• Council of Europe’s definition of “democracy”:

    • Individual autonomy: The idea that no-one should be subject to rules which have been imposed by others. People should be able to control their own lives (within reason).

    • Equality: The idea that everyone should have the same opportunity to influence the decisions that affect people in society.

  • Compare/contrast with Dahl’s criteria.

    • Equal opportunity is a key part of most of Dahl’s 5 critical properties.

    • Can we as technologists quantify the “equality” of “influence”?

  • Social influence distributions

    • One person, one vote: democracy (nominally)

    • One dollar, one vote: economics, corporate ownership and governance

    • One web page, one vote: PageRank initial condition

    • One reference, one vote: PageRank output condition

    • One joule, one vote: Bitcoin

    • One machine-learning input sample, one vote: governance by AI

      • Including learned bias



Old, from 2019:

  • Some basic premises of democracy:

    • No one is perfect or trustworthy enough to be guardian of all the rest

    • Knowledge and perceptions are imperfect and noisy

    • Representation, aggregation is essential to get “good” collective decisions

    • It’s hard to tell - and dangerous to decide to early - who is trustworthy or qualified

      • Foundation or “presume nothing” principle

  • Robustness: general concepts and analysis techniques

    • Engineering: fault tree analysis (FTA), simple quantitative risk estimation

      • Application to fault-tolerant systems: e.g., 2-disk backup

      • Application to network routing, gossip - e.g., UseNet

        • Single path

        • Two paths

        • Star network

        • Highly-connected network (e.g., expander, small world)

      • Application to corporate governance: e.g., directors and bad strategy

    • Distributed systems: benign faults, Byzantine faults, rational faults

    • Threshold assumptions: e.g., Lamport’s “Byzantine Generals Problem”

    • Statistical: e.g., median, mean, mode as measures of central tendency

    • Social choice: robustness to manipulation, incentive compatibility

      • Social choice and statistics: deciding on comfortable room temperature

    • Trust/reputation networks: h-index, PageRank


Post-lecture blackboard snapshot 2019:





Last modified: Monday, 5 October 2020, 13:28