Mina as a lab for deliberation

Governance
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Hey everyone!

It’s Ben again- researcher in Mina Foundation’s protocol governance team :wave:

We recently explained how we want to share our research on key governance concepts, principles and best practices.

One initial problem we have been exploring is how Mina Protocol’s governance should be organised to harness the intelligence of individual community members to make the best decisions that are aligned to the wishes of the Mina community.

Last month we published the first in a series of research blog posts to explore the potential of collective intelligence where groups of people are organised at scale to solve public problems in ways that often outperform individual people alone.

We now want to publish the second blogpost that explores the role of deliberation in collective intelligence. What is really exciting is that deliberation can be a unique feature of Mina’s governance compared to other blockchains so Mina can set an exciting example to the rest of the industry, as well as the wider world!

Thanks for the feedback about making blogposts simple to read. This blogpost is quite long but we hope it is still readable since it has a nice mix between ideas (first half) and specific examples (second half).

We welcome any initial feedback on this draft blogpost before we publish it shortly.

For example, some questions to consider:

  • Deliberation helps people identify their preferences- and their rationales for them- before voting so that the result is more likely to reflect what the community really wants. How do you think deliberation could be effectively deployed in Mina’s decision making, such as the MIP process, to complement voting?
  • What do you think of the different types of deliberation tools presented in this blogpost? Are there any specific examples you think should be applied to Mina? Are there any other examples you think are worth exploring?

Please feel free to provide comments in the document linked above as you read or leave messages directly here in MinaResearch. We are thinking about publishing this blogpost next week and want to discuss it at the governance Q&A Town Hall on the 28th. Feedback before then would be great!

Best wishes

Ben

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Greetings @BenK_MF

In your topic “Deliberation counters cognitive biases”, you say: Groupthink may also be responsible for decision making that eventually led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Many believe “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was a false flag to start a war with Iraq that was profitable for Dick Cheney, the Bushes, BlackRock, the central banks, the oil companies, and of course the military industrial complex.

Julian Assange expresses it succinctly in this video clip but there are many layers to the issue

Consider the following leaders:
Napoleon, Hitler, Lincoln, Garfield, JFK, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein
Some leaders are “good” and some are “bad”.
But good/bad has nothing to do with whether or not their countries are attacked and the leaders are killed. What matters is whether or not the leaders cooperate with the central banks. Leaders who refuse to have their countries plundered by central bank fiat currency will be killed, and their countries will be plundered by military force.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayana
It’s deja vu all over again - Yogi Berra
In this video clip we see that the U.S. central bank controlled government is accusing Iran of non compliance with nuclear arms treaties when the nuclear arms inspectors testify that Iran is in full compliance. It seems the powers that control the United States are working the same “Weapons of Mass Destruction” disinformation campaign that worked so well against Iraq and against the American people. It should be noted that the Iranian Central Bank prohibits usury and lending at interest.

In Sharia law, usury, or riba, is the charging of interest on loans, and is strictly prohibited. Sharia law prohibits usury for a number of reasons, including:

  • Equity: Sharia law aims to ensure equity in exchange.
  • Exploitation: Sharia law considers lending with interest to be an exploitative practice that favors the lender at the expense of the borrower.
  • Wealth protection: Sharia law aims to ensure that people can protect their wealth by making unjust and unequal exchanges illegal.
  • Monopoly: Sharia law views riba as a tool of monopoly.
  • Misuse of money: Sharia law views riba as a misuse of money, which should be used for real spending, savings, and investments.

From the above we may see why the U.S. central bank controlled government seeks war with Iran.

Two points to consider with respect to your comment about group think and Iraq is:

  1. Our community will need access to uncensored information and uncensored opinion if our group is to avoid manipulation of the collective consciousness and the resulting plunder as we have seen with Iraq.
    This section of Beemocracy for Mina describes one of many possible immutable and censorship resistant forums for our governance discussions.

  2. Cryptocurrency is an escape from central bank fiat currency which makes our community a natural enemy of the central banks and their supporting complexes. This should be considered as governance is created. Governance must be decentralized with no leaders and must exhibit all the qualities of a commodity (not securities)
    This section of Beemocracy for Mina covers this topic in greater detail.

Also, it is noteworthy that Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, was arrested in France today and is facing 20 years in jail for refusing to censor his platform. The charges include terrorism, money laundering, and more—looks like they’re targeting anyone who defends free speech. This highlights the need for governance without leaders.

Durov probably never imagined his platform would be so important.
Now imagine money, voting, and social media all running on Mina.
That is the nervous system for all of humanity as a super-organism.
This is why I am glad the Mina community is planning for the future now.

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Greetings @BenK_MF,

Under the heading, Making Sense Of The Data, it is suggested that a.i. be used for mining opinion data. There is much in the news about how ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLMs are being used, not to make sense of public opinion, but rather to shape public opinion. There are many decentralized ways to aggregate data such as tags on documents applied by the authors themselves and public opinion polls. Personally I think it is dangerous to use a.i. to gage public opinion.

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Greetings @BenK_MF,

Under the section “Swarming Tools”, we learn something of how bees collectively decide where to make a new hive. Then swarm.ai is suggested as one of the tools which might be used to mimic the bee’s collective decision making process. Swarm.ai allows all stake holders engage in a sort of tug of war in which all participants can pull towards their best compromise. This seems like it might be a very useful tool, but this is not at all the collective decision making process which natural selection has engineered for bees.

Yes, bees do collect as a swarm outside the old hive when it is time to select a new hive, but that is where the swarm behavior stops. After the bees collect as a swarm, some of older bees will decide to become scouts and leave the swarm and look for a new building site. These scouts will then come back to the swarm with first hand information about site they have visited and then debate using their movements to signal distance, direction, and suitability for a new hive. The key to their success seems to be that only bees with first had information get to participate in the debate. From what I can tell, the closest thing we humans have to this process is governance by random jury.

How exactly bees make collective decisions is covered in the videos found at the top section of Beemocracy linked here.
How humans could implement a similar collective decision making process is open to interpretation.

Thanks so much for the work you have done and for inviting our thoughts and comments.

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Hi @johnshearing :wave:
Thanks for this extra, thoughtful details!
I can see where they can be sprinkled into this blogpost and some forthcoming ones.

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Hi again @johnshearing
Juicy!
Yes, there are a range of views about how AI tools could be used in deliberation or not at all.
I hope you can attend our Governance Q&A next week on 4 September so we can explore your perspective with the rest of the community

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@johnshearing
Yes you are quite right that the swarm.ai is loosely inspired rather than carefully informed by the reality of beehive decision making. I will correct the wording accordingly.
I hope we can discuss (decision making) process innovation with the community shortly when we explore the beemocracy example in more detail soon!

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