Research notes : The Byzantine type problem

 This is not so much of a blog post as it is notes for myself.

My quest for many years now has been to create a specific kind of specification  language that would describe distributed systems, or in other words, multi agent systems,  mainly human agents augmented by their computer devices.

Now  here is an interesting thing. Let us assume  that we do create such a language. How will be sure that the specification is  respected by all participants?

For blockchains like Ethereum that have a weak type system, thus they do  not have a specification language, the only way to trust the computation is to actually perform the computation in the public.

This does  not have to be the case for us. A specification in a dependent type language does require computation to determine the type of  the output of a function, but it does not require to know the function itself, just its type. Thus one could have a private function that computes a value, and that value can be checked against its expected type.

In other words, all we need  is to compute the types of the outcomes of a  computation to provide validation. This is huge because we can then abstract big parts of a distributed system, like a group of actors, and simply forget about its internal structure. Our only concern would then be the validation of the results at the edges with the outside world.

This can enable a hierarchical decentralized validation mechanism, where a single centralized blockchain is not needed.

( We do need to make sure that each abstract function is not called more than once with the same input, because then we would  have to also check that they give  back the same  value, and we do not want to do that.)

The inefficacy of Rovolutionary organizations - A sympathetic critique.

Changing the world has been the main goal of revolutionary communist or anarchist groups. There is a plethora of evidence in my lifetime that such groups are ineffective.


In order to show that, I will not look into the strategies that they take but simply on the results. There have been multiple social movements that wanted change and those groups failed to provide the necessary organization that would make those movements successful.

The first of the social movements I took part in, was the European Social Forum in 2002.

It happened one year after the start of the Afghanistan War, and as you can see, we were holding anti-war placards. But this movements started a few years earlier in 1999 in Seatle where people were protesting the role of the WTO, the effects of Globalization and capitalism. The protests continued in Genoa, Italy in 2001 and then Florence in 2002 . The ESF in Florence was a gathering of political movements across europe that discussed for multiple days on an alternative to capitalism. This was followed by a 1 million people demonstration in Florence. I remember walking for hours.
   The ESF continued for 2 more years, one in London and the next in Athens.
It was successful in a way since it inspired a lot of people that another world is possible. But I do not remember any decisions taken that would be helpful in transforming this world. There were two factions. The one promoted change through the elections, that we should build left parties that would take part in the elections and that would then perform change when they become the government. The other faction, the revolutionary one that I was part of, was interested in mass mobilization from below, that would force its view to any government that was in power.
    Even if the revolutionary proposal was correct, there were no innovative organizational changes that would make such a movement successful.
 Eventually that movement faded away, due to the fact that noone proposed something that would work and due to the fact that the EU used the police to suppress it.

 The next social movement I am aware of was the result of the economic crisis of 2008. This triggered the Occupy movement, from New York to Spain, Greece and many other Countries, notably many Arab Countries like Egypt.
 I didn't participate in this movement, so I can only say what i heard. In New York, and many other places In USA, the movement was about inequality, the fact that the 1% was holding a tremendous amount of wealth while the rest was simply trying to survive. The movement's main organization was the assembly. In Greece, the people that occupied the square organized a discussion in place in which the occupiers took decisions on what to do next.

This lead to a political crisis. The parliament was surrounded by demonstrators to the point that the MPs could not leave the building. In Greece , the steep reduction of GDP, the increase of unemployment to 25% led to a volatile political system. The people were angry and they were ready to follow anyone that was to propose a solution, either on the left or on the right.
  The protests were met with police brutality and eventually they faded away. But the old political system was in disarray. The solution that was the most eminent was that of electoral change through the support of the Syriza party. This led to the capitulation of Syriza since it was unable to respond to the economic pressure of the EU.
  But one should not forget about the inability of the revolutionary organizations of Greece to turn the movement into mass protests from below, into worker strikes and into the eventual electoral capture of the state as an intermediary step in the transformation of Society. The sad thing about all this is that even if they did all of the above, they wouldn't be able to mitigate the side effects of the economic isolation by the EU.

The third movement that has just started is that of the Black Lives Matter in 2020 in US and all over the world. Even though the movement focuses on Racism, the increased police brutality toward the protesters and the use of the military to suppress the protests has led people to question the role of the police and the military and to question the political system itself. People start to understand that they do not live in a democracy, and thus the movement has the potential to question Capitalism itself. Given that there is no way that this movement can be expressed in the elections, this could lead to a new era of political and social insubordination from below.

Given though that there is no organization that can provide an effective method that could lead to systemic change, this movement will fade away as well, even though its effect could linger for many years.


I think it is quite conclusive that the current revolutionary organizations are ineffective. This is very important to understand. Most organizations will blame either the people or the State and its mechanisms of suppression. But we should not forget that the role of a revolutionary organization is to mitigate those mechanisms.

The people are willing but the revolutionary organizations cannot. This can only lead to one outcome. Eventual social change will happen only after a complete social collapse, a collapse that would destroy all previous social, political and economic relations. This would lead into chaos and from chaos we may see a different society emerging.
  That could be due to an ecological crisis or an economic crisis.

The other alternative is to try to find effective methods of organizing. It is imperative that communists and anarchists understand that they need to change their tactics.

Ryaki network : Workers in favor of technological progress.

  In a previous blog post of mine, I had proposed a new rule that would give the right to those that consume an X amount of money, to work to regain the same amount of money. This , I proposed, would change the behavior of agents to consume as much as the infrastructure allows. We would have full utilization of infrastructure and thus a tremendous reduction in production costs and thus reduction of the cost of living. You can read about it here  , though the algorithm is a bit outdated.

  In this article, I want to point out that we will also have a secondary effect. Workers will stop having an aversion toward technological progress that endangers their jobs and their income. This is very important, because we want to avoid the need to create a structure / organization that forces technological progress in the production process . Instead workers / consumers will autonomously welcome progress.

I think that it is important to see how things work in Capitalism. In capitalism, workers or worker power is a commodity. Companies simply want to buy as few of it as they can, and for this reason, they adopt productivity increasing technologies. On the other hand, workers do not want to lose their jobs since they do not have the right to work, other than the one given by their employer.
It is for this reason that a secondary group in the company should take these decisions, whose interest aligns with the company itself. I think this is called the management team.

For worker cooperatives, member workers have the full benefits of capital investment. But if a non-member worker wanted to join the cooperative, those benefits would have to be split with him too. In other words, technological progress is welcomed by member workers but other workers are not.

Now, let me point to you what happens with the proposed ryaki network:
There are two rules that need to be taken into account :

A. You have the right to work the same amount that you consume. Thus you get priority with regards to others that haven't consumed as much on positions that you both qualify.

B. Each production unit has specific positions that need to be filled, but those positions do not belong to a single person. They belong to multiple people that take turns to work there. Workers are eligible to work in multiple posts.

Because workers can work in multiple positions and they have the right to work in any of those positions, their income remains stable when an organization adopts a new structure that reduces their hours of work , or makes their position obsolete.

Replacing the Web : The importance of social context to information.

While creating a language to encode and compute p2p social structures, I was thinking that parallel to those digital social structures, the Web would remain the same, used to store and retrieve information.
I am starting to believe that this is wrong. We need to encode the social contexts/structures around information. For now, they are either implicit or entirely missing.

Information is created by a social structure and it is used in other social contexts. Thus information has a social function. It is the input to other social processes.

If information provides a service to society or to some group of people, making this relation explicit also results in creating a feedback loop where those groups finance the creation of that information.

As you can see, information is not different from any other production process. A social structure produces a product, and that product is consumed by a specific group, which , if production was democratic, finances and guides production with participatory social structures.

Currently, information , on many occasions, lacks a social purpose and noone takes responsibility for the accuracy of that information. In the future I envision, information has a purpose and someone is responsible for it, for ex. to update it to make it more accurate or clear.

In need of a generic fail-safe organization.

For every solution to a problem , we have assumptions about the state of the environment with which we interact. Those assumptions can stop being correct. What do we do when that happens?

  Let us further assume that the problem is a societal one, and the solution is a social organization. If we define rules under which this social organization functions and we require the environment to respect some restrictions, then when it doesn't, we end up with no social organization that can solve the issue.
  If the organization was mediated with software , then that software will be thrown away, and new forms of organization need to be developed from ground zero. Writing specialized software is time-consuming, thus practically, for a long period of time, the organization will need to use non-digital methods to preserve its structure. This, for many reasons, is both impractical and unacceptable.

  The things get even more difficult when we understand that social organizations depend on each other. If one is not able to perform its role due to a change in the environment, all other dependent social organizations will collapse as well. Thus, sometimes, we can end up with catastrophic failures.

  How can a system be able to adapt to such environmental perturbations? Here , I mean adaptation under conditions it was not designed for.

  In my opinion, we need to define a generic type of organization that can act as a fail-safe mode, it will try to fulfill the imminent problems and at the same time it will create the discussion space for the creation of the new organizational forms that will replace the failed ones.

  What characteristics should this generic organization have? This is a question I need to answer.

Freedom and Democracy as a Welfare Service

Freedom is not free. It has an economic cost that depends on the material conditions that enable it. The same is true for Democracy. At the same time Freedom and Democracy are fundamental human rights. Without exceptions, all must afford those rights. Thus, any proposed social system must create mechanisms that provide those rights to its participants.
 
My exposition will start by analyzing previous movements on freedom and Democracy and possibly discuss their limitations.

Digital Freedom and FSF

 

One cannot discuss Freedom without talking about the Free Software Foundation. FSF supports the freedom of the users of Software It believes that the users have the right to understand how the software works and to modify it to better support their needs. It is important to understand software as an intermediary between the hardware and the user. It gives the user an interface to interact with the machine. It enables the user to perform certain actions or it restricts him. In this sense, the interface that the software provides is similar to a legal system that allows or disallows certain actions.
  Thus , one could say that FSF supports the right of the users to change the digital system, rather than simply picking among the actions that are possible within the provided software. In this sense, FSF is consistent with revolutionary thought.

  From a materialistic point of view though, this is not possible. Users almost never change the software to suit their needs. In fact, proprietary software might even be more perceptive of its users needs, because the users are also the customers. Free Software provides freedom as long as you are a hacker, and even then , it is very difficult to perform a change. Only the writer of the software and a select few that maintain it are able to make changes. As software becomes more and more complicated, developers only understand parts of the software and only together can they support it.
  In order to have actual democracy and freedom, we need to create a welfare service that is free for all to use, that allows users to vote on changes about the software (or fork it and create alternatives) and provide funding so that the developers of the software will perform them.
  In conclusion, digital freedom requires the existence of a welfare service.

Material D&F : Democracy and Freedom viewed from the Revolutionary Left.

The revolutionary Left had always had Democracy and Freedom as the goal. For the RL , social relations and the economy should be determined by the will of the people. But similarly to the digital case, there is an intermediary between the citizens and the execution of actions. The interface here is the rules that each community , group or society has demanded to be respected.

  The type of rules can depend greatly on the context. In production, there is a specific workflow that must be respected. The use of machinery requires specific handling to avoid damaging it. Coordination in a community about social issues requires specific methods of decision making and types of actions to choose among.

It is in this context that the RL supports the right of the citizens to change the rules, the interface that each user will need to respect. Here though, we have the same problem, the citizens know what they want , but they have no knowledge how to acquire it. Can citizens change the rules themselves?

Consider the case of a nuclear plant. A community might decide that it wants to reduce the nuclear waste that goes to the environment. The community perceives the externalities of the nuclear plant. For the change to happen, it must interact with a group of nuclear scientists that will provide the new rules about the functioning of the nuclear plant.
Similarly, assuming that you eat at a restaurant, the customers can vote on changes of the food quality or provide directions on what type of food they prefer. Only a trained chef will be able to turn those directions into rules of cook-making that the cooks must abide by.
  In conclusion, material freedom does not only require the right to vote but also the support of trained professionals that will provide the solutions, and will create the new rules that certain members of society must follow to have the desired results.
  Since freedom and democracy is a universal right, this service must be provided to everyone, thus it must be a welfare service.

Cyber-physical systems : The elimination of the cyber physical barrier.

I have discussed digital and material freedom and the need for the existence of a welfare service that enables them. Digital freedom has been proposed by the FSF, material freedom by the Revolutionary Left. The interesting thing is that the cyber-physical barrier is starting to collapse. (And one of the goals of my work is its collapse.) The examples are many. ERP systems had been used in production for many years. Our interaction with the State has been digitized. New p2p systems start to emerge, such as airbnb and Uber, that use software to determine the interactions between the customers and the providers of a service. Blockchain and smart contructs promise to digitize part of the interactions we have as a society.
  Software starts to determine our social relations and the economy. The interface that citizens use start to increasingly become digital.
The rules are written in software.
  It is in this context, that the notion of Digital Freedom and Material Freedom start to blur and start to become the same thing. The RL has to start thinking about Free Software and Digital Freedom and translate its ideas to this new world.

Freedom as a welfare service

Any group that supports freedom as a universal right needs to understand that freedom requires maintainers. It requires a service that takes user input and produces changes to the rules and the software that create that user interface. That service needs to be free and it needs to be productive.

We need to measure the productivity of the service in order to determine the degree of freedom that it provides. If users propose changes, the service needs to interact with the users, provide guidance and actually perform the changes that the users want.

The group must find ways to support such a welfare service. In order to understand the magnitude of the cost, Research for new products or production methods need to be part of this welfare service, thus the cost is greater than the current cost on Research. This amounts to 2% of the GDP.

Freedom is not free but it must be free for everyone.

Multi-level selection and Cultural Evolution

I recently had the chance to learn of a new theoretical model on Evolution called multi-level selection. I will try to describe it and provide my first impressions on the different interpretations / uses of that theory from the community and its rejection from mainstream social sciences.
( I wanted to make a more thorough research on the subject, but currently it is not possible.)

Now, the main idea of multi level selection is very simple but this simple idea has profound implications for our society. It goes against mainstream theories that were built to support the premises of Capitalism, basically, the notion of the individual selfish actor. Social sciences have thus been victims of the system they belong to.

Let us first describe the mainstream mechanism of Evolution.

A. The actor is an individual organism to whom we attach a fitness function with which we measure its ability to survive.

B. We perform a simulation and then compute the fitness results with which we remove actors that have not performed well. This could mean for example that those actors have not been able to acquire enough food to survive.

C. We introduce random mutations that change the behavior of actors.

D. We perform the above multiple times.

We assume that natural selection works in the same way. Actors that have favorable mutations increase in number while others perish.

The important thing to note is A. The fitness function applies on the individual. This means that behaviors that increase the fitness of the individual are the ones selected. This leads us to conclude that only selfish behaviors are evolutionary selected.

This is consistent with the mainstream economic theory of an actor that is super rational and selfish. Since it is on our nature to be selfish, any other  theory that does not conceive the individual as the actor leads to failure.

Consider the case where we have a common piece of land where everyone can herd his sheep. Since the amount of grass is limited, it is best for each individually to overgraze his sheep. This eventually leads to the destruction of the land, not providing grass to anyone and the whole economy around it collapses. It is because of this that it has been suggested that individual property is the only way to govern resources.

Now, this is not true. Let us start with genetic evolution before switching to cultural evolution. Random mutations can propose any form of behavior, and it is selection that promotes those that increase survivability. Consider then the case that a specific mutation leads to an increase in the fitness of another organism whose behavior also increases the fitness function of the other. An increase of of the population of one organism leads to an increase of the other and vice versa. This is an example of a selection process that promotes a non-selfish behavior.

Mainstream evolutionary scientists will tell you that this is reciprocity, thus this only proves the selfishness of the individual actor. Note though that this is incorrect. Organisms do not necessarily have the capacity to judge actions. A selfish action here is defined as an action that directly increases the fitness of itself.

Multi-level selection thus proposes that a specific number of individual actors interact in such a way that their survivability depends on other. In such a case, we could consider the group as an actor that behaves in a specific way and which has its own fitness function. Individual mutations that increase the fitness of the group are thus selected while those that that do the opposite perish because the group perishes.

This formulation of evolutionary theory allows the existence of altruism, something that obviously exist in Human Society.

If we now return our gaze into culture , we will see that the main ideas of multi-level evolution also apply here. Elinor Ostrom's work is important here. Elinor studied communities whose livelihood depended on a common pool of resources like the one I described before. She found that depending on the case , the members created rules to govern the common resource. They imposed restrictions on its use and they checked that each member behaved accordingly. Some groups were more effective than others. This lead to an evolution of the rules of governance based on a group fitness function.

Let me now link the above ideas with my work. It is only recently that I learned about multi-level selection but it is directly related to what I am searching.

In essence, I am searching for a digital language that describes the rules of a group / community , that will have the same functionality as the DNA in organisms.

A. The DNA is interpreted so as to determine the structure of proteins
    This language will be compiled to create communication tools that permit the behaviors that the rules allow.
B. DNA can be copied and transfered into another organism.
     The digitization of the rules will permit a group to copy the institutional rules of another without any errors.
C.  DNA contains information about the organism that is subject to the effects of evolution.
      Similarly, each group will be able to mutate its rules and will be subject to a fitness function.

What I hope with this is that the complexity of the rules of community institutions will increase to the point that their effectiveness will surpass that of the state or the undemocratic corporations.
This digital language is hoped to increase the speed of the cultural evolution of institutions.

Unfortunately for me, the rules describe the concurrent interactions of agents and there isn't any widely accepted theory around distributed concurrent execution.
Thus my main research is on Computer Science rather than on Social Sciences.