[EM] Proportional hierarchy

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

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.