Not my system, just amalgamating newer ideas, nothing really unique here idea wise I am pretty sure.
No I think they will be fine at efficiency and effectiveness but these are not the chief criterion anymore the
deeper concern is where the gains go.
It would still be possible to do stuff like Loomio but the blinded layer or process might still have very strong advantages for more important issues.
I’ve answered your questions you just don’t want to see the answers, so no failure on my part.
You repeat your same points over and over and over and over .
And give zero real world applications.
And you misportray my points over and over in spite of my rebuke and correction.
I don’t care what your philosophy books say… If they don’t relate to a real world, (Not a made up world where everything is Slavery no matter how much somebody may like their job) Then it is total BS…
This discussion is over. Lock the thread. Everyone is sick of our discourse.
That’s fine. You don’t see the point and don’t like the idea. Maybe you’ll change your mind. We disagree and that is fine. But the key area of dispute is that you think current systems on the business side are not the problem and don’t need to be changed much and may only need the tweaking that progress will bring. I see them as the core of the problem in need of radical change. You are convinced that you’ve seen the solution I have in mind and its limited or no real improvement and the proof is that it hasn’t taken over the world yet. I say its gaining traction and with automation and newer approaches it may be the bottom up answer to our top down problems. It’s ok to disagree even if you happen to be an expert in the area and I am disagreeing with an expert with real world experience. You’ve got Janitor sharing your perspective it seems. Other experts on such organizational systems don’t necessarily share your opinion, Wolff, Chomsky, Alperovitz are among them also Sanders seems to see the promise. And users on this forum who don’t seem to share the same perspective include myself, Thomas Anderson, Phillip Rhoades, Traktion, fergish and possibly Happy Being. I’d go further and say the structure of the actual SAFE product in its current form and the structure of the SAFE organization are cooperative very much in the spirit of what I am suggesting.
@Warren I agree with decentralization and building things from the bottom up. However I’m not about to start demonizing all hierarchical systems or judging others. Also I’m a bit more pragmatic and value efficacy and practical examples. So while I can agree with some of what you say and relate to a point you take the whole thing to a very uncomfortable and impractical extreme from what I’ve seen so far.
Its not like we’ve put it in practice. But you discomfort with my zealotry is noted.
It doesn’t matter if it is a problem or not. You have massively failed to explain how complex nuanced technical decisions can be made within your model. The system doesn’t exist because some academics blueprinted it and proclaimed “This is the way it ought to be” It came to be because it is the most efficient method of solving business problems that businesses need to solve.
“Efficiency isn’t important” you say. But we are talking 10 times magnitude or more efficiency. We are talking about people who know what they are doing making decisions that they have time to know how to make. or delegating that same decision to a committee of 10 or more who have no where close to the time to know what they need to know to make such a decision. It means the difference between right answers that people are accountable for and wrong answer that nobody is accountable for. And in most cases wrong answers will cost money and threaten jobs and future revenue.
I would be happy to dialog with anyone who can make a case for the opposite being true, but the truth of the matter is that evolution leads us to hierarchy because hierarchy is efficient.
You can come out with some “This is the way things ought to be” from academics. And that is fine. But in order to make your case you are going to have to give real world examples not drop a bunch of names and say “see” How do we decide between machine A and machine b? How many people need to study up on such thing etc etc. Why are 10 answers from less informed better than 2 or 3 answers from highly informed? Which I have asked and asked to no avail.
I have worked on self - directed work teams. I have worked in cooperatives. I have worked in corporations. I have seen the good and the bad in all. You don’t seem to have a clue about anything that happens in real companies aside from what you may have read in a philosophy book or something. Your examples are all hyperbole – They are nowhere near anything that is sustainable or frequently observable in the real world. Basically you take the worst case scenario and pretend like that is an everyday situation most places. Its not.
I like self directed work teams. When I was building widgets there was no doubt that I knew a lot more about building widgets than my managers did. I should make most of the decisions about how to build widgets. And they gave me and my co-workers near full control on those issues – But the next question up is outside my realm. – How many widgets should we build. I don’t know the customer demand. I don’t know the carrying cost on inventory. I don’t know the obsolescence schedule and when rev 2 will likely come out. Somebody else has to be experts on that – If I where to try to be an expert on that I wouldn’t have time to build widgets. This is a real world example. Most likely there is one of the widgets I built in your house right now. It was a good gig. Still Hierarchal - because that is the only way nature can arrange operations like this. But absolutely respectful to every layer of the organization…
I rebuke your posts mostly because you seem totally clueless. The more I prod you to show a clue, the further you retreat into fantasyland textbook answers.
It’s stupid. Its a waste of time. It isn’t getting anywhere.
I think ordinary hierarchies with bosses etc will remain for many years to come, but there will I predict emerge decentralized structures that will compete with the existing companies, organizations and later on maybe even with governmental structures.
And having anonymous democracy will perhaps be useful in some cases, but in many cases ego and personality will be useful. And remember, even when we interact with our egos and personalities (real or pseudonyms) it’s possible to do that and evaluate what people contribute without being biased by who they are. I have for example looked into conspiracy theories, and then it’s really important to distrust even the “biggest” authorities and experts.
The merit of an idea should have nothing to do with who voiced it, especiallt when its being used as a basis for action.
Accountable to who? Answer, disconnected parasites. Your arguement is equivalent to: the truth of the matter is evolution leads us to the Nazis because the Nazis are efficient. This is pure idiocy.
Also, the person closest to the subject matter would be in the mix of deliberation but accounting puppets would not be able to screw everyone over.
You keep trying to defend what isn’t working.
Take the time to look at iCEO the magic eight ball hierarchy is being automated away. Look at the high frequency trading systems that read the news and respond with their own news stories. Tech is making time for people to broden their expertise. You’re not a fan of democracy, which is crazy, because you see it as a threat to your power or that of your groups.
1 in 7 people in the world are involved with coops. It is the model that can free us from top down corporatism. When we still had more democracy you could get sick without losing your house, income and kids and going into bankruptcy or debt, and with reasonable outcomes even with older medicine. Right now under corporate business first rip off based society even paying 1000 a month you can’t be sure this won’t happen or that you’ll be able to find an emergency room, because of the idiot notion thar ERs are supposed to be profitable.
There was a time when business was a lowly profession in thr US. They didn’t even have degrees for it because it wasn’t considered a real or honorable discipline. We need to go back to that. Did it help a lot when we put money grubbing puppets for parasites over Drs., in hospitals. You really think a Dr., couldn’t do a better job the a hook in the ass bean counter?
Once again, the founding fathers hated corporations and wanted the outlawed. The country born over a fight with one of these tyrants and over a fight with money changers, Even the Monarch had the Quo Warranto corporate death penalty doctrine because he these corporations as rival tyrants. Some concrete practical and real world examples for you.
Corporatism is dying, its reallt already dead and over, the crashes are accelerating because people have had enough of corporate wage slavery both in the workplace (direct slavery where you are constantlt threatened with having your children fired into the street) and indirectly with debt and bills maxed and complete patrician fools like the royalist Jeb Bush who said Americans aren’t working hard enough to support his life of rent seeking luxury.
This other model is about making sure royalists can’t take what isn’t theirs and the complain about being taxed on what they’ve stolen. Its about making sure that concentrations of wealth can’t be used against ordinary people and making sure their money isn’t uses against them. Its also about giving ordinary people a voice in the work place and veto power as they are give the true power of ownership of what was alwaya theirs and for which they have by far the strongest claim. Its about endinf exploitationism and getting royalists inherited wealrh fools like Jeb Bush out of politics.
Its about recognizing that if we don’t want to be property, inherited wealth can never be a basis of power and that the wealth if the wealthy is a luxory we can’t afford if we have anyone in poverty.
But I believe I more easily accept something said by an expert than a layperson. That’s a kind of bias I admit, but it’s often convenient when quickly looking up some information. When I look into something deeply, I often start with distrusting everybody, including peer-reviewed science. That might seem paranoid almost, but check out this quote from the prominent scientific journal The Lancet:
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” – http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1.pdf
And in the business world, keeping the correct information secret and spreading misinformation is a strategy for holding onto power.
And generally, we have been indoctrinated to unquestioningly swallow what authorities tell us. We have been conditioned to rely on second hand sources instead of being able to validate information directly ourselves. Experts today are like the high priest in the middle ages. Only the priests knew how to interpret the information and the general public had no access to the knowledge. The same today in many areas, and we are told it’s too complicated to understand, when in fact what Einstein said seems more correct: if you can’t explain something to a 6-year-old child you haven’t really understood it yourself. The same applies to scientists and other experts. I predict we will experience a massive shift in how we use, teach and learn knowledge.
Wow, awesome post, if you don’t mind. Let the ideas be considered on their merits in a way a child can understand where possible in an internally blinded transparent forum on a regular basis or if concern about cotext is not there on a forum that is completely open to the public in real time or after sufficient delay.
If you give a differential equations test 10 ten random intelligent folks and give the 2 hours to do it they will never come close to getting the same proportion of correct answers as if you gave the same test to one or two mathematicians.
Same goes for tax compliance, Inventory control, accounts payable, Building widgets, deciding which machine to buy, deciding which order to place the machines. Deciding to ship to customer A or customer B first.
Often people in different roles will have conflicts of interests that need to be reconciled. Do we hire accounts or do we hire widget builders? Both could use more labor - but there is only so much the company can afford to hire.
This doesn’t magically get reconciled – Somebody has to do the differential equations on this decision. And 1 or 2 are going to nearly always be righter than 10 intelligent non-speciallists.
In the business world wrong answers cost jobs.
You can throw a bunch of labels and call it monarchist or feudal or whatever you want to call it – None of this changes. None of this will ever change. If you make wrong decisions everyone in the system loses. Even if you make the wrong decisions in a egalitarian manner. Everyone goes down in flames together.
More inflammatory BS. With not an ounce to do with anything I suggested.
And not an ounce of substantive rebuttal about why things happen the way they happen.
Most of us still earn paychecks. Despite the rampant government idiocy. You can say “its not working” but you are comparing it to something that doesn’t exist. Your ‘failure’ is hyperbole from textbooks.
Like I said I have worked in all of your nirvana wonderlands. None of them where that much different than any other company. Because numbers always rule… Decisions that need to be made get made and there are people who love them and people that hate them. Businesses the choose right thrive, businesses that choose wrong flounder, and it doesn’t really matter who or what makes the decisions.
I’ve lived it. You show zero sign of living any of it…
And what form does a group of mathematicians choose? The smarter the organization like say MIT where its all PhDs them more they choose the collegiate cooperative academic model of decision making. You need to consider the model thats coming quickly in books like The Second Machine Age MIT Press where you don’t have widget makers they are all knowedge workers and above just like in academia, and in a world where the highly automated is that can make ends meet this is what you get. And in that environment, unless you get the Koch type influence trying to generate delusion, you don’t throw away mental power or get caught up in the cult of personality and ego. You efficiently consider ideas in real time, if you don’t have an interest or and insight or question you are free to stay on thr sidelines or abstain but you are completely empowered to contribute and encouraged.
You keep repeating this BS about the so called experts but in life and death decisions we rely on a jury of peers because it has higher deliberative capacity and better insight. This situation is iterative a never ending jury, interested because this affects the members livelihood and their day to day work life. Again and again to the point is nor profit for disconnected parasites, there ruled out in this arrangement, the point is the empowerment and quality of life of those doing the work who also own/control it together. The supervisor, manager, exec, board, stockmarket parasite stack and overhead is gone, nothing wasted on supporting its net negative non contribution. The people that make up the organization are free intead if being productized and enslaved.
And again, such people would quuckly cease to buy from, work with or for non democratic institutions. Democracy begins in the work place. This is the way to high compensation and freedomm and 20hrs or less work weeks and the end of being pimped out over and obssessed with intrinsically worthless money.
Its a model time tested in academia (MIT, Oxford…) in juries and Think Tanks, its the model that understandibly dominates where highest quality consideration is needed and new tech can scale it. MaidSAFE could easily implement such model and its not far off from its current model. And it could scale this as it grows but with this model and partner organizations like it it would never have to be very big.
One big advantage of having trusted experts and authorities in the decision process is that it can greatly speed up the decisions. The choices made by known experts can simply be taken as valid immediately, without examining them. And even if some of the expert choices are bad, in the vast majority of cases they will be good and well grounded in established expertise knowledge.
Anonymous crowdsourced decision systems could probably also be made fast and efficient. I think I have already mentioned it in another thread, but I heard that when people guess about say the number of balls in a huge jar, then each individual choice will generally be way wrong, but when all the choices are averaged the guessed value becomes very close to the actual value.
And one could imagine hybrid systems with both methods used and integrated. Something like that. I believe there are many possible good solutions. And as always, the really efficient decision systems will probably be ones we can’t even imagine today. Both decentralization and hierarchies working together perhaps, like in the human brain.
I see your reference to organic seeming integral or developmental hierarchy but I see each cooperative as a cell. Some see a cellular universe, and in a sense even a pixel is like a cell.
But in such a cell expertise diffuses. Id see a hybrid withib a cooperative not bringing back in hierarchy but possibly unblinded like Loomia working with a more formal blinded layer for more mission critical strategic and tactical decisions.
Once again they aren’t enslaved now.
Math is a tyrant no matter who makes the decisions. You cannot spend more than you have. This is true for profits and non-profits alike.
You cannot guess what you will earn without extensive study. You cannot guess what any one function is going to cost without extensive study. You cannot know when to stop doing what you are doing without extensive study. You cannot know when to start something entirely new without extensive study. Business is too complicated to be run by crowds because there is simply WAY too much for the crowds to know.
I am not a slave., It is disrespectful and WRONG to make such a point. When you do, you undermine your arguement with nearly every person in the workforce. We are free to move to a more productive opportunity.
Do you have a job? You give zero signs of experience… You treat everything like some philosophical construct. Its like you are studying the shadows and missing the reality entirely.
Stop dissenting and use your mind to help me figure it out.
Fast forward. SAFE is launched. Its successful. David and Nick are tired but the world is demanding the OS and Search and Up Voting Systems and Distributed Computing and SAFE Mesh and SAFE certified hardware, and borrowing from Suarez Smart Mob etc.
They don’t want even for a while to run on 2 of the 12 cylinders. The core members are brought in to a new MaidSAFE structure. It uses all the new tools like iCEO and Loomia. Its a Distributed Automated Cooperative as it is completely flat and relies heavily on automation for its production pipeline.
For important strategic and tactical decisions they have a blinded real time persistent decision method.
Its very much like Loomia, but its blind. The decorum means ideas are considered and responded to and voted on without regard to who made the comments. If someone starts using pronouns or code to reference themselves or others, group members can opt to anonymously vote to flag this as a referential comment. When the count reaches a pre-agreed upon number that person’s comment is removed and they are blocked from the vote and further commenting in that decision thread. The group in the beginning off the process decides the threshold for decision in terms of number of votes or consensus and also duration, but the commenting process is available 24-7 until closure. Any topic or decision can be reopened pending a similar process. In the beginning David and Nick want veto power so their votes initially count for more. But as trust in the process grows (and it does) they drop the veto power and go with one to one votes. This process creates an atmosphere of plausible deniability which means people don’t have to couch or justify, it makes it possible to cut out preliminaries and put forth honest decisions and assessments.
These threads can be kept internal or transparent during the deliberation or released after an interval. In this environment people are not bound. Agreements here do not force action on others. They are free to abstain, or not participate or not offer comment.
What is the penalty for disregarding the crowd consensus? Who is going to punish me for spending the company money and not turning in the expense reports correctly? Where do they get their power? Hey, the NSA crowd took over a majority and says we oughta switch to TCP/IP routing. Citibank, AT&T, IBM and the NSA are the biggest users of SAFE and provide massive farms (You wouldn’t know it because everything is anonymous, remember)-- They really want the “aiding of crime” thing to go away… What if I don’t go along?
How do you know if speech is sponsored or not if everything is anonymous?
Who is the DAO to tell me what to do? Isn’t that another form of tyranny?
Do I look like a slave?
Or I am free to ignore it. and it will keep paying me anyway because peace love and lets all get along?
There is no difference… If you work you still have to do what needs done and some evil entity is going to tell you what to do. Be it a leader or an ignorant mass. You will either be bossed around, or the work that needs to get done will fail to get done because everyone is working on what they want to work on and not on the work that needs to be done.
Careful who you bring in. Focus of activity is the point of the ongoing constant deliberative process. Always a boss huh? So you admit your gov overlord is inevitable? If that is the case why not try for the most benevolent probably software based totalitarian system we could hope, you know one that prioritizes the needs of the poor.