At 05:40 PM 3/25/2007, Juho wrote: > > I'm considering an FA to be an organization that has formal rules > > that prohibit the association from developing precisely those things. > >Ok, it seems that the FAs are in fact not without rules but have >quite strict rules (to keep them "free").
No, that's not accurate. FAs have no rules that prevent them from becoming non-FAs. I've chosen to call the "FA rules," "Traditions," after AA usage. They don't bind anyone. Any meeting can violate these traditions, and nobody will prosecute them or expel them or the offending members. (More accurately, it would be a violation of the Traditions to do so.) The FA Traditions are mostly derived from the AA publication, Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions, in particular the latter part. There is a further publication, far less widely read, Twelve Concepts for World Service, which contains additional material. Bill Wilson designed the Traditions and the Concepts specifically to avoid the organizational hazards that have been noted here. It's not an accident, it was quite deliberately done. What keeps the FA going is *the members.* As long as there are some members who behave in accordance with these principles, at least generally, the FA still exists as an FA. The "official organization" might become something else, and what happens in the real world, because of the ubiquitous lack of understanding of these organizational principles, is that nobody is left, or not enough to maintain some coherent activity. But that hasn't happened with AA, and the reason is probably the formalization of the Traditions by Bill W. Enough AA members understood this to maintain critical mass. One of the Traditions bears mentioning in this regard: "AA as such ought never be organized, but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve." It's really a remarkable statement. It establishes "AA" as something different from the organization that exists. What is "organized" is not "AA." It is, variously, AA World Services, Inc., which is a "service board." Or it is, say, a regional Intergroup, which might operate an office. Or it is an individual meeting, which has a Secretary, Treasurer, coffee pot, and a box of books, and just about nothing else. The latter is closest to being "AA." But don't these Traditions "organize" AA. Not really. Compliance with them is totally voluntary. An AA meeting that, say, accumulated a large treasury, contrary to traditions, wouldn't be delisted. What would happen, really, is that somebody would ask why it was being done. If the members want to do it, nobody is going to stop them. AA World Services, Inc., wouldn't sue them! But consider what would happen. Suddenly there is an asset worth fighting over. And, Bill W. might have written, give alcoholics something to fight over, they will fight over it. He was really writing more about general human nature.... but it was especially true for alcoholics, at least to him. >Power attracts power hungry people. The rules you mentioned (quite >rigid and well tested ones) and "separation from power" may be needed >to keep the FAs "free". They are strong but not "rigid." Got a reason to disregard one. Go ahead. At your own peril. Bill W.'s comment would have been that if it works, let us know. The Traditions recommend avoiding things that don't work, that are destructive of group unity, and maximizing unity was a major goal. He did not want to get unity by imposing some dogma, he wanted it to be natural, to represent true consensus. A lot of what is supposed to be AA dogma is actually simply a general consensus. You can disagree with it at an AA meeting, and you wouldn't be expelled. The only danger might be from some newcomer who doesn't understand AA and who could feel threatened by it.... In my opinion, some of the common opinion in AA is simply not true. But it is true enough that it makes a good starting point. It isn't true that an alcoholic *can't* take only one drink. But it is far safer to assume that it is true than to test it.... >(A side observation. One option is to keep all the conclusions/ >recommendations/outputs of a meetings anonymous (not tied to any of >the members) to keep the discussions neutral and to reduce the use of >a meeting as a tool for personal career/image booster.) Possibly. But I don't mind that individuals gain publicity from what they say. I do mind if an individual is represented as being an FA spokesperson without being authorized, and I'd be very careful about authorizing anyone. There'd better be a good reason, and the scope of the authority should be clearly defined. For example, an officer can be charged with reporting the results of polls. By the way, I'm more or less in violation of this myself, except that I will add that what I write is only my own opinion and is not an official pronouncement on behalf of BeyondPolitics.org. Where I or others have written wiki pages, they are drafts, proposals, not fixed doctrine. I take the liberty of writing as if I had authority, because it is simply much easier to write in that way, otherwise qualifying everything becomes far too cumbersome. I also get cut a little slack as a founding member. Bill W. was able to write the Traditions and put his own opinions in there..... > > the owner of the FA domain decides to become a little tyrant > > > The proxies and other active members who don't agree with this can > > simply recreate the FA with an altered name. > >This doesn't sound very good (if common). It'd be better to avoid >this cycle and keep the rules such that (in most cases) the old >structure can be kept "free". Who enforces the rules? Essentially, structures put in place in an attempt to guarantee this freedom can quite possibly destroy it. Rather, FAs depend on the natural freedom of members. The key is that members can and do communicate directly; such direct communication is the core of the FA. If the central organization, such as it is, is corrupted, the members simply recreate what they need. This is actually how AA works, though there has never been a need to recreate the national organization. Meetings come in and out of existence as needed. Meetings tend to multiply. Instead of trying to create some enforcement structure that would prevent meetings from going astray, AA simply lets them do what they are going to do. It is about as libertarian as can be imagined. It is *not* better to "avoid this cycle." What happens if there is disagreement over how to conduct a meeting is that members, generally, don't fight over the meeting. The majority in the original meeting, or the original leadership, depends, continue the original meeting, and whoever else wants to do so starts a new one. In a different location and/or at a different time. Everybody knows about this. And some people go to the new meeting and some go to the old and some, indeed, go to both. It simply isn't a big deal. Now, if meetings accumulated property, suddenly the equation changes. There is suddenly something to fight over. Power. Control. And all the ensuing ugliness and distraction from the original purpose, which is mutual support in AA. AA actually grows through this process. Instead of considering it chaos and loss, consider it cell multiplication. Growth. Meeting opportunities multiply, meetings become more convenient and thus more people can practically participate. Meetings also become diverse, with various special interests. While theoretically AA meetings should be open to all alcoholics -- self-defined -- in fact there come to be women's groups, men's groups, gay and lesbian groups, dual diagnosis groups, etc. These special groups to some extent violate the AA membership definition, and there is continuing controversy over this, but they continue to exist and probably they do more good than harm. The harm would come if such special meetings dominated an area, which doesn't seem to happen. > > The FA traditions are a vast protection, even without DP. With DP, > > I strongly expect, the structure becomes extremely robust and > > extremely difficult to corrupt. > >What is the property of DP that gives this protection? How much do >you refer to the chained voting mechanism? How much to the continuous >election that gives immediate feedback? What other properties? First of all, toss the idea that DP is about chained voting, even though it can have some effect like that. Thinking of DP as a voting process has been a severe limitation on the concept. It is a communications device that happens to be useful for voting, but voting is a small part of it. The essence of it is the communication network. A proxy and client have, in my view, an agreement. It is an agreement of mutual accessibility for communication. By accepting a proxy, the proxy agrees to receive communication from the client, and, presumably, to respond to it. Likewise, by assigning a proxy, the client consents to communication from the proxy. Proxy assignment lists based on this agreement *can* be used to expand votes, on an assumption of a relationship of trust, that the client trusts the proxy to serve when the client is unable to act directly. Because I'm working with the FA context, I don't have to nail all this down, since votes aren't going to bind the clients, as FAs have no authority at all over their members -- beyond, possibly, denying that the member represents the FA. The protection comes from the fact that proxies will have lists of their clients, including contact information. So a proxy does not depend on a central organization for communication with the clients, and vice-versa. The central organization *cannot* hijack this link, unless the proxy and client have relied upon it, which I don't recommend. So suppose somebody manages to gain a majority at the top level, either legitimately or through fraud, and the trustee holding the domain keys is either complicit or goes along with the vote, and the vote is to change the FA in some crucial way. The proxies who agree with this simply go along with it. Those who don't can *immediately* create their own organization to continue what they consider to be the "true vision." And, *at the same time*, they can remain within the original organization, assuming that it will tolerate them. Because of DP, they don't have to duplicate a lot of effort, since they can particpate -- in either organization -- through proxy. In a major organizational split, what is created is two or more organizations that have links through proxies. Those links are only broken if members choose to break them, or if one of the organizations has gone so far from the FA traditions that it expels members. (While it can occasionally be necessary to limit participation in some ways, AA would never "expel" a member for bad behavior. In the FA context, a member might be sanctioned (by majority vote at a meeting), but would not lose voting rights for any reason I can think of. However, the vote might have to be exercised by proxy.... There are details involving fraudulent registrations that I won't go into. Suffice it to say that such aren't the problem that they might be considered to be.) As the trustee for BeyondPolitics.org, what would I do if the registered membership voted to change what I considered to be a crucial FA characteristic? I'd make the judgement at the time, but what I might do, if I considered the matter truly important, would be to freeze the domain. On the home page would appear referrals to any domains set up by the various factions, and the home page would be, as far as possible, NPOV about it. Essentially, I would protect the overall FA concept, while allowing the factions to pursue their own interpretations and decisions. If I kept the original domain as an active site, I'd have the problem of property, of an asset. The point is to grow through disagreement and diversity, without becoming biased as an organization. > > Some kind of body to create and enforce international law makes > > sense, though. Present structures are pretty inadequate. > >Some level of enforcement is needed but I'd be careful not to >establish a one centrally controlled unit to do that. Right. It is better if there are *many* units capable of some level of enforcement, that voluntarily cooperate. And, in a more enlightened world, that don't normally fight with each other in equal matches. The idea is to find consensus, which can then be properly enforced against what dissident elements remain *when necessary*. Much of the harm of force comes when it is inadequate to prevail immediately. > > I'm not proposing FAs as the "main working method," i.e., the main > > method of carrying out the business of government. FAs are > > thoroughly libertarian, an FA "government" would pretty much be an > > oxymoron. But large FAs would essentially be able to keep > > governments in check. It could be pretty interesting. > >Ok, a method for keeping check of the decision making process, not >part of that process. You should state this clearly when promoting >the method and when justifying the details of it. Rules and >optimisation criteria for the legislative and other decision making >structures may be often different. My discovery has been that if the supervisory intelligence is created, the power structures that already exist are generally adequate. It is only when they are not supervised that they are dangerous. (More accurately, when the power structures are also the only systems for developing group intelligence, the ensuing blindness can be fatal.) > > Okay, suppose the employees of the FBI form an FA/DP organization. > >This example points out that FA style structures can be used also >inside otherwise closed organisations. Companies and "bureaus" differ >from democratic decision making in that they are centrally and >hierarchically led. FA style approach probably will have somewhat >different role here. Right. The FA isn't "inside" the closed organization, it is, rather, in parallel to it, connecting the *participants.* In the FBI example, the top-down structure is not challenged, it is, rather, enhanced by a rapid feedback, independent structure. The biological analogy would be that the traditional organization is like the organization of cells by diffusion of chemical messengers, these messengers aren't specifically targeted, they do not just connect two cells, but they affect all the cells in the environment. Then the DP structure is like adding a nervous system to this, linkages that are specifically between individual cells and that link all cells, or at least key cells in various locations, in a rapid communications network. The important thing to take away from this is that parallel FA/DP organizations can be formed, at any time, and they do not depend upon the consent of the traditional organization, in general, as long as the members of the latter are free to independently associate. One of the suggestions is that the shareholders of a large corporation could form an FA/DP shareholder organization. This organization would serve, among other things, to make suggestions to the members as to whom to name as official corporate proxies. This could give small individual shareholders power commensurate with what is already done by large institutional shareholders (who often hire professional proxy organizations). Shareholders, by this means, could recover control over corporations that are presently far too self-directed, with management and the board in bed together, too often at the expense of shareholders (and the public in general). The DP structure, it must be realized, is maximally efficient. It can concentrate deliberative power down to a very few people, it does not require that every member, or even that many members, put in a lot of time. My vision is that people will eventually belong to *many* FA/DP organizations, maybe hundreds of them, something that would be unthinkable with traditional organization. The key is the proxy, who manages communication with the organization for the member. And it is important that this also work for the proxy. Proxies may be paid, but if they are to be paid, it must be by their clients. (It is perfectly acceptable for a proxy to charge for the service; the proxy-client relationship should be as free as possible, assuming mutual consent. No mutual consent, no relationship. This is why the proxy lists we have created so far have an acceptance field. We want the proxy-client relationship to be mutual. *This* is the protection against the bugaboo of some famous person collecting millions of proxies. If that famous person has to consent to communication from all those millions of people.... well, he won't do it. Rather, he will pass off the requests to someone else, building a network, and if the client in the end isn't satisfied, *personally*, with the person he ends up stuck with, he'll go somewhere else.) >One (just one) possible reason is that in the open process people >tend to say what they think others expect them to say. It's an obvious possibility, but if you actually went to Town Meeting, I don't think you'd offer this possibility.... People pretty much say what they please. > One reason >behind the well established idea of keeping ballots secret is to >allow voters to make their decisions free of any external pressure >(of the community, of the husband, of the election officials, of the >media, of friends, of the FA, and the most vocal members of it). Sure. It's a protection, and a sound one. > > The town would know in advance if it was going to pass or not, > > because of the proxy structure. > >It could be best to keep the discussion forum just a discussion >forum. The FA is exactly that. It doesn't control anything, it merely informs and makes recommendations. Technically, the FA makes *no* recommendations, but the proxies who form the structure can and will. The FA may report poll results, that is about it. Poll results are facts, not opinions. > It could give some indication on what the outcome of the >ballot might be. But there may be another FA round the corner with >different discussions, and the people in the FA are not bound to the >opinion of the most vocal persons at the FA meeting. There might not be any FA meetings, routinely, other than scattered meetings between proxies and their clients. It is important to realize that I'm not trying to set up a complex independent structure to take up people's time. Indeed, this was the concern of one town official. It is already hard to get people to volunteer for town boards and committees, and to come to Town Meeting. The last thing we needed, was the fear, was another new activity to take up people's time. But that is a misunderstanding of what is being proposed. All that is really being proposed is that a proxy list be set up and used. The rest is what I expect will fall out from that, with little extra effort. Active proxies will largely be those who would go to Town Meeting anyway, and what they do in their position as proxy is to communicate with their clients. I.e., talk with their friends about town affairs. Not a huge additional burden. But the difference is that there is this formal structure, and a means of representing what is going on. We can generally presume that the votes of proxies at Town Meeting -- or at hearings or other special meetings, including on-line forums -- will approximate the position of the town, to the extent that the collection of proxies represents the whole town. Present Town Meeting can't do this because the membership is skewed due to participation bias. Proxies de-skew this, I expect, at least to some degree. It doesn't have to be perfect. No proposals are being made that laws be changed. What is proposed is totally legal, now, and it is simple and cheap. And astonishingly difficult to advance as a proposal. I understand why, which is why I'm happy to get one or two more people who grasp the concepts and consider this great success. For now. The problem is more like inertia than like an actual obstacle. I'm not running into true opposition, at least not yet. And with inertia, the solution, if the force you can apply is limited, is sustained effort, which accumulates. As I've said, I've got a lever, and I've found the fulcrum, and I'm attempting to move the earth. And it is moving. A little. As is exactly what I'd expect at this point. >The strongest driver might be the fact that if there is some power or >other benefits available there will be people trying to reach that. >My medicine for this would be to isolate the FAs from decision >making, career building etc., just like you did (in most places). As I mentioned, I'm not averse to "career building." But when the FA starts making, itself, "decisions," there has come to be a power focus, and thus an attractor for corruption. Theoretically, clients can assign personal funding power to their proxies, but this is still highly decentralized and thus far more difficult to corrupt than a central treasury subject to disposition by a central committee or even by vote of an assembly or the entire membership. To move that funding, you have to convince the members or their proxies. Without that delegated spending authority, you've got to convince the members. The trick is that the proxies will do it if *they* are convinced, so if you can convince the proxies, you have a good shot at convincing the members, since the members chose the proxies, presumably, for general trustworthiness. You may try to corrupt a few high-level proxies, but the likely result is that proxy relationships will be disrupted. It is hard to maintain lies in a large number of person-to-person relationships. (If proxies are given spending authority, generally I would assume that it would be of limited scope, perhaps enough funding for a month.... and this kind of thing is going to happen in caucuses, it must be noted. Caucuses can take on projects, hold controversial opinions, and generally do things that the FA as a whole can't do without violating traditions.) > > Remember, the FA/DP organization never "gets some power." There is > > no center to grab and corrupt. > >Yes, "freeness" and "separation from power" go together. I'm glad that has been accepted. It is quite difficult to get across to some people. > > You try to corrupt it, you break the links that you grabbed, and > > the elements that were connected to them reattach elsewhere. > >This is supposed to happen in the regular formal democratic decision >making process as well. Corruption may hit both (unless well protected). Well, DP is nothing but a collection of links. This is true of regular democratic process, but only very informally and irregularly. > > The puppet master > >One important part of the "mathematics of democracy" is that groups >that believe in majority decisions within the group and strong >discipline within the group have more power in the decision making >process than (more fragmented) groups whose members always sincerely >vote as they personally feel. The members of these groups may thus be >controlled by "puppet masters" or maybe rather "elected masters" and >group majority decisions voluntarily (and there may be nothing >suspicious about that (within these particular groups)). What would happen in an FA/DP organization is that groups of people like this would exist as caucuses. The economics of consensus still apply. I think. We really won't know until it is tried. What I do expect, quite strongly, is that FA/DP won't do harm. It may not solve every problem -- though it has a better shot at it than anything I can imagine -- but it is highly unlikely to make things worse. It doesn't exhaust the members, or at least it shouldn't. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
