Governing Democracy, the Internet, and Boardrooms

Transcript

from its early days the internet has been broadly speaking really skeptical of the idea of elected representatives is it because of hacker culture coder culture personality type I mean there's been a deep impulse to get around the idea of elected representatives and that's kind of appealing but there's also reason to be modest when all of the countries in the world that use democracy have converged on one solution to this problem namely elected representatives and you're like nah they don't know what they're talking about we can do better maybe you can but you want to have like some degree of modesty about something that in 2500 years of thinking about this no one has yet

really managed to solve in any other [Music] way hello and welcome to web 3 with a16z I'm Robert hackit and today we have a special episode about governance in many forms from nation states to corporate boards to internet services and beyond our special guests are Noah Feldman constitutional law professor at Harvard who also architected the meta oversight board among many other things he is also the author of several books and our other special guest is Andy Hall professor of political science at Stanford who is an adviser to a16z crypto research and who also co-authored several papers and posts about web 3 as

a laboratory for Designing and testing new political syst systems including new work will link to in the show notes our hallway style conversation covers Technologies and approaches to governance from constitutions to crypto blockchains and Dows as such we also discuss content moderation and Community standards best practices for Citizens assemblies courts versus legislatures and much more where governance comes up throughout we reference the history and evolution of democracy from ancient Greece to the present day as well as examples of governance from big companies like meta to startups like anthropic as a reminder none of the following should be taken as tax

business legal or investment advice see a16z crypto.com disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our [Music] investments so I want to start with like a really broad question maybe it's too broad but what is the right model for internet governance we have all of these companies that host platforms that people participate in that they build on top of that they connect and communicate on and so a question is like what is the right way to govern those platforms

right now the most popular ones at least are owned by corporations and they sort of get to call the shots there is that the way that it should be idealistically in like a world that we all live in and work in and play in and may I start with a little bit on formulation corporations don't exist in The Ether much as we sometimes like to fantasize either positively or negatively that they do they're products of law usually Delaware law because of the weirdness of how the American Federalist system works and they're governed by a plethora of obligations and regulations that are not only in their place of incorporation but are also state law everywhere and

federal law and a lot of the duties that they have they can't get rid of even if they tried to get rid of them so if you make and sell a product you're liable for the bad stuff that happens to people as a result of that product even if you pretend you're not and even if you don't want to be that's just to give an example of a Duty you can't get away from that means that all corporations are intensely regulated all the time already even before we get to the specific regul ations that are relevant say to a user generated content social media platform so the first thing is you're going to be governed by state and National laws and in a more tenuous way you're going to be governed by those International laws that your government bothers to apply to you and which by the

way there are plenty of governments that are democratic formulated and you know some of bunch of these laws are presumably coming from the will of the people yeah and some of them are undemocratic and lousy but they still affect you if you want to do business in a country so you know all of these things are are in place that's the first thing I would say so there already is a lot of governance that comes from governments like the good old-fashioned kind of governance then there's a further and really important question of whether there should be more governance coming from governments and if so of what kind and that's very hot topic right now the US Supreme Court this year is deciding three different sets of issues all

related to what are the rights of platforms what are the rights of users what is the role of government with respect to social media and until now there's been exactly zero Supreme Court Doctrine on social media companies and now we're going to have a whole bunch of it so this is a a major transformational year unfortunately we don't know the answers to any of those things yet definitively we have sort of tea leaves from the oral arguments so that's another really huge issue like how far should it go how much regulation should the states of Florida and Texas be able to weigh in on content moderation yeah so you're referring to the the net case that the Supreme Court is reviewing and um what's that issue there is these states would like these social media platforms not to censor or moderate certain types of speech I mean

that's how the states would put it the companies would say that the states want to force them to carry content that they may not want to carry or want to limit the ways that they can moderate the content on what they call their platforms and so that's you know it's like any Supreme Court case you've got two sides and those are the the two main perspectives and then beyond that there's to me a super fascinating question I know Andy's thought very deeply about this too of modes of Regulation that platforms can choose first of all for themselves and use internally then there's potential collaborations as in between different platforms on Collective uh self-regulation which is a form of

governance and then there's the weird kind of hybrid structure that the Facebook oversight board represents and then in a different way the anthropic long-term benefit trust represents and those are methods whereby a company creates a kind of hybrid structure where there's some independent actors whom the company agrees to be governed by for some limited set of purposes and that's another really interesting and to my mind kind of innovative and Cutting Edge way of doing this which like any Innovative Cutting Edge thing has its pros and its cons and is also very much experimental phase right now I think this we're already getting into something very deep and interesting which is like where are the boundaries where do we think the real world

governance ends and when or why would any type of organization want to go beyond it seems like there's at least a few reasons but no I'd be curious what you think I mean there's obviously just a sense as a company or as an organization that you want to do more um than government has told you to do that's like one possible motivation seems like there's also something about the global reach of some of these platforms we know that Global coordination around regulation is very challenging and so in the absence of that coordination you might feel the obligation or the Strategic need to do something uh to coordinate that yourself and then there's also something this hasn't come up yet but the I think a third explanation has something to do

with competition and uh I think going back to your original question Robert you know in a world where we had perfect competition in a very classical sense between all different types of Internet services I think a lot of the governance Beyond traditional regulation would be done by users voting with their feet and the challenge we get into is the scale of many internet services and the network effects put them in this kind of interesting position where they're at a very very large scale which makes it in some ways hard for users to vote with their feet because they like being where their friends are but at the same time there's still a lot of economic competition across services so it's not obvious that these companies aren't

really monopolies in the in the traditional antitrust sense and it's put them in this weird Zone where there is a sense that users are unhappy being locked in to any particular platform but at the same time traditional antitrust tools don't really seem to apply and in that weird gray area it might make sense for large platforms to play with additional modes of giving their users the ability to decide together how the plat platforms going to work in a world where they can't freely individually move between platforms for the same service and Andy I I don't think you would disagree with this there's also the advertisers who perfect economic picture would just go where the people

were where the users were so in that sense they seem less important but as we've seen in the um what you might call the X Files um the advertisers have turned out to be major players because they don't wait to see what the users will do I mean they also do that but they take preemptive steps based on their perceptions of what might happen and the reputational costs and all of those sorts of things and so they're big players too and they're another reason why a company a platform might want to have its own self-regulatory mechanisms and here I just want to add in this super polarized World there are no neutral decisions that you could say oh well everybody should leave me alone because I made a neutral decision whether you take content down or leave it up you're

non-neutral whether you amplify it or don't amplify it you're non-neutral depending on how much you amplify it you're non-neutral depending on your algorithm you're non-neutral and everyone has sort of realized by this point certainly in this ecosystem that there's nothing neutral and where a lot of people are mad at you and there is no neutral position you might have an incentive to offload some of the decisions just so people will be mad at someone else and also because people might not users might not trust you as the platform and then they might you might think it's better off that people will trust somebody else more than they Trust trust me even though they may not trust them fully either I totally agree I think it's an exercise in trying to rebuild trust and I think something Noah said really important which is like

trust in tech companies is falling in a lot of parts of the world not in all parts of the world but in many parts of the world but at the same time faith in government is falling in a lot of those same places and so there is no obvious actor to make some of these very hard calls in a neutral procedurally Fair Way where the key is that I think you as a user you'd like to be in a position where you know a platform decides on a piece of content or what app is allowed or what transactions are allowed in a way such that even if you disagree with the particular decision you still buy into the process by which the decision was taken and today I think there's a lot of people

who question both a company's ability to build such a process but also a government's ability to build such process and in the absence of trust in either of those processes it makes sense from a business perspective um to try to improve your trust in society as a company by finding a third option for a fair way to make that um decision this sounds like a really good segue into the oversight board because that is an attempt to satisfy these conditions that you're talking about to kind of offload some that's responsibility onto a third party to enhance transparency and Trust hopefully and create a process that is

reasonable and Rule Bound for moderation and all sorts of decision- making behind the scenes let's talk about the formation of that and the needs that led to its creation I think the core background situation that then Facebook was was facing now meta when it when Mark Zuckerberg decided to create the oversight board was the recogn that there were some very very hard content moderation questions they were still pretty simple at the time they were sort of do leave up content do you take it down they were not as fine grained as they now have become but in which he might have a strong intuition about what the right answer was but

reasonable people could differ and I think the Insight that he was able to see is that actually there there might be a right and a wrong decision I'm not I'm not a relativist I don't think there are like always two decisions no there might be a right and wrong decision on this but reasonable people could differ about what the right decision is and it probably didn't matter that much from the standpoint of platform governance which of those two decisions were taken but if he made it it was going to take him a lot of time it was going to take him a lot of effort he had no special expertise in any of the underlying questions and people were going to be really angry at him and distrust him so that no matter what he decided it would

decrease the legitimacy of Facebook as it then was and so the idea that I I proposed to him and that I think resonated for him was maybe this decision doesn't have to be made by you in the first instance the company is going to make a decision they're going to have a policy and they're going to try to file that policy but if it's controversial why not create a group of independent experts and bring those questions the hardest questions to them have them answer the question in light of Facebook's principles International principles Common Sense good judgment have them explain their decision and see if it worked and I would say that the secret sauce There is

the explanation of their decision the secret sauce is that if you're answering a really hard question where you admit there are different possible answers you should explain why you're doing it and that explanation that practice of Reason giving has the capacity to confer a lot of legitimacy when it comes to hard decisions because I think it reassures people that thoughtful people gave thought to this that they had some degree of expertise that they deployed that expertise and that they tried their best it's not a magic solvent some people will still be really mad about the decision but everyone will be able to say I hope this is the closest thing to a fair decision-making process that we could have come up with and my last point on this is obviously this idea of

legitimacy and fairness did not come out of the blue it's borrowed from Real World institutions especially courts that often are not elected often their decisions aren't appealable if it's like a supreme court or a high court they're the last word they're not always right they're often controversial people get mad about them but the institutions on the whole have a fair amount of legitimacy I mean it's a funny moment to be saying it now when the Supreme Court has you know done a lot of self harm on the on the legitimacy front but the Supreme Court still has much greater legitimacy in the eyes of Americans and that's even after you know a range of other things that the Supreme Court has done that they don't care that it's the majority doesn't care that it's

undermine their legitimacy so the idea that you can get legitimacy from reason decision-making was borrowed from that realm and applied experimentally to the oversight board and I think on the whole it's working not perfectly but that it is working but that's a that's a topic for further discussion you mentioned that this is a funny moment to be uh to be talking about the legitimacy of the courts um now of course it's an institution that's hundreds of years old but based on the way things have shaken out is there anything you would have done differently in your conception of this sort of analog body to a court system for well actually if I can answer in the reverse way there is something that we

did that I'm actually kind of proud of which differentiates us from the Supreme Court we have the oversight board is a pretty big body of people who who um decide cases um sometimes all of them but sometimes in subsets and it isn't partisan so it's not set up so that when you change the composition by a vote or two everything flips on you which is what happens at the US Supreme Court and so and then you know retirements and deaths and so that kind of it can all change in a second it's highly partisan and it's very responsive some of the time to political changes are all features that we intentionally did not put in the

oversight board to lower the temperature around its decision-making process is this something that the government should take into account like if you were setting up a new government and a new court system would you make changes of this sort yes absolutely I mean it's crazy that the Supreme Court I mean you have to go back to you know 1787 people died a lot younger being on the Supreme Court was not that good a job a bunch of people who were who had that job would quit and go back to private law practice because they couldn't stand the job and it you know it didn't pay enough and you had to get on a horse and ride around and hear cases all it just wasn't that Pleasant um now people live longer they get into that job and they never leave you know

they they leave the court when they die a lot of them which is very I mean it's unhealthy it's not good and we also have a much more polarized politics than they certainly did at the beginning although there have been periods of intense polarization in US history so yeah if you were designing it from scratch now you would have staggered terms with time bound it wouldn't be you know the luck of you know Justice Scalia died Barack Obama was President but Mitch McConnell was able to block the confirmation hearings I mean that kind of crazy town Hardball politics should not affect the composition of the Supreme Court and since one of my one of my jobs is that I watch the court closely part of my job shouldn't be having to have like a not quite expert but pretty good amateurs

knowledge of like the health of the individual Justice is if they're diagnosed with a certain cancer what are the probabilities that they'll live and how long like that's that's distasteful and also like absurd that that should be part of our the way we decide things we shouldn't be thinking in those terms I want to raise one thing that I I want to make sure we spend more time on how the board is doing because I think there's a lot of interesting different aspects of that to unpack one thing I just want to raise that Noah and I have talked a lot about in the past and lots of other people thought about that I think is important is one one important difference between say the Supreme Court or us courts or courts in general and the oversight board is sort of whose laws they're interpreting so Noah

referenced this earlier that they're basically they're considering cases on the basis of Facebook's principles or meta's principles and I think that's the logical way to start but one thing people obviously then point out is well you know the Supreme Court isn't referencing a single corporations rules it's referencing democratically written rules that the legislature writes nevertheless it's an interesting I think thing to consider in the long run can you get a sufficient amount of legitimacy as Noah called it from a Court online that's interpreting the rules of the company when part of the

concern is whether the company is setting the rules in the right place or not and so one thing people have talked quite a bit about but I don't think we've cracked is how would you democratize the legislative process as well so that something like the oversight board would be making decisions with respect to democratically written uh policies yeah this is super interesting and let me add one more twist to the way things have been playing out because this is something that has not been broadly discussed or broadly covered except in the very narrow group of Specialists mostly academics and you know and NOS who follow the oversight board the oversight board has been really worried about the thought that they're following meta's

rules they don't want they want they're more ambitious than that they want to follow something more democratic but they can't use the laws of any particular country because there isn't one particular country that's binding so what they've been doing is theyve claiming to apply international law the international law of free speech which is not anywhere near as Democratic as the laws of a democratic country but it is sort of second order Democratic because these are treaties that were enacted by countries some of which or many of which were Democratic and which all countries recognize as legally binding now the upside of that is that it sounds a lot more legitimate than we're deciding these important questions based on meta's rules and it's also a little more democratic the downside of

it is international law actually isn't that well set up to answer these questions because it's not designed to govern what a platform should do it's governed it's designed to govern what countries should do that's why it's International it's the law of stuff between countries so the oversight board has had to be really creative they basically relying on some work by by Scholars they've basically created a whole new body of what they call international law that they say binds meta and bind should in principle bind other platforms and they're out there making this law and there's no one to tell them no um you know some I I just supervised a student who were disertation saying this is unjustified um but my response to that was always that might be true but you

know who's going to stop them and they're trying to do that so that's a bid that is out there and it's interesting to watch and as I say it hasn't been very well covered but I also I do want to get back to the point that Andy is talking about which is what are the experimental creative things that a big platform like meta could use to bring Democratic input to bear on some of the hardest decisions that it makes well we should it might be good to start with the history which is that this is something apparently Mark Zuckerberg has thought about for a long time because back in the 2000s when the platform was still pretty young they they had a sort of a disagreement among users about what the new community standard should be and Mark uh held a global referendum on the

platform and I mean it's super interesting you can actually on the internet archive you can go and uh see the video he posted encouraging all the users on Facebook there were about 300 million at the time to vote uh and and what they learned through that process was actually it's really hard to get people to vote so out of the 300 million users I think something like 60,000 of them voted and the reason for that probably because you know most people are not logging on to any part of the internet to do the hard work of governance they're logging on to have fun or see their friends or whatever and in addition the the decisions being considered were they were pretty abstruse like you had to read these like

100 page documents and stuff so I think it was a really Innovative idea that suggested early on this idea that uh there's a way to potentially make decisions about a platform democratically but it turned out to be challenging to to make work in practice and so now if we fast forward to today yeah I think lots of people are interested in ways to set at least some kind of broad simple policies where the values that users hold are relevant to the decision through some kind of democratic process process no one has really figured out how to solve this core problem of participation as well as informed participation as well as if it's a

platform that's Global in scope how do you actually get people in different countries who speak different languages to even work together to figure it out what if they have radically contrasting values or goals there's a lot of really hard questions but I think there's yeah there's at least two veins of experiments worth deep on one which I think no by the way voter voter participation rates are a problem not just in online voting but in you know IRL voting too that's true that's true although the Australian thing and you could make it mandatory you know you could make it you open you open Instagram and you can't use Instagram unless you vote on these issues but then you're not going to get highly informed voting right I mean yeah these problem's

describing I just to make them concrete because I think they're two kind of good examples one is the problem that I don't know if people are listening all have heard of this or not because it may be a little dated but they called The Bod mcboatface problem Oh yeah this was Reddit uh right the didn't Reddit the British government the British government decided they were going to use um you know this new amazing thing the internet to gather votes on what they should name a new Battleship and you know the the winning vote getter was bod mcbo phase which I think we can all agree is a fantastic name for batt I don't see the problem yeah yeah her majesty ship I guess it was then her majesty ship bod and mcbo face somehow somehow didn't the land for

the Royal Navy um and then the other example that I like to use and Andy mentioned this is let's imagine you're setting a nudity policy well there's one policy that works in the south of France on a beach which is more permissive than what we have in the US and then there's Saudi Arabia which is a lot less permissive than we have in the US and it's not obvious that either of those should control the entirety of the platform it's not obvious that our model should follow the the platform either it's mostly a default that you know a lot of these platforms are us-based companies and so us-based standards end up controlling Americans think oh those are the reasonable standards but of course there's no inherent reasonableness

answer to the question of like how much skin you should show That's a classic example of something that different cultures are equally confident that their way of doing it is the only right way to do it so that's a that's a genuine Challenge and then you that leads to thinking well maybe we should have regions with different rules in different regions and it turns out it's harder to do that on a global platform than you'd think and most of the global platforms have tried as much as they can to avoid that because they don't want this kind of extremely vulcanized platform where it all depends on where you logged in from and you know if you have a VPN you can get different standards I mean you can imagine what a what a mess it can quickly become so those are part of the

challenges um and then the last part of the challenge is all of our examples of democracy Andy you can you can correct me if this is wrong because you're the political scientist but at least the ones that come to my mind all of our examples of democratic governance assume a denominator that is the relevant group of people it's the people who live in your town are going to vote on Town policy or your state your country we don't really have true democracy at the global level and so that raises the question of who's the who's the denominator who's the relevant Community to vote on these issues and maybe it's the users but a lot of issues affect non-users and so you know is it everybody including non-users is it a

subset of users that problem is I think the very first problem to Grapple with and in a lot of ways it's the most challenging let's unpack the B mcbo face thing for a second because I think it's really important it's a great example of two or right really three deeply related problems in the use of voting to make Collective decisions the first is just the lack of participation so very few people actually voted on the vood mcbo face decision because why would most people pay attention or even know about it second which is closely related to the lack of participation is that who then are the weirdos who choose to vote when not very many other people are voting

it's people who have very extreme weird preferences like the kind of people who think it would be hilarious if there is a vote named voting MCB face and so those two things go together quite tightly low participation and then selection for unusual unrepresentative extreme views or preferences or trolling so I think that's like an important thing to understand and then the third which is also deep Rel deep deeply related is the just the general problem that the you're asking people to vote on decisions and they have no skin in the game and that again lowers the incentive to participate and lowers the incentive for

people with representative views to participate and I think what if you had to serve on that ship you might care a little bit more well that kind of gets for the Noah's denominator point I think there's a very broad challenge it's much broader than just democracy which is how do we govern things that are not economic in nature in ways that are smart when the people were asking to do the governance don't have skin in the game and that's that was the pro you know that was the problem with open AI governance it's been a challenge with University governance the trustees in some sense don't have skin in the game if you measure the skin by how much money they put in they they would say I mean I'm not not that I'm always sympathetic to them but the donors were the only ones with skin in the game you

know we're donating the money all you're all you guys are doing is taking a salary that's a good point that's a good point that's what they say I mean I'm not saying I'm on board with it anyway go on yeah yeah and and when we look at at all these voting problems if you're ask asking people to vote on things that don't clearly affect them that's a reason you might not get very informed participation further more when you ask large groups of people to vote you have this problem we call the Paradox of voting which is that even if you do care a lot even if you do feel like you have skin in the game if lots of other people are voting then you know your vote doesn't matter it's not going to swing the outcome and so no you could care infinitely much about the decision

and yet your incentive to actually pay attention is very very small so we put those things together and we ask okay how are you going to do something Democratic to make a you know a big decision and a big online platform I think you have to start with this fundamental set of problems that are you want to get people to participate you want them to pay attention you want them to feel like it matters and how on Earth do do that and I think there's been several directions of experiments that are pretty fascinating one when know alluded to earlier is what anthropic as well as meta and others have been playing with where you you don't use voting you use these things called citizens assemblies and then the other is what's going on in crypto where

you're experimenting with different types of voting that try to draw in only the people who have some sense of skin in the game through the tokens that they hold so those are I think two two sets of experiments we can learn a lot from and I would just add one more framing thing here most most forms of democratic government in the history of the world I tried to address these questions by saying we're not going to have direct governance where every single person has to vote on every issue because that's also like a time consuming thing and and so one way to solve both the how much time do you put in and the how much do you care and the skin in the game is to have representative decision-making this is the move from like ancient Athens where everyone can show up and vote

every to be clear every free man can show up as a citizen and vote in the assembly to a system where you elect people and your representatives are professionals or quazi professionals and they do the decision- making and the voting they have skin in the game they have the job of caring about getting reelected based on whatever incentives they have and that gives them the incentive to try to guess or figure out what you're thinking and one of the really interesting things about the internet and I think it's important background to when we dive into both crypto and citizen assemblies is that from its early days the internet has been broadly speaking the ideology of the internet or the ideologies of the internet have been really skeptical of the idea of elected representatives

there's this impulse and it's really interesting to explore why is it because of hacker culture is it because of coder culture is it the personality type of the people who first got really good at using the internet before everyone used it I mean there's a lot of possible explanations but there's been a deep impulse to get around the idea of elected representatives and both of the these these experiments the citizen assemblies and the crypto or Dow or organizations are attempts to like say we are going to reinvent the wheel like we're not going to do the thing that all democracies have done namely rely on elected representatives we're going to do something different and better and that's kind of appealing because especially if you have some skepticism in our elected representatives it's a

good time to try to reinvent what they're doing but there's also a reason to be modest when all of the country in the world that use a certain technology namely democracy have converged to a first approximation on one solution to this problem name the elected representatives and you're like nah they don't know what they're talking about we can do better maybe you can it's worth definitely worth trying but you want to have like some degree of modesty about the probabilities of of coming up with something that in 2500 years of thinking about this no one has yet really managed to solve in any other way I want to build on that quickly because I think it's really important and I completely agree with Noah th% there's something about technologists and people online

that makes them really crave direct democracy and one of the key claims they make is that technology is going to allow for direct democracy that it didn't work in the physical world because it was too burden this is going to be my question like does the internet is it a step change like have we entered a new era where based on the tech that's available now the this is conceivable there are no certainties in the social sciences but this is as close to a certainty as I'm willing to go is the technolog is going to make no difference to this problem and nature is just the way it is it goes back to the Paradox of voting I was talking about it's very burdensome to be asked to understand and

become informed on every possible decision that a group is going to make and you might think and this is I think the fallacy that a lot of people in Tech have committed you might think that having more quote unquote democracy by putting more votes to the people is going to get you you know a more empowered user base but the opposite is in some sense true the more things you ask them to do the more burdensome it is for them to do it the less that they'll choose to do it and that then creates a really important and dangerous vacuum because now you have very few people voting and then interest groups can come in and

capture the decision-making process at a relatively low cost because there's not that many other votes out there for them to compete with and this is I think fundamentally why yeah no successful Society on Earth has stuck with direct democracy for very long and it's why technology is not going to solve the problem because it's actually not a problem about voting in person being too difficult or anything like that it's a problem of information acquisition and Analysis and I'll just note on that point people have also claimed that we'll be able to provide voters with all the information they need to make every decision through some kind of app I've had a lot of undergrads in my office

pitching me on the next app that's going to inform us all about politics so we can vote on everything ourselves and the problem is that information or that data is not enough you actually need to analyze it and then decide what to do and that's actually quite difficult and so the being buried in data on what you know your community is voting on is just not enough to help you do this and so I think it's a completely fundamental problem that goes Way Beyond technology that has to be solved through other models besides direct democracy and I'll just note almost all of the big voting Dows in crypto now have some form of representative democracy as a result of

this if you're listening to this and you and you think no that you know no and Andy you're wrong you know like technology will you guys are just elitists come on let let the M exactly what I would say is if you're an aspiring technologist ask yourself what's your vision for the company you're going to found and in 99.9% of cases people are like oh I want to found the company and then I want to have founder shares and I want to control the decision-making and then you say well why and they say well because otherwise like my the VCS will first get involved then they'll be shareholders they're going to dilute my votes and they're going to take the company and they're going to do all kinds of stuff I don't want to want to do with it and I'm the one who knows because it's my company I

spend the most time on it I care about it that's exactly the problem that and's describing so I always find it amazing when you know those students come in and say that because I say to them oh are you imagining a company where you will have no special input into how the company runs you know and every decision will be made collectively and they're like are you crazy of course not and I'm like well then there's a contradiction in what you're proposing so it's the you know the intuition that technology will interfere you can easily fix that intuition by just asking yourself when you get rich with your own company do you want to be in charge of it and in my experience almost everybody thinks the answer to that is yes um although there are some tweaks right I mean so another thing that anthropic did and I I know

about this because I was involved in advising them on it is they've created a long-term benefit trust which is a trust that appoints at first just a few but eventually will appoint a majority of members of the board of directors of anthropic and the people on the trust who are going to appoint those board members are not themselves shareholders so what anthropic is doing there is it's not the full open AI thing where the the parent board was completely made up of people who had no stake in the company which blew up as we know this is a more modest in between version where there will still be shareholders on the board of directors but the idea is to have some external check so it's a little bit better but that's very rare so let's

talk about the example of anthropic you're saying that in this case there are actual shareholders that are able to serve on the board and that this is different from meta's oversight board and it's also different from open AI where people did not have a stake in the company and so maybe there will be a more representative collection of views in there for keeping the concern going and also uh mitigating risks that could arise yeah it's it's designed to avoid problems on both sides so take the open AI problem you want to have some you know break glass CL measer and so the break class measure was they created this nonprofit entity um and that was its the overarching body that the board

of directors belonged to and then underneath that board of directors was the for-profit entity that was that we think of as open AI the actual company that does stuff if the people on the board of directors of the nonprofit who had no Financial stake at all believe the company was going the wrong way they could break the glass and fire the management of the company and they did that they believed that things were going terribly aride that this is bad for the world and they broke the glass and they fired the directors of the company the management of the company until it backfired and the glass flew back in their face and exactly they didn't realize that what would then happen would be that Sam Alman would then say well I'll I'll just go to

Microsoft and I'll take every single employee in the company with me and then the employees all went online and signed up that they would go with him which is maybe not so shocking because of of course you're going to agree to jump ship and so then it backfired and then the members of that board of directors had to resign so what you need in the real world is something that doesn't go that far where there are people who are not financially incentivized who serve on the board but there are also people on the board who understand the real world and who do have Financial incentives and they develop a relationship with each other so that it is possible for the people who are worried about a problem and want to break the GL us to do so in a thoughtful and responsible way where it won't blow

up in their faces so that's what the long-term benefit trust is trying to do um and it does give some real reasonable responsibility to people who don't work for the company um and in that sense it's a kind of cousin of the oversight board but it's different from the oversight board because those folks don't have day-to-day decision-making responsibility they're there at the level of oversight and break glass in an emergency whereas the oversight board is meant to be an everyday you know there are hard problems that meta is dealing with and the oversight board weighs in on them so I would call them cousins um they have some conceptual similarities but they're not you know they're not they're not they're not siblings they're definitely not twins it seems a little bit interesting that you have a certain

set of people who have this opportunity working side by side with people who are I assume just getting a regular salary and then how you get those people to really care about you know the decisions that are being made they have to care based on their reputation and this was relevant at the oversight board too so how do you get the oversight board members actually to care that they do a good job it's not so simple but the short answer is it's nobody's full-time job and the the jobs that they have are as activists or as Scholars or as people who care about free speech and so the idea was that they will care a lot about their own reputations and that will give them the incentive to do a good job it's not perfect but it was the best we could come up with if it was their full-time

job their incentives might be too closely Allied you know with the power of their institution and they still probably want to do a good job but it wouldn't it wouldn't be that they had a reputation to preserve elsewhere so that was a kind of complicated compromised decision because it's not it turns out it's a hard problem you know how do you get people to care about their jobs usually it's they get paid more if they do it well and they get fired if they do it badly and on an independent body you can't really do either of those things you know you can't like reward them for making good decisions and if you can punish them by firing them for doing for making the wrong decisions they're not independent anymore so then you need something somewhere in between and reputation I think is the most powerful

motivator and there I would just say you know you might think oh no one's motivated by reputation but there's turns out there's a whole bunch of people in the world who take the jobs that they a lot of them are academics who take the jobs that they have rather than some job that would pay a lot better because they care about the things they're doing they like doing it and then so you ask like okay now you have tenure when I remember you know getting tenure and thinking oh this is so great and then someone said to me this is so great you'll never have to do a day's work again I thought to myself like I never thought of it that way like I'm so much of a neurotic I'm going to keep on working hard but rationally if I were a real rational actor I maybe I

would stop and the main reason not to is then my reputation would be in tatters and people would say as they do say about some academics oh there goes Feldman he's one of those people who the day he got tenure he never did did anything ever again and you know that hurts so and I care about it not hurting it's impossible to picture you Noah stopping working after tenure such lay about so anthropic is also one of the examples of these uh citizens assemblies so might be yeah describe the citizens assem these and let's let's dive into that I think the general idea here is you have cases where you're either worried that too many people won't participate if you hold a vote or that they won't actually enough about the issue prior to having some kind of

deliberation together Andor briefings on the issue to make an informed decision and so instead of holding a vote you try to randomly sample a representative group of your citizens in the case of a citizen assembly or users in the case of one of these online I'll call them user assemblies other people call them different things uh and then you bring those people together the idea is because you've randomly sampled they'll be representative of the user base of your platform you get them together you have them debate the issue you have them hear briefings from experts so that they're informed about the issue and then you have them make a decision through voting or some other Collective

process um on the whatever the difficult issue is and this is something it's had some history in the real world going way back um and you know it's closely related to this idea from ancient Greece of sortition what is sortition sortition was this idea that uh you would randomly choose people to be in charge of various issues it's election by Lottery yeah some people call them lotra also the idea is basically we need someone to have the full-time job of running some part of the government we don't want to vote for them because that creates all kinds of weird incentives so every year we we have a lottery or every or twice a year and we pick one or two people who

are going to have this job and so and they only do it for one term they don't have to worry about getting reelected um but for reputational reasons they try to do a good job because you know they'll look bad if they don't do a good job and people will think well of them if they do a good job so you pick them randomly um and then you do it again the next year it's sort of like uh jury duty but like heightened to the absolute upmost level well the Athenians had very aggressive jury duty they had much larger juries and they paid them quite well which is interesting too I think the main justification for sortition was this idea I'm going to paraphrase this but there's this great quote from Douglas Adams the author of hitchhiker's guide and several other great books

that's basically like any person who wants to be in charge is ipsofacto unqualified to be in charge and and I think that was the idea of sortition is we don't want these you know untrustworthy overly ambitious potentially Cor corupt or sociopathic people who desire power to be the ones in charge we want you know the average well-meaning patriotic citizen to make decisions instead and so the way we're going to make sure we don't allow that sociopath to insert himself into power is we're going to randomly choose who's in charge and I just want to note it's it's an

interesting solution to that problem it also raises a bunch of it own challenges if you think that a big part of what makes democracy work is what we call accountability the idea that the person whose job it is to pay attention learn the issues figure out what maps to your preferences and make decisions on that basis if it's the fact that they're worried about whether they're going to get to keep their job is what makes them do all those things well then sortition is a terrible terrible method because I have no incentive to do anything I've been randomly chosen was to do this job and now I just have to do it no matter what I don't have those strong incentives that are coupled with my desire to win re-election so there's no

accountability in some sense unless like Noah was saying considerations like reputation patriotism genuinely just caring about the issue are are dominant so those are kind of that's one of the key trade-offs but if you do a bad job maybe you'll get maybe you'll get ostracized and exiled they used to do that they would actually that too but another key trade-off which is the background Assumption of sortition is that you don't need very much that all the expertise you need to do the job you already have or can pick up really fast so you know imagine you're running your startup and you know you're going to choose someone to be your your CTO and you're like oh I'll do it by sortition like bad luck for you if your Lots fall on me because I don't code well enough

to be able to do a good job of reviewing the other people's code that's necessary in the startup for the CTO and so and there's no chance that in the six-month or onee period I could get up to speed fast enough like maybe if you gave me a year I'd make some progress maybe but you know I don't have the relevant expertise so it's also partly based on a very amateur in a positive sense amateur idea of government kind of you know you can imagine 19th century British Aristocrats who think that like anyone in their Club if called upon could sit in government and figure it all out you know but life is very complicated today and the things that government does today are infinitely more complex than they were in a you know antique Society you know in Athens and so even if you

assume that people could have done a good job then it's not so clear they could do it now and even the Athenians didn't do it for certain jobs like they didn't pick their generals by sortition they they weren't dumb enough to think that they could go ahead and win Wars by picking a random person to be the general that that required some expertise so that's an that's a second problem and then a third problem is is this job the kind of job you get better at over time because if you get better at it over time you're not going to get a chance to because you're in for six months or a year and then you're out and so you're not if it's the kind of thing where there's upsides to doing it for longer you're going to lose the upsides obviously there're also downsides having

someone in the job for too long but you know this sort of like it's sort of like term limits on on steroids so I think where I completely agree with all that and so where this has gone so so I was one of a number of people who helped design this user assembly for for meta it's called the the community forum and based on these concerns but also knowing that having straightup user voting would be very challenging uh we really wanted to focus on really value Laden decisions where it's not really a matter so much of expertise but really it's about trying to capture in this community what are your core values that that affect this

decision and that might be a place where this is a more workable model but I do think it's quite limited and and going forward it I mean my personal view I don't know what Noah thinks but my personal view is I think these things have to be expanded in some way to bring in more expertise and to allow for delegation as we call it in crypto because of because of the things no one's just saying I think it's particularly hard that someone serves on one of these things learns a bunch and then disappears and so developing ongoing expertise in the types of decisions that are socially fraught going back to the beginning of this whole conversation the kinds of

decisions a platform might want to give over to its users we're going to want people to develop ongoing expertise and a sense of accountability for that I think and as Andy says there's there's also there could be a lot of upside so I mean take a a hard kind of values-based you know ethical or moral question you know let's go back to the what what should the nudity policy be on a social media platform right it's a hard question and you could imagine that if you take a thousand people and they're genuinely representative of the users which is a tricky thing which we've talked about but imagine that they are and you know maybe they all have an Impulse one way or another way when they start but then you give them enough information for them to have some

thoughtful conversations and then see where they land after say you know three longish conversations over 3 days they may all land in a place that's a lot more thoughtful in fact they will land in a place that's a lot more thoughtful than where they started and they may have a different perspective than say the people who work inside the company or The Outsiders Who start off very committed to one point of view or another either because they're like I don't know they're they're pro- sex and they want to have as few clothes as possible or you know they're deeply religious and they want to have as as many clothes as possible and so you know you could imag that you get and I think it's plausible and I think you know I think in some of the experiments that and's run with with meta you get a more

thoughtful nuanced balanced answer and I think for those purposes it's great it's and it's better than a focus group because there's maybe a little less control you know in Focus grouping the problem is if you're good at running a focus group you can make the focus group say almost anything and here there are more people there's more space there are more protocols to stop the people who are presenting the question from driving the answer in a particular way and it just makes sense that we would get a in general we get a better result not every time I mean because there's some scenarios where deliberation produces perverse results you know where people get into a Cascade where you know this is like how people burn witches you know group think and herd mentality yeah you get into that and then everyone goes

towards some crazy extreme thing that can happen but there are a lot of techniques that Andy's you know design um builds in that they're designed to stop that from happening now part of this community forum is you're trying to provide information so people can make an educated decision about something and maybe um maybe change their mind about something so they arrive at a you know workable solution um but my question there is how do you how do you ensure that the information and education that people are receiving is non-biased or objective and uh you know because whoever is presenting you the menu of options they have a great amount of control on steering you toward a certain outcome good question for Andy and then the other tricky problem is how do you

make decisions about what informational decisions about what's the right information right imagine what what we're discussing is precisely the misinformation problem what's our Baseline you know where do we even start on what what is reliable it's super challenging problem I think there's a couple different answers none of which are perfect and this is a a broad problem in all democracy not just the online world and not just these assemblies um though it's it's perhaps sharpest in these assemblies since the entity organizing the assembly makes decisions about what information to present I would say a couple things one is you try not to have a monopoly on information and so you know big part of these assemblies is that people get to

discuss and deliberate and they're completely free to bring in any information they want gathered from whatever Source they want so that's I mean that's the first most important thing probably then of course you try to do as good a job as you can of bringing in experts that are credible to represent the different sides of the debate I think it's it's become in Vogue a little bit uh on a certain part of the Twitter Community or EXC Community I guess it would be these days to say that there's lots of fraught debates in society where it's obvious that one side is factually correct and so we shouldn't show both sides that both cider ism is is itself a problem of course there are in instances and places where that might

well be true but I don't think you can get people to make an informed decision about any issue if you don't let them hear both sides or more than two sides of the issue even if you think the preponderance of evidence rests on one side than the other you really I think can't get to an informed decision unless you've heard all the arguments and so I think that's a a big effort in this is get a a diver a diverse set of experts um to present all sides uh but you know long run I think you want to be in a position if you really can build out a democratic system that goes beyond these assemblies you'd want to foster a competitive ecosystem in which different

information providers crop up and provide their different analyses and Views and that's something I've talked quite a bit about with Dows because I think that's an issue in in crypto too on that point there's also a body of literature about um you know people in brainstorming settings and when there are bad ideas proposed it actually enables the group to arrive at better decisions over time yeah I mean that idea which I mean the the the classic modern formulation of that is John Stewart Mill you know his argument for free speech was we actually need the bad arguments because what working through why they're bad and wrong and false will help us get the right arguments and that's it sounds kind of like a trit argument but if you really think about it it's it's pretty deep because it's

not obvious um and it's and it's interesting in that in that way I think another really interesting kind of aspect of this whole challenge to me is jumping out to the bigger political world of democracy you know so you were you were asking before Robert about you know it's a funny time to be talking about the US Supreme Court as a model and I think the same in a way is kind of true about these ideas of democratizing but one of the aspirations of the community assemblies or forums that citizens assemblies or Community forums that Andy's talking about is to get real disagreement that is thoughtful that doesn't turn into polarized yelling at each other and one of the ways to do that is by narrowing down the issue so

let me point to one weird feature of our polarization one weird feature of our polarization is that people turn out to have really strong views about things they don't know anything about and they have them instantaneously so you're like how like how do you you know this happens to me some I'm like talking to somebody and they're like oh I'm sure I think X and I'm like I've known you for 30 years you don't know anything about that why do you have the strong position and the answer is as a timesaving device in a world where there's so many issues and they're so complicated once we've picked a team you know we're blue or we're red or we're libertarian or we're Anarchist or whatever we Happ to be once we've picked a team there's now a list of positions that's associated with that team and so we just default as a

defensible time-saving juristic to siding with our team on those issues because we kind of think that someone else has thought about it or a whole bunch of people have thought about it and probably this is where I'm going to end up because I generally agree with this group of people on various things and one of the things about doing a Citizens assembly or a community discussion about a narrower topic is you can sometimes avoid this habit that we have of defaulting to a polarized position as a time-saving device because you're going to be told about it like you're going to get the information in front of you and so it's not only that we're closed minded and that we don't want to listen to the other side although that does happen we're also partly close-minded because we're

barraged with so much information that we don't have time to consider every perspective on every issue we just don't have the cognitive bandwidth to do it I actually think that's one of the problems with our current polarization it's not the only cause of it there have been polarizations in many societies that didn't have any much anywhere near as much information as we're getting so it's not I'm not making some like you know this is the main causal Factor but it is one reason that we do better in a well-designed Citizens assembly often than we do like out in the wild of politics I think that's been one of the most interesting to me surprising learnings from them both in the physical world and online is they're generally organized around the most fraught kind of culture wars type issues and when

they've been run one of the big learnings I think has been that you know if you get a relatively small group of people together and you structure the conversation well uh people generally are pretty reasonable they don't it turns out they don't want to be so partisan or or so hostile when they're put into the right environment um and that connects to other things about our polarization right which is that it it is much larger than it seems because we consume so much of it through these online platforms where we we hear the loudest voices but we don't see the in-person interactions that turn out to be usually less polarized I had a funny example of that from my own life I was I was moderating a panel at at Harvard and

some students decided they were going to leaflet against me and they were handing out leaflets to people as they came in and the leaflet was like it was like a four-page leaflet um but it its text was entirely a download from a Twitter like a Twitter thread that someone had created attacking something that I that I had written and I was like this is so it was just so weird because it it didn't translate well to the format of the you know to the format of the you know of the leaflet but also I just thought to myself the extremity of the formulations that this person was using you know against me online you know they didn't really translate to The Forum where like we were having a thoughtful conversation and I I sort of felt bad

for the people who were Lea liting because it's one thing to you know call what I said I think vapid horseshit which is what they were describing me is saying like they seemed in context weird and rude to be saying that because everyone in the room was having a rational reasonable conversation whereas on Twitter I'm sure it seemed great and then the punchline of it was there was like a substantive issue where I had in the thing i' had written that they made that made them angry I made an argument one possibly wrong but I made an argument and I gave evidence for it and I supported it and their response to this argument was it's obvious that this is wrong so we're not even going to entertain it and I was like that just sounded so absurd in the context of a university on Twitter it sounds great

right like Felman is is full of vapid horeshit so why should we even bother to refute him all you need to know is that we think he's stupid and then that's enough to reach the conclusion but in personal conversation very hard to carry that off without looking silly I think since you brought up Harvard are you feeling this intense tension between the administration the student body it just seems like such a powder keg over there it was a very very very intense fall and I mean very intense as intense as I have experienced on the University campus and I've been on and off of this campus since 1988 so it was it was extreme now things are sort of slowly getting back to maybe normal is too strong a word but towards a a calmer way of being and I

will say during all of this you know our classes were normal you know like school went on you know people learned stuff they studied for exams you know we did have a normal campus life but all of the intensity that was being felt was was it was felt um so it was it was an experience and not for the most part I think it's it's fair to say for most people they don't think it was a good experience have things subsided a little bit yeah I I think so you know I mean there's now so what are universities bad at and what are they good at universities are really bad at making Fast decisions about anything they don't like to do it and if they do it they make bad decisions because if your personality were that you could really

react in real time you know you'd be like a Trader you'd have you'd have some job where you could really take advantage of that um and of course there are some people in University who are really intellectually quick but the best of them use that intellectual quickness to fill in their depth and then you make the decision over time so universities are bad at the fast stuff and the fall was all fast stuff responding to a news cycle making issuing statements and declarations now we're entering a phase where certainly here you know the university has two task forces already set up to study these issues there's two more at least coming and this is going to be the part the universities do pretty well well like take a deep breath figure out what

we've done wrong figure out what we can do better give reasoned explanations of how we should do better in the future and so our kind of ner the nervous system of the University will return closer to what it's best at you know and again I want to be clear there are some people whose you know nervous system is always like go go go and that's really valuable in a whole bunch of dimensions of life but at University is not really one of them and so we do our best when we breathe a little bit and that's that's now what's happening um and that's that's better so in that sense it's a we're heading directionally in the right way though by no means are we there yet I think it's a it's a really good and important example of just the general topic we've been discussing

because a lot of it has to do with governance and the governance of these super important very in some cases very old long running institutions that are not straightforward businesses and therefore face quite complex governance issues and certainly some of the ones you know I've observed over the last let's say 10 years that make it so challenging is you have the exact same uneven participation problem so not every faculty member leans in and participates in the governance of their University evenly the ones who choose to do that may have different views than the ones who don't and then on top of that you have I don't necessarily mean this in a negative way

but like the mission creep of the University which is a lot less focused on protecting academic freedom and and developing the very best research in the world and a lot more focused on a lot of other uh issues that extend Way Beyond research and I think it's hard it's hard to figure out how to fix those governance problems because the institutions are so big um entrenched in so many different areas and trying to spread their attention across so many different things and I One do is to step back from at least in my view to step back from thinking that by making declarations the institutional part of the University contributes to our understanding of of the truth and of

knowledge I don't I don't think that's true so if the Deans get together and hold a meaning and announce that the second law of Thermodynamics is true I don't think that gives us much special knowledge into whether the second law of Thermodynamics is in fact true however you know when the people who are at The Cutting Edge of some area of inquiry published their research in a peer- review journal there's reason to take that serously it's not always correct it's always subject to revision but I would stop and listen closely to what they had to say and give it some you know some epistemological you know benefit of the doubt because they're expert and they're speaking on their area of expertise in a thoughtful way and I think one of the things that's happened is that our universities and not only our universities but it's

happened in universities have kind of fallen into this part of the mission creep that and's describing of thinking that they have to express a public statement on every matter of public importance and I understand the moral impulse to say the right thing but that has to be balanced against are you good at that and are you contributing to the University's Mission which is to pursue the truth in the broadest sense you know through Reading Writing and teaching but that's different from you know being in the announcement and declaration game and I don't think universities are very good at that and I think stepping back from that is it's not the by no means an overall solution but it's a first step this is happening all across Corporate America and Beyond uh you know these

calls for activism and for institutions to take a position on various matters I have clients coming to me corporate clients every day saying we're in so much trouble about this you know and I do try to tell them there's no such thing as being neutral that's their first point genuine neutrality is not possible in the world but within the framework of realizing that you can't be neutral you can sometimes step back and say look you know we're not going to take a view on this or that important thing and they're the companies find themselves in these positions because they're lobbied and they're lobbied by people who are trying to affect consumer Behavior often and sometimes they're able to pull that off I mean meta has

been subject to a boycott you know I mean other company big companies are also subject to to various boycotts so you you you are living in a real world if you have customers you have to worry about your customers but you also have to be aware that your customers could be all over the place and that's one of the reasons to have step back policies including policies of referring something to some other group of people and saying this is a really hard one we're not qualified to decide this and we're handing it off to somebody who is qualified to weigh in on it I agree and I think the key value is the tie in your hands you really you have to make what we would call in the social sciences a credible commitment you have to get to the point where the people who would try to force you to

take a position on the issue that's irrelevant to your core Mission yet important to them believe that there's nothing they can do to make you take the position and I think the critical mistake that a lot of the most important universities made as well as a lot of Corporations made was to give in to those demands and then create common knowledge that they can be forced to make those statements and that they aren't committed to not making those statements and you know people often point to it but the one of the few iiv ities that had less of a problem with this stuff has been the University of Chicago because they had made a pre-existing written commitment to not take such positions and that has turned out to be a huge luxury for them that

other universities haven't afforded themselves because they hadn't made that commitment or the commitment wasn't credible and I think that's I think you know the central problem is that over a 10 plus year period a lot of the top universities demonstrated that they did not have a credible commitment to not taking those statements and now they're trying to walk that back but it's hard to create that commitment out of nothing I'd be remiss not to bring the conversation back to some of the subjects we were discussing at the very outset around internet governance and um you you're mentioning this concept of credible commitments uh in the context of the University of Chicago but when it comes to making commitments with internet services and binding people to rules I wonder what

the path forward is there when you look at something like the meta oversight board they have made some decisions that meta doesn't necessarily have to adhere to now it adds a lot of transparency to the process but I wonder if there are other systems that would you know bind services and corporations and applications to the way that they uh to some some set of you know agreed upon circumstances of course the thing that comes to mind is daos distributed auton organizations and how you can sort of create these uh commitments in blockchain code that bind all

participants I'll just say I mean my view on this I think there's two things that are interesting about blockchain and Dows with respect to this topic the first is this trust problem and being able to write and commit to a process so one of the first things you know projects do when they start in crypto is essentially write a constitution I.E write down in code how they're going to make decisions over different issues and you know exactly how binding those are is Up For Debate it's a little bit complicated but in the long run with blockchain I think it really is true that the constitution you commit to through that process in code is a lot harder to change without resort to some

kind of democratic process than if it's not committed in that way especially if it goes Way Beyond what can be protected through normal real world legal processes and so I think there is something really interesting about being able to build an online community where you can make a sort of Promise into the future that anytime this type of decision comes up this is the process by which we're going to make that decision I think there's something quite interesting about that the second is more economic in nature and has to do with you know one of the most important types of trust for online platforms is the trust between the different sides of the platform's market and so you know almost all online platforms have this characteristic that they're trying to

bring together two sides of a market drivers and riders or developers and users for the App Store and so forth and you really need the producer side of that two-sided platform to believe that into the future they're going to have an economically beneficial relationship with the platform and I think one of the biggest challenges we're seeing in the space right now look at like the huge dispute between epic games and Apple for example is that Developers are starting to feel like it's still a tremendous opportunity to develop on top of these extraordinarily good Global platforms but at the same time the taxes they pay to the platforms are going up the decisions made around their services are

changing in unpredictable ways they would like to have a much longer term promise about how the platform's going to treat them and that's another place where I think being able to make a long-term in some sense immutable promise over the econom IC relationship between a platform and its producers I think could be could be important in a broad sense that's what a constitution is I mean a constitution the best metaphor for it is you know Odysseus and the Odyssey when he's on his boat and he's going to the island of the sirens and he knows they're going to be so appealing to him so beautiful their song so beautiful that he's going to jump ship and so he you know he ties himself to the Mast and tells his crew members like don't let me

go that's in one of the leading metaphors is what a constitution is I mean you know the idea is sort of like we know that when the chips are down and we're in a panic we're going to take away people's rights we're going to silence them we're going to take away their you know their uh right against arbitrary arrest and so we we we try to bind ourselves from doing that and we try to create institutional mechanisms to bind ourselves notably in government there are two parts to that there's the written rules and then there's the human ability to interpret and maybe even override those rules and there's a productive tension between those things and it goes all the way back to a debate believe it or not I hate to be so ancient Greek but we've done a lot of ancient Greeks today a debate between

Plato and Aristotle about which is better whether it's better to have the rules in the end in charge because no one's perfect which is the arle view or whether it's better to have the wisest person you can get your hands on in charge because King yeah because the rules won't give you the best outcome all the time which is broadly the The Plato View and they're both right you know you need some you need some back and forth or productive tension between those things and that's true in Dows where you know you don't want the thing to lead to a total spiral down you need to have some break class measure uh and it's also going to be true in um you know in something like the oversight board where the company sometimes has committed itself absolutely to following

their rulings other cases it's asked for an advisory opinion but in the end you know if meta chooses to stop listening to The Advisory to the oversight board altogether it could they would just have to pay a reputational cost for doing it so I mean I think you know this really is in the realm of art rather than science you always need to have some of each you need to have some meaningful constraint and then you have to have some capacity for flexibility um and so it'd be nice to say there's like a magic solution to this but there there isn't and there's 's no purely technological solution but there's no solution that has no technology because rules and the following of rules are a technology so you you need both and that's um may not

be the it may not be the most um thrilling conclusion rules always win or people always win actually Sometimes some wins and some the other wins and that's that's real life um so maybe that's not a terrible place to to end what I have to say on the topic I want to build on that in one particular way which is like one of the things we study a lot in the history of democracy is this idea of constitutions and what we call in political science and political economy self- enforcing constitutions there's no external Authority that can bind a country to its Constitution and so the Constitution only has power in the long run to force

people to follow the rules if there's some track record of everyone having agreed to it for long enough that it has some special power that it gets that it acrs over time because there's nothing to stop someone from tearing it up and ignoring it and so that's why we call them self enforcing they only really bind into the long run when everyone has a long enough track record of agreeing to be bounded by it this goes back to the Magna Carta where King John was forced to sign it right and then he was sort of like well actually I'm not going to pay attention to it that much and then there you know there was a battle over the legitimacy of the crown and all yeah tons of history of this and and the US Constitution is somewhat unusual in

the length of time for which it's proven to be somewhat self- enforcing that same problem exists online and I think Noah is right he was hinting at this I think that blockchain or ways of writing immutable agreements into code do not uh in a comprehensive way solve this problem of self- enforcement because you still always people have the option to fork and to leave and to do whatever they want or to change the code and you know as long as they agree to it and so there's still something deep in like he was saying art rather than science about it however I do think for the online World blockchain

provides something pretty fascinating that I was really Blown Away by as a political scientist when I discovered it and I think it's best highlighted through an example so there's a dow called Lio and Lio has been discussing publicly for a while its desire to build in a veto for certain types of decisions and what they want to do is essentially update their constitution to say when there's this one set of decisions maybe the Dow just makes the decision but when it's this other type of decision it goes to an external veto and when I was talking to them and to other people about how that would work in practice

one of my biggest concerns was that in the real world if you try to set some procedural rule that only applies to one set of legislative votes and not another then it's just obvious that strategic actors will Channel it into whichever category is favorable to them so if that they'll just claim like if I don't want the veto to apply this they'll just claim this is one of the votes that the veto doesn't count on and because legislators get to make all their own rules you really can't stop that and we've seen that the Senate occasionally the Senate parliamentarian tries to stop the Senate from doing stuff there's a weird equilibrium where sometimes the Senate defers to the parliamentarian but in the long run that the Senate has no real deep obligation to do that and can

always change it its rules if it wants to if enough people want to and so I kind of thought this veto is not going to work because you can just redefine Leo's votes into one category the other well I think the thing that turns out that I learned that's really interesting is no because these votes the the topic of the vote is defined by the smart contracts that the vote actually touches or doesn't touch you can Define in a very deep and immutable way whether this is one of the votes that the veto is going to apply to or not and that allows for a form of commitment that I've never seen before in A legislature I don't think it's a Panacea uh I think there are still these broader issues of self- enforcement that

matter for all the reasons Noah is saying but I do think it offers something pretty f fascinating uh in the vein of binding commitments to legislative procedures isn't this the miracle of the US Constitution Noah I mean you've written a biography of James Madison the fact that you can set these rules up front and yet make them flexible enough that they can endure well if we had Madison here he would agree that it was his his Perfect Design um you have to ignore the Civil War and some other uh blips but yeah I mean the aspiration was to create something that would be able to be both rule-based and also responsive to change over time some of the design elements didn't work well I mean the amendment provision we we use

it very very rarely um he probably thought that was generally okay but there have been some circumstances where we really need reforms and we can't really get them more fundamentally it was it's a system that's designed to enable compromise and to enable compromise in the middle and to push politicians back towards the center and that's why you know right now if you ask about sort of the big question the grand questions you know plaguing politics and political science I think it's fair to say that if you have some confidence that the laws of political science are still true then you think that we will migrate back towards the middle because our system is designed to push us back towards the middle and if you on the other hand are

really panicked about where things are going and the possibility for breakdown you think that it might take to you might still believe in the rules but you think they might take too long to operate and then in the short term you could get a breakdown in overall faith in the system's capacity on the other part of it is looking at the world around us and seeing that for all of our polarization lots of elements of our society are still functioning um and functioning really reasonably well amazing uh this has been a fantastic conversation um thank you both so much for all your time thank you so much really fun thank you yeah this is great we sort of took it by Fiat that direct democracy has problems we

mentioned bod mcbo face which is a pretty humorous example but I like are there more serious examples from history from the physical world of direct democracy in action and going arai I mean the most classic example people point to is uh and which the Americas Founders pointed to was Athens so Athens had a pretty robust direct democracy the reality of how it function was quite complicated it wasn't as simple as just like everyone showed up and made every decision they were actually like pretty complex layers of decision makers and stuff but there was a significant component of direct democracy among landowning men and uh one way that people say it

went toy is that during the war with Sparta um you know this is just one telling but like the the people got swept away with passion and were uninformed about the Strategic decisions that had to be made and essentially forced Athens to open a second front in the war by invading uh Sicily and that sort of turned into Athens Vietnam it was like a disaster um and it massively sapped Athens power it was super super costly and that is often held up as an example of like mob rule this is because

the decision to open a second front and invade Sicily was now you said there are complex layers of decision- making but in this respect it was kind of a Bottoms Up decision no the claim is that the mob was manipulated by um ego driven generals who wanted to burnish their reputations by opening a new invasion and that they manipulated the mob into supporting them and if you look in the classical era and you know you could question the motives of all these authors that's sort of the The Stereotype that arises and so Post Athens Glory Days a lot of Roman writing refers to mob Rule and the ability of

demagogues to manipulate the mob as reasons to be very skeptical of direct democracy uh there's like a really famous Passage in Virgil's Zid where he goes on at length um about how you know cynical leaders can whip up the mob and what we really need are seasoned Statesmen who will you know make decisions carefully on behalf of people you know more modern examples hard to say it's so unfunctional that it's really not even it yeah it's really I mean you can point to like uh in Switzerland there's a pretty AG Rive local referendum system I think there's General agreement that it's kind of

crazy but like it doesn't work as badly as some other things I mean you literally at the Canton level in Switzerland you uh vote on who receives passports it's really quite wild yeah there's some great research on this um and you know in the US people point to California as pretty extreme on the end towards direct democracy and that can go both ways um in some ways I think it's an important and potentially valuable institution because it allows voters to surface issues that the legislator might want to ignore and so if you think your legislators aren't doing a good job or are captured by special interests or for whatever reason are not sufficiently

accountable to voters then giving voters this alternative mechanism to force issues could be quite valuable the downside is that you end up with tremendous voter fatigue because you have lots of these votes and the California ballot is ridiculous uh it's it's many many pages long most people including myself can't understand most of the issues being voted on and then the second problem and this is often a problem in direct democracy is interest group capture of the agenda and so how ballot initiatives get onto the ballot is complicated but it's actually not that hard for a well-resourced committed interest group to force

carve outs for themselves onto the ballot and so one thing that happens in California is every cycle we have to vote on this extremely abstruse uh ballot initiative that has to do with whether doctors should be required to sit in on all dialysis and you might think it's doctors who are pushing this because you might think like oh they make money from it but no the doctors do not want to do this and they think it's crazy because there's no medical reason why aor needs to be present for the administration s just a ton of time wasted and yeah yeah it's it's crazy and it's being pushed by uh certain interest groups that are kind

of just more generally in a conflict with doctors and they have stated publicly that the reason they put on the ballot every two years is to force the doctor's interest groups to spend money convincing everyone not to vote for it so it's it's it's a complete waste of everyone's time and resource ources and so that I think is a great example of how these processes get messed up by the way the Irish referendum that just happened my brother-in-law was just visiting from Ireland so I was interested in this going on um I it was interesting to see people reject so strongly these proposed changes to the Constitution I don't know if you tracking it no I haven't followed that very carefully but I do think that's a good example where referendums

if they're embedded into a broader process and it way can be a really good way to get more signal from from voters and this happened in California I think it was 2018 we had a bunch of pretty like culture War related referendums or ballot initiatives yeah and quite consistently the voters really signaled through them that they were in a more Centrist position than California's elected officials um and I think that had a big impact on how the elected officials then proceeded from then on after lost uh these these big ones so I do think it can be valuable but it's complicated how you en act in practice and I think that's kind of where dowo governance is

heading there will still be some direct token holder voting but there will also be a lot more delegation to professional experts on these issues you need to protect against mob rule but also plutocracy and exactly find some sort of uh you know middle way yeah and I think that it uh the delegation stuff you know it's very valuable but it's not going to solve the participation problem fundamentally you're still going to need the token holders or the other voters to pay attention and make sure their delegates don't go Rogue and that's going to require some pretty careful planning because there's definitely a temptation

to set it and forget it in terms of delegating your tokens um but we have lots of reasons to to suspect that if that behavior manifests regularly the delegates won't have those incentives we want them to have to do a good job so I think a lot of the most interesting work right now in Dow governance is around how do you build delegation programs that first of all recruit and give good incentives to delegates while at the same time second of all still encourage token holders or other voters to pay attention and to think about red delegating their votes on a regular basis so that delegates feel like they're being watched what are people putting in place what sorts of

new rules or experiments are happening first thing that's happen which I think is really interesting is a bunch of the largest Dows have instituted they each have a different name I would call them delegate programs which is a combination of often it includes paying the delegates sometimes is a function of how many votes they acrew and creates like a online web interface that makes it easy for for token holders to delegate to different delegates and so you're putting together you're you're creating incentives for there to be delegates and you're helping token holders find delegates um and we've actually done some research there's some pretty interesting evidence that rolling out those programs actually does increase token holder voting

participation probably because you're asking the token holder to do a much easier task instead of voting on like literally changes to the underlying protocols code you're just asking them like find one of these delegates who you like and give them your voting power and part of these programs is also having the delegates write platform statements Andor post videos about what they want to accomplish as a delegate that again helps the token holders find like oh you know that's a delegate that shares My Views I'm going to delegate to them for now fascinating so this is a paper that you're working on currently yeah yeah I'm hoping to have it done in the next month or so we'll see very cool and so basically getting people to delegate

their votes more uh making it low friction making the information available for people to make reasonable decisions about who they want to delegate to and the directions that they'll take a a dow exactly yeah no and I think it's going to be a really important model because uh and this came up in the conversation with Noah I think a lot of people in other parts of online governance are coming to the same same conclusion that we need Representatives because we need this kind of expertise and accountability and we can't rely on direct democracy uh but web 3 is years ahead literally years ahead in experimenting with how you actually set up

representative democracy uh so I think it's going to be yeah really important development I mean we've got this intense like darwinian combat going on you know all these experiments just let loose and seeing which ones will flourish how far away are we from you know actually determining what works what doesn't work and seeing you know the kind of best practices shake out from all this I don't know I think there's probably two aspects to it that we need to have happen before we'll know for sure one is to get dowas to a place where they have you know more broader killer use cases for society which will in turn make the governance decisions

higher Stakes for society and then we'll see which governance structures can stand up to that pressure uh in some ways they're already involved in high stakes decisions uh certainly in these like defi protocols and stuff but they don't have the same kind of uh Global public pressure on them that other online platforms have faced because other online platforms are much more mature have many more you know regular users and so forth so I think that's going to be a really big interesting shift as it occurs that's going to bring the Dow governance more together with what we talked about with Noah in terms of like Web 2.0 governance and then the second is we we need over time to have more

Dows with broader distributions of voting power which is happening over time you know big criticism of Dallas historically has been you know they're clothed in the rhetoric of democracy but the voting power is very unevenly distributed and that may make some of this like delegation experiment sort of of uh unrepresentative of what would happen in a broader democratic system where there's more conflict among users with with roughly equal amounts of power uh and so that is the trend I think in token holding over time and again as these become larger as they touch on more killer use cases for society I think we'll see that broader distribution and that will be another

kind of pressure test for these systems um so those are the two things I'm keeping my eye on [Music] w [Music]