Vitalik's latest long article: Pluralism philosophy briefly explains what encryption technologies it needs

An interesting contradiction in the crypto industry, which has become my digital home as a geo-nomad for the past decade, is its relationship to the topic of governance. The crypto industry grew out of the cypherpunk movement, which values ​​independence from external constraints often imposed by ruthless and power-hungry politicians and corporations, and has long built technologies like torrent networks and encrypted messaging to achieve those ends.

However, with the emergence of new ideas such as blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and DAOs, there is an important shift: these newer structures are long-lived and evolving, so they have an inherent need to establish their own governance, rather than just circumventing governance by unwelcome outsiders. The continued survival of these structures depends primarily on mathematical research, open source software, and other large public goods. This requires a shift in mentality: the ideology that maintains the crypto industry needs to transcend the ideology that created it.

This complex interplay between coordination and freedom, especially in the context of new technologies, is ubiquitous in our modern society, far beyond blockchain and cryptocurrency. Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning the production of synthetic (aka “lab-grown”) meat in his state, citing “global elites who want to control our behavior and push a diet of petri dish meat and bugs on Americans” and that we need to “prioritize our farmers and ranchers over… the World Economic Forum.” As you might expect, the Libertarian Party New Hampshire (LPNH) social account openly criticized the “authoritarian socialist” nature of the legislation. But it turns out that many other self-proclaimed libertarians don’t share this view:

To me, LPNH’s criticism of DeSantis’ ban makes perfect sense: prohibiting people from eating a new, potentially more ethical and sustainable form of meat simply because of disgust is completely contrary to cherishing freedom. However, it’s clear that many people don’t see it that way. When I searched the internet for convincing arguments, the most convincing one I could find was this one by Roko Mijic: In short, once something like this is allowed, it will become mainstream, society will reorganize around it, and life will inevitably become increasingly difficult for those who don’t want to follow the crowd. This is true of digital cash, and even the Swedish central bank is worried about the accessibility of cash payments, so why doesn’t it happen in other areas of technology?

About two weeks after DeSantis signed the bill banning lab-grown meat, Google announced that it was rolling out a feature in Android that will analyze phone calls in real time and automatically warn users if it thinks they might be being scammed. Financial scams are a big, growing problem, especially in regions like Southeast Asia, and they’re getting more sophisticated at a pace that’s harder for people to keep up with. AI is accelerating this trend. Here we see Google creating a solution to help warn users about scams, and what’s more, the solution is entirely client-side: no personal data is sent to any corporate or government Big Brother. It seems magical; it’s exactly the kind of technology I advocated for in my post introducing “d/acc.” However, not all liberal-minded people are happy, and at least one critic, Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker, can hardly be dismissed as “just a Twitter troll.”

All three of these tensions are examples of a deep philosophical question that keeps me thinking: What should people like me who think of themselves as defenders of liberal principles actually be defending? Does an updated version of Scott Alexander’s idea that liberalism is a peace treaty make sense in the twenty-first century? Clearly, things have changed. Public goods are far more important and far larger than they once were. The internet has made communication abundant, not scarce. And as Henry Farrell analyzes in his book on weaponized interdependence, modern information technology not only empowers recipients but also enables creators to project power in a sustained way. Existing attempts to deal with these problems are often haphazard, trying to treat them as exceptions to the principle that need to be tempered by pragmatic compromise. But what if there were a principled way of looking at the world that valued freedom and democracy that could incorporate these challenges and treat them as the norm rather than the exception?

Contents of this article

• The book "Plurality"

• How would I define pluralism in one sentence?

• What is the super-politics of pluralism?

• What is the pluralistic model of “the world as it is”?

• How does pluralism differ from liberalism?

• How is pluralism different from democracy?

• What specific technologies does the pluralist vision advocate?

• identity

• Multiple currencies and assets

• vote

• dialogue

• Brain-to-brain communication and virtual reality

• Where does pluralism fit into the contemporary ideological landscape?

• Is pluralism compatible with an exponential future?

• Is pluralism compatible with valuing excellence and expertise?

• Where might these ideas be applied first?

Introduction to the book "Plurality"

That’s not how Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang introduce their new book, Plurality: the future of collaborative technology and democracy. Glen’s account is slightly different, focusing on the increasingly antagonistic relationship between many in Silicon Valley’s tech world and the political center-left, and seeking a more collaborative path forward:

Glen Weyl introduces his book Pluralism during a lecture in Taipei

But for me, it was more in the spirit of the book to offer an introduction to a range of related issues from my own perspective. After all, the explicit goal of Pluralism is to try to appeal to a wide range of people with a wide range of concerns, from all parts of the traditional political spectrum. I have long been concerned about what I see as a steady decline in support for democracy and even freedom, a decline that seems to have accelerated since about 2016.

I have also worked on governance issues first-hand in my role as a governance builder in the Ethereum ecosystem. At the beginning of my Ethereum journey, my original dream was to create a governance mechanism that was provably mathematically optimal, just like we have a provably optimal consensus algorithm. Five years later, my intellectual explorations eventually led me to theoretical arguments for why such a thing is mathematically impossible.

Glenn’s evolution of thought has been different from mine in many ways, but it has also had many similarities. His previous book, Radical Markets, laid out ideas inspired by classical liberal economics as well as the latest mathematical discoveries in the field, in an attempt to create better versions of property rights and democracy that address the biggest problems with both institutions . Like me, he has always found both liberal and democratic ideas compelling, and has tried to find an ideal combination of the two, treating them as opposing goals that need to be balanced rather than two sides of the same coin that need to be integrated. More recently, as in my case, the mathematical part of his social thought has also evolved in the direction of trying to treat not only individuals but also the connections between individuals as first-class objects that any new social design needs to consider and build around, rather than as errors that need to be eliminated.

It is in the spirit of these ideas and of the emerging shift from theory to practice that Glenn and Audrey’s book, Pluralism, is written.

How would I define pluralism in one sentence?

Glen Weyl defines pluralism most succinctly in his 2022 article “Why I Am A Pluralist”:

I understand pluralism as a social philosophy that recognizes and promotes prosperity and cooperation among different socio-cultural groups/systems.

If I had to expand on this a bit and define the book in four main points, I would say the following:

• Glenn's Hyperpolitics: The world today is caught in a narrow channel between conflict and centralization, and we need a new, upgraded, high-performance form of digital democracy to replace both.

• Pluralistic atmosphere: The overarching themes are that (i) we should understand the world through a patchwork of models, rather than trying to extend any single model beyond its natural applicability; and (ii) we should take connections between individuals seriously and work to expand and strengthen healthy connections.

• Pluralism-Inspired Mechanism Design: There is a set of principled mathematical techniques that allow for the design of social, political, and economic mechanisms that treat not only individuals as primary objects, but also the connections between individuals. Doing so can create newer forms of markets and democracies that address the problems common in today's markets and democracies, particularly in bridging tribal divides and polarization.

• Audrey's practical experience in Taiwan: During her tenure as Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan Province, China, Audrey has incorporated many diverse concepts, which is a starting point for learning and reference.

What is the super-politics of pluralism?

In his magnum opus, Network Nation, Balaji Srinivasan describes his view of the world today as divided into three poles: the center-left English-speaking elite represented by the New York Times (NYT), communism, and the extreme individualist right represented by Bitcoin (BTC). Glenn gives his own description of “21st century political ideology” in Pluralism and elsewhere, as follows:

The names of these three are taken from Civilization VI, and in Pluralism, Glenn simplified their names to Technocracy, Liberalism, and Pluralism. His description of these three is roughly as follows:

• (Synthetic) Technocracy: Some mechanism run by AI and a small human elite creates lots of amazing things and ensures that everyone gets their share of what they need to live a good life (e.g. through UBI). The political opinions of non-elites are considered unimportant. Examples of this ideology include China, the World Economic Forum (“You will have nothing, but you will be happy”), the UBI advocated by Sam Altman and his friends, and from my recent travels, I might add the Museum of the Future in Dubai.

• (Entrepreneurial) Libertarianism: maximal protection of property rights and freedom of contract, and the expectation that the most important projects will be started by some kind of "great founder" entrepreneur. Individuals are protected from abuse almost entirely by the right to "opt out" of any system that becomes too inefficient or exploitative. Examples of this ideology include books like The Sovereign Individual, free city movements like Prospera, and the Net Nation.

• Digital democracy/pluralism: Using internet technology to create higher bandwidth democratic mechanisms that can aggregate preferences from a wide range of people and use these mechanisms to create a stronger and more effective "third sector" or "civil society" that can make better decisions. Glenn cites examples both from fiction, most notably Star Trek and anything by Ursula le Guin, and from real-life prototypes, most notably e-government in Estonia and Taiwan.

Glenn sees pluralism as a way to avoid three failure modes simultaneously: coordination failure leading to conflict (which he sees as a risk with liberalism), centralization and authoritarianism (which he sees as a risk with technocracy), and stagnation (which he sees as a risk with “old world democracies” that lose competitiveness to liberalism and technocracy). Glenn sees pluralism as an underexplored alternative, and his project will flesh out this idea, while Audrey’s will be realized first in Taiwan and then elsewhere.

If I were to summarize the difference between Balaji’s plan and Glenn and Audrey’s, I would summarize it as follows. Balaji’s vision revolves around creating new alternative institutions and new communities around these new institutions, and creating safe spaces where they have a chance to grow. Glenn and Audrey’s approach, on the other hand, is best captured in the “fork and merge” strategy of Taiwan’s e-government:

So when you go to a regular government website, and change the O to a 0, this domain hack ensures that you're looking at a shadow government version of the same website, except it's on GitHub, except it's powered by open data, except there's real interaction, and you can actually discuss any budget item around this visualization with your fellow citizen hackers.

Many of the projects in Gov Zero became so popular that the government and ministries ended up merging their code, so if you go to an official government website it looks exactly like the Citizen Hacker version.

In Audrey's vision, there is still some opt-in and opt-out, but there is a tighter feedback loop through which improvements from micro-opt-outs are integrated back into the "mainline" social infrastructure. Balaji would ask: How do we let synthetic meat people have their synthetic meat cities, and let traditional meat people have their traditional cities? Glenn and Audrey might ask: How do we structure the top layer of society to guarantee that people are free to do either one, while still retaining the benefits of being part of the same society and collaborating in every other way?

What is the pluralistic model of “the world as it is”?

The pluralist view of how to improve the world begins with a view of how to describe the world as it is. This is a key part of Glenn’s evolution, as Glenn’s views on these issues a decade ago were much more inspired by economics. It is therefore instructive to compare and contrast the pluralist worldview with that of traditional economics.

Traditional economics focuses on a small number of economic models that make specific assumptions about how entities work and treats deviations from these models as flaws whose consequences are not too serious in practice. As given in textbooks, these assumptions include:

• Competition: The common case for market efficiency relies on the assumption that no single market participant is large enough to significantly influence market prices through its behavior—instead, the prices they set determine only whether anyone buys their products.

• Perfect Information: People in the market fully understand the products they are buying

• Perfectly rational: people in the market have common goals and are committed to achieving those goals (which can be altruistic)

• No externalities: The production and use of items traded on the market only affects producers and users, and does not affect third parties unrelated to you

In my own recent writing, I’ve generally emphasized an assumption related to competition but more powerful: independent choice. Many mechanisms proposed by economists work perfectly well if you assume that people act independently to pursue their own independent goals, but they quickly break down as soon as the participants coordinate their actions through some mechanism other than the rules you set. Second price auctions are a good example: they are provably perfectly efficient if the above conditions are met and the participants are independent, but they break down badly if the highest bidders can collude. Quadratic funding, invented by me, Glen Weyl, and Zoe Hitzig, is similar: it’s a provably ideal mechanism for funding public goods if the participants are independent, but if even two participants collude they can extract unlimited funds from the mechanism. My own work on pairwise-bounded quadratic funding attempts to fill this hole.

But once you start analyzing extremely important parts of society that don’t look like trading platforms, the usefulness of economics declines further. Take conversation, for example. What are the motivations of the speaker and the listener in a conversation? As Hansen and Simler point out in The Elephant in the Brain, if we try to model conversation as an exchange of information, then we see people closely guarding information and trying to play tit-for-tat games, talking only to get responses from others. In reality, however, people are generally eager to share information, and criticisms of people’s conversational behavior often focus on the tendency of many people to talk too much and listen too little. In public conversations such as on social media, a major topic of analysis is what kinds of statements, claims, or memes go viral—a term that directly acknowledges that the most natural scientific field of analogy is not economics but biology.

So what is Glenn and Audrey's alternative? A big part of it is simply recognizing that there is simply no single model or scientific method that perfectly explains the world, and that we should use a combination of different models, recognizing the limitations of each model's applicability. In one key section, they write:

Mathematics in the 19th century saw the rise of formalism: the need to make the definitions and properties of mathematical structures precise and rigorous in order to avoid inconsistencies and errors. In the early 20th century, there was a desire to make mathematics “solved”, or even to give an exact algorithm to determine the truth or falsity of any mathematical claim. [6] On the other hand, 20th century mathematics was characterized by a surge in complexity and uncertainty.

• Gödel's Theorem : Several mathematical results from the early 20th century, most notably Gödel's Theorem, showed that key parts of mathematics cannot be completely solved in some fundamental and irreducible way.

• Computational complexity : Even if reductionism were possible in principle/theory, the amount of computation required to predict higher-level phenomena from their component parts (its computational complexity) would be so large that performing it is unlikely to be of practical interest.

• Sensitivity, Chaos, and Irreducible Uncertainty : Many even relatively simple systems exhibit "chaotic" behavior. A system is chaotic if small changes in initial conditions over a long period of time lead to radical changes in its final behavior.

• Fractals: Many mathematical structures have been shown to have similar patterns at different scales. The Mandelbrot set is a good example.

Glen and Audrey go on to give similar examples from physics. As one of the many co-contributors to this book, I contributed an example that was accepted:

• The three-body problem, best known for its role in Liu Cixin's science fiction series, shows that even under simple Newtonian physics, the interactions between three bodies are so chaotic that their future behavior cannot be predicted using simple math. Yet we can still regularly use 17th-century abstractions like "temperature" and "pressure" to solve the trillion-body problem, and these abstractions are useful enough for everyday applications.

In biology, a key example is:

• Similarities between organisms and ecosystems: We find that many different organisms (“ecosystems”) can exhibit features similar to multicellular life (homeostasis, susceptibility to disruption or overgrowth of internal components, etc.), reflecting their emergence and multiscale organization.

By now, the theme of these examples should be easy to understand. No one model works across the globe, and the best we can do is piece together multiple models that work well in a variety of contexts. The underlying mechanisms are not the same at different scales, but they do “rhyme.” Social science, they argue, needs to move in the same direction. This, they argue, is where “technocracy” and “liberalism” fail:

In the technocratic vision we discussed in the last chapter, the “chaos” of the existing administrative system is replaced by a large-scale, unified, rational, scientific, AI-based planning system. This unified subject transcends localities and social diversity and is thought to be able to give “just” answers to any economic and social problem, transcending social divisions and differences. As a result, it seeks not to foster and exploit social diversity and heterogeneity, but to obscure them at best and erase them at worst, which social science argues are what determine people’s interests, engagement, and values.

In the liberal vision, the sovereignty of the atomic individual (or, in some versions, a homogeneous and closely aligned group of individuals) is the core aspiration. Social relations are best understood in terms of “clients,” “exits,” and other capitalist dynamics. Democracy and other means of coping with diversity are seen as failure modes of a system that cannot achieve full coordination and freedom.

One particular model that Glenn and Audrey return to repeatedly is Georg Simmel’s theory of personality, which posits that personality emerges from each individual’s unique intersection of different groups. They describe this as an alternative to “atomistic individualism” and collectivism. They write:

According to [Georg Simmel], humans are highly social creatures, and therefore their identities are formed through social relationships. Humans gain key aspects of their sense of self, purpose, and meaning through participation in social, linguistic, and cohesive groups. In simple societies (e.g., isolated, rural, or tribal), people spend most of their lives interacting with the kin group we described above. This circle (primarily) collectively defines their identity, which is why most scholars who study simple societies (e.g., anthropologist Marshall Sahlins) tend to favor methodological collectivism. [14] However, as we noted above, as societies become urbanized, social relationships become more diverse. People work in one circle, worship in another, support political causes in a third, entertain in a fourth, cheer for sports teams in a fifth, perceive themselves as discriminated against in a sixth, and so on.

When this happens, the sense of self that people have in common with those around them at any given time gradually diminishes; they begin to feel both "unique" (viewed in a positive light) and "isolated/misunderstood" (viewed in a negative light). This creates a sense of what he calls "personality," which helps explain why social scientists (like economists) who focus on complex urban environments tend to espouse methodological individualism. Ironically, however, as Simmel points out, this "individualization" is precisely because the "individual" is split among numerous loyalties, and thus divided.

This is the core idea repeatedly reiterated in the book "Pluralism": to regard the connections between individuals as the primary object in mechanism design, rather than focusing solely on the individuals themselves.

How does pluralism differ from liberalism?

In his 1974 book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick argued for a minimal government that performed basic functions, such as preventing people from committing violent acts, but left other functions up to people to organize themselves into communities consistent with their values. Since then, the book has become a manifesto for many classical liberals describing their ideal world.

Two examples that come to mind are Robin Hanson’s recent article “Liberalism as Deep Multiculturalism” and Scott Alexander’s 2014 article “Archipelagoes and Atomic Communitarianism.” Robin is interested in this concept because he wants to see a world with more of what he calls deep multiculturalism:

Superficial "multiculturalism" tolerates and even celebrates cultural markers such as clothing, food, music, myths, art, furniture, accents, festivals, and gods. But it is also usually much less tolerant of cultural values ​​such as war, sex, race, childbearing, marriage, work, children, nature, death, medicine, schools, etc. It seeks a "mutual understanding" that we are all (or should be) actually the same once we get beyond the markers of difference.

In contrast, deep “multiculturalism” accepts and even celebrates the coexistence of multiple cultures with very different values. It seeks to make the world, and even geographical regions, tolerant of these different cultures in an environment of peace and prosperity. It expects some distrust, conflict, and even hostility between cultures due to differences in values. But it sees this as the price of deep cultural diversity.

Since the primary purpose of most non-liberal government activity is to create and maintain a shared community/culture and its values, this impulse to use government to promote a shared culture seems to be a major obstacle to liberal-style governance. That is, liberals want shared government without shared community or culture. The usual “liberal” vs. “statist” political axis might be seen as an axis about the extent to which we want to share culture, rather than allow for different cultures.

Scott Alexander came to a similar conclusion in his 2014 article, though his basic goal was slightly different: he wanted to find an ideal political architecture that would create opportunities for organizations to support the public good and limit culturally subjective public bad behavior, while limiting the pervasive tendency for subjective arguments about higher-order harms (“homosexuality is corroding the fabric of society”) to become masks for oppression. Balaji’s Network State is a more specific proposal for a social architecture that attempts to achieve exactly the same goals.

So a key question worth asking is: in what ways is liberalism inadequate for achieving a pluralistic society? If I had to sum up the answer in two sentences, I would say:

1. Pluralism means not only achieving diversity but also leveraging diversity and working more actively to build higher-level institutions that maximize positive-sum interactions among different groups and minimize conflict.

2. Pluralism exists not only at the societal level, but also within each individual , allowing each individual to be part of multiple tribes at the same time.

To understand (2), we can zoom in on a specific example. Let’s look at the debate surrounding Google’s on-device anti-fraud scanning system in the opening section. On the one hand, a tech company released a product that seemed to be motivated by a sincere desire to protect users from financial fraud (a very real problem; I know people who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to it), and it even went a step further and checked the most important “cypherpunk values” box: data and computation remain entirely on the device, and it’s purely for warning you, not reporting you to law enforcement. On the other hand, we have Meredith Whittaker, who sees the product as a slippery slope to something even more oppressive.

Now, let's look at Glen's preferred alternative: a Taiwanese app called Message Checker. Message Checker is an app that runs on your phone that intercepts incoming message notifications and analyzes them. It includes features that aren't related to scams, such as using client-side algorithms to identify the messages that are most important to you. But it can detect scams, too:

A key part of the design is that the app doesn’t force all users to follow a uniform set of rules. Instead, it lets users choose which filters to turn on or off:

From top to bottom: URL check, cryptocurrency address check, rumor check.

These are all filters made by the same company. A more ideal setup would be to have it as part of the operating system and have an open marketplace where you could install different filters created by a variety of different commercial and non-profit players.

The key multivariate feature of this design is that it gives users more granular opt-out freedom, avoiding an all-or-nothing approach. If a norm could be established that device anti-scam scanning must work this way, it would seem to make Meredith’s dystopia less likely: if a carrier decided to add a filter that deemed information about transgender care (or, if your fears run in the other direction, advocating for limiting gender self-classification in athletics) as dangerous content, individuals could simply not install that particular filter, and they would still benefit from the rest of the anti-scam protections.

An important implication is that “meta-institutions” need to be designed to encourage other institutions to respect this ideal of fine-grained freedom of exit – after all, as we have seen with software vendor lock-in, organizations will not automatically adhere to this principle!

One way to think about the complex interplay between coordination and autonomy in pluralism.

How is pluralism different from democracy?

Once you read the chapter on voting, many of the differences between pluralist and traditional democracy become clear. Pluralist voting mechanisms have some powerful, explicit answers to the problem of “democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat” and the related worry about democracy degenerating into populism. These solutions build on Glenn’s earlier ideas about quadratic voting, but go a step further by explicitly counting votes at a higher rate if those votes come from actors who are more independent of each other. I’ll cover this in more detail in a later section.

Aside from the major theoretical leap from counting just individuals to counting connections, there are broad thematic differences between the two. One key difference is the relationship between pluralism and the nation-state . Liberal philosopher Chris Freiman summed up one of the main shortcomings of nation-state democracy very well in this tweet, which was personally very inspiring to me:

This is a serious gap: two-thirds of global inequality occurs between countries, not within them; a growing number of public goods (especially digital ones) are neither global nor explicitly tied to any particular nation-state; and the tools we use to communicate are highly international. The democratic project of the 21st century should take these basic facts much more seriously.

Pluralism is not inherently opposed to the existence of nation-states, but it explicitly strives to move beyond reliance on the nation-state as the locus of action. It provides guidance for a variety of actors, including transnational organizations, social media platforms, other types of businesses, artists, and more. It also explicitly recognizes that for many people, no single nation-state can dominate their lives.

Left: The concentric circle view of society, from a sociology paper in 2004. Right: The pluralistic view of society: intersecting but non-hierarchical circles.

Ken Suzuki’s Smooth Society and its Enemies develops an important theme of pluralism in more detail: membership in an organization should not be seen as a matter of “right or wrong.” Instead, there should be different degrees of membership, and those different degrees of membership will bring different benefits and different degrees of obligations. This is an aspect of society that has always been true, but has become even more important in an internet-first world, where our communities are no longer necessarily nested and completely overlapping.

What specific technologies does the pluralist vision advocate?

The book Pluralism advocates for a fairly broad set of digital and social technologies that span what are traditionally thought of as a large number of “spaces” or industries. I will focus on a few examples from specific categories.

identity

First, Glenn and Audrey offer a critique of existing approaches to identity. Some key quotes on the subject:

Many of the simplest ways to establish identity simultaneously undermine it, especially online. Passwords are often used to establish identity, but unless this authentication is done very carefully, the password may be compromised more widely, rendering it useless for future authentications, as the attacker will be able to impersonate them. “Privacy” is often considered a “nice to have”, especially useful for those who “have something to hide”. But in identity systems, protecting private information is at the core of usefulness. Any useful identity system must be judged by its ability to both establish and protect identity.

About biometrics:

[Biometrics] have significant limitations in determining and protecting identity. Tying such a wide range of interactions to a single identifier tied to a set of biometric information collected from a single individual at the time of enrollment (or registration) forces a stark trade-off. On the one hand, if (as with Aadhaar) the administrators of the program use biometrics for authentication over time, they would be able to tie or see activity to that of the person to whom the identifier points, thereby gaining an unprecedented ability to monitor a wide range of citizen activity and potentially undermine or target the identities of vulnerable groups.

On the other hand, if only biometric technology is used to initialize an account, the system will easily be stolen or sold, and this problem has seriously affected the operation of related services... If at some point in the future, the eyeball can be deceived by AI systems combined with advanced printing technology, then such a system may experience extreme "single-point failure".

Glen and Audrey prefer to use an intersecting social identity approach to do this: leverage one’s entire behavior and interaction to achieve the fundamental goals of the identity system, such as determining the degree of community members and one’s credibility:

This socialized, diversified approach to online identities was pioneered by Danah Boyd in her visionary master's thesis on "multi-faced identity." [28] While she focuses primarily on the benefits of such a system for personal agency (in the spirit of Zimmel), its potential benefits for the balance between identity establishment and protection are even more surprising:

• Comprehensiveness and redundancy : For almost anything we might want to prove to strangers, there are people and institutions (usually many) who can “guaranteed” this information without any specialized surveillance strategies. For example, people who want to prove that they are older than a certain age can turn to friends who have known them for a long time, the schools they attend, doctors who have verified their age at different times, and of course governments that have verified their age.

• Privacy: Perhaps more interesting is that the “publishers” of all these attributes learn this from interactions most people think are consistent with “privacy”: We don’t worry about the common knowledge of these social facts as much as we worry about company or government surveillance.

• Security: Pluralism also avoids many “single point failure” issues. Even the corruption of several individuals and institutions only affects those who rely on them, and those people may be only a small part of society, even for them, the above redundancy means they may only suffer from a partial reduction in the verification capacity they can achieve.

• Restorability: Individuals can rely on a set of relationships, such as 3 of 5 friends or institutions to recover their keys. This “social recovery” has become the gold standard in many Web3 communities and has even been increasingly adopted by major platforms such as Apple.

The core information is that any single factor technology is too fragile, so we should use multi-factor technology. For account recovery, it is relatively easy for us to understand how it works, and it is easy to understand the security model: each user chooses what they trust, and if a user makes a wrong choice, the consequences are mostly limited to that user. However, other use cases of identity are more challenging. For example, UBI and voting seem essentially to essentially agree on who the community members are. However, some people work hard to bridge this gap and create something close to "feeling" like a single global thing, while based on subjective multi-factor trust.

The best example of the Ethereum ecosystem is Circles, a UBI token project based on the "Trust Network", where anyone can create an account (or an unlimited number of accounts) that generates 1 CRC per hour, but you will only consider the coins of a given account as "real Circles" when the account is connected to you through the Trust Network Graph.

The spread of trust in Circles, excerpted from the Circles white paper

Another approach is to completely abandon the abstract concept of “you are either human or not”, try to use multiple factors to determine the credibility and membership of a given account and give it UBI or voting rights proportional to that score. Many of the ongoing airdrops in the Ethereum ecosystem, such as Starknet airdrops, follow such principles.

Starknet Airdrop Recipient Category. Many recipients end up falling into multiple categories.

Multiple currencies and property

In Radical Markets, Glenn focused on “stable and predictable, but intentionally imperfect” versions of ownership, such as the Hamberg Tax. He also focused on “market-like” structures that could fund public goods rather than just private goods, most notably quadratic voting and quadratic financing. These two ideas remain prominent in Plural. The non-monetary implementation of quadratic financing is called Plural Credits, which helps record the contributions of the reconciliation book itself. The idea around Hamberg Tax has been updated, trying to extend the idea to a mechanism that allows assets to be partly owned by multiple different individuals or groups at the same time.

In addition to the continued emphasis on super-large-scale market design, one of the new additions to the program is to pay more attention to community currency :

In a multi-center structure, various communities will have their own currencies that can be used in limited areas rather than a single universal currency. For example, housing or education vouchers, ride vouchers at a fair, or letters of credit for buying various stall foods at a university. [18] These currencies may be partially interoperable. For example, two universities in the same town may allow exchanges between their food vouchers. But if the holder sells community currency to a wider currency without the consent of the community, it is possible that the rules are violated, and even technically impossible.

The fundamental goal is to combine deliberately localized local mechanisms with global mechanisms to achieve large-scale cooperation. Glenn and Audrey believe that their revised version of market and property is the best candidate for the largest global cooperation:

Those who pursue pluralism should not want the market to disappear. There must be something to coordinate the coexistence between the widest social distance, if not cooperation, and many other ways to achieve this, even insignificant ways like voting, face greater risk of homogeneity, as they involve deeper connections. Socially conscious global markets offer greater prospects for pluralism than global governments. Markets must develop and thrive with many other models of cooperation to ensure a diverse future.

vote

In Radical Markets, Glen advocates quadratic voting, a voting approach that addresses problems that allow voters to express preferences of varying intensity, but at the same time avoid the most extreme or resource-rich voice-led failure modes that dominate decisions. In Pluralism, Glen and Audrey are trying to solve different core issues, and the following section summarizes the new problems they are trying to solve:

Giving parties who have twice the legitimate interests in a decision is natural but misleading. The reason is that this usually gives them more than twice the power. On average, inconsistent voters offset each other, so the total influence of 10,000 completely independent voters is much smaller than that of a person with 10,000 votes.

When the background signal is completely uncorrelated and numerous, there is a simple mathematical method to explain this: the growth rate of a series of uncorrelated signals is the square root of its number, and the growth rate of the correlation signal is linearly proportional to its intensity. Therefore, the weight of 10,000 uncorrelated votes is as large as the weight of 100 related votes.

To solve this problem, Glenn and Audrey advocate designing a voting mechanism using the principle of "decreasing proportion": adding unrelated signals, but only sqrt(N) votes are given to N related signals.

This approach has precedents in national and international organizations such as the United States, which usually have some councils that give sub-units (the former is state and the latter is state) a certain number of voting rights that are proportional to their population or economic strength, while other councils give each sub-unit one voting right, no matter how big or small. In theory, ten million voters in a large state are more important than one million voters in a small state, but the signals they represent are more relevant than ten million voters from ten different states, so the voting rights of 10 million voters in a large state should be between these two extremes.

Left picture: The U.S. Senate, each state has two senators, no matter its size. Right picture: The U.S. Electoral College, the number of senators is roughly proportional to the population.

Of course, the key challenge for this design to work more generally is to determine who is “unrelated”. Participants in concert act pretend to be inconsistent to increase their legitimacy (aka “false propaganda,” “decentralized live-action deduction,” “puppet state”…) have been a mainstream political strategy and have been around for centuries. If we instantiate a mechanism to determine who is relevant to whom by analyzing Twitter posts, people will start to craft their Twitter content to make it look as unrelated as possible in the algorithm, and may even deliberately create and use robots to do this.

Here I can propose my own solution to this problem: vote on multiple issues at the same time and use the vote itself as a signal of who is related to whom. One implementation is paired quadratic financing, which allocates a fixed budget for each pair of participants and then assigns according to the intersection of the pair of voting methods. You can do something similar to the voting: instead of giving each voter one vote, but giving each pair one voter one (dividable):

If calculated by the original number, the votes for favor won 3-2 on question C. But Alice, Bob and Charlie are highly relevant voters: they agree on almost everything. Meanwhile, David and Eve agree on only C. In pairs, all votes of “opposition to C” will be assigned to C, which is enough to overwhelm Alice, Bob and Charlie’s “opposition to C”, whose pairs of votes for C combined only 11/12.

The key trick of this design is that determining who is “related” and “unrelated” is an inherent part of the mechanism. The more consensus the two participants reach on one issue, the less they vote on all other issues. A group of 100 “organic” diverse participants will receive a fairly high voting weight because any two participants have relatively small overlap areas. Meanwhile, a group of 100 people with similar beliefs and listening to the same media will receive a lower weight because their overlap areas are larger. A group of 100 accounts are all controlled by the same owner and they will have perfect overlap because this is a strategy to maximize owner goals, but they will receive the lowest weight.

This "paired" approach is not mathematically an ideal way to achieve such things: in the case of quadratic financing, the amount of funds that an attacker can withdraw grows with the square of the number of accounts they control, and ideally should be linear. How to specify a "ideal" mechanism aspect, whether it is quadratic financing or voting, has the most powerful attributes in the face of an attacker who controls multiple accounts or related voters, which is an open research question.

This is a new type of democracy that naturally corrects the phenomenon that sometimes labels "NPC" in Internet discourse: a large group of people may be just one person because they all consume the exact same source of information and believe in the exact same things.

dialogue

As I have said many times, especially in the context of DAO, the success or failure of governance depends on the formal governance mechanism and about 80% on the communication structure that participants have before determining opinions and entering them into governance. To this end, Glen and Audrey also spent a lot of time thinking about better technologies for large-scale conversations.

One of the dialogue tools they focus on is Polis . Polis is a system that allows people to submit statements about a problem and vote on each other’s statements. At the end of a round, it identifies different major “clusters” in different perspectives and lists statements that best get support from all clusters.

Source: https://words.democracy.earth/hacking-ideology-pol-is-and-vtaiwan-570d36442ee5

In fact, Polis has been used in public discussions on legal proposals in Taiwan, China, including setting rules for ride-hailing services like Uber. Polis has also been used in other occasions around the world, including experiments within the Ethereum community.

The second tool they focus on has achieved greater success in becoming mainstream, but in large part due to its “unfair advantage” of being introduced to an existing social media platform with hundreds of millions of users: Twitter’s Community Notes .

Community Notes also uses an algorithm that allows anyone to submit proposed comments for posts and displays comments that give the highest ratings for those who disagree with most other comments. I describe this algorithm in more detail in my comments on the platform. Since then, Youtube announced that they plan to launch similar features.

Glen and Audrey hope that the concepts behind these mechanisms can be expanded and applied more widely across the platform:

While [Community Notes] currently puts all opinions on the entire platform in one scope, we can imagine drawing a series of communities within the platform and leveraging its bridging-based approach, not only notes but content first to get attention.

The ultimate goal is to try to create a large discussion platform, which is designed not to maximize metrics such as "engagement", but to intentionally optimize consensus points among different groups. Mutual benefit, but also to identify and utilize every possible cooperation opportunity.

Brain communication and virtual reality

Glenn and Audrey spent two full chapters discussing “post-symbol communication” and “immersive shared reality.” The goal here is to spread information between people in a way much higher than the bandwidth that markets or dialogues can achieve.

Glenn and Audrey describe an exhibition in Tokyo that allows visitors to feel the feeling of getting older:

The visor blurs vision, mimicking cataracts. The treble of the sound is stripped off. In the photo booth that reflects the test of old age, facial expressions become blurred. In the bustling market, the simple act of recalling a shopping list that is kept in mind becomes an adventure. Standing on the ankle with heavy objects and leaning against the cart simulates the wear of time on the body or the weight of age on the posture.

They argue that future utilizing technologies such as brain-computer interfaces can achieve more valuable and realistic experiences. "Immersive shared reality" covers what we commonly call "virtual reality" or "metauniverse", but has a wider scope than that, and is described as a design space between postsymbol communication and dialogue.

Another book I have read recently on similar topics is Herman Narula's Virtual Society: A New Frontier for the Metaverse and Human Experience. Herman focuses on the social value of the virtual world and how the virtual world supports coordination within society when it is given the right social meaning. He also focuses on the risks of centralized control, believing that the ideal metaverse should be created by organizations that are more like nonprofit DAOs than traditional companies. Glen and Audrey have very similar concerns:

Enterprise Control, Surveillance, and Monopoly: ISRs blur the boundaries between public and private, and digital spaces can be both private and open to the broader audience or observed by enterprise service providers. Unless ISR networks are constructed based on the principles of rights and interoperability that we emphasize above and are managed by a wider multi-governance approach dedicated to most of the rest of the book, they will become the ironiest monopoly cage as we know.

If I were to point out a difference in their vision, that was it. Virtual Society focuses more on the shared storytelling and long-term continuity aspects of virtual worlds, pointing out how games like Minecraft win the hearts of hundreds of millions of people, although by modern standards it is very limited from the perspective of cinematic immersion. On the other hand, pluralism seems to focus more on (but far from the only) sense immersion and is more receptive to short-term experiences. The argument holds that sensory immersion has a uniquely powerful ability to convey certain information that we are difficult to obtain. Time will tell us which of these visions, or which combination of the two will succeed.

Where does pluralism lie in the contemporary ideological landscape?

One thing that impressed me when I look back on the political changes we have seen since the early 2010s is that the movements that have succeeded in the current environment seem to have one thing in common: they are both object-level, not meta-level. That is, they are not seeking to promote broad general principles on how to solve social or political problems, but rather seeking to promote specific positions on specific issues. Some examples that come to mind include:

• YIMBY: Representative “Yes, In My Back Yard”, the YIMBY campaign aims to combat highly restrictive zoning regulations such as the San Francisco Bay Area and expand freedom to build housing. If successful, they think this will reduce the largest single component of the cost of living for many and increase GDP by up to 36%. YIMBY has achieved many political victories recently, including an important zoning liberalization bill in California.

• Crypto Industry: Ideologically, the industry represents the principles of freedom, decentralization, openness and anti-censorship. In practice, most crypto industries end up focusing more on the openness of the global financial system and the freedom to hold and consume funds.

• Extended lifespan: Using biomedical research to figure out how to intervene before the aging process develops to the extent of the disease, potentially giving us a longer (and completely healthy) lifespan, a concept that has become mainstream over the past decade.

• Effective Altruism: Historically, the effective altruism movement represents a widespread use of a formula: (i) care about doing the most good things, (ii) strictly determine which charities actually achieve this, and point out that some charities are thousands of times more effective than others. However, recently, the most prominent part of the movement has turned to the single issue of AI security.

In modern movements that are not driven by problems in this way, a large part can be seen as vague cults of personality, united around any set of positions taken and changed in real time by a leader or a handful of well-coordinated elites. There are also movements that may be criticized as ineffective and inconsistent, constantly trying to impose a list of changing causes under a umbrella of an ill-defined, unprincipled “Omnicause”.

If I had to ask myself why these shifts occurred, I would say this: Large groups have to coordinate around certain things. And the reality is that you either (i) coordinate around principles, (ii) coordinate around a task, or (iii) coordinate around a leader. When an existing set of principles is considered outdated and inefficient, the other two alternatives will naturally become more popular.

Coordinating around a task is effective, but it is temporary, and once that particular task is completed, any social capital you accumulate will easily dissipate. Leaders and principles are effective because they are task factories: they can constantly output new things and new answers to new problems. In both options, principles are more socially scalable and longer-lasting.

Pluralism seems to be in a very opposite direction to the broader trend. Together with a very small number of other modern movements (probably cyber countries), pluralism has a much wider scope beyond any single task, and it seeks to coordinate around principles rather than leaders. One way to understand pluralism is to recognize that (at least on a very large scale) coordination around principles is the superiority of the triangle, and it is working to find a new set of principles that apply to the 21st century. Radical markets are trying to reshape the fields of economics and mechanism design. Pluralism is trying to reshape liberalism.

This chart by Gisele Chou is a good example of how all the mechanisms described in the above sections combine into a framework:

To some extent, this framework is perfectly justified. Philosopher Nasim Taleb likes to quote Geoff and Vince Graham to describe his rejection of “scale-not universalism”: “At the federal level, I am a liberal; at the state level, I am a Republican; at the local level, I am a Democrat; at the family and friends level, I am a socialist.” Multiple philosophy attaches great importance to this and recommends different mechanisms on different scales.

On another level, it sometimes feels like a “multiplex atmosphere” is like an umbrella that brings together very different concepts, and the reasons for accepting or rejecting them are very different. For example, “It is very important to build a healthy connection between people” and “the difference in the degree of connection required to consider” are very different statements. It is entirely possible to use paired quadratic financing to create a new, better UN to fund cooperation and world peace, but at the same time, “creative collaboration” is overrated, and great work should be the vision of an author. This seemingly inconsistency is partly due to the diverse authorship of the book: for example, virtual reality and brain-brain communication are written by Puja Olhaver in part. But this is the weakness of all philosophy: 19th-century liberalism combines democracy and markets, but it is a comprehensive work of many people with different beliefs. To this day, there are many people who like democracy and doubt the market, or the market and doubt democracy.

So, one question worth asking is: If your background intuition about various questions differs in some ways from the “pluralistic atmosphere”, can you still benefit from pluralistic thought? I think the answer is yes.

Is pluralism compatible with the future of crazy indexes?

By reading pluralism, you might get the impression that while Glen and Audrey’s meta-level vision of dialogue and governance are very appealing, they don’t really see what’s going to happen in the future. Here are the specific goals that they hope to achieve:

• We believe it can increase economic output in the workplace by 10% and increase growth by one percentage point.

• In the health field, we believe it can extend human lifespan by 20 years.

• In the media field, it can bridge the disagreements created by social media, provide sustainable funding, expand participation, and significantly increase press freedom.

• For the environmental field, it is at the heart of solving most of the serious environmental problems we face, and may even be more important than traditional "green" technologies.

• In terms of education, it can subvert the linear structure of current school education, thereby achieving more diverse and flexible lifelong learning paths.

These are all very good results and ambitious goals for the next decade. But the goals I want to see from a technologically developed society are bigger and more profound than these. When I read this part, I remembered my recent description of the Future Museum in Dubai and Tokyo:

However, the solutions they propose are mostly fine-tuning, trying to make the world more gentle and friendly to people with these diseases: robots can provide guidance to people, such as writing braille on business cards, etc. These are very valuable things that can improve the lives of many people. But they are not what I expect to see in future museums in 2024, and what I want to see is a solution that people can really see and hear again, such as optic nerve regeneration and brain-computer interfaces.

Dubai’s attitude toward these issues deeply touched my soul, but Tokyo did not. I don’t want a future that is 1.2 times better than now, enjoying a comfortable life of 84 years rather than 70 years. What I want is a future that is ten thousand times better than now… If I become weak due to illness and live in an environment that still makes me comfortable despite the illness, it is certainly an improvement. But what I really want is technology that can fix me and make me stronger again.

Dubai is an interesting example because it also uses another technology that deeply touched my soul: geological engineering. Today, the use and risks of geological engineering are still in a rather local range: artificial rainfall in the UAE, and some blame it for the recent floods in Dubai, despite unanimous opposition from experts. However, there may be greater rewards tomorrow. Solar geological engineering is an example: instead of reorganizing our entire economy and society to keep CO2 at reasonable low levels and keep the earth at a reasonable cool temperature, there is another possibility that achieving the 1-4 degrees Celsius cooling goal is only spraying the appropriate salt into the air. Today, these ideas are highly speculative, and it is too early to talk about science to make scientific commitments or use them as excuses for inaction on other things. Even more modest proposals like artificial lakes can cause parasite problems.

But as this century progresses, our ability to understand the consequences of these behaviors will improve. Just as early drugs were often harmful and today they could save lives vitally, our ability to heal the planet is likely to undergo a similar transformation.

But even after the scientific question becomes easier to understand, another real big question hangs over our heads: How exactly should we manage such things?

Environmental geopolitics is already a big problem today. Disputes about river water rights have already existed. If transformative continental or world-scale geological engineering becomes feasible, these issues will become more stakeholder.

Today, it seems hard to imagine any other solution except that several powerful nations unite to decide everything on behalf of humanity. However, the idea of ​​pluralism is likely to be the best opportunity for us to come up with a better solution. The idea of ​​common property that certain resources or environmental characteristics can be shared among multiple countries, even non-state entities responsible for protecting the natural environment or future interests, seems convincing in principle. The challenge of history has been that these ideas are difficult to formalize. Pluralism provides a range of theoretical tools for this.

If we look back from the geological engineering problem and think about the category of "crazy exponential technology" in general, we may feel that there is a tension between pluralism and the technology that leads to exponential growth of capabilities. If different entities in society move on a linear or slightly superlinear trajectory, then the slight difference at time T is still a slight difference at time T+1, so the system is stable. But if the progress is super exponential, then the slight difference at that time will become a huge difference at this time. Even if calculated proportionally, the natural result is that an entity that surpasses everything else will be born.

Left: Slightly hyperlinear growth. A small difference at the beginning becomes a small difference at the end. Right: A super exponential growth. A small difference at the beginning quickly becomes a very large difference.

This has actually always been a trade-off. If you were to ask which 18th-century institutional organization looked the most “diversified,” you might think of deep-rooted large family relations and industry associations. However, the Industrial Revolution swept away these and replaced them with economies of scale and industrial capitalism, which are often considered to be the cause of huge economic growth.

However, I think the static diversification of the pre-industrial era is essentially different from the pluralism of Glen and Audrey. The static diversification before the Industrial Revolution was crushed by what Glen called “increasing returns.” Diversification has specially designed tools to deal with it: democratic mechanisms that provide funding for public goods, such as quadratic financing, and more limited ownership, especially if you create something very powerful, you can only have partial ownership of what you create. With these technologies, we can prevent the hyper-exponential growth of the scale of human civilization from turning into hyper-exponential growth of resource and power inequality. Instead, we design property rights in such a way that the water rises. Therefore, I think the exponential growth and the concept of diversified governance of technical capabilities are highly complementary .

Does pluralism mean a weakening of excellence and professionalism?

There is a political idea that can be summarized as “elite liberalism”: it values ​​the benefits of free choice and democracy, but acknowledges that some people are investing much higher than others and hopes to impose friction or restrictions on democracy, giving the elite more room for maneuver. Some recent examples include:

• Richard Hanania's concept of "Netzsche's liberalism" attempts to reconcile his long-standing belief that "some people are superior to others in a deeper sense... society takes disproportionate benefits from a few scientific and artistic geniuses", and he increasingly recognizes the benefits of liberal democracy, which can avoid truly terrible outcomes while not over-consolidating the status of specific elites with bad ideas.

• Garrett Jones's "10% reduction in democracy" theory advocates more indirect democracy through longer term, more appointments and similar mechanisms.

• Bryan Caplan carefully supported freedom of speech , believing that freedom of speech at least gives anti-elites the opportunity to form and develop ideas under hostile conditions, and that even an open "ideological market" is far from fully guaranteeing good ideas to win wider public opinion.

There is similar debate on the other side of the political field, although there is a tendency to focus on “expert knowledge” rather than “excellence” or “wisdom.” The types of solutions advocated by people with these claims usually involve making compromises between democracy and chaebolism or technological domination (or something worse than the two) as a way to try to screen for excellence. But what if we don’t do this compromise, but instead work harder to solve the problem directly? If we start from the goal of such a goal: we want an open multi-mechanism that allows different people and groups to express and execute their different ideas so that the best can win, then we can ask the question: How do we optimize institutions based on this idea?

One possible answer is: predict the market.

Left picture: Musk declares that the British civil war is " inevitable " . Right picture: Polymarket gamblers, who really participate in it, think that the probability of a civil war is ... 3% (I think this probability is too high, but I also bet)

The prediction market is a place where different people can express their opinions on what will happen in the future. The advantages of prediction markets come from the view that when people have a "stakes", they are more likely to give high-quality opinions, and over time, the quality of the system will also improve, and those with incorrect opinions will lose money, and those with correct opinions will make money.

It should be noted that while forecasting markets are diverse in the sense of being open to different participants, they are not the case in Glen and Audrey's eyes. This is because they are a pure financial mechanism: they do not distinguish whether one person bets $1 million or one million unrelated people bets a total of $1 million. One way to diversify the forecasting market is to introduce per capita subsidies and prevent people from outsourcing the bets they use with these subsidies. There are some mathematical arguments that this does better than the traditional forecasting market in terms of inspiring participants' knowledge and insights. Another option is to run a forecasting market while running a Polis-style discussion platform that encourages people to submit reasons for their belief in something—perhaps using soul-bound proofs recorded by previous markets to determine who happens more weight.

Predictive markets are tools that can be applied to many form factors and environments. One example is traceable public goods financing, where public goods are supported only after they have an impact and have enough time to evaluate the impact. RPGFs are often considered to be combined with an investment ecosystem where the upfront funding of public goods projects will be provided by venture capital funds and investors who predict which projects will succeed in the future. Both the post-event part (evaluation) and the pre-event part (prediction) can become more diversified: the former uses some form of secondary voting, and the latter uses per capita subsidy.

The book and related articles are not really discussed from a “good and bad” perspective and perspective, but are just drawing more benefits from more different perspectives. On the “resonance” level, I think there is indeed a sense of tension. However, if you believe that the measurement of “good and bad” is very important, then I don’t think these focus is essentially incompatible: there are many ways to adopt one of the ideas to improve the mechanisms designed for others.

Where can these ideas be applied first?

The most natural application of the concept of pluralism is the social environment, and our society has faced the problem of how to improve cooperation among different and interacting tribes while avoiding centralization and protecting participants’ autonomy.

I personally like three experiments most: social media, blockchain ecology and local government. The specific examples are as follows:

• Twitter的Community Notes（社区笔记） ，其笔记排名系统已经被设计成支持那些获得广泛参与者支持的笔记。改善社区笔记的一个自然而然的途径是找到将其与预测市场相结合的方法，从而鼓励老练的参与者更快地标记那些将获得关注的帖子。

• 面向用户的反欺诈软件。Message Checker以及Brave浏览器和一些加密钱包，都是软件范式的早期例子，它们积极地代表用户工作，保护用户免受威胁，而不需要集中的后门。我预计像这样的软件将会非常重要，但却有固有的决策问题，即决定什么是威胁，什么不是威胁。多元论理论可以帮助解决这个问题。

• 区块链生态中的公共产品融资。以太坊生态大量使用了二次方融资和追溯融资。多元机制可以帮助限制这些机制相互勾结，并补贴生态中面临相互竞争压力的各部分之间的合作（L2扩展平台和钱包）。

• 网络国家、popup cities及相关概念。基于共同利益在网上形成的新的志愿社区，然后在线下“具体化”，有许多需求：(1)减少内部独裁治理，(2)彼此之间更多的合作，(3)与他们所在的实际管辖区域更多的合作。多元机制可以帮助改善这三方面。

• 公共资助的新闻媒体。历来，媒体要么由听众资助，要么由中央集权国家的行政部门资助。多元机制可以实现更加民主的机制，这些机制也明确地努力连接两极，减少而非加剧两极分化。

• 地方公共产品。有许多超地方治理和资源分配决策可以从多元机制中受益；我的加密城市相关文章包含了一些示例。一个可能的起点是拥有高度复杂居民的准城市，比如大学。

如今，我认为正确的思考“多元主义”的方式是将其视为社会机制设计理念的“直觉泵”，以更好地保护个人和社区的自由，实现大规模合作，并最大限度地减少两极分化。上述环境是实验的良好基础，因为它们包含(i)现实世界的问题和资源，以及(ii)对尝试新想法非常感兴趣的人们。

未来，关于21世纪世界结构会有更广泛的政治问题，包括个人、公司和国家拥有什么样的主权水平，世界最终会变得多么平等或不平等，以及哪类强大的技术会以何种顺序发展以及将具有哪些功能属性。无论是“多元主义氛围”，还是多元机制设计理论的具体含义，关于这些话题还有很多话要说。

对于同一个问题，通常会有多种相互矛盾的方法。例如，多元论理论意味着，如果一个群体或机制与社会中其他主导机制不相关，能够带来独特的事物，那么该群体或机制的提升就是有价值的。但是，亿万富翁作为受欢迎的输入方，将不相关的活动注入到一个由所有内部决策逻辑都极其相似的民族国家主导的世界，还是更加活跃的民族国家作为受欢迎的输入方，将多样性注入到一个由同质的亿万富翁资本主义主导的世界？你的答案很可能取决于你对这两个群体的原有感觉。

出于这个原因，我认为最好不要把多元论理解为你现有的世界思考框架的总体替代品，而应将其视为它的补充，这些基本思想可以使各种机制变得更好。