A Minimum Ideal for Organization, PS3

VECTION
3 min readAug 8, 2021

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Implementing Pain Tracing Blockchain into Organizations (2)

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Let us assume the following four conditions as minimum ideals for the desirable state of organizations.

1. Sustainability: Efficient enough to be competitive with all existing organizational forms.

If an organization provides a “dream work environment” for its members (e.g., workers) but is too inefficient or unproductive, its outputs will not be competitive. The organization will eventually be forced to dissolve. The comparison for efficiency is with existing organizations working on the same product.

2. Pain minimization: Reduce the total amount of stakeholders suffering as much as possible.

Suppose an excellent efficiency is obtained. Nevertheless, if that efficiency is redeemed by the intense suffering of the organization’s community, then the organization is undesirable. The reason for minimizing suffering and not maximizing total happiness (utility) is that in an organization with huge inequalities, even if suffering occurs, the total can be increased by some members corresponding to the “utility monster,” or only the utility of investors can be enhanced. In the past, many revolutionary activities have ignored this condition. Therefore, they forced “sacrifice for the organization (revolution).”

3. Scalability: Even if the number of members increases, other conditions can continue to be met.

It is common that a venture company with a good atmosphere starting with a small group, becomes a mere bureaucratic organization after it becomes a giant. However, since individual members' intelligence and cognitive abilities are limited, there is no way to avoid organizational growth, division of labor, and division of authority. Existing organizations often solve this problem by hierarchization.

There may be other ways, but none have been discovered yet. Also, simply decentralizing the organization will not solve the problem of cognitive ability. However, it is not clear to what extent managers and upper-level members of the hierarchy need to be rewarded with higher rewards. Hence, changing this condition may be possible.

4. Security: Less likely to be destroyed by malicious attackers

Consider a society where there are only good people. Suppose an organization is created that happens to meet all the requirements. However, if a single selfish intruder destroys it, the organizational structure is too unstable to be adopted.

Our history provides many examples of “revolutions” that temporarily create a “good system” and then break it all at once. So, not trusting all people? That will not work either. Ideally, an organization should be able to reduce the cost of security as much as possible. Of course, there is no way to know how to do this.

We call these “ideals” the PS3 condition (Pain, Scalability, Sustainability, Security) for ease of remembering. PS3 is incompatible with, for example, the position that “society values only the concentration of resources on talent and its creativity. So it is not the ideals for everyone. However, PS3 defines the ideal of an organization only through the properties of the organization itself. In this sense, it is a “minimalist” ideal. It is possible to plugin such ideals as “freedom and equality (of members)” into PS3, but it is necessary to examine whether attached one will not destroy PS3. In this sense, PS3 is more like a “condition” than a normal “ideal.”

Credits: Original idea and articles by Asaki NISHIKAWA, Draft written by Toshihiro FURUYA and Moya, Simultaneous editing by VECTION

This article is based on the “Blockchain and Revolution: What are the conditions under which decentralization can be a ‘revolution’?” and “r/place subjects and governance: Blockchain and interfaces that invite revolution.” We have extracted, added, and re-edited the parts describing pain tokens and PS3.

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