Edits to deliberative-cosensus-protocols

content/articles/deliberative-consensus-protocols/index.md

@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ author: Jonathan Warden
 
 A **deliberative consensus protocol** is a process that online groups can use to make decisions. It's designed to produce *good* decisions that are fair and manifest the collective intelligence of the group. And it's designed to work at scale.
 
-This is not easy. Once a group gets large enough, somebody will start trying to manipulate the results. And even if everyone acts in good faith, it is hard for a large group to agree even on basic facts, let alone optimal decisions. And even if people agree on the facts, they may have vastly different values and preferences.
+This is not easy. Once a group gets large enough, people will start trying to manipulate the results. And even if everyone acts in good faith, it is hard for a large group to agree even on basic facts, let alone optimal decisions. And even if people agree on the facts, they may have vastly different values and preferences.
 
 And yet we think that **intelligent group decision-making can scale with the right process**.
 
@@ -31,15 +31,14 @@ A deliberative consensus protocol is like a blockchain consensus protocol in tha
 
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-A deliberative consensus protocol is like a blockchain consensus protocol, which induces users to give **honest** answers to questions of sufficiently uncontroversial facts (such as the state of the blockchain). But unlike a blockchain consensus protocol, which only works when there is no honest disagreement about the correct answer, a deliberative consensus protocol does not punish disagreement. Instead, it rewards **honest opinions**. It then uses a **deliberative process** to discover the most **informed and unbiased opinion** of the group.
+A deliberative consensus protocol is like a blockchain consensus protocol, which induces users to give **honest** answers to questions of sufficiently uncontroversial facts (such as the state of the blockchain). But unlike a blockchain consensus protocol, which only works when there is no honest disagreement about the correct answer, a deliberative consensus protocol does not punish disagreement. Instead, it elicits **honest opinions**. It then uses a **deliberative process** to discover the most **informed and unbiased opinion** of the group.
 
-Although it is *like* a blockchain consensus protocol, a deliberative consensus protocol does *not* require a blockchain. It is meant to be used anywhere an online group needs to make decisions: governance of open-source projects and DAOs, direct democracy, open fact-checking and peer review, moderating online forums, or improving social-media ranking algorithms to combat misinformation.
+Although it is *like* a blockchain consensus protocol, a deliberative consensus protocol does not require a blockchain. It is meant to be used anywhere an online group needs to make decisions: governance of open-source projects and DAOs, direct democracy, open fact-checking and peer review, moderating online forums, or improving social-media ranking algorithms to combat misinformation.
 
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 Instead of using cryptocurrency as a reward system, a deliberative consensus protocol can reward users with **attention**. This produces a game-theoretic equilibrium where the users with the most influence on the platform are those who consistently vote according to their honest opinions given the information that has been shared with them by other users. 
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-But a deliberative consensus protocol can facilitate not just more intelligent decisions, but also more intelligent **conversations**.
 
 ## Fair Decisions
 
@@ -51,7 +50,7 @@ What constitutes a fair decision? Well, let's consider some examples of unfair d
 
 So I would propose that a *fair* trail would be one that discovers the 1) **honest** and 2) **fully-informed** opinion of an 3) **unbiased** jury.
 
-This is what a deliberative consensus protocol is designed to do. It uses a deliberative process to discover what an **unbiased** sample of the group would **honestly** believe after they have considered all the most **informative** -- or convincing -- comments made by other users.
+This is what a deliberative consensus protocol is designed to do. It uses a deliberative process to estimate what an **unbiased** sample of the group would **honestly** believe after they have considered all the information and arguments shared by all other users.
 
 To accomplish this, the protocol uses three different technologies, that correct in turn for 1) **dishonesty**, 2) **ignorance**, and 3) **bias**.
 
@@ -63,9 +62,11 @@ To make these game-theoretical mechanisms work, there must be some sort of **pay
 
 As I argue in [The Law Of Attention](/the-law-of-attention), there is one and only one thing that effectively motives behavior of social platforms, and that is **influence**, which is mediated by **attention**. If nobody pays any attention to your posts in an online platform, there is no point in posting. If your votes have no effect on what posts get attention, there is no point in voting. So all participants in social platforms, whether their motives are financial, political, personal, or selfless, can be treated as if they were motivated entirely by attention.
 
-An online platform can use some sort of **reputation** system to determine how much attention they can command on the platform. Instead of building a follower count, users would need to earn reputation points that determine how much attention is directed to their posts, and how much their votes count.
+An online platform can use some sort of **reputation** system to determine how much attention users can command on the platform. Instead of building a follower count, users would need to build their reputation score in order to have "reach" on the platform. 
 
-A protocol can then use an increase or decrease in reputation as the payout currency. This makes it possible to fully employ the tools of game theory and mechanism design to engineer a protocol that creates an equilibrium where everyone is motivated to answers honestly in order to have influence on the platform, because they expect other users to do the same.
+A protocol can then use reputation as the payout currency. So users need to consistently vote honestly in order for their votes to have any weight.
+
+This makes it possible to fully employ the tools of game theory and mechanism design to engineer a protocol that creates an equilibrium where everyone is motivated to answers honestly in order to have influence on the platform, because they expect other users to do the same.
 
 ## 2) Correcting for Ignorance using Deliberation