA. Depends on what the members want to do! > >Definitely depends on the members, yes. FA seem like an empty shell >which are filled by people and their energy.

Yes. The FA is a truly minimal structure, almost an organizing concept that people happen to follow voluntarily than a traditional organization, with strong officers, bank accounts, budgets, etc. AA meetings do have officers, but they are clearly servants of the meeting. At least at most meetings. It is a little tricky describing AA meetings, since there is actually no central control, and meetings can vary greatly. I can write that the secretary is not the boss, and then there is a meeting where the secretary tells everyone what to do. Of course, attendance at this meeting is quite likely to decline rapidly, and, unless the secretary wises up or is replaced, that meeting might end up disappearing. It gets boring showing up, opening the doors, making the coffee, and hardly anyone shows up.

An AA meeting, especially a large one with substantial rent to pay, will have a bank account. It might have as much as a few hundred dollars in it….

The point is that the activity of an FA meeting is that of the members, who continue to own that resource, they do not turn it over to the organization. I have never heard of an AA meeting with an employee. Even intergroup (where meetings in an area coordinate their activities, publish meeting lists, etc.) would, I’d think, generally not hold substantial assets. (My experience is more with other programs than AA, where, definitely, what I’m writing is true.) And AA as a whole is practically a phantom, because national and international coordination is handled for the most part by AA World Services, Inc., which does hold some assets and which does have employees and formal legal structure, but which is not AA itself, but a “service board … directly responsible to those [it] serve[s]” The closest thing to AA itself is the Conference, which takes place once a year in New York. Interestingly, they have a travel equalization system…. so that all delegates contribute the same amount to travel costs.

(Cash never flows from the central organization to local groups. Local groups are rigorously independent, that is part of the design. Instead, the central organization is designed to depend almost entirely on the local groups, so ultimate control is distributed, not centralized. That control is not through democratic process, but through economics: if the central organization fails to respect the broad consensus of the groups, it will lose their support, and they do not need it. It needs them. It serves them by providing publications as a convenience, and through a few other services. AA intergroups, in the past, published material independently, they can afford to do it if they need to. But, instead, most of them send their excess cash on to AAWS. Does this mean that AAWS provides free publications? No, I don’t think so. It sells them, at only a small margin above cost. Once again, the central organization is not subsidizing in any way local activities. I think there are lessons aplenty in this.)

Why do I write so much about AA? To my knowledge, it was the first successful organization to formally adopt the Free Association principles. Many of those principles long predate it, you can find some of the ideas, I think, in anarchist literature. But the idea, for example, of keeping the organization as a whole above controversy, is not so easy to find. After all, people interested in politics usually are pretty opinionated!

And AA was not just successful, it was spectacularly successful. It essentially saturated its market, it has no major competition. (Technically, of course, it does not “compete.” AA meetings, for example, don’t advertise, nor does AAWS.)

Is AA TOP? In some ways, yes. To members. And members are self-defined. “The only qualification for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” I’ve been to many open AA meetings, including small ones where the gentle expectation is that everyone will speak, and I’ve sometimes “qualified” myself by saying, “I’m qualified for membership because I have a desire to stop drinking. YOUR drinking.” Which always got a laugh. In fact, that is more or less the membership qualification for Al-Anon, not AA; Al-Anon is essentially a support group for families of alcoholics which was founded through the realization of Bill Wilson’s wife that she, in fact, needed the kind of support that Bill was getting through AA, that she was, in some ways, just as insane as him….

> > Aside from projects in which I may become personally involved, I’m > > trying to promote a general understanding of the possibilities. It > > could be much simpler to transform society than we imagined. > > > > Or it might be much more difficult than I imagine…. > >I do tend to think it will be much more difficult :(

Most people think it is impossible, even before they know what it is. So perhaps you have become a little more optimistic!

I’ve been making up slogans, for the last year or so….

If we want to change the world, it has to be easy.

Lift a finger, change the world.

Or the dark-edged one, “How to change the world in one easy step? Go back to sleep. We will change it for you.”

>If only because society as a whole, the human specie in fact, does not >change deeply that often.

The kind of change I’m working on could be a
once-in-the-history-of-the-species kind of change. It does not involve major changes at the individual level, actually, though such changes would come as a consequence.

Nor does it require “society as a whole” to change. Only a few must change, and that change consists mostly of realizing that coordinated collective action is possible without coercion. It is like a libertarian who has worked for years to try to change the government to be more libertarian, who suddenly realizes that he’s been working on the wrong project. He needs to create libertarian organizations, not governmental, to demonstrate that the philosophy works, and to show that coercion is actually not necessary. Or at least to show the degree to which it is not necessary.

Governments are currently very much about coercion. Taxes are, of course, coercive, practically by definition. Public safety is maintained through coercion, even when it is known that coercive methods don’t work. An example is one I’ve mentioned: it is known that speed limit signs have no effect on the speeds at which people actually travel, it has been tested. So attempts to increase traffic safety by setting lower speed limits do not increase public safety. They merely make it easier to catch and punish “speeders.” And in most places, the average person travels faster than the speed limit. One reasonable argument for posted speed limits is that it makes it easier to prosecute people who are driving at an unsafe speed, because “unsafe speed” is actually not a fixed thing, it depends on conditions, it even depends on the driver and the condition of the driver.

Does this increase traffic safety? Probably not, indeed, it is possible that there is some slight damage to safety. Why? Well, a few people do religiously obey speed limit signs. Thus creating a bit of a traffic hazard, because the safest traffic is generally traffic moving at a constant speed, as long as that speed is not truly excessive.

Now, I’ve been cited for speeding in Massachusetts three times, and, as I’ve mentioned, I contested all the citations and was found not responsible. Even though I was actually exceeding the posted speed limit. Without going into details, it is not terribly difficult to “beat” speeding tickets, if one was not actually travelling a an unsafe speed. But that’s not my point here. My point is that I was stopped for speeding a fourth time. The officer simply warned me and let me go with no citation. The four stops were each in a different town. Guess which town is the one in which I pay more attention to speed limits.

I just realized this today. The intervention of that officer who did not punish me, but who was merely advising me, cautioning me, is the intervention that stuck. I certainly did not resent it! Now, this is just me, but I suspect that I’m not so unusual.

It still may be necessary to coerce the seriously dangerous driver. Even there, there may be better methods than punishment, I don’t know. But I do know that punishment as a pedagogical method has long been discredited. It is actually illegal. In Massachusetts, in order to adopt a child, we had to promise not to use punishment.

Okay, so children don’t respond well to punishment. Now, at exactly what age does punishment start to work?

(When punishment is so certain that it becomes simply the obvious consequence of doing a thing, it works quite well. It is when a behavior usually produces a reward and only rarely a punishment that punishment is singularly ineffective. The offender merely seeks means of avoiding the punishment.)

But society does not respond rapidly to new information. Again, this is functional. “New information” can shift all the time. First it was decided that fat was bad for you, that fat was responsible for the excess heart disease in certain societies. And cholesterol is really bad, since that is what clogs arteries. Then it was announced by the “experts” that, no it is not all fat. There are good fats, it is those bad saturated fats that are the problem, i.e., butter and so forth. And cholesterol? Well, at first, you better stay away from eggs. Then, no eggs aren’t so bad. Indeed, cholesterol in diet has very little to do with cholesterol in the blood, since the body makes its own cholesterol. And, even though the “only sat and trans fats are bad and cholesterol is okay” position has mostly made it into print in mass media, that, itself, is far from the truth. From what I’ve been able to find, there is no substantial research implicating saturated fat. Consumption of butter, for example, did not correlate with heart disease, when it was studied. Blood chemistry improves on a low-carbohydrate diet which is high in saturated fat.

How did this public information mess — which is still very much a mess — come about? Well, turns out that there is no good method of reliably determining scientific consensus. A governmental body held some hearings, which were dominated, it’s been charged, by people holding a certain view, based on some defective research, a seriously flawed study, and that body issued a report which became a public health agenda, an attempt to save millions of lives by improving diet. Unfortunately, they got the science wrong.

Ahem. FA/DP methods should be able to find and generate scientific consensus in a quite scientific way. That is, they have a means of, we anticipate, measuring consensus without having ask everyone. Only a few need actually participate, when the matter is simple. And when it is complex, FA/DP should be able to bring together the best thinking, to filter it from the noise.

Yes, the kinds of good information ranking systems that are being worked on by some here can help….

>Internet, cell phones, might have triggered the release of an energy >sufficient to modify everything.

Perhaps. Actually, the FA/DP principles do not require the internet, and the lack of the internet might only slow things down a little. The barrier is not the difficulty of communication. It is the absence of understanding as to what is needed. FA/DP might actually reduce the traffic, for there is a huge amount of redundancy noise in the present system due to lack of filtering. Because the information is so vast and unfiltered, I don’t know if what I’m writing is also being written somewhere else, more or less, and even google does not make it easy to find, because an independent effort may well not use the same words.

However, it may indeed turn out that some internet project was the crucial turning point. On the other hand, I’ve got a local project that may take up my attention for some time. I’ll write about it in its own topic. It is not an internet project, per se, though it may have a web site, perhaps a dot-BeyondPolitics domain, and that may facilitate it. But it will involve face-to-face meetings.