Large Scale Decision Making
Joum
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@purplelibraryguy posted this in another group's discussion. Lots to consider in this and I though it should be posted here.
Hello. Apologies in advance for wall of text. I’ve been thinking about these issues for a while.
It seems to me that there are two problems of scaling. If anything the less serious one is how to make a decision involving huge numbers of people. The more serious one to me is, over millions of people there are too many decisions. Not everyone can be involved in all of them. How do we scale the use of Loomio-like direct democracy mechanisms to allow all the decisions to get made? How can we make all the decision-making direct and accountable without everyone spending 57 hours a day making them?
A few thoughts about the first problem. First, it seems to me that while on a smaller scale there are good reasons to favour consensus approaches to decision-making, when you get to a decision with huge numbers of people participating, while it would be good to retain some of the sensibilities of consensus approaches I don’t feel that actual consensus is a feasible way to do things. If you have twenty people you can work things out so you get a result everyone can live with, or even work things out so you have an everyone who will be able to work consensually together. If you have two hundred thousand, I suspect there will always be some who disagree.
Second, taking that as a background assumption, I also think that with that many people it becomes a bad idea to structure things so that voting is on one proposal. There will be many ideas, some will not be able to be assimilated into a single proposal or persuaded to back off. A mechanism for decision-making on a large scale would ideally accommodate voting among multiple options suggested by discussion participants. Otherwise the first mover would control the debate, and the structure would be very vulnerable to the whole “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done!” fallacy. I tend to favour a ranked ballot type setup for deciding among the multiple options, but there are lots of possibilities.
For really large decisions, this would also likely become unwieldy. With enough participants, you could end up with hundreds of proposals to choose among on a single decision topic. Many of them would be largely redundant. There would have to be some way of winnowing them down before the real decision was made. I envision a couple of things, first having some moderators who would look proposals over, try to figure which ones were functionally about the same and get the proposers together to draft a common unified version. And some kind of pre-decision dealie perhaps, where only the (some number of) proposals with the most “likes” or whatever actually got decided among in the end.
For me this problem, while difficult, has been less of an Achilles’ heel for egalitarians than the second problem, of decision overload.
The current approach divides decision-making hierarchically and among things like ministries, departments and so forth, such that top-level political representatives make very broad decisions and set the tone for those further down, who make decisions on less broad issues within their particular silos, and set the tone for those still further down in further-subdivided silos and so on. Eventually you get down to the majority of people who make very trivial decisions in very narrow contexts, or effectively no decisions at all. Those higher up can generally countermand the decisions of those below. Overall, an awful lot of people are involved in making decisions of some sort, and on average few are involved in each such decision. All of this is a result of a lot of practical compromises with the core organizational goal. In hierarchical decision-making, the ideal for those at the top would be for them to be in complete control, make all the decisions, and for everyone else to make none. This is physically impossible, but they do try, as terms like “Taylorism” and “micromanagement” attest.
One key objection to serious popular involvement generally in decision making is that if you radically expand the number of people involved in each decision on average, the total amount of time and effort devoted to the making of decisions greatly increases. And indeed, increases even more than the number of people, because of the very problems we’re discussing here; the more people who might have something to say, the more there is for each of the people involved to assimilate and potentially respond to, and so on. It’s a process of communication, and more people means more happens; without care it can be exponential.
But I think a lot of the problems with the ways decisions are currently made are more about the hierarchy and the silos than they are about the number of people actually making the decision. Hierarchy means those deciding are different from either those the decision impacts or, much of the time, those with knowledge of the issue, both of whom are generally lower on the totem pole than those deciding. Thus hierarchy also means those affected and those with knowledge cannot change the decisions. And of course people higher up, deciding what will happen to others, typically have different interests from those of the people they’re deciding for. Silos, the idea that a particular group owns a kind of decision and is allotted sole power over it but has no involvement in or power over other kinds which may be related, make all this worse—they further limit information and accountability, and widen divergences of interest.
None of these problems have much to do with the sheer number of people involved in the decision. It’s just that we think of it in a binary opposition: The opposite of elite/autocratic decision-making is decision-making by “the people”, and so we think in terms of everyone in general deciding. That would be the ultimate. I think for an egalitarian approach to decision-making, the practical compromises should not and need not involve a little limited re-introduction of hierarchy. Rather, we still need to split up decision-making but the split can be done horizontally. What’s needed is distributed decision-making, with groups making decisions about particular kinds of things, but flat groups open to entry on a voluntary basis by anyone who cares to, perhaps also deliberately inviting people with relevant expertise. Further, groups could nest, be broader or narrower. There will be a need for some decisions to see wider participation. Rather than someone higher in a hierarchy being able to countermand decisions from lower down, a broader group should be able to countermand the decisions of narrower groups that are part of it. And, a narrow group contemplating a decision should have a way for people in it to decide it’s too big and needs to be kicked out to the wider group.
So in this sense, the model I’m proposing remains the opposite of the hierarchy model in a sense. Rather than the big, wide decisions being made by the few at the top with decisions going narrower as they go down to the masses, the few big wide decisions would be made by pretty much everyone, the public at large, with narrower decisions made by smaller groups according to their interests (in both senses of that word).
We see something like distributed decision-making today in Free/Open Source software production; people decide what projects they will involve themselves in, if any, and a huge ecosystem of software has grown up this way. It has its shortcomings, though; many important but unnoticed niches end up with crucial work undone. In an actual full-blown society trying to make decisions this way, I might expect compensation through something analogous to jury duty—everyone might have to be involved in some minimum number of decision-making groups, and in addition to the ones you choose, there might be some sort of random assignment so that necessary but unsexy things got some attention.
(On a side note—Richard Bartlett mentioned Parpolity. Back when I first heard of it, I was expecting great things from Parpolity because I’m quite a fan of Parecon. Then I read through the basic proposals, and it strikes me as just a delegate model pretending not to be one. Worse, it’s multi-layer delegation, making those in the “top” layers even more distant than they are now. It seems much like the way the more unwieldy, unresponsive large union federations operate today. Not an improvement, not immune to capture by powerful interests, not the direction I’d like to see at all. This sort of committee-of-committees-of-committees model has been proposed many times, I think because starting from a single group that seems like the obvious way to generalize, and perhaps without technology it would be all that could be done. But I don’t think it stands up to serious thought and I am certain that we can do much better nowadays.)
Well. That’s my, rather more than two bits especially at today’s prices. I hope it’s in some way useful or thought-provoking to somebody.
Deleted User Wed 29 Apr 2015 11:45AM
Oops forgot the link to the article:
https://hbr.org/2007/06/how-successful-leaders-think/ar/1
Joum Wed 29 Apr 2015 10:23PM
"The beauty of DDP is that you don’t move on until the people present understand what the minority has to say."
"It seems to me that to make good policy we need to engage the people in the development phase rather than just in voting on the final product i.e. making the decision."
Great points.
"In today’s world simple and clear is mostly not available. Most issues are complex, messy and intertwined."
We create the complexity. It is the main tool of the powerful. We are 'forced' to jump through many hoops, but really, the hoops don't exist. They are not rules of nature, they are created by humans.
As for the complexity of technology, yes it is complex but I think it is being increasingly simplified.
I think complexity is something that can be changed.
Greg Cassel Thu 30 Apr 2015 12:51AM
@claudiaperrybeltra , thanks for your thoughtful contributions here. I'm having a hard time getting anywhere Googling with Direct Democracy Process (DDP) and/or Lewis Method. Can you please verify if this page is what you mean? That page seems to translate pretty well into English, but it's not very informative from my perspective.
I certainly agree with including diverse people in the decision process, especially the critical aspect of developing proposals.
Deleted User Thu 30 Apr 2015 11:02AM
Sorry, my mistake its Deep Democracy. here is the link
http://www.deep-democracy.net/
Purple Library Guy Thu 30 Apr 2015 6:37PM
I also think Claudia makes very good points. The unfortunate part is that the kind of deep deliberation you're talking about, where people stop to assimilate and understand the ideas of people with minority opinions, is I think particularly hard to scale up.
It may well be that ultimately, no matter what we do to overcome it, there is a bias in direct and deep democracy towards small. This suggests that if we're ever running a society in that kind of way, we'll be better off trying to make the economic structures and so forth smaller and less far-flung and complex. And there will probably be a natural bias in that direction. I don't think everything can or should become local; both on a practical level and a cultural level I don't think that's ideal. But at the same time, it seems like the current social and political culture actively prefers and pushes towards big, complex and tangled, partly because it's a power model with hierarchies. If your objective is power and you reach the top of a hierarchy, how can you continue to get more? Make it a bigger hierarchy, extend it somehow. And partly it seems as a somewhat deliberate device to overcome challenges from below by making decisions and power as distant and apparently irrelevant to ordinary people's lives as possible, as invulnerable as possible to challenges from things such as naturally smaller-scale direct popular democratic processes. So I agree with Joum, mostly.
I do think the mechanisms I'm suggesting in my first post can make it possible to keep decisions mainly small, leaving the kind of deep deliberation Claudia's talking about possible, while scaling decision-making overall to a wide scope capable of challenging current models. But such a system will still work better if things are less huge and entangled, leading to fewer reasons to kick decisions out to larger groups and so less decision-making overload and fewer decisions being made in larger fora that make the best deliberation methods harder.
Greg Cassel Thu 30 Apr 2015 8:17PM
I don't want to oversimplify things, but I keep coming back to the idea that binary propositions should succeed or fail based on a mandate for supermajority support. It's a very simple principle. It incentivizes people to learn how to find common ground.
It's not necessarily any harder to find a supermajority than a simple majority. It just requires less aggressive proposals. (If a proposal would require a lot of 'selling'/ marketing, then it probably will and should fail.)
The common ground, or supermajority, of a large group is smaller than the common ground of a smaller group. This is perfectly natural. Thus, to whatever extent supermajority is stressed, decentralization and local rule/ autonomy is stressed. But that's not to say that there wouldn't be some common ground at the largest possible scales of direct democracy-- even globally.
Purple Library Guy Fri 1 May 2015 5:27AM
Hmmm . . . well, I'm Canadian, and in Canada we have experience of requirement for a significant supermajority for key decisions. It has its downsides. It is so difficult to reform our constitution that many needed reforms and/or updates have been abandoned, and often in Canadian politics the mere words "But doing that would require a constitutional amendment" are enough to kill an important idea. Nobody ever wants to face another round of constitutional wrangling that gets nowhere. This is why, for instance, we still have an unelected senate unaltered from the earliest days of Canada as a country. Nearly everyone dislikes the current setup, but there seems no way that any particular proposal would be able to command the required supermajority to change it.
So, I'm not saying no supermajority requirements. But I'd suggest going easy. Too high and you'll never get anything done.
On a side note . . . I see a philosophical problem with supermajority requirements. That is, there's an ethical defense of simple majority requirements. There's a different ethical rationale for consensus requirements. But any particular supermajority rule is essentially arbitrary, or at best a pragmatic compromise deemed (by a supermajority?) to generate good outcomes. It doesn't really bother me if I find the case for the good outcomes persuasive. But that raises questions. What is the optimum rate of success for propositions? What is the optimum level of controversy required for a proposition to fail? How do you determine something like that?
robert green Fri 1 May 2015 11:35AM
the idea that we can "make things less tangled and big" per @purplelibraryguy pre-supposes a different problem set than the one we actually have. what we have learned over the past 30 plus years is that the world's interconnections are baked into our reality, and that the scale of the problems we face are massive, not small. there are places where the idea of micro-decision making is great--and there are even places where big problems (electric power transmissions distribution) have small answers (micro-grids and local control over solar power arrays that feed a small neighborhood or favela).
all of that might play into a "smaller is better" paradigm, and i'm well aware of how "too big to fail" went down here in the US. but the bigger truth (!) here is simple: the most important issues facing humanity are transnational, multilateral, and require people to behave like they share their policy and politics with other people who don't look like them. global warming, whose effects are going to be greatest, initially, for the poorest amongst us, whether in micronesia or bangladesh, does not get solved by micro-actions. one can like that or hate that, but it doesn't change its essential truth. these types of problems require expert guidance (we are talking about the most complex systems humans have ever tried to understand), massive response across numerous stakeholders and so on. so while one can hope to reform the behavior of individual stakeholders (corporate or governmental, intra or international) one cannot realistically propose to make the solutions "small" in any sense of small d democracy. one must listen to those who have devoted their lives to helping the rest of us survive on this small and lonely orb, and one must take actions on massive scale using massive instruments of power in order to solve these problems.
Greg Cassel Fri 1 May 2015 5:06PM
I think supermajority has typically been hard to achieve because people don't 'have' to pursue that option. They can usually pursue a more aggressive simple majority alternative, even if that effort runs into a supermajority roadblock further down the road--for instance, U.S. Senate filibusters and Presidential vetoes. (So much energy wasted in 'symbolic' votes. And then, when the 'stars' align properly to remove the filibuster and veto protections, look out!)
Simple majority appeals to people's desires to simply get their way; to not communicate, to not compromise. They try to cobble shaky coalitions to get everything they want, regardless of how much it will alienate others (whom they may regard as enemies.)
I understand the philosophical clarity you find in simple majority voting, @purplelibraryguy , but I don't consider that clarity to be an ethical justification. I personally don't think there is any ethical justification for any majority to impose their will on any minority. I'm a pragmatist, however, and I know that coercion and violence aren't about to magically disappear regardless of what we seek politically. I seek simple tools to generally reduce coercion and violence.
I believe in voluntary associations whenever possible, and I think we have all the technical tools and knowledge we need now to develop our voluntary associations with a great deal more of collective intelligence and collective learning than we have previously. So, naturally, I believe in raising the bar for decisions made 'by' groups with varying levels of involuntary membership-- i.e., citizens of political entities. Few people statistically speaking have realistic choices in their national citizenship, and personal agency is limited even on the level of state/province and local living arrangments-- especially for poor people. So, I think the goals of government at each level should genuinely reflect the interests of diverse minorities.
I really do think that we could achieve actionable supermajorities on many key subjects, including the need for sustainable energy, environmental protections, reducing wealth disparity and many other subjects. However, people are very deeply wrapped up in their partisan struggles for supremacy.
Deleted User · Wed 29 Apr 2015 11:45AM
I have been rather silent on this, but not without thought. In preparation for tomorrow here are some of these derived from my personal knowledge in change facilitation, human development, consciousness and neuroscience.
Also, neuroscience shows that we are anything but rational. In fact our emotions have ruled our mind and actions (amygdala in limbic brain) for far longer than judgement simply by the way the brain developed.
The part of the brain used for judgement, organisation, strategy (in pre-frontal cortex) does not fully develop til 20 to 25 and sometimes even 28 years old. Until then emotions definitely rule. Connecting the limbic brain and PF cortex apparently creates emotional intelligence. There are plenty of people who do not make that connection. Due to this the norm of decision making, expert or not, is also based on personal beliefs learnt through life experiences and situations, and psychological development.
So as you see you can create a perfect decision making model and not get it perfect, simply because everyone's mind works different.
Based on my work with Direct Democracy Process (DDP) (Lewis Method if you want to Google it), the only way this wisdom can surface if you include many different people in the process of decision making. That is a representative spectrum of the population. Success has been reached in combining DDP with other communication methods which draw out individuals wisdom. The beauty of DDP is that you don't move on until the people present understand what the minority has to say. As part of this process is also acknowledging that everyone in the room has authority on the subject, not just the expert, some people speak from experience. And to ask what it would take for them to come along. This comes close to a consensus model of decision making. But on the way it tries to bring out all the knowledge people hold, even the unconscious knowledge.
It seems to me that to make good policy we need to engage the people in the development phase rather than just in voting on the final product i.e. making the decision. The sharing of knowledge to support this process is then essential.
I think that the Australian system of mandatory voting stops much of the progress from happening in this country. You can see how much political views are 'inherited' in a family. This inheritance effectively shapes the experiences and beliefs of people into the future. So families who have an active discussion about politics will have raised kids and young adults interested in political discourse, while those who do not will not. E.g. a way off example is sport. If you get kids interested in a sporting club around 10 years of age, they will become attached to that sporting club. It works with other interests too.
As we currently have a large apathy towards politics, decision making will exclude all those that don't have the awareness, the interest or the mindset capacity to digest political discourse. Politicians self-interest and the medias terribly biased reporting does not help to break through and hold the attention span of people for more than a few days. This does not help decision making.
In today's world simple and clear is mostly not available. Most issues are complex, messy and intertwined. Hence, people don't go to the trouble to understand, because it takes too much effort. We can see what happens when politicians are trying to break it down into simple. In Switzerland the people voted and agreed on an initiative which has implications with the Bilateral agreements with the European Union...its a massive legal headache.