Reddit mentions of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St)

I thought this was an excellent paper that lays out an intriguing and surprisingly achievable plan for a vote-less democracy. Well worth the read.

However, I worry that futarchy doesn't adequately account for the distorting effect of trying to measure and optimize specific metrics. Even if the metrics are a good measure of the thing that we want to maximize, the process of trying to maximize them will cause them to become less effective proxies.

To take a blatant example, taking out advertisements to convince people to rate their lives highly would be extremely favored by the system, even if they did nothing to actually improve the lives of the people. The cost of the advertisements could easily be outweighed by even a small percentage of citizens bumping themselves up to "1". There's no mechanism by which the DAO can oppose this: even if it sees the danger in advance, it can't prefer to prevent such behavior, because such behavior would be "good" for its goal of maximizing the metric.

More subtly, maximizing (primarily short-term) subjective welfare is likely to have a lot of undesirable effects. For instance, whistleblowing would likely be heavily punished in a democracy DAO: evidence of corruption has an immediate negative effect on the subjective well-being of citizens, and any long-term effects caused by more trustworthy government are likely to be overwhelmed by the short-term unhappiness.

You can try to use more and better metrics, but I suspect this is the sort of problem where any proposed solution has isomorphic failure modes. Would love to be proven wrong, however, as there's a lot to like about this sort of system!

(The above analysis borrows heavily from Seeing Like A State, which I regard as required reading for anyone trying to build new social systems.)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Institution-ebook/dp/B00D8JJYWA

for you

Good post. If you want thought-provoking material relating to the inherent connection between the State and surveys of land ownership ("cadastral maps"), check out Seeing Like A State. Not necessarily RPG-relevant, but very interesting stuff for understanding how many elements of the modern world (including seemingly unrelated things like family surnames) came to be so ubiquitous we forget completely that they are inventions. Still some good worldbuilding takeaways and fodder for creating narrative background.

This reminds of a focal area in the book Seeing Like a State, which looks at why and how the maturation of state administration depends upon better data, developed through standardization of measurement and abstraction. Good book if you're interested in that sort of thing, and a beneficial view of history when discussing policy today.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D8JJYWA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1