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One interesting question is if you can get the benefits of legibility without the very human downsides of corruption, authoritarianism, poor decision-making, an

One interesting question is if you can get the benefits of legibility without the very human downsides of corruption, authoritarianism, poor decision-making, and self-dealing that come from having humans at the top of this pyramid of legibility. I work for one of those Big Tech companies, and internally, it is anything but legible. Very consequential decisions are made by a small team that happens to have responsibility for the codebase in question, oftentimes very far down in the org. Culturally at least there is a respect for data and a sincere effort to do the right thing, but when your decisions impact 3 billion people there is no way a human can fully evaluate them. And ironically, a recurring problem for the last 20 years is that the CEO has no idea what's going on within the company. Most records about what's being worked on, why, how far along they are, who's involved, etc. are firmly in the realm of metis, tribal knowledge that's passed down in 1:1s and watercooler conversations. The more I encounter other powerful government bureaucracies (like building codes, local government, zoning, legislation), the more I suspect they work the same way. Somebody at the time it was formalized decided "this is how it should work" on the basis of the best information available at the time, and then once it's formalized, it's virtually impossible to change. I'm interested in crypto not for the "get rich quick" or even the "currency" aspect, but for the prospect of replacing corporations and executives. Crypto's big innovation is in creating a shared reality everybody accepts without a centralized authority to enforce that reality. This is exactly the same efficiency advantage that having a single executive gives. Could you use blockchains to essentially create an "artificial executive", a plan of record that everybody gets behind that doesn't fall prey to human fallibilities?

ben_w 2y ago
> Could you use blockchains to essentially create an "artificial executive", a plan of record that everybody gets behind that doesn't fall prey to human fallibilities? Yes but it will either be a rigid bureaucracy, or subject to manipulation by interested parties, or an inscrutable AI, or some combination of those. It's not like we have good results when trying to write flawless code, that never needs big fixes, and that is so future proof as to never need updates.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  Probably true, but the big question is "where is the efficient frontier, and is it better than what we can achieve now with human institutions?" I like to think of AI not as "artificial" intelligence but as "aggregate" intelligence. Computers are really good at aggregating the opinions of millions of individual humans. That's what search algorithms like PageRank do, it's what recommendation systems do, it's what voting systems do, it's what markets do, it's what statistical quant trading systems that try to predict the movements of markets do. For these purposes, a computer seems to be reliably better than humans. So why not use computers for what they're good at, aggregating the behavior of millions of individual humans, while still letting humans give their own input.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    While computers are indeed very efficient at this: to the extent that the aggregation is useful, it gets gamed. PageRank was great, until SEO was invented by someone who realised there was an opportunity if they gamed it for free advertising, then it became a Red Queen race between SEO teams and Google. Markets are mostly pretty good, but the USA has a special law about onion futures because someone realised they could game the free market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act Etc.
    - nostrademons 2y ago
      But powerful humans are also gamed, and usually more easily than computers. Haven't you ever told an exec what they wanted to hear, or refrained from telling a manager something that might make you or your project look bad? The whole lobbying apparatus is about altering the perceptions of lawmakers so that you get more favorable laws. People usually operate on fewer pieces of data than computers, and so one falsehood can alter their decision-making more than it would a computers. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than what we have now.
      - ben_w 2y ago
mr_toad 2y ago
Why would the Shareholders want that?
- nostrademons 2y ago
  It would be a new set of shareholders, and their motivation is the same as always: "Other people are rich and I'm not."
Frummy 2y ago
Some DAO’s (decentralized autonomous organizations) function well in their small local area of application, like the rest of crypto there’s usually a centralised organisation behind it, and some scams and failed applications obviously
c0balt 2y ago
> The more I encounter other powerful government bureaucracies (like building codes, local government, zoning, legislation), the more I suspect they work the same way. It depends. Knowing some government organizations in Germany this is quite spot on especially when "CEO" level positions are set by political policies based on regular elections and not based on normal carrer-based government servants. However there are exceptions but they tend to be rarer the bigger an organization becomes. > Somebody at the time it was formalized decided "this is how it should work" on the basis of the best information available at the time, and then once it's formalized, it's virtually impossible to change. This is indeed also accurate but depends on precedent and the number of relevant dependent entites. If you have precendet of changing a set of rules (somewhat) regularly then dependants can get used to adapting it, e.g., tarifs, tax code and parts of building code. This however gets a lot harder when more people depend on it because you will then have to make sure (information of/about) your rule changes get propagated appropriately, e.g., updates to driving safety legislation that affect everyone with a car.
Spooky23 2y ago
Yes and no. The point of a government bureaucracy is to eliminate arbitrary decision making from the people in the field to the extent possible. Taken to the extreme, you have the social security administration, which has a manual which essentially prescribes a procedure for any of thousands of scenarios. Zoning or code compliance requires some level of professional judgement, but the standards and procedures are driven by legislation or policy. Pushing that stuff to the end user just pushes the complexity of the business rules to the end user. Because there’s usually multiple political parties or interests and a level of public accountability, governments are good & efficient at delivering what they are mandated to deliver. (What they are asked to deliver is usually the “problem”.) When was the last time that benefits checks weren’t issued? Commercial entities with similar qualities are also very bureaucratic (ie banks, airlines). Tech companies tend to be pretty bad at internal controls, and engage in a lot of hold my beer.

ben_w 2y ago

> Could you use blockchains to essentially create an "artificial executive", a plan of record that everybody gets behind that doesn't fall prey to human fallibilities? Yes but it will either be a rigid bureaucracy, or subject to manipulation by interested parties, or an inscrutable AI, or some combination of those. It's not like we have good results when trying to write flawless code, that never needs big fixes, and that is so future proof as to never need updates.

nostrademons 2y ago
Probably true, but the big question is "where is the efficient frontier, and is it better than what we can achieve now with human institutions?" I like to think of AI not as "artificial" intelligence but as "aggregate" intelligence. Computers are really good at aggregating the opinions of millions of individual humans. That's what search algorithms like PageRank do, it's what recommendation systems do, it's what voting systems do, it's what markets do, it's what statistical quant trading systems that try to predict the movements of markets do. For these purposes, a computer seems to be reliably better than humans. So why not use computers for what they're good at, aggregating the behavior of millions of individual humans, while still letting humans give their own input.
- ben_w 2y ago
  While computers are indeed very efficient at this: to the extent that the aggregation is useful, it gets gamed. PageRank was great, until SEO was invented by someone who realised there was an opportunity if they gamed it for free advertising, then it became a Red Queen race between SEO teams and Google. Markets are mostly pretty good, but the USA has a special law about onion futures because someone realised they could game the free market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act Etc.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    But powerful humans are also gamed, and usually more easily than computers. Haven't you ever told an exec what they wanted to hear, or refrained from telling a manager something that might make you or your project look bad? The whole lobbying apparatus is about altering the perceptions of lawmakers so that you get more favorable laws. People usually operate on fewer pieces of data than computers, and so one falsehood can alter their decision-making more than it would a computers. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than what we have now.
    - ben_w 2y ago

mr_toad 2y ago

Why would the Shareholders want that?

nostrademons 2y ago
It would be a new set of shareholders, and their motivation is the same as always: "Other people are rich and I'm not."

Frummy 2y ago

Some DAO’s (decentralized autonomous organizations) function well in their small local area of application, like the rest of crypto there’s usually a centralised organisation behind it, and some scams and failed applications obviously

c0balt 2y ago

> The more I encounter other powerful government bureaucracies (like building codes, local government, zoning, legislation), the more I suspect they work the same way. It depends. Knowing some government organizations in Germany this is quite spot on especially when "CEO" level positions are set by political policies based on regular elections and not based on normal carrer-based government servants. However there are exceptions but they tend to be rarer the bigger an organization becomes. > Somebody at the time it was formalized decided "this is how it should work" on the basis of the best information available at the time, and then once it's formalized, it's virtually impossible to change. This is indeed also accurate but depends on precedent and the number of relevant dependent entites. If you have precendet of changing a set of rules (somewhat) regularly then dependants can get used to adapting it, e.g., tarifs, tax code and parts of building code. This however gets a lot harder when more people depend on it because you will then have to make sure (information of/about) your rule changes get propagated appropriately, e.g., updates to driving safety legislation that affect everyone with a car.

Spooky23 2y ago

Yes and no. The point of a government bureaucracy is to eliminate arbitrary decision making from the people in the field to the extent possible. Taken to the extreme, you have the social security administration, which has a manual which essentially prescribes a procedure for any of thousands of scenarios. Zoning or code compliance requires some level of professional judgement, but the standards and procedures are driven by legislation or policy. Pushing that stuff to the end user just pushes the complexity of the business rules to the end user. Because there’s usually multiple political parties or interests and a level of public accountability, governments are good & efficient at delivering what they are mandated to deliver. (What they are asked to deliver is usually the “problem”.) When was the last time that benefits checks weren’t issued? Commercial entities with similar qualities are also very bureaucratic (ie banks, airlines). Tech companies tend to be pretty bad at internal controls, and engage in a lot of hold my beer.