A Treatise for One Network – Anonymous National Deliberation [pdf]
simurgh-beau.github.ioHi HN,
I am the author of this white paper, posting under the pseudonym Simurgh. Thank you for taking a look.
The Motivation: This project comes directly from my experience watching the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement in Iran and the subsequent efforts by the state to fragment and divide the opposition. I felt that if people could only talk to each other at scale and discover their common ground, they would be less susceptible to this strategy.
The Project: This white paper outlines a protocol for doing just that. It's a structured, multi-stage deliberation system designed to be built on a platform with an existing network, like Telegram. It uses three core principles:
Absolute Anonymity: To protect participants.
Structured Process: A tiered funnel to distill signal from noise.
Meritocratic Promotion: To ensure the most well-reasoned ideas rise to the top.
My Ask of the HN Community: I am not a cryptographer or a large-scale systems architect. I am posting this here because this community has an incredible depth of expertise. I am looking for your honest feedback, especially on:
Potential failure modes and security vulnerabilities in the protocol design.
Suggestions for strengthening the system against manipulation.
Any thoughts on the overall concept from those who have experience building social or secure messaging protocols.
I don't see how this can be resistant to manipulation.
I don't see how it can be resistant to foreigners flooding the system with their text or to people creating multiple accounts to have an outsized influence.
I think if those problems could be solved it would be the best thing in the world, but the funnel procedure and the meritocratic promotion don't matter in the absence of those things. There are also many ways to do what this system proposes. A threaded discussion system is also good.
The problem is instead the lack of manipulation resistance from multiple accounts and people who shouldn't have accounts at all.
Hi Simurgh! This seems like a very ambitious project. I wonder if you've had a look at what others have done in this space. I initially liked the look of Ehud Shapiro's stuff [1] but I'm not sure he has the right take on the French political philosophy he draws on (or perhaps things have moved on now from the sources he cited). But perhaps his protocols are neutral enough to serve your purposes too?
[1] https://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/shapiro/home
Related: https://pol.is/home
Pol.is is a tool that uses ML to synthesize these shared views and provide inisght into both areas of consensus and discordance.
I am not sure of the specific relationships but it has been championed by Audrey Tang (Taiwan's minster of digital affairs) and other Pluralist people.
I think this is a worthy tool but slightly narrower than pol.is because it's just as important to understand where there is disagreement.
I agree that a system that enables anonymous deliberation is desirable, however, the power of vendor to surveil and deceive participants can be a lucrative opportunity for selling out democracy to the highest bidder. Hence to have a solution like that one first need to solve the remote electronic voting problem.
How Orwellian.
Democracy is not, about implementing whatever the majority says, nowhere in the world is democracy practiced like that. Democracy is about safeguarding minority rights and enforcing a government which functions by compromise. Protection against the tyranny of the majority, is what democracy is about.
To justify the "Orwellian". A society wide consensus justifies a total state, it removes legitimation from the opposition and creates an environment where divergence becomes suspicious. What OP does not understand is that totalitarian regimes in most case do have a popular mandate and exactly that popular mandate is used to justify the total state. Additionally, OP talks about Iran, but has he considered what would happen if 70% of the Iranian population would support the regime? What would the result look like, if not perfect evidence that the opposition should be oppressed.