Most democratic systems are broken.
Why?
Because the people voting in them are lying.
ETHDenver 2022…
I got a message from Adam Stallard - he wanted to compete in a hackathon and build a Median Voting app. Quite simply, an app that gives voters an onchain prompt with a numeric response, and returns the median of all votes.
In Adam’s characteristically muted excitement he told me:
“It works because no one benefits from responding anything other than what they actually want.”
After the ensuing wikipedia rabbit hole... I was truth-pilled. Truthful mechanism-pilled. And now it's my go-to litmus test for spotting a well-functioning democratic system:
Are the respondents voting truthfully?
Try it on the low-hanging fruit first - “who do you think should be president of the United States?” Today 100+ million US citizens will probably lie on this question, voting for a candidate as a strategy to get their preferred outcome, not how they'd answer that question honestly.
This is a "known bug" in US democracy, and now we have tested solutions like Ranked Choice Voting and The Computational Democracy Project, which is also helping shape some of the democratic systems in web3 too. So far in the crypto world however, we've mostly spun up exciting new ways to fail that same test.
Take the most common decision-sourcing questions in web3 - "who should we fund?" and "how much should they get?" We have systems in crypto that source answers to this that look like the honest response of 1 or 2 heavy stakeholders made in a private telegram chat, and ones that look like digital army warfare, measuring how many users or bots a project can get to take an action on its behalf.
With so much money at stake, it's not easy to build systems that beat this, but it's relatively easy at least to understand what the system should do:
Get voting weight to a diverse set of people that know and care about the topic.
Structure the prompt so voters have the most to gain by responding honestly.
This, and all the other characteristics of a wise crowd as defined by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of the Crowds.
For our median voting app, Adam and I imagined implementations like a web3 community choosing their token's inflation rate.
In a mean voting system where average value wins, respondents strategize to vote higher or lower than they believe, since this gives their vote more impact.
In a median vote where outliers are ignored, this doesn't work - one tool in a governance toolset that can intelligently source decisions.
I'll end by putting this all in a nice, friendly triangular shape we know and love...
The Hierarchy of Needs for Democratic Systems:
At the very least, democratic systems need to give social legitimacy to decision outcomes and a system for nonviolently removing bad leadership. A better system can then create a sense of meaning and belonging to members, so they treat the whole as their own.
In it's highest form, democracy is the harnessing of collective intelligence.
The gumball machine effect... where showing enough people a picture and asking them to guess how gumballs are in the machine can get you pretty close to the answer...
the wisdom of the crowds...
emergence...
a higher order...
a sum far greater than its parts...
a gateway to a new chapter in evolutionary biology.
Because after all... you and me - we’re just a pile of cells. Trillions and trillions of them. Each acting in their own self-interest, inadvertently acting in the interest of a far greater collective by simply being themselves and doing what they do best.
