Define "to foster diversity and alignment"

[moul]

We mention the goal of "fostering diversity and alignment." However, this phrase can be open to interpretation and may seem contradictory at first. We need to define what we mean by "foster diversity and alignment" to ensure a shared understanding.

Things to avoid include misinterpretation, conflicting priorities, biased judgments, and ineffective communication that makes people feel unsafe.

Maybe: alignment involves endorsing the constitution and core values, while diversity entails experimenting, competing, pioneering, taking risks, and iterating.

[jaekwon]

Great.

What there is so far:

We believe that by embracing diversity and fostering open dialogue between competing self-aligned groups we can create a more robust, innovative, and decentralized ecosystem. The diversity of specialized hubs will accelerate innovation, while the diversity of coopetative hubs will reduce overall global systemic risk. The benefits will extend beyond immediate technical solutions, contributing to a more vibrant and collaborative blockchain and global community.

One way I see diversity, is with many many competing minimal modules that implement well designed interfaces (or APIs). There also needs to be competition among interface designs, and here especially the innovation must be permissionless; not forced, but enable all the natural architects to flesh out their ideas in isolation, and pick among them the most interesting ones to subsidize, and allow others to continue developing their interfaces/APIs/frameworks too.

Ideally we have many many modules (git projects) that implement the many interfaces (for every concern of the stack from consensus to VM to EIPs/ERCs/GRCs in smart contract userland, and person to person, enterprise to enterprise, and transnational relations), and what supports these to grow are the frameworks that are opinionated about what interfaces to support and all the business around it.

Embracing diversity == many many modules AND many interfaces/APIs Fostering open dialog == Project Carmel like Between self-aligned groups == e.g. among competing hubs AtomOne and Gaia; or Rust vs Go, or Wallet vs Wallet

The benefit of this approach is that we get parallel innovation and mutual success. Nobody is going to solve all of it at once; we all benefit from interoperability among specialized components where-ever such is reasonable.

[moul]

I like the updates you made. We should make 'alignment' clearer, though. It's important to understand what it really means. Right now, it sounds like alignment is just about picking people who are similar, which doesn't seem welcoming to everyone.

But, if alignment means agreeing on a few simple, key rules and values, it's a better idea. This way, alignment is about everyone following these simple rules. This lets people be different in other ways. It's like having a shared starting point that brings all kinds of people together. My idea is to replace 'alignment' in our document with something like 'constitution signers' or 'members.' But I'm open to other suggestions.

[jaekwon]

It isn't welcoming to everyone. I don't think we should be, the purpose is to get away from unaligned people who are not insignificant in number. Lawyers have a bar, Traders have a license, even Thieves have a code, and these should all be written down and everyone should agree.

The whitepaper will be done when there is nothing to disagree about, because everything is considered and derived from first principles. And we can all agree that these can apply FOR ATOMONE but we can support something different for other chains. The key is immutability of certain things for AtomOne. We can all agree that AtomOne shouldn't change, and try to ban anyone who does try to change it.

These documents should be written so that everybody can be in COMPLETE alignment (because there is no detriment to aligning with it only benefits), and if the people aren't aligned, they perhaps just need to learn more about what it all means, or they are mistaken, or even if what they prefer is actually better, it can be done as a new split/fork and NOT by changing AtomOne. Everybody not aligned with these should be exiled from AtomOne and even the Decentralists. These are some basic considerations everybody should be able to respect because they are intended to be easy to align with, and THEREFORE everyone who is unaligned are ignorant or dangerous, and therefore they do not belong here.

(But this only makes sense if these founding documents are perfect and consistent; but they aren't because these drafts are just getting started.).

Some degree of ignorance might be ok if they are aware of what they don't know, and abstain from making unwanted discussions or actually paying deposits to propose unwanted changes. But the problem is with the people who are ignorant (or malicious) and lawless. I don't mean that they break the law; rather they excel at using the law to their advantage. They will stay within the law and use money to buy shills who will manipulate public sentiment because this is apparently the ordinary course of business these days (see Manufactured Consent for example by Adam Curtis). And if we do not push them out upon some judgement of their character that they do not belong here, then they will with enough incentive take over the Decentralists and use it for their purpose.

The purpose of AtomOne is to demonstrate and exercise the right to exit and self associate while excluding others; our right to split in the face of unwanted changes. While we would surely be improving things by modifying the distribution with input from votes on proposals, it doesn't mean it's enough, and we ought to have some other means of keeping the quality of membership.

Engineers need to get certified by an accredited institution. Not necessarily, depends, but it sure would suck to not have the old established institutions. Lawyers need to pass a bar, doctors need to go through med school torture and survive, and you even have to be above a certain age and satisfy other conditions in order to vote. FaceBook and now Twitter is trying to keep identities at least 1 per person, because with things like ChatGPT, you can't know that a person is really real until they you meet them in person, so everything is susceptible to Sybil attack even with VOIP communication. We need to consider this attack vector now seriously, or we would be encouraging the development of tooling to exploit it against us. We are already practically being harassed by pseudonymous accounts on Telegram and Twitter.

The Decentralists would have more appeal the more rational and aligned its members are. And what it does is it creates splitting systems, and offer these to everyone who wants their own community. We should eat our own dogfood and demonstrate its power by making the Decentralists a good set. So we need to know that somebody is real, and we need to know that somebody isn't working to subvert the alignment of the community.

It's completely unwoke and uncomfortable because, who doesn't want to include everyone? But I'd say, NOTHING works if you include anyone because there is nothing at stake and this completely manipulable. Not even an age restriction? Are they even aware of what a financial meltdown looks like or were they even around when every single crypto exchange was getting hacked? Do they have the right frame of reference?

It's obviously difficult and controversial to measure someone's competency etc. But "alignment" isn't asking for that. It's just asking for, "are you intelligent enough to understand that the AtomHub is supposed to stay immutable, and if you have good ideas you are supposed to use it rather than attempt to change it?".

[moul]

💯, thank you.

I feel that the current document lacks clarity in explaining alignment. This lack of clarity may confuse people and make them uncertain about whether it refers to being aligned with you, AiB, decentralists, or a team, or multiple ones, or everything that will happen in the future.

To improve clarity, let's include the following statement in the terms section: "Alignment means fully agreeing with this document and the constitution."