You can always leave, and the intent would be to make that as painless a process as possible. There are also internal and external options already designed for people who want to keep one foot on the outside (so to speak), which would probably be a good match for exactly the sort of person who’d be more likely to decide it wasn’t a fit, right?
Those are kind of conversations that came up years ago, it’s probably safe to assume that the obvious hasn’t been missed until you’ve done a double-check But I also left a LOT out because I’m trying to put together something that gets read. (EDIT: Feel free to point any out anyway! Preferably with possible solutions! You’re a clever one, and I’m kind of an ‘every problem prefers three solutions’ type of guy and I like when somebody comes up with something awesome because the pump wasn’t primed in advance )
But yeah, like I said, nothing’s perfect, but we need more options, don’t we? And this one has definitely not been tried yet. Plus this one exists on top of all the other ones, so we’re not talking about REPLACING Nations, instead it’s SUPPLEMENTING them.
Also, for some people this is just not going to be a good option, and that’s the point. This is for the few billion who aren’t going to create (or look for) problems. I wouldn’t consider targeting people who wouldn’t throw their hearts into such a thing until we’ve run out of everyone who WOULD…and I think that’ll take a while when you take the non-first-world nations into account, true?
Together, I think they support the concept that a society based on equality requires some sort of opt-in structure as otherwise there’s no reason for humans to go to the mental effort (our current socioeconomic system rewards people who seek to be ‘extra important’ and economically punishes those who cooperate freely).
I personally also think it supports the ‘people should be able to move freely between groups with completely different structures without risk or difficulty’ concept that had been gradually incorporated into the co-pernation concept thanks to a lot of input, experience, and science…but I’m willing to admit a little personal bias there.
Fun! I’m opting in to workshopping the first point.
Can we be good Rawlsians and say unfair hierarchy is detrimental … ?
There are cases when we want to opt into a hierarchical relationship in order to facilitate better cooperation.
For example, if I ask @shaddack to mentor me to root and unlock a phone, I need the hierarchy of student and teacher to work with him toward that objective.
Or if I join a softball team I accept my place in the hierarchy under the coach and more experienced players so we can cooperate strategically.
Yup, those are exactly the sorts of things that wouldn’t fall into the negative category. I think in when you get down to it the ‘negative’ hierarchy is that which exists without free and open consent…so situations where individuals are forced into tiered hierarchies, caste systems, and groups where individuals are placed above others without much for responsibility or accountability.
Leadership is still a valuable trait, as are mentorship and such. And sometimes people just want things to be simple and would rather hand off a lot of responsibilities to somebody who they think could handle them better.
It depends a lot on what you want to accomplish within the structure and how important the benefits of cooperation are to you and in that scenario. It doesn’t do any good to be in a flat higher maintenance system when none of the benefits are in your list of priorities, y’know?
It’s probably also important to acknowledge that we all change over time, at different rates, and in different ways, so even if you want something small and flat one year doesn’t mean that the next you wouldn’t thrive in a larger environment that does have some tiering…and when each of those options is populated by people who are choosing to live in them and accepting the responsibilities appropriate for their role then it’s a lot easier to manage than when you’ve got something like we have now…where everyone is trapped in a very specific system and only has limited mobility in one small part of their lives (jobs), and that mobility varies a lot from person to person.
I agree. A distinction is also needed between new opt-in agreements and those background agreements (constitution, laws, conventions, language, etc.) we’re born into.
We can opt into or out of the new agreements, and background agreements are stickier, true?
I have not read this exchange even close to comepletly. But… But… But…
Humans are not equal. There, I said it.
Egalitarianism and meritocracy are ways to punish my brother and father. Mental effort for an egalitarian society is not available to every participant. Hierarchy, with extreme empathy can work quite well.
In the abstract, power can never be taken, only given. That is, if a person is of sound mind, his decision to obey whatever order is given to him is his decision alone: who he obeys is entirely up to him, thus no one really has power over him, except that which he surrenders voluntarily. There can be incentives and disincentives, positive and negative consequences, to obeying or disobeying, but such is the way of any decision.
The problem then becomes that people compel other people to obey them using force, deceit, or manipulation, or threat thereof: threatening or providing negative consequences for disobedience beyond those inherent to the decision, falsely promising positive consequences, or meddling with thought processes in order to prevent rational thinking. In an ideal society, every decision would be a fully informed one, and made freely and openly, without force, deceit, or manipulation. This would be as egalitarian as a society can be, as everyone would have their minimum needs met, and then any leadership would be based on actual merit and open consent.
Of course, the system breaks down when you ask the question: how do you enforce the rules about force, deceit, and manipulation, without appointing someone to use force, deceit, or manipulation to stop them? And once those people are allowed to use such tools, how do you prevent them from using those tools to compel people to give them more power?
Yup, with the current list of opt-in and opt-outs for most people often being close to zero, sadly…and even in those cases it’s a pretty limited and largely lame set of options from the job standpoint. And it’s very hard to choose a new economic or voting system (and again, the options are pretty weak)
I think that’s also where Dunbar’s number really can’t be ignored. There are no ‘big’ solutions that work from the top down, only well designed small ones that can interact well together and support each other. You can have a LOT of distinct groups of 100 people or so when you’ve got a million to work with, right? They don’t all have to be exactly the same.
Well, ‘can’ and ‘do’ are very different things. You can’t count on a benevolent dictator and most of us humans haven’t experienced one.
That being said, as we hit on, people work better in different systems based on who they are at that particular time in their lives.
The ‘opt in’ bit is important. We’re talking (some of us, at least) about something that people join rather than something they’re born into, and within that system people can choose between a number of different systems (egalitarian, hierarchical, squad based, whatever) …but under that huge umbrella based on the commitments everyone makes nobody is ‘superior’ to anyone else inherently, we all just have different skills and different roles
That’d be an absolutely mandatory attitude for it to function well, and people who feel the need to be special or have people who are below them are best left out and don’t provide any net value.[quote=“nimelennar, post:67, topic:70851”]
Of course, the system breaks down when you ask the question: how do you enforce the rules about force, deceit, and manipulation, without appointing someone to use force, deceit, or manipulation to stop them? And once those people are allowed to use such tools, how do you prevent them from using those tools to compel people to give them more power?
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That’s why in the discussion a few of us have zeroed in on the opt-in co-opernation type structure above. If people are ‘trapped’ in a system then their consent isn’t very strong, they need to be free to leave and move to better groups as they see fit, and that transition has to be largely risk-free so they’re not coerced into staying based on anything other than the merits the group offers.
That reduces the ‘need to enforce’ down to a far smaller level than it is currently, as people can just leave for things they like better. And anybody who really doesn’t get the point can always be fired.
Anything else creates the mess that we’re in, and we have lots of that exact mess here and we could use something different yet viable.
We agree that there are at least two tiers of agreements for opt-in in or out. There are the Dunbar agreements of 100 or fewer people and the background agreements including cultural, political and economic contexts and which — among other differences — generally have explicit or implied “membership” above the Dunbar number.
We may or may not agree on the Dunbar number has a hard limit for ‘big’ solutions.
It seems like a limit not worth disputing for groups like project teams, congregations, and property owners’ associations.
OTOH it’s a default opt-in to injustice to turn mostly away from other larger groups and all “top down” remedies.
Do we really mean to opt out of gubernatorial or national groups for electing political representatives? Are we going to decide in advance that supporting the Violence Against Women Act or the Civil Rights Act is a poor use of resources?
You answer the question by saying the smaller groups can interact with each other.
Is that all we need to say? I think more is needed to examine the relationships between Dunbar groups and the larger groups if fixing injustice is really part of the plan.
Otherwise we have an insufficient basis for deciding whether the activity of any Dunbar group is making matters worse from the perspective of the larger background agreements.
Or are we going to limit ourselves and say the Dunbar groups work better and not try to make the claim that Dunbar groups are a necessary component for remedying unjust circumstances?
(Unless I misread them, the second option is closer to the answers that might be given by @nimelennar or @japhroaig.)
I think that the Gospel of Matthew has a great idea for dealing with Dunbar’s Number:
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
So, however you treat someone outside of your Dunbar group, you’re, in reality, treating someone very important to you. It should, essentially, make Dunbar’s Number obsolete within Christianity.
It’s just a pity that very few Christians are that Christian.
I’ve been thinking about this recently with relation to marriage (or other relationships, but marriage is more formal). In many ways, I want to remove just about every obstacle to my wife leaving. There are some that aren’t true any more (it would be illegal, she would be destitute without my financial support, it would be social suicide), but there are also things like sunk costs and pressure from other areas that might make her think that she couldn’t leave if she wanted to. On the other hand, I’m not her sugar daddy and so she’s responsible for supporting her own quality of life - we’re happy to support each other temporarily, but we both need jobs as I have no intention of giving up the bulk of my income as the price of separation. On my part, I have to support equal pay for women (which they do have at our age group) and support her career as her job isn’t to stay at home and support mine.
This doesn’t mean that we’re not committed to each other or that we’re not willing to make significant sacrifices or longer term investments for each other, but the thing keeping us together has to be the advantages rather than negative pressure keeping us from separating.
(I’m not suggesting a universal, just my own particular experience)
I think this is one place where Dunbar’s number applies, but it needs to be regulated by structures a lot larger than this. If relationships were allowed to develop without any protection of rights, there would inevitably be very asymmetric relationships without any protection of the weaker party.
I think of it more as a default starting point…as in ‘we should start and fall back to conditions that match our biology when things aren’t working, not a firm limit we’re stuck with. It’s definitely something we need to remain cognizant of because it is arguably, as Mr. Wong said so well 'the single biggest reason why society doesn’t work’
If you’re talking about how the co-opernation concept would interact with the world at large, then I prefer simply not giving external systems any more respect than they deserve and treating them (just like the Worldminers would treat holes in our economic systems) as resources that can be exploited/optimized for the greater good.
With this point of view Citizen’s United is a good thing because we can still work together to (for example) primary Colbert/Stewart vs. Stewart/Colbert and other things that don’t so much support broken systems as take advantage of their flaws.
Our solution to civil rights and violence towards innocents of any sort should default to 'we want to employ/embrace/incorporate anybody who’s willing to join the fun, and non-charity external systems that are created by internal people should be the second option. I don’t think supporting specific organizations has a ton of real value until all the other options are tested, they’re responding to the existing paradigm and therefore working form a position of weakness.
Yeah, I could’ve said it better, I actually describe a couple of variants in Doctor Who and the Rightly Broken Rule…but there are TONS of ways for people to interact directly with small groups while still supporting larger ones and causes.
That’s not a hierarchical issue or anything like that because each group is specializing in their roles. We can still have huge tiered structures, just none where a CEO is ‘worth’ a hundred nurses.[quote=“hello_friends, post:70, topic:70851”]
Or are we going to limit ourselves and say the Dunbar groups work better and not try to make the claim that Dunbar groups are a necessary component for remedying unjust circumstances?
(Unless I misread them, the second option is closer to the answers that might be given by @nimelennar or @japhroaig.)
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Nah, like I said, people can always choose larger groups! We just have to be aware of our own biological issues before we try to expand our influence, because our neurons fire differently in those situations and we have a history of just pretending that’s not true…the whole design is around admitting what we are rather than expecting to be what we’re not.
So a huge group of tens of thousands of people operating towards a common goal is completely viable, but we’re not forcing everybody in those groups to adhere to a specific system nor are we limiting groups abilities to interact and interface with different groups. And if ten thousand people choose exactly the same system then yay, that means ten thousand people think it’s awesome.
I’m still keen at keeping the starting point small (I like 42) because that sets the stage for variety and creates more options for people to choose from. I wouldn’t think it’s a good idea to move a way from that as a default with the ability to create larger systems until we’ve proven we aren’t going to screw anything up.
We still have LOTS of ways for groups to interrelate, and it’s fundamentally not that different from how business units operate in corporations or the military operates with it’s own tiered structures, just with the groups having more complete control of their day-to-day operations.
Yeah, if we try to STAY small then we end up just like the many failed Utopias and can’t get anywhere.
The ‘embrace Dunbar’s number’ concept is primarily to take into account the things we tend to deny that evidence validates is true (scientific method on top of the corporation and all of that)
The secondary reason is to give people a whole lot more options to choose from, so they can ‘vote with their feet’ and explore and experiment with lots of different systems in a single lifetime rather than only getting to sample one.
That way the best options will grow and create forks of themselves, and the crappy ones will fade away due to being depopulated
It’s a good idea, but it’s not something people take to naturally.
There are lots of people who can overcome it, but we can’t expect everyone to become magically enlightened, nor can we design a system that relies on that as a concept, true?
Instead we need something that encourages it and raises better humans down the road, but at the same time can survive just fine if people don’t feel the need to fight their own biology…and we do naturally turn strangers into NPCs.
I think an important point is to recognise that larger groups don’t inevitably turn out on top, and there needs to be a limitation of the power of leaders and an increase in the power of individuals to choose their own path and to have a stake in the systems that they’re supporting. The fact that successful corporations are generally large isn’t accidental - there are significant advantages that they have that small groups don’t have access to, especially in the legal and tax systems. Working to change that balance of power is a larger scale problem, just as ensuring opportunities outside of the group is a society level problem that has to be bigger than the Dunbar number.
That’s fair, and I can agree unless that point becomes axiomatic for any injustice remedy
And that’s not what we’re saying that the Dunbar number means. We’re not discounting the risk that consciously opting in as a cooperative and self-actualizing member of a Dunbar-sized group may contribute directly or indirectly to unfairly burdening or oppressing other people or groups.
A “Dunbar group” includes a non-negotiable, non-normative practical limit on group size. It’s also a way to begin thinking about projects and opt-in approaches to community and work.
Okay, unless I’ve misunderstood, count me opted-in for Dunbar group planning.
Yes, this is the sort of problem that concerns me too. It’s one thing to opt-in to a Dunbar group. It’s another to ignore the risk of tacit approval for injustices embedded in larger systems, like corporate, individual or estate tax laws. Or the Citizens United decision. I think the problem is avoided if I’ve understood @William_Holz (summarized above).
I agree that the institution of marriage is good for seeing risks and inequalities within social groups. Without a meaningful right to exit the group, there’s increased risk of trauma and unfairness to more vulnerable members of the group. And sometimes intersecting group member identities complicate the problem.
For example, the leader of the group may claim special cultural group rights not to publicly educate the group’s child members. Honoring the claim may protect the group. At the same time, honoring the claim may increase risks disproportionately for girl group members, esp. if they later exit the group.
That pretty much nails it. I arbitrarily picked 42 because
It allows for multiple groups to mesh without hitting that 150 ‘limit’, so you can group people who are only on the same page in one way (like people who are part of the same ‘work team’ but are split between hippies and technocrats, and so on) as well as allowing for families and such to overlap.
But it’s more just setting the stage for ‘if you’re only influencing that local group then you can probably just go with the flow and not bother thinking too hard, you’ll need to pay a bit more attention once you break outside of that limit because of evidence and a verifiable biological issue we all encounter’
It’s just another component of the whole ‘pay attention to who we are, not who we want to be’ thing and the concept of placing the scientific method on top, it just also offers a lot of opportunities so it’s worth some extra focus.
I think we want a system where ‘Cosplay island where people use a Netflix like voting system and produce entertainment from a collection of writers that play RPGs in the evenings’ is a legitimate option…even if it only makes a few dozen people extra happy and extra productive…it’s still way better than ‘contractor in a call center that lives in Detroit’, right?[quote=“hello_friends, post:77, topic:70851”]
Yes, this is the sort of problem that concerns me too. It’s one thing to opt-in to a Dunbar group. It’s another to ignore the risk of tacit approval for injustices embedded in larger systems, like corporate, individual or estate tax laws. Or the Citizens United decision. I think the problem is avoided if I’ve understood @William_Holz (summarized above).
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Yup, you nailed the plan. I just wasn’t going on about those bits in my design because I wanted to start as a less threatening entity and work our way up. I had to focus on defining a specific solution and approach, even if the intent is something much broader.
Yeah, I really need to finish that article I’m working on.
Basically the concept is a combination of This, This,
and This.
It’s admittedly a little ambitious, which is why I’ve got the plan that starts as a small business and uses only existing legal systems and structures to get where we need to be.
But I also left a LOT out because I’m trying to put together something that gets read. (EDIT: Feel free to point any out anyway! Preferably with possible solutions! You’re a clever one, and I’m kind of an ‘every problem prefers three solutions’ type of guy and I like when somebody comes up with something awesome because the pump wasn’t primed in advance )
