At 01:40 AM 8/24/2006, Rob Lanphier wrote: >Congratulations, you just insulted me by telling me I'm 20 years behind >you, and assuming that I'm trying to solve the same problem you are.
Sorry about the perceived insult. However, I don't think that what I wrote was understood, for FA/DP direct addresses the problem Rob has written about. >Ignoring, of course, the fact that I wrote about something like DP 11 >years ago (it's now in the "1996" section because that's where I lumped >a bunch of my old eskimo.com pages, but I posted this on Hypernews on >May 30, 1995): >http://robla.net/1996/steward/ What Rob wrote about there was not DP, it was standard proxy, as Rob himself notes at the end of the cited article. Delegation is not mentioned, and standard proxy, while it extends the scale where direct democracy remains practical, it runs into the same severe limits, only at a higher scale. DP is a solution to this problem, which I did some up with about twenty years ago, though I have no documentary record to prove it. I may have mentioned it in some posts on the W.E.L.L. in the eighties, but I'm not sure, and my old archives were on 5.25 inch floppies that mostly became unreadable. >I'm talking about something different than DP, on purpose. I'm looking >to create a hierarchy in a comment system, based on a set of ranked >preferences. The problems being solved are: >1. Information filtering >2. Giving people the sport of climbing the hierarchy (more on this in a >bit) DP is a direct solution to the information filtering problem, in the FA context. In that context, voting is a detail, voting really only measures the level of consensus that a proposal enjoys, because FAs leave power directly in the hands of members, they do not collect assets, and if they are DP, they cannot be hijacked by a central administration, for the proxies can reconstruct the entire organization (or the part of the organization that does not accept the hijacking) quite rapidly. What proxies do in FA/DP, essentially, is to filter information: they protect the center from traffic coming from the periphery, and they protect the individual members, at the periphery, from receiving more traffic than they can handle. After all, people might belong to hundreds of these organizations, and, in addition, I imagine that people will continue to have families, jobs, and even hobbies. What I was writing about in my unfortunate post was based on the fact that the kind of structure Rob had described was close to the kind of structures that I first conceived, before I came, finally, to the thoroughly libertarian solution that has come to be known as FA/DP. None of this invalidates what Rob has written. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
