The Democracy Project

What Hacker News says

1. kqrApr 2022
   Some authors take multiple books to fully flesh out the ideas outlined in the first, so there are some doubles recommended here.

   I also found it impossible to rank books, so instead I took roughly the top 20, grouped them into themes, and then ranked the themes based on how important I think they are.

   1. Deming is the primary writer of the type of management we need to be competitive: Deming, The New Economics & Out of the Crisis.

   2. There is a wide variety of ways for humans to organise. Nobody is forcing the default capitalist bureaucracy on you, so be creative: Graeber, Bullshit Jobs & Dawn of Everything & The Democracy Project.

   3. How people are motivated: Pink, Drive.

   4. How to create a high-trust, less authoritarian, open, collaborative environment within a traditional hierarchy: Marquet, Leadership is Language.

   5. Communication: Voss, Never Split the Difference. Faber, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen.

   6. How to help organisations who don't want to admit what their problem is: Weinberg, Secrets of Consulting.

   7. How to structure organisations and processes to deliver maximum value: Reinertsen, Principles of Product Development Flow. Ward, Lean Product and Process Development. Womack, Machine That Changed the World.

   8. How to innovate cheaply: Westrum, Sidewinder.

   9. How to estimate things properly: Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. Tetlock, Superforecasting. Savage, The Flaw of Averages.

   10. How to train people to be experts at things: Hoffman, Accelerated Learning.

   11. How people fail at decisions: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow & Noise.

   I had to leave out a few about statistics, causality inference, project portfolio investment that didn't make the top 20 cut.

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2. JasonCannonNov 2021
   I recommend Debt the first 5000 years as well as The Democracy Project. Both of which were absolutely fascinating to me. Solidarity forever and rest in power Graeber.
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3. specialistJul 2021
   Maybe start with Utopia of Rules? Even though his books progressively build his world view over time, that might be the most accessible.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules

   Last year, I binged on his audiobooks (local library), and own the hard copies to leaf thru.

   Sorry, can't vouch for how accessible his ideas are. I'm very primed to hear what Graeber has to say. Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, etc. And every book about policy work (organizing, lobbying) that I can find.

   The Democracy Project might be his best primer on his theory of social change. First part is the back story on Occupy Wall Street. The second part is the Anarchist critique of classical Liberals (today's Democrats and Republicans in the USA). As an active member of the Democratic Party, Graeber is very challenging, hard to hear. But ultimately I agree with his observations. TLDR: The answer is always more participatory democracy, and what that'll look like.

   (The Democracy Nerd podcast has an episode on Oregon's citizen juries, for just one example of participatory democracy. https://democracynerd.us/episode/exporting-oregon-style-demo...)

   "Debt: The first 5,000" reprogrammed my head. Graeber simply tries to answer the question "What is money?" by listing all the different notions thru our known history. (eg We had "virtual currency" centuries ago.) Any one blathering about money, debt, crypto, spending, currency, etc is hard to take seriously if the omit (ignore) the questions Graeber asks.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt%3A_The_First_5000_Years

   Right now, I totally agree with Graeber's model for advocating change. Based on my own experiences doing policy work, and observing others.

   But I don't think his (now decade old) views on money, debt, and power are nearly radical enough. Sadly, Graeber recently passed, so we'll probably never learn his thoughts on modern monetary theory (MMT) and such.

   Also, I'm now keen to learn about Marx and Marxism, if only to better understand Graeber's criticisms. I still haven't found anything accessible to noobs like me.

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4. specialistJan 2021
   re managerialism: I used to complain that we geeks got no respect. What I'd give to be ignored and neglected again.

   I'm going to chew on your "second chasm" notion. Thanks.

   Maybe it's just how things go. Fads, "selling out", poseurs, fashion, lost in translation, etc. Uncle Bob also references the rapid growth of our profession, where warm bodies are added faster than best practices can percolate.

   To do list item: Maybe Everett's Diffusion of Innovations talks about this.

   I've been getting a lot out of David Graeber's books, most recently The Democracy Project and Utopia of Rules. They're the first description of workplace democracy (collaboration, empowerment) which matches my own experiences. Back then, I was just kinda winging it (eg "What would Drucker do?"), because I really didn't have a lot other options.

   Graeber considers the paradoxes better than most sages. eg How a movement begats its own destruction.

   I keep thinking about that cliche of how anything taken to its logical extreme becomes it's own opposite, related to an abundance in one area causes a deficit in another.

   Bringing us back to Goldblatt's Theory of Constraints. All balance is completely lost with all the players trying to hyper optimize their own little corner. Worse, "rationalists" weaponize fallacies like "beware the slippery slope!" to actively reject any kind of nuance, moderation, judgement, balance.

   Thanks for listening. Trying to articulate my grievance helps me organize my thoughts.

   --

   Oh. One parting thought. I'm trying find a rhetorical basis for advocating moderation, proportional solutions. Something akin to rational altruism. I want a mashup of algorithms, game theory, and hedges (eg basket of investments, NPV) to guide decision making and governance. To make it okay to do 100 crazy ideas, because maybe 3 will hit the jackpot. To make it okay to try a variety of mitigations, because there is no one right-sized solution. Etc.

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5. specialistDec 2020
   Stealing phrase (paraphrasing) from a recent HN comment...

   TLDR: Two kinds of work are doing and justifying. Those of us used to doing are really bad at, and demotivated by, the justifying.

   Sorry, I should have book marked it.

   --

   Finally listening to Graeber's Utopia of Rules. It's kinda blowing my mind. Like a firestorm in my head.

   Graeber's The Democracy Project has even more radical, useful explanations. His distinction between "rational" (following the rules) and "reasonable" (doing what's right, fair) gives voice to something that's been plaguing me for decades.

   Graeber supplies more of the puzzle pieces for how capitalism (in the USA) came to mean corporatism, and how these paradigms necessitate the Kafka/Brazil (movie) style bureaucracies we all hate.

   It's really an amazing time to be alive. I came of age reading Peter Drucker, Buckminister Fuller, Donald Norman, and many other humanists. (The conclusions of the proto-libertarian stuff never made sense to me. I always thought of myself as whatever the leftist version of libertarianism would be. Same complaints, different conclusions. I had no idea that makes me an anarchist. It took me reading Graeber to finally start understanding what Chomsky's been talking about.)

   Looking back, I truly didn't understand how far out of the mainstream their notions were. The humanists made sense to me and I guess I assumed everyone was on the same page. Alas, I've always been an outsider in my own land.

   With the rise of post-capitalism and renewed interest in direct democracy, empathy, participation and so forth, my world is finally starting to make some sense.

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6. fredsirMay 2020
   I'm not gonna go meticulously through all your stuff between we are just arguing about the same back and forth.

   > But that's literally human nature. We are not equal. I may be able to produce the finest of farts, but the fart market is terrible and nobody wants my farts. You, being a fine apple farmer, are in much higher demand. It's a natural process that you'll gain power by being in demand.

   It's not human nature, it's a structural property. There has been societies all through the history of the world, and some are still in existence, as described by the book Anarchy Works that I linked earlier, that has also had fine fart makers and fine apple farmers, but the difference was that the foundation was, that even though what I do is more in demand than what you do, we share what we have, so no one falls behind, and then maybe discuss if I really should spend so much time perfecting my farts. There is no reason why society should "allow" someone to hoard stuff when it's not beneficial to society. Instead, society should try to deter hoarding and greed, and in the event that it's not possible, they should exile the person until they change their behaviours to match the wishes of society.

   If you structure your society so that greed is rewarded, you get greedy inhabitants. If you structure society so that solidarity and compassion is rewarded, you get inhabitants accordingly.

   > But do you want anti-vaxxers to have their voices heard?

   They should be able to say what they wish. Anybody should. The reason why such things seem to have a hold is because information is not free, you have to fight to be educated, and your education is dictated by lobbyists, and you have news and politicians and social medias who manipulate information for profit. That's why stuff like flat earth and anti-vax seem to be growing. It's because of misinformation and a lack of education in the populace, at least that's what it seems like to me. The more knowledge and information is available to all in a population, the less we see of such things like flat-earth, anti-vax, extreme religious beliefs, nationalism, racism, speciesism and so on.

   It's because people can make bucks from stuff like that - see for example Facebook - that such things are spreading. In a society where compassion and solidarity were rewarded, stuff like that would be much less.

   > I know about liquid democracy. I've watched the pirate party with some anticipation before they spiralled out of control into yet another utopian far-left "reality is not relevant" hobby club. First of all, for it to be meaningful, it requires an informed public. We don't have that, and we won't get that. Ah, but they don't need to be informed, they can delegate their votes! Please take a look at Youtube or Twitch and who the most successful content creators are. That's who will command the votes in your liquid democracy. You're annoyed by Trump? Add more liquid democracy and Trump will seem like an elder statesman.

   And that's why we cannot reform society to such things. We cannot try to have a bit of direct democracy here, and some cooperatives there, because it will always be in opposition to the rest of society, and in the end, as greshams law dictates, bad will win. We need to "tear it down" and built it up anew, on a better foundation.

   > I do not believe that democracy should be the dictatorship of the majority that it is today. When you want to decide everything by majority rule, you're turning everything into a political battlefield. I do understand the allure and the hope for efficiency if we decide something once and then it's settled and everybody has to surrender to that decision. I also do understand that it's a road to hell, that it will lead to conflict and war.

   I don't believe in the dictatorship of the many, and direct democracy doesn't. It's not inherent it in. There is lots of ways to structure direct democracy is not a dictatorship of the 51%. Right now though, we have a dictatorship of the 1%. That's far worse than a dictatorship of the 51%.

   > 1) Acknowledge that people are different, have different preferences and aversions. 2) Acknowledge that your preferences and aversions are not the result of a quest for truth but simply that result of your genes and the experiences you made, so it's not that they are right, it's just that they are yours, which makes it feel like they are what everybody should have. 3) do not attempt to force yours on everyone, not by violence, not by vote. 4) Where the preferences conflict so that a (largely) unanimous direction can not be found, do not force a decision, but offer a split: if you and I cannot decide on a car and color, that's okay. We don't have to, we can get two bikes instead.

   What you are describing is directly fitting with the anarchist playbook, and it's directly contradictory to our current society in the modern world. Yet, you are saying our current society is quite good.

   I don't wish to continue this discussion, it's just too draining. I think you should try and read these following books, and if you do, I think you'll find that you actually agree with anarchism very much. I'm not sure where on the anarchist spectrum you lie, but at least it does sound like you align very much with anarchism in general, if you'd just give it a chance.

   Here are three books:

   * Anarchy Works: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-ana...

   * Post-Scarcity Anarchism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post...

   * The Democracy Project: https://b-ok.cc/md5/1BD930F7B17488F2F5BD28BE2AE4584C

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