More edits to deliberative-consensus-protocols

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

@@ -15,9 +15,10 @@ 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 in large groups, where bad-faith actors may try to manipulate the results. And even if everyone acts in good faith, collective intelligence does not always scale well. Large groups often fail to come to consensus on even basic facts, let alone optimal actions.
+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.
+
+And yet we think that **intelligent group decision-making can scale with the right process**.
 
-But **intelligent group decision-making can scale with the right process**.
 
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 But the fact that large groups often don't make good decisions doesn't mean they *can't*. Often, the key might simply be the **process**.
@@ -32,7 +33,7 @@ A deliberative consensus protocol is like a blockchain consensus protocol in tha
 
 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.
 
-Although it is *like* a blockchain consensus protocol, a deliberative consensus protocol does *not* require a blockchain. It can 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. 
@@ -50,23 +51,25 @@ 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** (e.g. representative) 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 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.
 
 To accomplish this, the protocol uses three different technologies, that correct in turn for 1) **dishonesty**, 2) **ignorance**, and 3) **bias**.
 
 ## 1) Correcting for Dishonesty using Game Theory
 
 First, to address the problem of **dishonesty** and coordinated manipulation, a deliberative consensus protocol can use game-theoretical mechanisms such as the [**Bayesian truth serum**](https://nel.mit.edu/bayesian-truth-serum/). BTS is an extraordinary mechanism (developed at MIT) that rewards users for giving honest answers *even if users believe that most people disagree with them*.
 
-To make these game-theoretical mechanisms work, there must be some sort of *reward*. If a deliberative consensus protocol is not a blockchain protocol, and the reward is not cryptocurrency, then what is the reward?
+To make these game-theoretical mechanisms work, there must be some sort of **payout**. If a deliberative consensus protocol is not a blockchain protocol, and the payout is not cryptocurrency, then what is the payout?
+
+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.
 
-In the deliberative consensus protocol, the reward currency can be **attention**. As I argue in [The Law Of Attention](/the-law-of-attention), if nobody pays any attention to your posts in an online platform, you will stop posting. If your votes have no effect on other posts, you will stop voting.
+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.
 
-So in an online platform where reputation translates to the ability to influence the attention of other users, we can use an increase or decrease in reputation as the reward 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 answers honestly, because they expect other users to do the same.
+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.
 
 ## 2) Correcting for Ignorance using Deliberation
 
-Second, to address the problem of **ignorance**, a deliberative consensus protocol can use an algorithm such as the [**Global Brain Algorithm**](https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/) to curate conversations that discover the most convincing arguments on each side of a question, in order to determine the opinion of users who have considered all of these arguments. 
+Second, to address the problem of **ignorance**, a deliberative consensus protocol can use an algorithm such as the [**Global Brain Algorithm**](https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/) to curate conversations that discover the most convincing arguments on each side of a question, and estimate the opinion of users who have considered all the most convincing arguments. 
 
 The global brain algorithm works by analyzing a threaded conversation tree and considering the upvotes and downvotes on each comment, depending on *who has seen what other comments before they voted*. It then filters and ranks comments to influence how much attention each receives, in order to deepen the most informed conversation threads while pruning uninformative threads that do not effect voting behavior. 
 
@@ -83,7 +86,8 @@ To address this problem of **self-selection bias**, an unsupervised machine-lear
 
 ## Summary
 
-A deliberative consensus protocol does not solve all the problems of group decision-making. For example, the dilemmas in designing fair democratic voting mechanisms addressed by social choice theory still exist when there are conflicting goals and preferences. But a deliberative consensus protocol can enhanced online group decision-making processes by more effectively distributing information and producing a fair decision that represents the collective intelligence of the group.
+
+In one sense, the problem of democracy is one of scalable group decision-making. A deliberative consensus protocol does not solve all the problems of group decision-making. The vast field of social choice theory deals with the challenges of  designing fair democratic voting mechanisms when there are conflicting goals and preferences. But a deliberative consensus protocol can enhanced online group decision-making processes by more effectively distributing information and producing a decision that best represents the collective intelligence of the group.
 
 But the greatest potential of these protocols may simply be the improvement in discourse. In a sense, the most important decision for any group to make is [*how to allocate their attention*](/what-deserves-our-attention). In any online discussion platform, a deliberative consensus protocol can be used to focus attention on the most informative conversation threads and on comments that stand up to scrutiny, thereby promoting deep, honest, informed, and intelligent conversations.