Merge pull request #735 from gnomevan/main

added image tags and backlinks

contents/english/6-0-from-⿻-to-reality.md

@@ -25,20 +25,20 @@ In this section we therefore try to bring the potential impact of ⿻ down to th
 
 Radical social and technological change holds an irresistible allure to human imagination, yet so often ends in tragedy.  Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way found in a recent analysis that not a single violent revolution in the twentieth century led to lasting democratic government.[^LevWay]  Yet we can all think of many dramatic changes for the better in human history, from the dramatic advances in information and communications technologies of the twentieth century to the establishment of a diversity of free and democratic governments around the world over the last three hundred years.
 
-What allows for peaceful and beneficial revolutions?  In her classic treatise on the topic, social philosopher Hannah Arendt contrasts the American and French Revolutions.[^OnRevolution]  The American Revolution, she argues, grew out of local democratic experiments inspired by migrants exploring ancient ideals (both from their own past and, as we have recently learned, that of their new neighbors)[^GraeberWengrow] to build a life together in a new and often hazardous setting.  As they traded ideas and built on related concepts circulating at the time, they came to a broad conclusion that they had discovered something more general about governance that contrasted to how it was practiced in Britain.  This gave what Arendt calls "authority" (similar to what in our Association chapter we call "legitimacy" or "common belief") to their expectations of democratic republican government.  Their War of Independence against Britain allowed this authoritative structure to be empowered in a manner that, for all its inconsistencies, hypocrisies and failures, has been one of the more enduring and progressive examples of social reform.
+What allows for peaceful and beneficial revolutions?  In her classic treatise on the topic, social philosopher Hannah Arendt contrasts the American and French Revolutions.[^OnRevolution]  The American Revolution, she argues, grew out of local democratic experiments inspired by migrants exploring ancient ideals (both from their own past and, as we have recently learned, that of their new neighbors)[^GraeberWengrow] to build a life together in a new and often hazardous setting.  As they traded ideas and built on related concepts circulating at the time, they came to a broad conclusion that they had discovered something more general about governance that contrasted to how it was practiced in Britain.  This gave what Arendt calls "authority" (similar to what in our ["Association and ⿻ Publics"](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/) chapter we call "legitimacy" or "common belief") to their expectations of democratic republican government.  Their War of Independence against Britain allowed this authoritative structure to be empowered in a manner that, for all its inconsistencies, hypocrisies and failures, has been one of the more enduring and progressive examples of social reform.
 
 The French Revolution, on the other hand, was born of widespread popular dissatisfaction with material conditions, which they sought to redress immediately by seizing power, long before they had gained authority for, or even detailed, potential alternative forms of governance.  While this led to dramatic social upheavals, many of these were quickly reversed and/or were accompanied by significant violence.  In this sense, the French Revolution, while polarizing and widely discussed, failed in many of its core aspirations.  By placing immediate material demands and the power to achieve them ahead of the process of building authority, the French Revolution burdened the delicate process of building social legitimacy for a new system with more weight than it could bear.
 
 While Arendt's example is drawn from the political sphere, it resonates with literature on innovation in a wide range of fields from evolutionary biology to linguistics. While the precise results differ, this work all indicates that dramatic innovation thrives in environments where a diversity of "groups" (social or biological) that are internally tightly connected and externally loosely connected interact.  This allows innovation to gain the necessary scale and show its resilience, and then to spread.  More connected structures or more centralized ones either stifle innovation or make it dangerous, as changes are only occasionally net benefits.  More disconnected structures do not allow innovation to spread.
 
 While intuitive, these observations are a significant contrast to the model of experimentation and innovation increasingly discussed in both the science and social science literature on "randomized controlled trials" and the technology business literature on "blitzscaling", each of which we will consider in turn.  Randomized controlled trials, derived primarily from individual, non-transmissible medical applications, focuses on the randomized testing of treatments across individuals or other social subgroups leading to an approval and then rapid disbursement of the treatment to all indicated patients as with, for example, Covid-19 vaccines.  This literature has become increasingly influential throughout the social sciences, especially development economics and associated applied work on poverty alleviation.  This has encouraged the spread of a model of "experimentation on" communities, where economic and design experts construct interventions and test them on communities that may benefit from them, evaluate them according to often preregistered metrics and then propagate thus-measured effective treatments more broadly.
 
-This approach contrasts with  "community-based", which also has provided a rough approximation to the way that many early digital technologies that laid the foundation for ⿻ later on(such as the time-sharing, personal computing, and many applications).  As we discussed briefly in The Lost Dao chapter, these began in communities of early adopters which usually included many of the system designers "experimenting with" digital tools. While these communities often had some nascent ideas of what their systems were good for, they rarely could reduce desired outcomes to pre-specified metrics and, in fact, many of the components of their systems were created by other early adopters.  These systems spread to adjacent communities and eventually out to the public through many rounds of learning from the community in unexpected ways and feeding of such learning back into product designs, as well as the making available of applications created by communities.   
+This approach contrasts with  "community-based", which also has provided a rough approximation to the way that many early digital technologies that laid the foundation for ⿻ later on(such as the time-sharing, personal computing, and many applications).  As we discussed briefly in ["The Lost Dao"](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/) chapter, these began in communities of early adopters which usually included many of the system designers "experimenting with" digital tools. While these communities often had some nascent ideas of what their systems were good for, they rarely could reduce desired outcomes to pre-specified metrics and, in fact, many of the components of their systems were created by other early adopters.  These systems spread to adjacent communities and eventually out to the public through many rounds of learning from the community in unexpected ways and feeding of such learning back into product designs, as well as the making available of applications created by communities.   
 
 
 "Experimentation on" and "experimentation with" each clearly have their strengths and drawbacks.  But the latter mode has become increasingly inconsistent and even dangerous given the style of adoption spread that is sought in today's venture capital fueled digital technology industry. Venture capitalists like LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman have celebrated the "masters of scale" who champion "blitzscaling", in which start-ups receive large, early injections of venture financing to allow them to invest in growing their user base rapidly and and then leveraging the benefits of this supermodularity (e.g. network effects, learning from user data, etc.) to achieve a dominant market position.  Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was Hoffman-backed OpenAI, which achieved 100 million users within a few months of launching its ChatGPT. Such rapid adoption led to the widespread public concern about the potential social harms from such systems and regulation aimed at avoiding the cycle of "move fast and break things" and the earlier round of social backlash that accompanied comparatively slower-growing technologies (like ride hailing and social media).
 
-The basic challenge is that "experimentation with" is dangerous when paired with a fully capitalist market driven model of managing new technologies.  Because it seeks to manage system harms, challenges and interdependencies as they arise, rather than by *a priori* testing, it requires that the development process itself be driven by a more holistic notion of the technology's impact on the adopting community than sales or adoption figures allow.  This is precisely what many of the early ⿻ experiments discussed in "The Lost Dao" aimed to provide, through involvement of many social sectors and standardization processes, with commercial involvement tightly circumscribed.  Yet even this more balanced version of "experimentation with" falls short of the highest aspirations we might have for the safe and inclusive development of technologies that eventually aspire to be globally transformative, but which may carry significant risks.  
+The basic challenge is that "experimentation with" is dangerous when paired with a fully capitalist market driven model of managing new technologies.  Because it seeks to manage system harms, challenges and interdependencies as they arise, rather than by *a priori* testing, it requires that the development process itself be driven by a more holistic notion of the technology's impact on the adopting community than sales or adoption figures allow.  This is precisely what many of the early ⿻ experiments discussed in ["The Lost Dao"](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/) aimed to provide, through involvement of many social sectors and standardization processes, with commercial involvement tightly circumscribed.  Yet even this more balanced version of "experimentation with" falls short of the highest aspirations we might have for the safe and inclusive development of technologies that eventually aspire to be globally transformative, but which may carry significant risks.  
 
 
 In particular, even when technologies are successfully developed in the interests of the communities harnessing them, accounting for all the systemic harms they may create in these communities, they still may have significant spillovers on those not among this early adopter community.  The key danger is that technologies may be usable as weapons or otherwise harnessed by the community to benefit at the expense of others, a far more common effect than may appear at first glance because even "helpful" and "harmless" tools may endow the (often-privileged) early adopted community with social and economic advantages that they can use to subjugate, marginalize or colonize others.  This "competitive" effect has some benefits, in spurring adoption by and spread across communities seeking to harness the benefit of the tools partly in their rivalry and potentially by doing so creating pressure to harness and resolve resulting rivalries.  But it can also, at best, create exclusion and inequality that undermines the basis of ⿻ freedom and, at worst, can lead to "arms race" dynamics that undermine the benefits of new tools and instead turn them into universal dangers.  
@@ -66,9 +66,11 @@ While it is obviously impossible to perfectly achieve these five goals simultane
 ### Fertile ground
 
 Let us first consider the question of scale.  To realize the benefits of ⿻ technology within a community requires the community to contain at least a rough approximation of the diversity that technology aims to span.  This differs dramatically across various directions of technology.  The most intimate technologies of post-symbolic communication and immersive shared reality can be powerful even in the smallest communities and relationships, creating few constraints on scale and diversification of seeing and thus making it natural to prioritize other criteria above.  At the opposite extreme, voting systems and markets are rarely used in intimate communities and require significant scale to be relevant, especially in their socially enriched forms, making entry points far scarcer, more ambitious, and potentially hazardous. 
-
-<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/squarerootscale.png" width="100%" alt="Bubbles filled with smaller bubbles, some of which contain symbols of the social areas of workplace, media, health and environment.">
-
+<figure>
+  <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/squarerootscale.png" width="100%" alt="Bubbles filled with smaller bubbles, some of which contain symbols of the social areas of workplace, media, health and environment.">
+  <figcaption>Bubbles filled with smaller bubbles, some of which contain symbols of the social areas of workplace, media, health and environment.</figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br><br>
 However, given the reasonable flexibility across scales of most ⿻ technologies, the most broadly attractive sites for experimentation will be those that both contain enough diversity to enable most applications and are themselves sufficiently diverse to allow reasonable choice of diverse, safe, prestigious seeds.  While any simplistic quantitative representation falls short of the richness needed to characterize such examples, a simple rule of thumb is to seek for roughly the same diversity *of communities* as *within communities* as quantified by the number of units as illustrated in the figure.  In a world of (very roughly) 10 billion people, these would be units of roughly 100,000 people, as there are 100,000 such units if the whole world were partitioned into them: they have the scale of the square root of global population.  There is, of course, nothing magic about 100,000, but it offers a rough sense for the scale of communities and organizations that are the most fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of ⿻.
 
 There are many kinds of communities at this scale.  Geographically, this is roughly the scale of most middle-sized municipalities (large towns or small cities).  Economically, it is the size of employees in a large corporation or, politically, in a median nation.  Religiously, it is, for example, roughly the number of Catholics in a Diocese.  Educationally, it is a bit larger than  the number of students at a large university.  Socially, it resembles the membership of many mid-sized civic organizations or social movements. Culturally, it is roughly the active fan base of a typical television program, performing artist or professional sports club.  In short, it is a prevalent level of organization in a wide range of social spheres, offering rich terrain for surveying.