Governing democracy, the internet, and boardrooms

25:56Mostly a default that 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 answered 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 genuine challenge. And then you, that leads to thinking, well, maybe we should have a region, but different rules and different regions. And it turns out it's harder to do that on a global platform than you'd think.

26:31And most of the global platforms have tried as much as they can to avoid that because they don't want this kind of extremely bulk andized platform where it all depends on where you logged in from and, you know, if you have a VPN, you can get different standards. And you can imagine what a what a mess it can quickly become. So those are part of the challenges. And then the last part of the challenges, all of our examples of democracy and 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.

27:09It'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 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, 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 boating Macbode Face thing for a second, because I think it's really important.

27:45It's a great example of two or 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 voting backbone face decision because why would most people pay attention to 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 with both base.

28:24And so those two things go together quite tightly, low participation and then selection for unusual, unrepresented, extreme views or preferences or trolling. So I think that's like an important thing to understand. And then the third, which is also deeply related, is just the general problem that 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? It might hurt a little bit more. Well, that kind of gets for the Noah's Denominator point.

29:06I 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, you know, that was the problem with open AI's governance. It's been a challenge with university governance, the trustees in some sense don't have skin in the game. You measure the skin by how much money they put in that they would say, I mean, I'm not, not that I'm always sympathetic to them, but the donor's point. We're the only ones with skin in the game.

29:38You 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. And when we look at all these voting problems, if you're asking people to vote on things that don't clearly affect them, that's a reason you might not get very informed participation. Furthermore, 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.

30:15It's not going to swing the outcome. And so, you could care infinitely much about the decision, and yet you're incentive to actually pay attention to those very, very small. So, we put those things together, and we ask, okay, how are you going to do something democratic to make 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 you do that? And I think there's been several directions of experiments that are pretty fascinating.

30:50One, which I alluded to earlier, is what inthropic, as well as meta, and others have been playing with where 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 skid in the game through the tokens that they hold. So those are, I think, two sets of experiments we can learn a lot from. And I would just add one more framing thing here. 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.

31:35And so one 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 quasi professionals and they do the decision making and the voting. They have a 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.

32:13And one of the really interesting things about the Internet, and I think it's important background tool 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 any internet before everyone used it?

32:44I 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 these experiments, the citizen assemblies and the crypto or DAO 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 good time to try to reinvent what they're doing.

33:17But there's also a reason to be modest when all of the countries in the world that use certain technology, namely democracy, have converged to a first approximation 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. It's worth, definitely worth trying. But you want to have like some degree of modesty about the probabilities 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.

33:52And I completely agree with no a thousand percent, 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 burdensome. This was going to be my question. Like does the internet, is it a step change? Like have we ever a new era where based on the tech that's available now, this is conceivable? There are no certainties in the social sciences, but this is as close to certainty as I'm willing to go is the technology is going to make no difference to this problem.

34:32And the 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.

35:14And 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. 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.

35:53And 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 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 Bairied 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 because way beyond technology that has to be solved through other models besides direct democracy and I'll just note but almost all of the big voting dowels in crypto now have some form of representative democracy as a result of this.

36:49If you could get into this and you think, no, no one end to your wrong, you know, like technology. You guys are just elitists, come on, let them all go away. What I would say is, if you're an aspiring technologist, ask yourself, what's your vision for the company you're gonna have found? And in 99 .9 % of cases, people are like, oh, I wanna 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, the VC's will first get involved, then they'll be shareholders. They're gonna dilute my votes, and they're gonna take the company, and they're gonna do all kinds of stuff.

37:20I don't want to do with it. And I'm the one who knows, because it's my company. I spend the most time, and I care about it. That's exactly the problem that Andy's describing. So I always find it amazing when those students come in and say that, because they 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. 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.

37:52Do you want to be in charge of it? And in my experience, almost everybody thinks the answer that is yes. Although there are some tweaks, right? I mean, so another thing that Anthropic did, and 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 when Anthropic is doing there, it's not the full OpenAI thing where 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.

38:41But 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 OpenAI 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 mitigating risks that could arise. Yeah, it's designed to avoid problems on both sides. So take the OpenAI problem.

39:19You want to have some, you know, break glass measure. And so the break glass measure was they created this non -profit entity. And that was the overarching body that the Board of Directors belonged to. And then underneath that Board of Directors was the for -profit entity that was the 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 believed the company was going the wrong way, they could break the glass and fire the management of the company. And they did that. They believe that things were going terribly awry that this is bad for the world.

39:58And they broke the glass and they fired the directors of the company, the management of the company. Until it backfired and the glass back in their face. And exactly. They didn't realize that what would then happen would be that Sam Altman would then say, well, 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 them, which is maybe not so shocking because of course you're going to agree to jump ship. And so then it backfired and then the members of our board 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.

40:38But 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 were worried about a problem and want to break the glass 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. And it does give some real reasonable responsibility to people who don't work for the company. 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.

41:17They're there at the level of oversight and break -glasses and emergency, whereas the oversight board is meant to be in every day. You know, there are hard problems that met as dealing with and the oversight board weighs in on that. So I would call them cousins. They have some conceptual similarities, but they're not siblings and they're definitely not twins. It seems a little bit interesting that you have a certain set of people who have this opportunity to work inside 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.

41:51They 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 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.

42:29And they still probably want to do a good job, but 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.

42:59So 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 about reputation. But there's a whole bunch of people in the world who take the jobs that they have, 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 thing they're doing. They like doing it. And then so you ask, they go, 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 never have to do a day's work again.

43:32I 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 real rational actor on 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 felonies, one of those people who the day you got tenure, you never did anything ever again. And you know, that hurts. So, and I care about it, not hurting. It's impossible to picture you know, I stopped working after 10 years. Such a lay about. So anthropic is also one of the examples of these citizens assembly.

44:05So it might be describe the citizens of somebody's annual. Let's let's go right 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 know enough about the issue prior to having some kind of deliberation together and or reefing some of 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's assembly, or users, in the case of one of these online, I'll call them user assemblies, other people call them different things.

44:46And 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 on whatever the difficult issue is. And this is something it's had some history in the real world going way back. And it's closely related to this idea for a major Greece of sortition. What is sortition? Sortition was this idea that you would randomly choose people to be in charge of various issues.

45:31It's election by lottery. Yeah, some people call them lottockercies also. Yeah, 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 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 elected. But for reputational reasons, they try to do a good job because 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.

46:04So you pick them randomly and then you do it again the next year. It's sort of like jury duty, but like heightened to the absolute most 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 Pitch Hiker's Guide and some of other great books that's basically like any person who wants to be in charge is Ipso facto unqualified to be in charge. And I think that was the idea of sortition is we don't want these, you know, untrustworthy, overly ambitious, potentially corrupt or sociopathic people who desire power to be the ones in charge.

46:56We 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 know, it's an interesting solution to that problem. It also raises a bunch of its 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.

47:49I've been randomly chosen 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 dominant. So those are kind of, that's one of the key trade -offs. If you do a bad job, maybe you'll get, maybe you'll get ostracized and exiled. All right. They used to do that. They would actually do. But there's 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.

48:29So imagine you're running your startup and you're gonna choose someone to be your CTO. And you go, I'll do it by a sort of addition. 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 one year period, I could get up to speed fast enough. Like maybe if you gave me a year, I'd make some progress, maybe, but I don't have the relevant expertise. So it's also partly based on a great amateur, in a positive sense, amateur idea of government.

49:06Kind of, 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. 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 weren't dumb enough to think that they could go out and win wars by picking a random person to be the general.

49:46That required some expertise. So 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 are also downsides attacking someone in the job for too long. But, you know, this sort of like, it's sort of like turn limits on steroids. So I think where I completely agree with all that.

50:16And so where this is gone, so I was one of a number of people who helped design this user assembly for Meta, it's called the community forum, and based on these concerns, but also knowing that having straight up user voting would be very challenging. 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 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 going forward, I mean, my personal view, I don't know what, no, thanks.

51:03My personal view is, I think these things have to be expanded in some way to bring in more expertise into 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 in a sense of accountability for that, I think.

51:41And as Andy says, there's also, there couldn't be a lot of upside. So I mean, take up a hard kind of values -based, you know, ethical or moral question. You know, let's go back to the, 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 1 ,000 people, and they're genuinely representative of the users, which is a tricky thing. 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 three days.

52:23They 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 pro -sex and they want to have as few clothes as possible, or they're deeply religious and they want to have as many clothes as possible. And so you could imagine that you get, and I think it's plausible. And I think in some of the experiments that Andy's run with Meta, you get a more thoughtful nuanced balance answer.

53:00And I think for those purposes, it's great. It's better than a focus group because there's maybe a little less control. 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 are some scenarios where deliberation produces perverse results, where people get into a cascade where this is like how people burn witches.

53:35Group 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 design builds in that are 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 change their mind about something. they arrive at a, you know, workable solution. But my question there is, how do you ensure that the information and education that people are receiving is non -biased or objective and, you know, because whoever's presenting you the menu of options, they have a great amount of control on steering you toward a certain outcome?

54:19Good 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 we're discussing is precisely the misinformation problem. What's our baseline? Where do we even start on what is reliable? It's a super challenging problem. I think there's a couple different answers, none of which are perfect. And this is a broad problem in all democracy, not just the online world, and not just these assemblies. Though it's perhaps sharpest in these assemblies since the entity organizing the assembly makes decisions about what information to present.

54:56I would take a couple things. One is you try not to have a monopoly on information. And so, you know, a 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 become invoked a little bit on a certain part of the Twitter community or X community, I guess, in these days, to say that there's lots of fraught debates in society where it's obvious that one side is factually correct.

55:41And so we shouldn't show both sides that both citerism is itself a problem. Of course, there are 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 big effort in this is get a diverse set of experts to present all sides. 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 analysis and views.

56:39And that's something I've talked quite a bit about with Dow's because I think that's an issue in crypto too. On that point, there's also a body of literature about, 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 classic modern formulation of that is John Stuart 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 in falls will help us get the right arguments. And that's, it sounds kind of like a trite argument, but if you really think about it, it's pretty deep because it's not obvious.

57:17And it's interesting in that way. I think another really interesting aspect of this whole challenge to me is jumping out to the bigger political world of democracy. So you were asking, before Robert about, 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 the 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.

57:55And 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 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 sometimes. I'm like, talking to somebody and they're like, Oh, I'm sure I think X and I'm like, I know you're for 30 years. You don't know anything about that. Why do you have this strong position? And the answer is as a time saving device in a world where there's so many issues and they're so complicated.

58:28Once we've picked a team, you know, we're blue, we're red, or we're libertarian, or we're anarchist, or whatever we happen 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 its defensible time saving heuristic to siding with our team on those issues. Because we kind of think that someone else has thought about 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.

59:16Like, 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 closed -minded because we're broad 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 do not have any much, anywhere near as much information as we're getting.

59:45So 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, people generally are pretty reasonable.

1:00:22They don't, it turns out they don't want to be so partisan or so hostile when they're put into the right environment. And that connects to other things about our polarization, right? Which is that it's much larger than it seems because we consume so much of it through these online platforms where 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 moderating a panel at Harvard and some students decided they were going to leaflet against me, and they were handing out leaflets people as they came in.

1:00:59And the leaflet was like, it was like a four -page leaflet, but its text was entirely a download from a Twitter thread that someone had created attacking something that I'd written. And I was like, this is so, it was just so weird because it didn't translate well to the format of the leaflet. it. But also, I just thought to myself the extremity of the formulations that this person was using against me online. They didn't really translate to the forum where we were having a thoughtful conversation. And I sort of felt bad for the people who were leafletting because it's one thing to call what I said, I think that bit of horse shit, which is what they were describing me as saying.

1:01:44They 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's seen great. And then the punchline of it was, there was like a substantive issue where I had, in the thing I'd written that they made, they made them angry, I'd 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.

1:02:13On Twitter, it sounds great, right? Like, Feldman is full of app and worship, so why should he even bothered 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.

1:02:49So it was extreme. Now things are sort of slowly getting back to maybe normalist who's strong a word, but towards a calmer way of being. And I will say during all of this, our classes were normal. Like school went on. People learned stuff. They studied for exams. We did have a normal campus life, But all of the intensity that was being felt was, it was felt. So it was, it was an experience and not for the most part, I think 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 think so. You know, I mean, there's now, so what are universities bad at and what are they good at?

1:03:29Universities 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'd be a trader. You'd have some job where you could really take advantage of that. And of course, there are some people in your university who are really intellectually quick, but the best of them use that intellectual quickness to fill in their debt 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.

1:04:07Now 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 of the university's do pretty 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 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 who's nervous system is always like, go, go, go, and that's really valuable in a whole bunch of dimensions of life, but in universities, not really one of them.

1:04:44And so we do our best when we read a little bit. And that's now what's happening. And that's better. So in that sense, we're heading directionally in the right way, though, by no means are we there yet. I think it's a really good, an 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, in some cases very old, long -running institutions that are not straightforward businesses and therefore face quite complex governance issues. Certainly some of the ones 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.

1:05:31So not every faculty member leans in and participates to 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 developing the very best research in the world and a lot more focused on a lot of other 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, entrenched in so many different areas, and trying to spread their attention across so many different things.

1:06:14I wonder if it was 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 the truth and of knowledge. I don't think that's true. So if the deans get together and hold a meeting 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, 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 seriously.

1:06:49It'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 benefit of the doubt because they are 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 are universities, but it's happened in universities, so I've kind of fallen into this part of the mission creep that Andy'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?

1:07:27And 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 not the, by no means an overall solution, but it's the first step. This is happening all across corporate America and beyond, 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.

1:08:01You 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 You can sometimes step back and say, look, we're not going to take a view on this or that important thing. The companies find themselves in these positions because they're lobbied. They're lobbied by people who are trying to affect consumer behavior often. Sometimes they're able to pull that off. Met has been subject to a boycott. Other companies are also subject to various boycotts. You are living in a real world.

1:08:43if 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 tying your heads. You really, you have to make what we would call on the social science as a incredible commitment. You have to get to the point where the people who would try to force you to take a position on this 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.

1:09:27And 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 one of the few universities 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.

1:10:05But 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 you're mentioning this concept of credible commitments 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.

1:10:46When 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 bind services and corporations and applications to the way that they to some set of agreed upon circumstances. Of course, the thing that comes to mind is DAOs distributed to autonomous organizations and how you can sort of create these 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 Dow with respect to this topic.

1:11:34The 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 and code how they're 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.

1:12:14Especially 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 any time 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. It 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 platforms market.

1:12:48And 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, looking like the huge dispute between Epic Games an 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.

1:13:27But 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 platforms are 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 economic relationship between a platform and its producers, I think could be important. You know, broad sense, that's what a constitution is. I mean, a constitution, the best metaphor for it is Odysseus and the Odyssey when he's on his boat and he's going to the island of the sirens.

1:14:06And he knows they're going to be so appealing to him, so beautiful, their songs, so beautiful, that he's going to jump ship. And so 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 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 or we're going to take away their, you know, their right against arbitrary arrest. And so we try to bind ourselves from doing that. that we try to create institutional mechanisms to bind ourselves.

1:14:42Notably, 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 had 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 Aristotle view, or whether it's better to have the wisest person you can get your hands on in charge.

1:15:11Because the rules won't give you the best outcome all the time, which is broadly the play -dove view. And they're both right. You need some back and forth or productive tension between those things. And that's true in Dows, where you don't want the thing to lead to a total spiral down. you need to have some break -glass measure. And it's also going to be true in something like the oversight board, where the company sometimes has committed itself absolutely to filing 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.

1:15:56They 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. And so it'd be nice to say there's like a magic solution to this, but there isn't. And there's no purely technological solution, but there's no solution that has no technology because the following are rules of art technology. So you need both. And that's, it may not be the most, the willing conclusion, rules always win, or people always win, actually sometimes some wins and some of the other wins.

1:16:38And that's real life. So maybe that's not a terrible place to end what I have to say on the topic. I want to build on 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 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, then it has some special power that it gets, that it accrues over time because there's nothing to stop someone from tearing it up and ignoring it.

1:17:27And so that's why we call them self -enforcing. They only really buy into the long run when everyone has a long enough track record of agreeing to be bound 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, there was a battle over the legitimacy of the crown and all that. That's a tons of history of this. 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.

1:18:01And I think Noah is right. He was hinting at this, I think, that blockchain or ways of writing immutable agreements into code do not, 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 as long as they agree to it. And so there's still something deep, and like he was saying, art rather than science about it. However, and 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.

1:18:43And I think it's best highlighted through an example. So there's a a doubt called LIDO. And LIDO has been discussing publicly for a while. It's 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 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.

1:19:37So if they'll just claim like, if I don't want the vetoed apply, they'll just claim this is one of the votes that the vetoes count on. And because legislators get to make all their own rules, you really can't stop that. And we've seen that in the Senate. Occasionally, the Senate parliamentarian tries to stop the Senate from doing stuff. There's a weird equilibrium where sometimes the Senate differs to the parliamentarian, but in the long run, the Senate has no real, deep obligation to do that, and can always change 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 light -ose votes into one category or the other.

1:20:12I think the thing that turns out that I learned that's really interesting is no. Because these votes, 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. That allows for a form of commitment that I've never seen before in a legislature. I don't think it's a panacea. I think there are still these broader issues of self -enforcement that matter for all the reasons that Noah's saying, but I do think it offers something pretty fascinating in the vein of binding commitments to legislative procedures.

1:20:53Isn'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 perfect design. You have to ignore the silver war and some other 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 use it very, very rarely. 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.

1:21:35More fundamentally, 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 And 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 two, you might still believe in the rules, but you think they might take too long to operate.

1:22:20And then in the short term, you can get a breakdown in overall faith in the system's capacity. And the other part of it is looking at the world around us and seeing that for all of polarization, lots of elements of our society are still functioning and functioning really reasonably well. Amazing. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you both so much for all your time. Thank you so much. Really fun. Thank you. Yes, it's great. We sort of took it by Fiat that direct democracy has problems. We mentioned boating both face, which is a pretty humorous example. But are there more serious examples from history, from the physical world of direct democracy in action and going awry?

1:23:03I mean, the most classic example people point to is at which the America's founders point to two 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. There were actually like pretty complex layers of decision makers and stuff, but there was a significant component of direct democracy among land -oating men. And one way that people say it went to rye is that during the war with Sparta, you know, this is just one telling, but like the people got swept away with passion and were uninformed.

1:23:51informed about the strategic decisions that had to be made and essentially forced Athens to open a second front in the war by invading Sicily. And that sort of turned into Athens Vietnam. It was like a disaster. 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. So the claim is that the mob was manipulated by ego driven generals who wanted to burnish their reputations by opening a new invasion, and that they manipulated the mob into supporting them.

1:24:51And if you look in the classical era, and you know, you could question the motives of all these authors, that's sort of the stereotype that arises. And so post -athons, glory days, a lot of Roman writing refers to mob rule and the ability of demagogues to manipulate the mob as a reason to be very skeptical of direct democracy. There's like a really famous passage in Virgil's Anita, where he goes on at length 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.

1:25:37It's so unfunctional that it's really not even strong. It's really, I mean, you can point to like in Switzerland, there's a pretty aggressive 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 thing. I mean, you literally at the cancer level in Switzerland and you vote on who receives passports. It's really quite wild. Yeah, there's some great research on this. And you know, in the US people point to California is pretty extreme on the end towards direct democracy. And that can go both ways. In some ways, I think it's an important and potentially valuable institution because it allows voters to surface issues that the legislature might want to ignore.

1:26:27And so if you think your legislators are doing a good job or are captured by special interests or for whatever reason or 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. 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.

1:27:08And 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 carveouts for themselves on to the ballot. And so one thing that happens in California is every cycle, we have to vote on this extremely abstruse 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 a doctor needs to be present for the But it sounds like just a ton of time wasted and yeah, yeah, it's crazy and it's being pushed by 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 doctors interest groups to spend money convincing everyone not to vote for it.

1:28:14So it's a It's a complete waste of everyone's time and resources. 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. It was interesting to see people reject so strongly these proposed changes to the constitution, I don't know if you're 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 in a healthy way, can be a really good way to get more signal from voters.

1:28:52And 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 that California's elected officials. And I think that had a big impact on how the elected officials then proceeded from then on after they lost these big ones. So I do think it can be valuable, but it's complicated how you enact in practice. And I think that's kind of where Dow government 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.

1:29:40You need to protect against mob rule, but also plutocracy, and find some sort of, you know, middle way. Yeah. And I think that 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. But we have lots of reasons to suspect that if that behavior manifests regularly, the delegates won't have those incentives.

1:30:23We 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 re -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 happened, which I think is really interesting, is a bunch of the largest hours of instituted.

1:31:00They each have a different name. I would call them delegate programs, which is a combination of often it includes paying the delegates. Sometimes it's a function of how many votes they accrue. And creates like an online web interface that makes it easy for token holders to delegate to different delegates. And so you're putting together your creating incentives for there to be delegates and you're helping token holders find delegates. 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.

1:31:39Probably 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 and or 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.

1:32:13Yeah. 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, 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 DAO. Exactly. Yeah. No, and I think it's going to be a really important model because, um, and this came up in the conversation with Noah, I think a lot of people in other parts of all the governance are coming to the same conclusion that we need representatives because we need this kind of expertise and accountability and we can't rely on direct democracy.

1:32:55But Web 3 is years ahead, literally years ahead in experimenting with how you actually set up representative democracy. So I think it's going to be 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 actually determining what works, what doesn't work, and seeing 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 down to a place where they have 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.

1:33:51In some ways, they're already involved in high stakes decisions, certainly in these like DeFi protocols and stuff, but they don't have the same kind of global public pressure on them that other online platforms have faced because other online platforms are much more mature, have many more regular users and so forth. So I think that's gonna be a really big interesting shift as it occurs. That's gonna bring the Dow governance more together with what we talked about with NOAA in terms of like web 2 .0 governance. And then the second is we need over time to have more Dow's with broader distributions of voting power, which is happening over time.

1:34:34You know, big criticism of Dallas historically has been, you know, their clothes, the rhetoric of democracy, but the voting power is very unevenly distributed. And that may make some of this like delegation experiments sort 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. 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.

1:35:13So those are the two things I'm keeping my eye on.