Multiple meanings of DID (and Plurality)

[pluralitybook]

The book overall and the Identity chapter in particular have the challenge that Plurality and DID are both used to refer to similar phenomena, both very different from the way they are used in the book, namely people with many fully distinct selves. I am open to suggestions of how to most thoughtfully and consistent with other parts of the book address this issue in the text. See issue #56 for more discussion here and I would welcome a constructive PR from @mg138 on this topic.

[msparkles]

Plurality would be the preferred wording, as DID is highly medical and specifically a diagnosis. (Think "transgender" v.s. "gender identity disorder")

Could you link the relevant sections, or is it just Identity? We admit, although the book seems very interesting, we haven't gotten the mindset to read it yet, we have slight dyslexia and that made reading a pain for us.

[pluralitybook]

DID is not something this book is helping introduce....it is very widely used for Decentralized Identity. It will be hard to understand the context without reading the full Identity chapter.

[GlenWeyl]

If @Identitywoman has anything to add here, I'd value her perspective and textual intervention to note this.

[Identitywoman]

It would be great to save the acronym "DID" for Decentralized Identifier a particular actual standard that was recently approved by the W3C. This is how the folks who gather in the communities working on the community commonly use this acronym.

The community says "decentralized identity" if it means the idea- which is mostly about a philosophy and idea that says people have identity from multiple places, they should be the locust of control or pivot point of information moving between contexts. Decentralized identity is often used to describe a a high level an architecture that includes the standard Verifiable Credentials (blobs of signed data from sources that may or may not be authoritative). It is a term liked by governments adopting the tech - because it doesn't have the word "sovereign" in it. Self-Sovereign Identity is another term in use in the market that basically refers to the same architecture - but with a little bit more of an "edge" of dislike towards any centralized source issuing anything to anyone - however accepts that it might.

The term Plurality as Glen and Audrey are defining in this book is bigger then any particular standard or even terminology nomenclature in around decentrlaized technology it is rooted in a discussion of human nature as we understand it now with new nuroscience and coming out of existing sociology and other disciplines. There is overlap but I don't see them as the same.

Do decentralized identity and SSI and the particular technical protocols DIDs and VCs play a role in enabling Plurality - totally - this is why I've contributed to the work..

Then I see this thread in another issue also talked about Dissociative Identity Disorder and the term Plurality. I don't have opinions on this discussion.

I think the fact Plurality can mean many things sort of helps make the point. :)

[GlenWeyl]

@Identitywoman I think you may have missed the key point. @msparkles is concerned that DID is so closely associated with the medical condition that its use to refer to a decentralized identifier may be harmful.

[Identitywoman]

Indeed I did miss the key point. If one looks at the protocol document from the W3C they "define" the way to abbreviated it.
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

In the world there acronyms that mean more then one thing. Its just the way it is. Not sure I can solve for this.

[msparkles]

Okay so, thinking about this for a while now, here are our final thoughts:

• it's not a suitable mindset to approach this problem thinking "well names are just like this, just the way it is." Just look at the name "Meta," it used to have a meaning, a specific, hard to explain one, but now people are gonna be like "metadata is that like the Metaverse?" It doesn't help that the meaning of "meta" is hard to describe/little known, a lot of people don't actually know what metadata means. We're talking normies, not techies, because eventually those terms are gonna reach normies- most people have heard of a HTML or HTTP.
• yes, in the end, it doesn't matter, because a highly stigmatized and little understood minority will most likely stay that way regardless of if we try to avoid confusion or not. but the world never was about doing things right, just doing things in the right direction.
• DID- we don't necessarily have a problem with the acronym. it is widely different in contexts- as Dissociative Identity Disorder is highly medical and usually unused. but "plurality" here seems to manifest orders of meaning beyond a technical usage, apparently philosophical, and to put plural people's context into perspective- we're already switching from the name "multiplicity" to "plurality" and struggling in doing so.

[GlenWeyl]

Madeleine, I agree with your general point and that your concerns deserve more engagement than I feel Kaliya gave. That said, the more I study it the less I believe that Plurality is a plausibly problematic conflict here. The term Plurality has been used I roughly the way we mean it for decades, dating at least to Hannah Arendt's work, and is also extensively used in political science. Some collusion is inevitable therefore. The additional collision caused by our usage, which I believe is even less likely to cause stigma-inducing confusion given it's a normative positive idea in our context, seems minimal. Further we have shifted from Plurality to this symbol ⿻, which I do not believe has such a collision, partly to address these ambiguities. If you believe this issue needs to be discussed further, I'd appreciate if you would engage with the substance of the book enough to appreciate the relevant context and try to persuade the community, in that context, that a change makes sense.

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Research Lead, Plural Technology Collaboratory (https://aka.ms/plural), Research Special Projects

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Outside of Microsoft I am Founder of RadicalxChange (https://radicalxchange.org) and Founder and Chair of the Plurality Institute (https://plurality.institute)

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From: Madeline Sparkles @.> Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2024 7:18:25 PM To: pluralitybook/plurality @.> Cc: Glen Weyl @.>; Comment @.> Subject: Re: [pluralitybook/plurality] Multiple meanings of DID (and Plurality) (Issue #87)

Okay so, thinking about this for a while now, here are our final thoughts:

• it's not a suitable mindset to approach this problem thinking "well names are just like this, just the way it is." Just look at the name "Meta," it used to have a meaning, a specific, hard to explain one, but now people are gonna be like "metadata is that like the Metaverse?" It doesn't help that the meaning of "meta" is hard to describe/little known, a lot of people don't actually know what metadata means. We're talking normies, not techies, because eventually those terms are gonna reach normies- most people have heard of a HTML or HTTP.
• yes, in the end, it doesn't matter, because a highly stigmatized and little understood minority will most likely stay that way regardless of if we try to avoid confusion or not. but the world never was about doing things right, just doing things in the right direction.
• DID- we don't necessarily have a problem with the acronym. it is widely different in contexts- as Dissociative Identity Disorder is highly medical and usually unused. but "plurality" here seems to manifest orders of meaning beyond a technical usage, apparently philosophical, and to put plural people's context into perspective- we're already switching from the name "multiplicity" to "plurality" and struggling in doing so.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/issues/87#issuecomment-1967954347, or unsubscribehttps://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABIRKSAFBH5KDUWQ3MPPB6DYVZZVDAVCNFSM6AAAAAA4EWBOZGVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSNRXHE2TIMZUG4. You are receiving this because you commented.

[msparkles]

Very well.

On a side note, we really need to get around to checking it out :sweat: