# Bottom Up Building: Pathways towards a Decentralized Society | Devcon Bogotá

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-09
- Duration: 1:18:31
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt--JpBmA-8FVc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JpBmA-8FVc

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/bottom-up-building-pathways-towards-a-decentralized-society/

Non-transferable NFTs (or soul-bound tokens) open a rich design space for enhanced social coordination and ultimately decentralization within Ethereum. If you’re interested in building a bottom-up, decentralized future, we invite you to join us in exploring non-plutocratic DAO governance, community wallet recovery, and sybil-resistance as well as potential use cases in news, science, and the creative and knowledge economy to foster consensus across difference.

Speaker(s): Puja Ohlhaver, Paula Berman
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: DeSoc,Decentralization,Soulbound Tokens

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Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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## Transcript

[Music] okay so in many ways I think non-financial use cases the first non Financial use case for blockchains is actually public infrastructure so and it's it's important that we think about in this use case what neutrality means and what decentralization means so the the program has changed a little bit and we're going to talk about that uh Paula do you want to get get us started our clicker is not super working but um okay so as Pua was saying uh we're here to talk about digital infrastructure and um what does that mean not only uh in the blockchain space uh there are all kinds of digital infrastructure but of course ethereum is often envisioned as a potential uh digital public infrastructure that can be used ubiquitously around the world so the idea is to do some collective deliberation together on what does that mean and what are some of the requirements for protocols and standards that are serving this function so um the agenda for today is we're going to Kickstart this with two short talks first uh Puja is going to talk about decentralization and then Glenn is going to talk about different um approaches to neutrality and what are some of the conflicts between them and after that if the slides work we're going to use a tool called police to do a deliberation together and this tool I'll explain this to you in a moment but it's a tool that uses Advanced statistics and machine learning to gain some nuanced insights in a digital conversation and so we'll take these insights then we'll have have an inperson discussion since that's a benefit of being here at Devcon and we'll come back to polce we'll do one one more iteration reflecting some of the uh learnings and then we'll look at the results um together so in essence this is going to be um an exercise in deliberation about digital infrastructure um so hand it over to Pua to get us started okay great um I like to walk around when I talk so as I said I want to talk about first decentralization and then it's working okay great and uh and Glenn will follow up with a prompt on neutrality so um because not everybody has read uh the paper I want to kind of give first principles of how I think about decentral decentralization and really the question is how do we build bottom up decentralized networks and there are all kinds of like networks right we have energy infrastructure we have physical networks we have Internet infrastructure inter uh networks starlink we also have blockchains we have social media these are all networks and the question is oops uh how do we get bottomup coordination of individuals who are part of communities to compose into larger pluralistic networks of coordination that can solve problems at different social scales um that is how I have conceptualized the question of decentralization doing this in a decentralized way how does this work so what do we before I give like a kind of first articulation uh of the principle let's just pump our intuitions and think about what do we not mean by decentralization so you know an autocrat controlling energy infrastructure not decentralization a benevolent entrepreneur controlling internet infrastructure not great either uh you know a group of sort of uh mining pools that control a lot of mining power hash power or stake not great for decentralization and you know corporate monopolies not great for decentralization and of course there's political centralization as well and you know there's tyranny of the majority which we're all familiar with in the Civil Rights Movement there's tyranny of a political Elite and technocratic Elite and there's also tyranny of a cultural Elite that and enforce their norms and language Norms on people who don't necessarily um you know agree but I think decentralization is a much more subtle question because we also have very very uh tacit and subtle what I call accidental overcoordination because of correlated interests and we see this in particular and very cutely and Glenn was the first one who brought this to my attention in his book radical markets in traditional financial markets and so in traditional markets a lot of people you know if you're a retail investor you give your money to an asset manager like Black Rock and Fidelity and what that asset manager will do will buy Stakes across rivals in a particular industry so say Stakes across like every Airline right but in doing that they have an incentive to vote as a shareholder to pressure CEOs to take anti-competitive practices lower prices excuse me raise prices lower salaries not invest in R&D not invest in Innovation and this is like not really great for markets and if you have a bunch of groups like Fidelity Black Rock You Know State Street Vanguard all doing this um it ends up being a kind of oops uniform anti-competitive pressure on the entire market and on the entire industry um and you what you get is the appearance of competition across Rivals and appearance of competition across asset managers but really what you get is a behavior monopolist so using this to pump our intuitions uh one of the principles we articulated in the doo paper was this principle of consensus across difference and the idea of consensus across difference is that you rather get consensus between differently Affiliated people or just very different people to surface consensus and that would be a better signal of a plural shared good across broader groups than say consensus amongst a narrow group of individuals who might be sort of intentionally colluding or accidentally over coordinating in the way the the Black Rock andell example Illustrated is there any questions about this principle go ahead is consensus fascist consensus between whom people uhhuh yeah you don't have to agree but if you get agreement across the the idea is that agreement across very different people is more likely to Signal something that's good for you know broader groups than rather consensus amongst people who are very similar right which might be more sorry of think it's yeah we can do fting wild fighting so okay I will I will move on we can we can leave it can I just make one comment that I actually think you're highlighting a good thing which is that the point of pluralism is simultaneously identifying areas of cooperation across difference and identifying the areas of difference so like you can't have one without the other in in the dance of decentralization and pluralism and we're going to talk about that like we're going to highlight that in the exercise we're going to do later so I think both are like really important yeah I'll say this like a lot of a lot of discussion in um or a lot of memes in crypto are about coordination and cooperation but they don't really address the question of conflict right and so consensus across difference is a principle that highlights and surfaces like our differences right but finds those consensus amongst the most diversely Affiliated um so how did we as a first approximation Express this principle in the paper well we first introduced this primitive called soulbound tokens or non-transferable nfts to represent memberships to social groups or represent affiliations and then as a second step we propose this mechanism of using quadratic voting or funding how many people have heard of quadratic voting and funding just raise your head okay so you're familiar right and and the nice thing about this mechanism is it um you know reflects some magnitude not just direction of individual preferences encounters some tyranny of the majority but as sort of the Black Rock example highlights you know we're individuals we're social beings we're in groups we're sometimes intentionally colluding sometimes were accidentally over coordinating and you need to Discount the influence of correlated social groups or in the kind of spirit of quadratic funding and and voting take a square root over the social group and this gives us a kind of degressive proportionality which we want because otherwise coordinated groups tend to drown out uh you know less coordinated groups in voice so to kind of summarize to get us our bottomup coordination the mechanism we proposed is well first of all seeing individuals as nested within communities and communities being constitutive of their individuals and capturing the intensity of individual preferences with quadratic funding and voting but also discounting correlations and say overcoordination accidental or intentional uh with with social correlation discounts and with this mechanism what we're hoping to do and this is again just a first approximation is to get this kind of nice intersecting partially nested structure of everg growing Network cooperation extending across you know digital and physical infrastructure and importantly a a paradigm where par power is not discret it's not binary it's not rigid but rather continuous partial and uh recomposing and fluid so this is a a broad in very broad Strokes an explanation of you know the conception of decentralization that we've ushered forward I'm going to hand it over to Glenn now and he's going to talk about reconciling this with neutrality and start pumping our intuitions there and asking us important questions yeah so uh Pua did a beautiful job but went quite quickly over this notion of degressive proportionality and I want to sort of ease into it by just um like pressuring some things that sound natural but are all contradictory with each other so they sort of create a paradox that forces us to think a step later is there a slide for this um poo on the neutrality stuff or yeah yeah okay so what is neutrality so like here's a bunch of different NS of neutrality which like lots of people and maybe the same people in many different context all go raah rah for but like actually can't be consistent with each other so like one notion of neutrality is like every country should be treated the same but then you're like well what about some countries are much bigger than others and maybe some countries are much richer than others and oh well I don't know okay and then like resources should be treated the same like packets of information or or units of compute or units of stake should all be treated symmetrically but wait like some people have a lot more of that than other people and is that fair and like maybe it's concentrated in certain countries and maybe those countries are all really coordinated maybe that's not good and then the US and China will just dominate everyone and hm and then like another version is individuals so like proof of personhood people are like really into like you know every person should have the same rights and you know it's really unfair that the Electoral College gives more like voice to certain people and and whatever but then you're like oh but like you know what if that just leads like the majority of white people to totally screw over black people in the US or like you know uh Hindus and um you know Muslims in India and and like well we also care about resources as well and we care about what countries people so anyways the point is that there's a bunch of different Notions of neutrality that we invoke in different contexts often very similar contexts and that are like pretty directly in conflict with each other um and I think there's like a really profound idea that starts to point the way to like how we might try to reconcile these that comes from this statistician named Lionel Penrose so what what Lionel Penrose said is that um if you have coordinated correlated things um and then a bunch of uncoordinated things the coordinated things get heard much more than proportional to like how loud they speak or How much votes they have or whatever um and and that comes from a very basic statistical principle which is if they you have uncorrelated things they tend to cancel each other out and so like their aggregate size only grows as the square root of the number of uncorrelated things whereas a single correlated thing that scales up grows linearly in its strength and um that might sound like a little bit abstract statistics but like it's something that literally you can just recognize from dinner conversation so like if you go to a crowded restaurant um there will be all sorts of people talking right and like the total volume of all the people talking will be like massively louder than the person you're trying to listen to next to you and yet somehow you can still hear that person because they're just slightly louder than any of the individual other voices and your brain like the whole mechanism of noise is to like take things that are uncoordinated and a little bit softer and cancel them out and like have that one coordinated thing that's slightly louder stick out right and um so Penrose originally applied this uh as a way to think about how votes should be given to countries or you know provinces within a federal union based on the population of the subunit so he said no it shouldn't be neutral across people because those people are coordinated with each other by their joint membership of the country or the subunit and no it shouldn't be neutral across units because units have different numbers of people in them instead the right principle is degressive proportionality which is that um the allocation should be based on the square root of the number of people within the country um yeah is this like punishing fascism because more people are working together the more they get penalized kind of yeah that sounds great yeah uh it's kind of like that so so the the point is that um so so he just and in fact this principle was adopted so the N treaty the the Polish delegation of the European Union uh proposed that they should literally use the square root but people thought that was weird or whatever and so it turns out that they put in a system where like if you look at the correlation between the square root and the number of like votes allocated It's like got a 99% correlation to that rule but it doesn't literally use that rule because people thought that was too nerdy but anyway basically that's the principle that's been used by the European Union um and the the thing is like quadratic voting is just another application of that same principle it's an application of that principle acknowledging that one site of correlation and coordination is individuals and an individual with a bunch of stake or a bunch of voice credits or a bunch of whatever whatever it is that they use to express stronger intensity is like a sight of that sort of coordination and you want to downweight that in this square root way because coordination can occur within that individual but coordination can also occur within groups and and really what I want to suggest is that all the correlation discount stuff that Pua is going at is just like a more General application of that principle it's like looking for all all the different sites of social coordination whether they be within groups or individuals based on stake or people or whatever and trying to downweight that coordination so that we ensure that voices are heard in a more Fair Way um anyway that's that's the basic frame that I want to give and then there's a lot to talk about because we don't know how to do that yet that's these are all just illustrations of possible things in that direction and uh we're groping our way towards figuring it all yes and um as we continue groping our way forward uh we'll have a deliberation together here about um about what it means and how should we be thinking about digital infrastructure so um we're going to do that using a tool called police which is a uh plural social technology so I'll just uh take a moment to explain what we mean by that so social Technologies are voting public goods funding identity money these are all tools that we use to relate to each other and coordinate um in society and what we're doing at radical exchange is we're trying to bring um about a new paradigm for technology that has a philosophy underlying it and that philosophy is the philosophy of plurality so I want H go too much into it but when we're instantiating a pluralistic social philosophy in in technology there are two things that we want to be looking for one is we want technologies that help recognize and sort of provide better uh resolution into the different social Dimensions that exist within a community and then we want uh Technologies to also Foster cooperation across social difference and sometimes that means fostering or Illuminating the the points of common ground and sometimes that means Illuminating the points of Divergence so that they can be worked out um so police is a very simple tool but uh before I give this explanation I know that our Wi-Fi is not so great so I'll I'll skip ahead and ask you to point your phones to this QR code so that in a few minutes from now you will all have it on your phone and then I'll come back and explain it well as they say in Latin America OHA God okay so what is police now come back here we have a recommendation from shre if you sign into the workshop Wi-Fi with the password build it 2020 it's much faster than the conference Wi-Fi 22 22 okay well uh Workshop Wi-Fi password Devcon Workshop build it all lowercase 22 thanks sh um okay so no need to go into it right now uh come back here and I I'll just tell you a little bit about this to and then we'll um start exploring it together so the first thing is that it starts with an open question and then um the participants can uh write statements in response to it and each statement will generate a card like this and the other participants are going to be able to agree disagree or pass um each of the comments and then what poce does is that it takes all of the data and then it clusters all of the participants into different opinion bubbles so according to um the opinion bubbles are defined according to how similarly these people uh voted so you can see what are the different social dimensions and dimensions of opinions uh within a group and then uh the last thing that it does is that it brings to the surface what are the points uh of common ground that these groups that have diverging views share so one example of how this has been used in the past um is in Taiwan uh this is used in Taiwan at the national level and they use it a few years ago to um try to understand how to regulate right sharing companies so in Brazil where I'm from this was a super polarized debate and I'm sure in many other places and there it was as well and there was a strong Pro Uber Camp strong anti-uber camp and then what police uh did there but its surface was just good common sense so the things that came up were that taxi capab should no longer be orange everyone agreed to that before they had to be orange in Taiwan um that this was an opportunity to review uh passenger safety uh regulations and uh questions of liability insurance so just good common sense that usually in the technologies that we use uh we don't have that we have the exact opposite we have the the polarizing statements are the ones that come to the surface and we we are uh stuck in our ability to to come together and debate uh productively as a society so this this is U an example of a plural social technology and we're going to experiment with it together right now um and this is our question how should we think about neutrality in digital infrastructure so the first thing that we'll do is we'll take five minutes um to evaluate some of the comments that are already there so you can go to the link and then um I'll be back with you in a moment all right um so we'll now move to the next step which is um sorry for the next five minutes we'll add new statements so here's what makes a good statement for this exercise the first thing is that it needs to be a standalone idea because if you have true ideas in one statement then the other participants won't be able to evaluate uh them they might agree with one and disagree with other so it's complicated so one idea per statement um these need to be short statements up to 140 characters clear concise um and hopefully raising New Perspectives um so let's take another five to to add statements in response to to our question okay so now um let's look at our report and then police generates a lot of data umps it collapsed to two groups wow okay groups collap so we had five groups and then it collapsed into two groups super interesting um and so police generates a lot of data um and we won't be able to have a super sort of in-depth analysis but we'll present the structure of the report and see what are some of the high level in sites that police provided to us so um to the folks back there uh Tech refresh but aren't I controlling it or no no you're not controlling it you're you're just seeing so it's e okay so so let's first look at uh some some of the obvious things so we had so so first of all I think we should just tell people what's in this report so yeah yeah okay yeah so let's let's first look into the structure and uh and then we'll get to to some of the insights later so the first thing that it does is um here's some data 118 people voted um and out of that group 109 uh were clustered into different opinion bubbles we had 3,800 votes evaluations of statements 78 statements uh 38 votes per person so you got to a little less than half of the statements uh but there's probably many redundant statements so it's it shouldn't be so bad um and then if you can so here uh polic is putting each each state each of these these dots corresponds to a statement and it's putting all of the statements on a spectrum from consensus statements to divisive statements and as you can see we have a lot more consensus than than divisiveness so it's just one thing that is interesting to notice is how social media distorts that picture for us and makes us believe that we have a lot more divisions but really we have a lot more consensus so graas okay let's see what's the most divisive statement uh neutrality means treating every country the same even if one country is richer than the other means treating every unique person the same um neutrality means treating every blockchain and protocol the same and enabling interoperability between them so these are get getting to sort of similar things and as you can see what police is doing now we have three groups very dynamically changing so group a has 44 people Group B has 26 people and Group C has 39 people and on group a uh which has 44 65% of of uh the members of group a agreed with it where whereas everyone on Group B disagreed with it and the majority the large majority of people in group C disagrees with it so here it's it's an example of like surfacing what are the areas of divisiveness and the importance of sort of Illuminating uh what are the points of conflict because this gives a clear opportunity to have a more informed conversation about this specific topic why is it that the folks on group a think that and why is it that the folks on Group B and C uh disagree so let's see what what what we agree about neutrality is context dependent and this questions um lack enough context to be useful okay quite thanking um H neutrality is different from fairness um what else we're we're groping towards something be be patient with us um we're trying okay [Music] so um neutrality is not about removing biases it's about embracing them all um so we can see H what does yeah people didn't answer but out of those who answered um about 40% of of people in just to be clear when you have very large number of people you should expect that white section to take up almost all the space because the whole point is that you get a random selection of things and it tries to pick up the underlying statistical correlations rather than like literally having everyone go through every statement that's the whole point of the could everyone hear that okay um so now this was just to give a few like a taste of like what what are some what were some of the divisive and and uh and consensual uh agreements but uh we'll look into them and sort of analyze it more afterwards but now let's look into what are some of the opinion bubbles what mass mass everyone disagrees is that a form of consensus yes and here like the other one that says that has everything in red the one on the top can you explain that a little bit like how which one on the top the one that was in the consensus uh so if if if it was everything red it means that everyone in that opinion group disagreed with that statement um so let's see how many clusters we have now uh okay so we have three clusters let's look at um what the the folks now it's we're back to two the latest update refresh and you know this is a demonstration of course um you know this tool has been used over days so you can sort of work through the data much better um and usually very very clear patterns emerge but um um let's you know we're we'll we'll do some we'll try to take some high level insights I have a pretty clear interpretation of the two groups yeah okay so you want to let's go through it a mes or is it always like so so one really important thing to understand is I think PO is amazing it's super cool it's a huge impact in the world it's also like absolute first like think of it as the like Bitcoin of like this kind of percent this this is not at all optimized there's like anyone who's smart technologist in the room is going to think of like seven things that could be improved features not all of which would work out but like it's just it's a it's like the most basic proof of concept of this type of idea so yeah um okay so in group a we have um 59 participants um let's see uh what do they agree about so about half of them think that neutrality means TR treating every unique person the same whereas on Group B oh no sorry I read it wrong 85% of people in group a thinks that neutrality means treating every unique person the same whereas um 76% of people in group b disagree with that so that that already sort of characterizes uh these different groups but maybe if we look into it more we can start to understand why uh let's see so neutrality means treating all transactions the same sort of similar principles neutrality means treating every country the same um neutrality means that the rules are set to not privilege any specific participant uh there's more shared agreement on that but those three first statements already sort of indicate um this division between groups A and B they're um it's very binary in the end yeah so the well why don't we go through it and I'll give an interpretation uh so let's go down to Group B now uh to look into that so group E has 50 participants and Group B seems um interesting so Group B is largely clustered around this agreements so the the Reds um and it's the disagreements to the to the three statements or statements in similar spirit so neutrality means treating transactions the same as long as they can afford gas that was uh not in in the other one above and uh the majority of people Group B disagree with that um and let's look at the first two neutrality in certain cases can be evaluated at a group level and not at an individual level um 94% of group of people in group b agrees with that um and they disagree that it means uh neutrality means treating every unique person the same so you can see a pattern there and then different forms of neutrality make sense in different contexts for example some should distinguish humans and Bots others uh should not I guess was the last word that is missing um 85% of people in groupy agree agrees with that so now majority majority per um so here actually majority is not a good word because uh what this is showing is the plural majority so what are the statements that groups A and B despite their divergences where where is it that they can find common ground so um neutrality means that uh means the rules are set to not privilege any specific participant 81% overall agrees with that uh 93 on group a 69 on Group B all human beings are rational uh everyone agreed that this was a a bit of a weird statement personal Liberty should be protected above corporate good um everyone agrees different forms of of neutrality Mak sense in different contexts for example some should distinguish humans and B some should others not should not uh fascism is needed to achieve neutrality um yeah uh lots of disagreements there and neutrality is different from fairness that's an important point so uh this is what's interesting about this is that despite the divergences these are the areas uh of Common Ground out of which you can start a conversation so um I'll hand it over to Glenn to share a few thoughts on on the analysis uh he was thinking about it here and then also if anyone has any any comments uh we'll hand it back to you grou I just gr gra okay um so this group has statements like neutrality and they agree with well the other group disagrees with it statements like neutrality means treating every person the same neutrality means treating every transaction the same neutrality means treating everyone in the same country the same uh sorry treating every country the same Etc and so what I would describe as this group as is sort of like the uh maybe feel-good group or something like that it's like there's many different forms of neutrality which I was trying to argue were in tension with each other and this group seems to be composed of people who kind of like all of them you know they're like M I don't want them to be in ttention with each other or they all sound good to me or something like that like that that's sort of the the the vibe I get from group a um Group B on the other hand uhara gr Perfecto um this one really likes statements like neutrality in certain cases can't be evaluated at group can be evaluated group in level and not individual level or um different forms of neutrality make sense in different context um and doesn't like neutrality is you know treating all the gas the same neutrality is treating all the people the same so the way I would characterize this is group a is like I like it all and Group B is like it's really complicated you know what I mean um and so the the the main divides into to be like group a is kind of embracing the contradictions and Group B is like trying to say in the face of these contradictions we've got to do a lot of really complicated thinking and I probably can't in a tweet length thing even express what I think the next steps of that are or something like that that's my interpretation in that Spirit um does anyone here feels like they identify with group a and want to wants to share uh elaborate a bit on their views and share with the rest of the group or group b any volunteers okay so are you on group a or Group B I'm on the group b and uh I like I saw it like from a perspec itive from like a tolerance and I I think like now group a like the neutrality yes was like close or embraced as as a tolerance by the group a that's that's how I feel it like we tolerate everything and try to neutralize thanks uh yeah uh darl Malone uh I think I would have been in group a I guess um and I I think I would say that the the complexity of neutrality kind of comes out if you look at it as a very specific thing that applies to those that are maintaining the function of a system and not necessarily looking at the decisions of a system um and I think that kind of for me makes makes it a lot simpler hi guys my name is fucho I think I associate myself with groupy more because in a complex system it's really difficult to evaluate neutrality when when some uh agents some people provide more value than others hey I'm Phil so I agree with Glenn's notion about the many different uh conflicting neutralities and I think that makes any decision taken on the basis of neutrality kind of reductionist so I kind of vibe with the like its complicated uh you know description I think that's kind of accurate hey this is ham one thing that I'm interested to understand is like how would we solve the like when like each all countries would be treated the same aren't we better off splitting United States to 50 country and and so on you know like it's how would we solve such kind of attack which is like you're you will coordinate again in a different way so you will take advantage with B yeah obviously okay oh one more hi um I'm saffron I um I probably was in group b definitely um and I think maybe this means that we can't say that um a system a system as a whole is or isn't neutral but that we can evaluate some degree of neutrality along a particular axis um and kind of look at it in a very multi-dimensional way okay two more um I was in group a and uh the way I what I thought about the groupings was kind of um it aligned with a vitalic paper about uh VTO fitocracy and bulldozzer political access and I feel like group a is like the VTO veto ocracy and Group B is maybe more the the bulldozer political access for those who haven't read uh can you just elaborate a little bit on on that from what I remember it was the VTO ocracy was more like if there's a lot of people um who are equally weighted they'll be able to keep back kind of a tyranny of bulldozers but bulldozers are needed in order to get a lot of stuff done so you kind of need both both groups to balance the system that's what I remember all right one more does anyone feel like they have something Victory Lee I'm in group b um two thoughts is that um one is probably some other people already mentioned that um it the social difference there's many D Dimension you cannot achieve neutrality on Old Dimension at the same time so it's it's a constrained neutrality maybe in one or two uh Axis or Dimension do achievable and also that to to achieve the neutrality you require a value judgment right um in what what make it neutral uh is just treat them all the same or sometime maybe require treating differently in order to be neutral that require Val judgment that also very difficult that's why I'm in the group b okay question yes what would be your what would be your take on only Group B commenting like like the vast majority of the people that have actually are um yeah I think it's an interesting question I wonder maybe if someone from group a um would like to elaborate a little bit more on their views um and share with the rest of the group um um well okay was bigger than if so you know your group a if you when you look at the statements from group a that people all agreed on if you all if you agreed on most of those statements then you're basically a group a person oh does it um yeah for me I was in group a and I just found myself um maybe a little bit naively having a bias towards just wanting to agree with all the statements I I mean I kind of saw some of the tension between the statements but I also um just feel like there's a lot of different interpretations of what neutrality is and kind of just found myself agreeing with all of them okay I'm I'm trying to wrap my head around the terms equity and equality and I'm would like to know from your perspective uh if those uh if any of those is actually a neutral one in any of these senses just one thing one thing to say about equity and in equality I'm not sure but I think that people are referring to a particular meme that defines those in a particular way uh not necessarily to like some abstract version of it um do you know the meme that I'm talking about yeah probably that uh there's like a fence and then you have like people with different heights and B is that the meme that you're talking about can you elaborate on that one Al so so like for example let's say uh let's go to the statement that says how many people have seen that Meme raise your hand okay most people have seen that Meme so I won't like explain what it what it shows but I just think that's what people are literally referring to and I don't want to elaborate on it because I don't you know you can do whatever you want but I think that's what people are thinking of but when we say neutrality means treating every unique person the same are we taking into consideration that or not and what and what are the things that we should be taking into consideration when we say treating the same good question oh let's uh continue developing this conversation the idea for now the next oh sorry you asked one final statement tranquil I just wanted to say that I have a little bit of a I have a little bit of a difficulty wrapping my head around the term neutrality because like uh you mentioned uh neutrality only exists in different context and when we're trying to build systems that are supposed to be neutral then that means that there's a certain bias to gain positive impact to get negative impact or whatever and when we're not building these systems by ourselves we're building them together and how can we make sure that we have as less bias as we can or we don't corrupt that bias when we're building the system it's an a great question folks um the idea for now uh I want to stick to our agenda so that we can make the best use of our time together the idea for now this was a prompt um and hopefully an exercise that shows some of the different views and uh I have to say I'm I'm I'm a bit impressed because usually um I it felt very binary you know the the results here um now three groups by the way what it's now three groups it's now three groups okay you want to refresh it so we take a look at what what group C is about quickly um what is Group C about so so a is the same as before basically but I'm trying to understand what group b and Group C are now okay uh we'll come back with a few more comments but the idea for now is just for you at your tables for us to take 10 minutes to discuss this and then as you you can share your visions and uh some of some of the questions that this this conversation and police brought up to mind uh to you and then what we'll do is we'll take uh we'll do another iteration on Poli this uh it becomes a lot more interesting when we iterate on it because we can see both sides we can think about it um in a more informed way and then the idea is to try to um understand where are the bridges what are the areas of Common Ground what are some of some of the statements new statements that can be added that can help breach these groups so uh let's just take 10 minutes uh to discuss at our tables um what is it how is it that we should be thinking about neity and your impressions about the exercise so far uh okay so folks come back here with me who's hearing me clap one time who's with me clap twice um okay sorry one second um so what I'd like to do right now is to uh have some of you so we we asked you to share uh what was your reason for being in group a or group b but is there anyone here who has very strong views on what neutrality is uh and wants to convey that to the rest of the group hi guys so our talk was primarily focused on debating neutrality within democracy uh he is from Colombia I'm from Mexico he's from the US Canada and what we all talked about was that it's really complicated to have to wait each vote the same when some of the democracy is corrupted from the from the campaign uh from the campaign start for example in Mexico right now we have uh amlo as our president and he's building a lot of infrastructure projects that don't make sense and more than 60% of the population agree with him but it's really difficult for people who well it's it's really difficult for the right incentives to guide the correct policies because when somebody can quickly say okay I'm going to give you uh this short-term reward for your vote well that's difficult so what we were basically talking about was neutrality in different contexts uh basically makes it yeah it's it's very difficult to have a neutrality when the people acting on it have different incentives yeah okay sure so I'm from Colombia and here in Colombia a big social problematic is buying votes so people although we debated about how it ended up affecting the policies and the actual morality of it at the end of the day it's not the right incentive it's an incentive external to the to the one that should be which is the actual policies and beliefs of the governor so weighing those people who are kind of neutral and don't know who to vote for or don't are not really interested in voting for and you offer them an incentive uh economic incentive then it becomes like their vote is not for the people it's for them and their vote is not actually for what you're voting for which is the governor but for the whatever money they gave you so should that vote be taken into account because according to a neutral perspective it should but I at least doubt it should thanks um so I think at our table we all agreed that it's not an easy thing to Define especially coming from like foreign languages we had like a and English as a second language was like we had a hard time even like reading those statements and comprehending them and processing uh but one thing that we all agree that natural naturality is um pretty much a a status of here and now uh even with like what you just said about political vote like here and now you're natural but maybe within like a few weeks you have an opinion and you will be agreeing or disagreeing so it's a almost like a you cannot keep the state forever it's just a Here and Now how you feel and it's yes exactly so we kind of had the same um feelings about like this exercise and like how we think about it and it changes for sure it's not something we can have forever this is super interesting sort of speaking to the needs for sort of continuous adaptation adaptability um okay so now I'm curious if uh was was there any of you who were either on group a or group b and after this conversation sort of gained a new understanding of the other group's perspective that you didn't have before um and maybe change your mind a little bit or just had a bit more Nuance in your views and would like to share that with the rest of the group yeah I that really stood out to me um Alex by the way um that as I was sort of watching these questions and how people were describing neutrality and siding with it I feel like neutrality for one uh took a lens where neutrality was very close to goodness like as if some people were already feeling like neutrality was good and that's how they were voting and another perspective which started clearly like forming for me as we were doing this was that some people at least to how I see it now seem to take neutrality as a rule we apply regardless of context which if you're going to strictly logically Define things like I think that makes a lot of sense um but yeah not everybody's going to view it that way and then if you get into complexity and no it's context dependent then you get a very clear uh split so it's really interesting to see multiple shifts in what I understood to be neutrality happen as we were going through how other people's observed it uh yeah so kind of referring to what I was saying before I mean like one observation like hearing here and like here discussion at the table was that um like very often like we want to tolerate someone else opinion we want to be like U good in a society but uh I mean me being part of the group b yes kind of like you know opposing to say that okay we can't neutralize things we can't tolerate everything yes like uh bad things should be called out right like uh neutralizing the value meaning like know getting rid of our civilization kind of the thing right so yes it's complex but you know um the the problem is that U like at some uh extrem yes like neutral thing can be in my opinion right if we like really know like take the value out of it right um yeah but I think like that's the problem does anyone else has some uh bridging Reflections okay thanks I'm lunardo and I was thinking about because we are all talking about neutrality like just neutrality but the question it says about digital neutrality right so I was thinking about if it is like maybe a difference or something very specific to digital because thinking about digital it's so that digital it maybe refers in general to Binary data info right and it it is be like that mainly for communicating so maybe if we talk about digital neutrality we are talking about communication across networks so from that point I see that maybe it's not like that complex the the term of neutrality because if you talk about communicating over networks it could be like any peer has the same chance to Comm communicates with other other PE right so at that point I think that I was the group a because I didn't see like a bigger complex problem but something in a in a specific context then if we talk about neutrality as general everything neutrality I think that we get to that point where it can be many different things and have many different ways to express neutrality right yeah and to emphasize that our our question is directed towards digital neutrality so that's um digital public infrastructure um neutrality in digital infrastructure um does anyone has any other uh sort of insights or bridging comments that they want to share okay um I thought that was a very insightful um exercise and um I think I was more associating myself with the group a at the start and then they were discussing and I was hearing other people giving feedback and I think I mean as just a human being uh it's very hard to make binary choices like uh just 100% yes 100% no and um for me it was like I would agree with the like most of the maybe uh questions that the group a was agreeing but unless there's some exceptional circumstances kind of the situation so for me it was um I was more um you know it was closer to me to vote on a group because uh like maybe 80% I would agree that as basic rule and basic understanding of neutrality but then also leaving a room for you know I don't know exception in special cases rather than just saying completely no and disagreeing so yeah so this is actually a wonderful point because we'll we'll iterate on the platform one more one more time after all of these discussions and in this iteration this is the opportunity for you to add that extra Nuance that you felt was missing in the former statement so neutrality unless so you can you can add that nuance and that complexity uh in this in this second iteration this is a little bit of a troll point but it did change my views so someone said the word neutralize earlier and I I made the connection between neutrality and neutralization like wouldn't the most neutral thing in the world just be if none of us really existed that would be super Fair it' be super conformant with all of group A's statements vacuously satisfy any definition of Neutrality um so just putting that out there as an idea okay just what he said I just thought of something like when we talk about digital neutrality right it obviously becomes a lot easier to enforce because you could like create things of protocol levels which humans cannot change obviously that is not we don't exist but we lock out a lot of choices that you could otherwise have in that and then in a sense you are like a lot of like freedom of choice is gone and thereby it's a lot more neutral which is not like very far from what he said I just wanted to make a bridging comment because as you pointed out I was a little bit dismissive of group a and and identified with Group B but just to like I thought your comment was very insightful which is um I think that many of people in group a seem to have thought of each statement is having much more implied context than like I was thinking like they were they might have been stated in a universal way but a lot of people thought well of course they must be talking about context X or context Y and so I'm in agreement with the statement because I see that implied context but if we draw that out maybe there wouldn't be a as much disagreement between the two groups because Group B was really thinking of them as very broad statements and group a was thinking of them as specific to the context where that principle is appropriate so now in the spirit of adaptability uh I want us to I I'm sorry I can take more uh inputs because I want us to take the time to do one more round uh let's let's see how this how these Notions um evolve by going back to the platform and adding bridging statements uh statements that have richer contexts and that add the exceptions to the rule and that you feel um can sort of um reflect anything that you might have learned uh about someone else's point of view uh today or anything else that you might that you might want to add you know uh it's not a uh tyranny but uh uh I think one of the particularly interesting things is to try to add that additional context and nuance and um and try to bridge uh what are some of those different views now that you've been more exposed to to them so let's take uh five minutes for that okay um let's come back to to the report and see how things have evolved so you know this is interesting I've I've done this uh Workshop I've used it this tool a number of times and I have to say that this was definitely the most binary conversation and the most binary group that I've ever um worked with and have sort of seen represented in in this tool which to me what that says is that this ecosystem needs a lot more of these kinds of tools and sort of conversations because it feels like yeah it's just very binary but uh We've evolved we have a solid third group right now uh so I think group a um remains uh with similar views group be sort of skeptical and saying it's complex it's complicated but not really articulating uh what what that complex vision is and then uh kuros to group C who is starting starting to um create some of these articulations so let's look into uh Group C together uh this was really interesting so Group C uh is saying neutrality must be putting in a context um otherwise it doesn't make sense neutrality is not an optimal solution for the evolution of the human race incentives are inherently non-neutral um and they super disagree with uh treating every country the same and every every unique person the same so they're saying you know you need contacts you need uh to take into account different incentives and um you need new I think that what's I I won't put my interpretation of the comment about ending the human races that sort of affirming that uh that you want plurality right you you want to have diversity you don't want to um collapse so is there any conception of neutrality that can also make room for um pluralism um remains to be seen but I think that this statement is expressed that this is a desirable uh thing um so yeah this let me do one more refresh here to see if anything uh different came on Group B the guy that said we must all perish to achieve neutrality made a good point um and let's look at the uh Spectrum here so a lot more concentration here on consensus um neutrality why important is not the only go neutrality is layered some layers of the system should should strive to be neutral um and some layers can be biased we should continue to ex should continue this exercise in a with drinks um okay so let's go let's see um what is it that all three groups can agree neutrality means rules are set to not privilege any specific participants neutrality is different from fairness um individuals should have autonomy over what products and services they use and neutrality while important is not the only goal of a society and is to be balanced with other priorities um and then what are some of the things that it's interesting because there's almost usually in the um plural majority section there's more agreements than disagreements this is pretty half and half there's a lot of areas of common ground of disagreements neutrality is fascist neutrality is fascist um neutrality means indifference not caring a lot of people disagree with that super interesting the group is never right against the individual um so um as I mentioned you know this this is super rich and they're you know it Merit doing a proper analysis that we can't do uh right here but hopefully this was an interesting exercise neutrality is a huge value uh in this ecosystem and uh it's one that has very very serious and important implications so um I'm I'm curious to hear any thoughts Reflections comments on this exercise or anything that you might have uh learned and um and we'll be posting a a more sort of thoughtful report um of how this went uh online so you can look for it on the radical exchange Twitter or you can come up uh to the table and um just send me just give me your email and uh yeah hopefully this was this was a good exercise I'll take a few comments and then we'll wrap up actually it's a question about the tool on the ex size I wanted to know if um in the second round did we vote again on the same statements or the votes we already had uh issued of the statements on the first round stayed the same because like from a deliberative uh Democratic perspective it would be interesting to vote again on on those issues like after debating yeah police is open- Source software so it needs uh a lot it needs a lot of work um but no the the votes Remain the same the votes remain the same so I thought that was an interesting experiment I guess one question is um I think this group is like all coming here with good faith and good intentions um and one thing I noticed is like as people answered questions even if I wasn't answering a question the groups could like pretty quickly kind of shift and also my position in the groups kind of could quickly shift so are you thinking about this in the context of like people who might want to like intentionally create those shifts or like kind of a more adversarial mindset and how would you mitigate that I guess no yesterday we were giving this Workshop to a group of organizations that are working on uh citizen participation in the Southern Southern Hemisphere and they were like my God this is like such a good tool for political manipulation and you can use it for good or bad I mean it can go in any direction but um part part of the thing behind uh trying to advance a paradigm with more pluralistic social technology is that if we if we can um provide more resolution into the different social Dimensions that exist within a community then that's that's the only thing that we will unlock good governance and uh our ability to find to cooperate across diversity so uh you know it comes it's a double-edged uh sword I'm not sure if that answered your question say Phil is that um it's just really interesting that like in this sort of socially conscious way of approaching things as supposed to like ones that are modeled purely on marketing incentives we just have like no analyses whatsoever in any field of like incentive Dynamics and ATT like just doesn't exist and like that's a really interesting challenge here like what is the incentive model that you want to use to analyze this is it based on individual attacks B group attacks is it like and what are the optimal I I don't even know I have no idea like it's really interesting question so just to share my perspective on the highlighted statement I thought this the other priorities are more like today versus the future like if you ask me should the world today be neutral yes of course there should be fairness had the world been neutral from day one of existence would be reach here I don't know so I mean I don't have an answer obviously but like I thought that's what like that statement is all about like today's neutrality versus neutrality as a tool to forward the human race I have some comments on on on the exercise itself I think that the exercise heavily depends on the quality of the questions and probably we need to have some um approach to exclude some some of these questions when we see some white areas there probably those those questions were not very you know um so people didn't want to to answer this question probably we should exclude them or probably we should have another options on the on the poll so where people voting so they can kind of exclude or report against this question thanks um we uh radical exchange we do develop a few Technologies but this is not developed by us is by the amazing Folks at the computational Democracy project um and and it's an open source software uh you can make a pool request or give them some support and share your feedback uh but yeah as as Glenn was saying this is a very very primitive tool but it is better than most of the things that we're using in trying to you know identify social groups and and uh illuminate areas of common ground and disagreement um and it it's it's something to it's remarkable how how primitive it is and and the fact that it's still one of the best tools that we have so we need to continue uh developing this can I jump in yeah helloo yeah so going back to the earlier part of the I I I find it interesting because I tried to Prime the discussion with like a conception of decentralization um and uh so we could actually use some of those if somebody want if you know if any here is a activist and wants to improve polus we could actually import some of those Concepts there like for example having non-transferable nfts to represent your groups in allowing contract voting and then we could have a much richer perspective of clustering there um but the SE the second observation I wanted to make like Glenn you gave your perspective on the clustering but I actually I think the difference between group a and Group B was like a was sort of more biased towards thinking about neutrality um in the in the sort of voice Camp of Voice versus exit and thinking about equality and Notions of fairness and being like yeah yeah of course like individuals nation states right and then I think Group B was maybe more focused on like neutrality as an exit I should be able to be able to send my information packet wherever I want to or like you know transactions independent of gas or with the exception of gas sorry with gas is the only limitation so I thought that was that's kind of I think there's some broad Strokes that can be made there on like Voice versus exit how that how where where you kind of are on that um might inform your view of of neutrality also looking for uh yeah I just wanted to talk about like you know um using some learnings from I mean this Workshop into the da like da tooling specifically right so like very often in Dao that you know um the questions we asking the Dow maybe not the right it's not not very often the right one like for example yesterday we had a workshop with um with maker on like how to optimize their governance process and like you know there was some drama related to uh yeah basically some voting uh currently in Cosmos we have um like this huge proposal for atom 2.0 and uh yes like uh very often we cannot like know uh get an agreement because uh the scope of uh of decision is huge right so like applying these tools for D to make more I mean to break them down and more make more uh specific uh decisions yes I guess that would really help in uh I mean activist in in the room wanting to contribute to police and I know that there was one um integration with web 3 wallets um that was made last year um but uh we ended up not using it but I'm happy to connect you uh with the folks who worked on it and as Glenn was saying I mean if this was if you could quadratically vote on the statements uh this would be incredible if you could also connect it with spts that are being used today for example for um at the Govern platform that creates uh spts for d contributions and then you have internal uh clusters you have external clusters you know there's there are many ways in which this can develop I'll go to some of the other folks I mean what do you mean of quadratic voting for like yes has no question I mean it's I mean mention that you thought that it was too binary yes or no and so it would be good to this I'm real this is really my thing this I'm weekly in favor of but you know I don't really know so instead of like 01 to have like more be able to express the intensity of how how much you agree or disagree but it can have a quadratic system with it you can have like credit credits that um that you can spend oh um if you have a set budget to spend don't you have to see everything at the same time to figure out how to allocate your budget um we we have a software for quadratic voting that we developed at radical exchange and the way that this happens is that you usually go through it through the different proposals a couple times and you sort of distribute it once and then you sort of continue readjusting it a few times which means that you probably need some way of curating a smaller number of statements um or you have a couple of rounds and like after the first round the you redistribute the credit yeah our sort of way to hack around this is that in many workshops that we do at radical exchange we first do a a police conversation then we do we curate a ballot and then we put it in the quadratic voting platform and then we do a vote um so we do this deliberation then there's also a delegation step so you have some credits then you delegate them around then you then we do a police deliberation and then a quadratic vote in the end and it works pretty well like in groups that are actually like trying to um work around a a solution um we've seen groups that have sort of been having a very hard time in advancing on a particular issue for months and then they did a workshop in one and a half hours using these three tools and uh they sort of unlock locked a few things so it it's a pretty good idea but it would be better to have them more integrated did you guys also think there were some like broad Strokes differences in one group thinking about the idea of neutrality versus one group thinking how would neutrality be applied in the real or the digital world what do you think what you say question like did you guys think that one group maybe especially in the first one one group thinking about neutrality as an idea and another group was thinking about neutrality like in practice like how would this translate okay like it sounds good but like because this would not translate well thereby we disagree with it or agree with it whatever might be folks we have five more seconds in this Workshop so I just want to thank everyone um and I also want to say we we have amazing infinite adversity in Infinite combination stickers here so you can come grab them and um and if you'd like to to get the report of this exercise we'll post it on the radical exchange Twitter but um I can send it to your email as well just come over and send me and give me your email address um and thank you so much