Venkatesh Rao 🛸 Beyond Exit and Voice

[Music] oh I think Tim put me last because this last session is supposed to bring the conversation back to the uh level of abstraction we started with and I think Tim knows that I'm not capable of diving below about five meters in these Waters and these guys I don't think have come up above 100 meters in the last hour there were like combinatoric formulas in the last three talks wow seven hours and I'm impressed you guys were able to keep up uh so this talk I decided I'm going to make it about foundational design principles because one thing I've learned in like over a decade of Consulting in different technical Industries most of which are such that I can't go very deep I've noticed that strong technical people who who come up to like you know high levels of technical leadership invariably they have like really strong foundational design principles guiding their entire work and what tends to happen is if that foundational design principle is a good one all these masses of like intricate detail that you have to like deal with they tend to go mostly right and luck kind of favors you in dealing with them whereas if your foundational design principle is off everything starts going against you so you get start to get all these millions of details wrong so since I can't talk about the details anyway I want to talk about foundational design principles so before I get started I'd like all of you to kind of like think about what foundational opinionated design principle do you bring to your work in building crypto technology because that's what we're going to talk about okay so this is a famous quote that's about a century old you can uh do some digging to see who started that people attribute it to George Orwell but um that's apparently apocryphal uh journalism is uh printing something someone does not want printed everything else is public relationships uh I was trying to find a way to Port it to crypto and this is what I came up with censorship resistance is completing a transaction someone does not want completed everything else is yield forming I am not technical enough to know whether this is an accurate idea or even like in the ballpark but it sounds kind of right to me based on what I've heard today so I'm kind of like 50% confident in it okay okay so this is going to be a very easy talk as far as technical comprehension goes but it might be a challenging talk as far as like you know introspecting on your moral beliefs goes so this is a picture I took on a walking tour yesterday of Istanbul and the guide pointed out this Stone it's on the side of Top Copy Palace most people people miss it it's near a fountain and you know tired tourists might sit on it and he told us that this is actually the chopping block used by the executioners of the Ottoman Empire and he told me something very interesting that uh for executioners the Ottoman Empire always picked death eny so they could not hear what the you know condemned person might be pleading might be like saying in their defense ask asking for like you know um Mercy they could not hear and they could not speak so it's kind of like you know not quite censorship resistance but flip it around this is like a descent uh resistance from the uh Sultan's point of view so and there's a fountain nearby for the Executioner to wash The Sword and the other thing he told us was that anything The Condemned man had it was usually a man anything The Condemned man had um on him when he was being executed like you know jewelry personal possessions it all went to the Executioner as a tip and since we've been talking a lot about tips and blocks today here's a block you get tips for like doing things on that block all right so this is one anecdote I wanted to bring up here's another one uh another part of the tour was the hagya sopia it's everything it's reputed to be so if you've been spending all week here and have any time left and you haven't been please do go but actually I found a few interesting sites of censorship here um as you all know Islam has um prohibition against representation of like human forms in um uh the religion and it's not like fully enforced in a very conservative way but since the hagya sopia was originally a church there are obviously iconographic elements throughout the church and the one on the left over there that's on top of what used to be the main Altar and now is the sort of U prayer niche of the um Islamic uh prayer ritual and there's pictures of like Jesus and Mary Right Above It And since that faces Mecca you can't have representation there so that part is covered up um no is that no that's sorry that's the middle one so the middle one is just above the altar so that's Jesus and Mary covered up the one on the left this is in the entrance to the main chamber and this is I think U Justinian offering Constantinople to Jesus or something like that so that image is visible but there is a little curtain there that's attached to a rope so you can pull it up and cover that up if necessary if there are people praying right outside so there's an option to sensor over there and on the far right this is to the left of the alter so it's not facing Mecca but if you're facing slightly left and up there's an image I think that must be Gabriel or somebody but that's not U censored so and hauga sopia it struck me as interesting that uh it translates to Holy wisdom this is this seems like a pretty wise approach to handling like uh censorship in a very pragmatic and charged um context okay sorry what am I doing okay so foundational design opinions so I'm about as much of an outsider as as would ever speak at an event like this and my sense of the foundational design opinion that drives not just you know censorship resistance parts of the technology but all of crypto is the exit versus voice dichotomy with a strong exit bias so most of you have probably not actually read the book uh perhaps you heard uh bology talk about 10 years ago when he made this meme in Silicon Valley uh but yeah this is a book about how when you don't like what's happening in an organization or a society you have two choices you either Exit or you voice your opinion right and they're not a symmetric pair of choices because voice is by nature more informative you complain you say things so voice is a more informative opinion an exit taken alone it just provides like warning sign that people are leaving it's kind of like a negative signal and loyalty which many people Miss it's in part of the book's title loyalty affects or modulates this decision so you might choose exit versus voice depending on the loyalties you feel right and some of the points uh the author hman makes about uh exit versus voices exit is fundamentally uh biased towards economic Solutions versus voice being a bias towards political Solutions right so there is a strong economics bias but think about this crypto has a strong uncritical exit bias like I said it goes way back things like Forks things like you know run your own node decentralization but censorship resistance if you ask anybody outside of this kind of context what they think it means it's going to be a strongly voice oriented problem you use the word censorship in normal conversation you're going to hear about newspapers being censored journalists being jailed so it's a strongly voice oriented problem it's not about people leaving it's about people staying in and fighting right so it's not that you're being censored in one medium so you go off to another medium it's not that um I don't know you're deplatformed of one social medium and you go pick another one it's not that kind of choice voice is typically a choice that has to do with u sorry censorship resistance is typically a voice problem so the question then becomes the default opinionated design tendency of crypto which is U exit oriented is there a fundamental tension there and I think there is okay so exit if you think about like a redu at absurdum analysis of what that leads to if every time you enter into a conflict with somebody and you choose between exit and voice and you constantly keep choosing exit and you keep going to smaller and smaller contexts what's going to happen you're going to like keep fragmenting you're going to like be unconstrained the this is an approach that frames sensorship resistance as being unconstrained so you're going to go more and more sort of like forking away and you will remain more and more unconstrained but with fewer and fewer relationships until you're perfect ly unconstrained with zero relationships this I think of as the libertarian endgame of you are alone on your Island nobody can censor you but nobody's listening to you anyway so there's a fundamental problem with this line of thinking right and this is typically what Libertarians celebrate as sovereignty and the philosopher to read about what sovereignty means is Hannah anant and she made like a really powerful Point that's really struck with me this is from her book The Human Condition she points out that sovereignty is not freedom you alone on your desert island is not Freedom that's sovereignty the difference is that you need other people around you to experience true Fe Freedom so Freedom by definition is something that only exists in a plurality of other people it does not mean you're assimilated into a bar where you have no individual identity in fact she explicitly rejects that it means you are like in you know in the Public Square you're constantly talking and so forth so that's freedom and an exit oriented bias will lead you further and further away from that fullest sense of freedom and from the point of view of Hannah arant sovereignty is a kind of degenerate Human Condition you're less than human you're subhuman and this is like a strong statement I know but I honestly believe this about most um you know card carrying uh Libertarians okay another huge wall of text this one I asked uh uh GPT to pull out some quotes for me from the novel by SRA no exit and and you've probably heard the phrase hell is other people and most people don't quite know the context of where it comes from and they assume it's something like you know you're annoyed by your neighbors and if you're stuck with your neighbors whatever it's going to be annoying and that's going to be like hell that's kind of like The Superficial interpretation the actual interpretation in the novel is when you are in relationships with other people inevitably they see parts of you that you don't see yourself they hold up a mirror they reflect your yion Shadow things like that and what you feel is trapped or tormented by the mere existence and gaze of others simply other people looking at you holding up a mirror to who you are reflecting parts of your identity that you might find uncomfortable or distressing that's what um hell is other people means so being in relationships with people in an nexcess of relationships with people and being free rather than Sovereign is hellish so that's kind of an interesting Paradox isn't it like we are defining freedom in a way following Hannah arent that if you also go with SRA is hellish so we're defining Freedom as a kind of hell that you choose to live in right so think about this like what this says about the default exit bias of um crypto okay so I kind of see this much more in the Bitcoin community of course than in the etherium community in the ethereum community you kind of see libertarian leanings but you do see people slowly pulling back like occasionally towards like you know questioning fundamental libertarian uh principles asking if sovereignty is really the be all and end all they there are the right philosophical Curiosities driving the question of what should our fundamental design decisions and design opinions be uh but exit in voice I think because it requires like a level of I don't know introspective self-awareness to understand properly and most people they idea of like picking exit over voices you read iron Ran's you know Atlas Shrugged at age 16 that's the limit of the philosophical questioning you've ever done and then you go around basically parting like sophomoric um libertarian um I know talking points for the rest of your life and you never really go beyond that but if you take the exit and voice Dimension truly seriously it's actually really hard being in a Nexus of other people and being truly free and being in hell is other people that's what it takes to navigate the exit voice dichotomy properly and barely anybody does that most people are like you know I want to live on my desert island with my guns it's like the cartoon picture so and I think it's kind of like unnecessary to tie the design of complex Technologies like ethereum to you know self-growth and self-awareness you don't have to do that is there a way to approach the fundamental design question of something like ethereum uh without having to be I don't know an enlightened philosopher and processing these questions so I think there is so I want to offer you another alternative spectrum that has been really useful for me over the last uh few years this is um professor emiritus of like safety and accident investigation research he studied nuclear reactors air crashes things like that for decades Eric H Nagel and he came up with this um principle he calls the etto principle efficiency thoroughness tradeoff which basically says that you have to choose between being efficient and being thorough and this can be hard to get if you don't have like a bunch of varied examples in your mind but think about like you know nuclear reactor safety that's not something you want to like you know efficiently do profit maximizing and like solve for very narrow legible uh cost functions and like do very efficiently and maximize your profits you want to like be very carefully checking every possible failure mode thinking through all the contingencies that could happen nuclear reactor safety is a tyus biased domain Airline safety like you know airplanes you don't want them crashing all over the place again tyus driven um field right whereas other things they can be efficiency driven like you know if you're creating Google Maps or any kind of mapping algorithm for getting from point A to point B you probably want the shortest distance or shortest time or something like that that's Sol ing an efficiency oriented optimality problem you don't want to wander all over the map right so think of tyranus as wandering all over the map checking everything making sure everything is sort of like cowed so the ETO fallacy this is a principle that hle came up with after doing a whole bunch of accident investigations I guess it's this idea that when something bad happens you know whether it's an air crash or a nuclear reactor meltdown or FTX melting down or the tornado cache thing you guys are all talking about all um okay there is a tendency to look back once the data is in and say that you should have done this this this this this and there's something fundamentally acausal and Impossible about that you can't do that you can't fix an efficiency bias in like you know ex anti efficiency bias with an expost um thoroughness bias in investigation you can't like say you should have been that thorough in covering that stuff right you have to have a tonus bias straight up you have to have it on day one not after the accident happens so that's the ETO fallacy which he uses as a critique of like most accident investigations being so exit versus voice had its own like um you know implications so exit is like economics biased and voice is politics biased similarly this principle has its own biases I think efficiency has a strong corporate and private utility bias so things like shareholder value or efficiency metrics and it creates atomized customers people who are naturally you know primed to become like libertarian pilled and like become completely isolated and atomized whereas thorus has a Commons and public utility bias so citizen values and it tends to create peoples so peoples as in like you know you know in a town square for example all interacting who are bound in webs of mutualism so efficiency versus thorness also has implications just as exit over voice but I think they're less ideologically loaded yes there's some extent it's a similar Spectrum here but I think it's a little bit more orthogonal and it's important I want to reemphasize that webs of people is not being part of a borg it means finding your freedom in relationships with others where I think Ursula lean had a really good quote about this which is to be whole is to be part so until you're part of something you can't be fully whole fully human so think of that as toness this is my last slide and I did have like improv stuff that I had in mind but I'm actually not going to go there I'm just going to stop here and let the discussion U take over but yeah uh I am a consultant I have to include a 2 by two in every uh presentation I do I think currently the crypto world is strongly exit biased and strongly efficiency biased because it does have like you know equivalence of shareholder value maximization and so forth and I think it needs to get to a slight voice bias at least in the ethereum Corner let Bitcoin explore the space of like you know strong exit bias uh somebody needs to do it but ethereum I think can be more wise biased and it can be much more heavily thoroughness biased which means it's going to start looking like a you know public Commons Way more than uh private and I want to make a point about so there's there's a meta thing going on here I earlier used the example of exploring a map and the shortest path as um by the way I'm a by training I'm a Aerospace controls guy and I did a lot of re research in path planning and Robotics back in the day so these are natural metaphors for me but yeah you don't want to go from where we are to where we need to be in an efficient straight line that would be both ironic and defeat the purpose if you tried to go efficiently towards toress you you can kind of see the problems that might occur so I think the trajectory in green is kind of what you need to do like explore the design space a little bit more inefficiently lazily wander around see what the implication of exit versus voice and thess versus efficiency are and maybe that's the right place to land maybe it's not um yeah I think I'll stop here and [Applause] yeah