We are interested in a process in which a small or very large group of people repeatedly reach and follow agreements. We refer to such processes as Social Choice. We identify five aspects arising from them, language, knowledge, discussion, collaboration, and choice about choice. We propose a social choice mechanism by careful consideration of these aspects.
Some of the main problems with collaborative decision-making have to do with scales and limits that affect the flow and processing of information. Those limits are so believed to be inherent in reality such that they’re mostly not considered to possibly be overcome. For example, we naturally consider the case in which everyone has a right to vote, but what about the case in which everyone has an equal right to propose what to vote over?
In small groups and everyday life, we usually don’t vote but express our opinions, sometimes discuss them, and the agreement or disagreement or opinions map arise from the situation. But in large communities, like a country, we can only think of everyone having a right to vote for some limited number of proposals. We reach those few proposals using hierarchical (rather decentralized) processes, in the good case, in which everyone has some right to propose but the opinions flow through certain pipes and reach the voting stage almost empty from the vast information gathered in the process. Yet, we don’t even dare to imagine an equal right to propose just like an equal right to vote, for everyone, in a way that can actually work. Indeed how can that work, how can a voter go over equally-weighted one million proposals every day?
All known methods of discussions so far suffer from very poor scaling. Twice more participants is rarely twice the information gain, and when the group is too big (even a few dozens), twice more participants may even reduce the overall gain into half and below, not just to not improve it times two.
It turns out that under certain assumptions we can reach truly efficiently scaling discussions and information flow, where 10,000 people are actually 100 times more effective than 100 people, in terms of collaborative decision making and collaborative theory formation. But for this, we’ll need the aid of machines, and we’ll also need to help them to help us. Specifically, the price is using only certain languages, that may still evolve with time, and by that letting computers be able to understand what we speak about, to understand things said during the discussions. Since no one knows how to make computers understand natural languages, we’ll have to make a step towards machines and use machine comprehensible languages. We’ll detail more about this point, but before let’s speak a little about self-amendment.
We describe a decentralized computer network, Tau, and as such, which social decisions may it support? The most that computers can do is to run programs. Over Tau we can gather knowledge and agree or disagree over it, and we can also actually do something and perform actions as arises from the discussion over the platform. Those actions are nothing but computer programs. And the most important program in our scope is the platform itself.
The main choices collaboratively to be made over the system, are about the system itself. Tau is a discussion about Tau. Or in a little more elaborate yet succinct definition:
Consider a process, denoted by X, of people, forming and following another process denoted by Y. Tau is the case where X=Y.
That’s the Tau. What the Tau is doesn’t matter, what matters is that it can change into anything we want it to be. Further, Tau is a computer program, so we refer to a program that changes itself up to the collaborative opinions and decisions of its users.
It should be remarked that we do not let Tau guess the people’s opinion, or even perform well-educated guesses as in machine learning, and that’s maybe the main reason we use logic. Things said over the platform are as formal and definite as computer programs, they just deal with generic knowledge rather than machine instructions.
Having that, a collaboratively self-amending program, it can transform into virtually any program we’d like it to be, or many programs at once. Indeed Tau does not speak only about itself but is open to creation of any other individual or collaborative activities, such that we make it possible for small and very large groups to discuss, share and organize knowledge, detect consensus and disagreements, and coordinate actions in forms of programs.
In order for machines to boost our discussion and collaboration abilities, they have to have access to the meaning of what we say. Machines use certain kinds of languages while humans use different kinds. For machines to use human languages, is something no one knows how to do, and for humans to directly use machine languages is pretty much inconvenient to the extent that it simply doesn’t fit common knowledge-sharing human communication. Machine languages are made of machine instructions, while knowledge representation is of a different nature. In other words, machines expect operational information, while humans make a lot of use of declarative language. Indeed one of Tau’s goals is to let us focus on the “know-what” and let machines figure out the “know-how”.
We, therefore, suggest a widely previously-suggested (cf. e.g. the article “Knowledge Representation and Classical Logic” by Lifschitz et. al) place in the middle between human and machine languages, which is logic. Formal logic is largely natural to humans and is something machines can work with. But still “formal logic” isn’t anything particular, as it doesn’t point to any language but is a vague description of a family of languages.
We postulate that there should not and can not be a single universal language. There is no reason for one language to be optimal (or even adequate) for all needs. We, therefore, come up with a meta-language that is able to define new languages, but hey this would be back to square one with one universal [meta-]language. We require the meta-language to be able to redefine itself and change, just as it can define other languages. By that, we get not only many languages but also a self-amending language, which is an important part in a self-amending system.
From here we continue to the Internet of Languages. Using the meta-language which we call TML (Tau Meta-Language, can get the impression from the ongoing work on GitHub) users define new languages by specifying logical formulas to describe what it means for two documents in different languages to have the same meaning. In other words, to define a new language, one needs to define how it translates a semantics-preserving translation into an existing language. Semantics in our scope is ontological (objects and relations), and not operational semantics as in programming languages. By that, we get an internet of knowledge representation languages that make the choice of language to not matter. A document in one language can be routed (using TML programs) into different languages.
We do not refer to translation as in French to Chinese, as we already stressed that we don’t deal with natural languages. Of course, theoretically, it might be the case that one day someone will program over TML something that can understand natural language completely, but we don’t count on such an event. Indeed there are many formalisms of natural language that are quite close to the full language and comfortable for humans to work with (what we refer to as “simple enough English that machines can understand”), so we can expect TML to process human-comprehensible languages to some extent. But TML is intended also for machine-only languages. For example, one might want to convert a document into a formatted HTML or into a Wiki, or to convert a program in some high-level language to machine code, or to synthesize code from logic. More generally, TML is intended to be a compiler-compiler.
Now that we can express knowledge and opinions in various languages (precisely those languages that users define over the internet of languages over time), we can communicate using those languages. We consider Human-Human communication, or more specifically Human-Machine-Human communication. The machine is not an equal part in the conversation, it is only a machine, it only organizes what we say and is able to do so since we encode our information in a way accessible to it. A user can broadcast an idea to another user, and at this narrow scope of transmitting one idea between two people we can already enjoy three benefits, easy explaining, easy understanding, and formalizing knowledge as a byproduct.
Specifically, the explainer doesn’t need to make the other user understand, they only need to make the machine understand. This task might be simpler in some aspects and more complex in others, still, machines are certainly less bound to organization and scale than humans. Having achieved an idea formalized in a machine comprehensible language, the second user can now not only translate it to other knowledge representation languages or to organize it as they see fit, or to compare it to other formalized ideas, they can also ask the machine all questions they got. Since the machine understood the subject completely, and by ‘understood’ we indeed refer to the theoretical ability to answer all questions (decidability arises here), it can help the user understand by the same definition of understanding, as it can answer all the user’s questions, without the need to refer the question to the original idea’s author.
But Tau is beyond such case. Tau is about discussions of any scale. It is structured as discussions just like on forums or social networks, with posts and comments, that can appear in a team or a profile. A profile (or identity) is a place where people will typically post their personal opinions and will be able to share them with other profiles they’re connected with. A team is a group of identities, created and configured by some user, and intended to deal with a certain subject. For example, a team could collaboratively develop a software product, or compose an agreed law or contract, or simply any scientific/philosophical/social/nonsense ideas.
So far sounds just like any other discussion platform, but here we can have many more features thanks to using machine comprehensible languages. To list a few, automatically detect repeated argument by the same person, or collect what each person said during the discussion and map all the agreement and disagreement points, or list all opinions and then who agrees with them, rather speakers per opinion than opinions per speaker, or to organize the information in the discussion in more organized and readable forms like a wiki. It can even comment automatically, suppose you see a post by someone expressing some opinion, but you already expressed in length your opinion about the subject in the past. You could then click “autocomment” and the system will automatically express your opinion, based on the exact information you provided in the past, and relative to the post you’re autocommenting to. Or, maybe most importantly, to calculate the set of statements agreed by everyone with no exception, under some scope in concern, can be network-wide, or per team, or per profiles connected to my profile, or per discussion, and so on. Remember, this is not magic at all, once everything is written in logic (or given we have a language that we can translate it into logic, namely TML definitions of the documents’ languages).
Over Tau we teach the network a lot of knowledge, intentionally or as a byproduct of discussions. We also form theories that we agree on and all contributed to. What can we do with this knowledge? Ultimately, in the computer world, all we can do is run computer programs. So on Tau, we will be able to discuss programs, and then actually run them. On Tau, we’ll have a special team called Tau, such that whenever the group accepts a new decision, Tau’s code is automatically modified. Over Tau we can make true those things that we agreed as desirable in our discussions. Once a team agrees or modifies its agreement on a specification of some program, no code needs to be written or rewritten as it can be done automatically, as everything is already in machine-comprehensible languages.
Choice about choice, is to choose how to choose. To be able to change the choice mechanism itself, or in other words, the rules of changing the rules, or equivalently, to change Tau’s code with time. This as for itself raises paradoxes and constraints on the possible logics. If rules can change themselves, they inevitably contradict themselves as they try to say something else. How can we formalize such a process in a paradox-free manner? We have a novel solution to this problem, but this is out of the scope of this article.
A version of this text was first published by Ohad Asor, Founder and CTO of Tau and Agoras on December 31, 2017
Ohad has been a Software Developer and Mathematician at top tech companies since 1995. He was the youngest university student in Israel, studying Mathematics and Computer Science at the age of 13. Over the years he has accumulated extensive knowledge and experience in programming, mathematics, logic, machine learning, complexity theory, engineering, economics, and decentralized networks.
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