Without Alignment between Conditions, Goals, and Mechanisms, Political Cheating Can occur

VECTION
3 min readJun 30, 2023

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The article “Without Alignment between Conditions, Goals, and Mechanisms, Political Cheating Can Occur” was published in mirror.xyz

The image was created using getimg.ai

To summarize,

When evaluating political claims, conditions, goals, and mechanisms all need to be considered. For example, pursuing only goals may lead to idealism, while pursuing only institutions will only result in technical novelties. If only conditions are present, no realistic solution can be found. More importantly, hiding any of them makes cheating possible.

This seems to be just stating the obvious, so I will explain a little.

VECTION proposes PS3 (Pain reducing, Sustainability, Scalability, Security) as the “minimum ideal”.

Here, the ideal was not so much a “point of arrival” to be reached, but rather a set of conditions that must be met in order for the organization to survive.

On the other hand, we have also proposed various mechanisms such as pain tokens, mirror budgets, and bot legislators.
We came to the conclusion that Goals are necessary as a link between these Conditions and Mechanisms.
Thus, the following four goals were proposed, which we named Vectionism.

Pain reducing: Reduce the total amount of pain as much as possible
Trial handiness: minimize trial and error
Decision making with high quality: Using information technology to make collective decision making as fast and as high quality as possible.
Discretion reducing: Reduce the discretion of rule makers and administrators as much as possible.

Here, the relationship between Conditions, Goals, and Mechanisms is as follows.

Conditions (Conditions) = PS3
and the means of its implementation is,
Goals = Vectionism
and the means of its implementation is,
Mechanisms = Collection of individual mechanisms such as pain tokens

For example, the relationship between “stability (condition)” requires “lighter weight of trial and error (goal)” and “mirror budgets” (mechanism) can be expected to be effective for this purpose.

The main purpose of this text, however, is not so much to present our ideas as to argue that many political problems stem from the neglect of either Conditions, Goals, or Mechanisms.

We often see, for example, a situation where there is only a slogan or a manifesto, but no roadmap to that state. In this case, there is no mention of feasibility or the roadmap, so any number of high ideals can be set forth. However, there is no consideration of how to implement them, which is the same as having no intention of actually doing them (or only creating an atmosphere of not doing them intentionally).

This also means that if any one of the conditions, goals, or mechanisms (CGM for short) is lacking, there is a possibility that someone will take strategic advantage (abuse) of it.

Therefore, we suggest that when evaluating political claims, the degree to which these three are in place needs to be evaluated not by adding them up, but by multiplying (integrating) them.

Please click on the link below to read the full text.

https://mirror.xyz/vection.eth/FH102FHdkkeKln3S8pkMgghCWBo2KasmsPdjTJtdeSo

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