Importance of Having Diverse Pressure Sources, Or “How Decision Systems Sustain”

If we are talking about any decision system, we need to consider that an decision system has different sub parts with different concerns.

To have the best decisions in a decision system

• There needs to be representative of all different concerns (diversity). If you are considering to decide if knives should be forbidden, you need two people that will defend security (knives are dangerous) and liberty (people should be free to do whatever they want) arguments at least, the more the better.
• Individuals should also be seeking consensus in a constructive way. You can’t get the best decision if one of the concern representatives doesn’t evaluate any counter arguments and block the discussion, abusing the freedom given.

If one of these two doesn’t work right, eventually either chaos follows or things turn into a one man show. Life continues constantly by making decisions based on different concerns, sometimes letting one win, sometimes another. We will dig into this idea. Diversity that always seek and respect consensus, trying to use correct methodology in a correct way, and constantly tries to improve without dangerous jumps is the key.

Think that you are in front of a chocolate shop. You are considering if you should buy a chocolate or not. What would be your considerations?

A part of your mind use your hunger to build its case. If you don’t supply your body with necessary amount of calories, you might die.

Another part of your mind uses need of happiness as its argument. Maybe you had a bad day, or you accomplished something so you deserve some chocolate to feel better. If you don’t get it, you might feel depressed, which is not a good thing for a healthy mind.

Another part of your mind would go against those, and would use beauty as its argument. If you go fat, you might lower your chances in dating.

Some other piece of your mind would seek the goodness of your hormonal balance. If you give too much prize to your brain without accomplishment, you could start procrastinating on anything in the long run. Do you want to end up doing nothing all day?

Taking all these concerns in your mind, you would come to a decision. Let’s say, you are thin anyways so beauty concern is irrelevant. You are not eating chocolate for some time so hormonal balance is out. You decide to eat the chocolate, since concerns that are backing the “don’t eat” action, are not valid for the case.

Since those beauty and hormonal balance concerns are the losers, should we just discard them for future decisions as a shortcut?

Consider that you found a unique way of redirecting your feelings to suppress them. You redirected your hunger to happiness instead of misery. Whenever you are hungry, you started feeling happy so you didn’t crave for food anymore. Hunger is not needed anymore right? That concern is a loser anyways. How would this end? You could simply die since not every case is the same.

Depending on your body state and environment, every time that you consider “Should i eat something?” is different, and you need to consider all your concerns that are rising from your different mind parts. Because your current state will be different every time. You, and your environment changes constantly with or without your decisions. Full suppression is a bad idea. This is one man’s show, and the show belongs to anorexia. There is no feed back because we suppressed other concerns.

But well, think of a different case, on the same problem. Think that your hunger is just not satisfiable. Whenever you see some food, you just can’t resist and your body weight went beyond limits. Since your hunger is using its freedom to raise its concern in a harmful way, you would need to suppress it right? Would you be able to think in an objective way considering all concerns? You would have trouble right? You wouldn’t be able to decide wisely. Most probably in some part of your life you would have a shock diet, in another part eating everything you find. Not healthy. This is chaos!

Now let’s get out of one’s head, and try another example with a group of people. Think that you are around a table, and discussing something with friends. Should you be free to interrupt people while they are talking to fix something they are talking about time to time?

Well, as an example, if some fake news was used as an argument as a mistake, it would make sense to tell that before your friend talk about that for half an hour before the group realizes whole speech was an empty effort right? If people respect each other and they are willing to listen to each others’ arguments, if mutual trust is present, and if interruption is sparely used, it becomes a tool of using the time wisely.

But what if somebody is constantly dominating the discussion by constantly interrupting and not letting anybody talk? Then the group would not be fine with interruption anymore right? Would the group be able to use the time in a productive way? As an extreme example (argumentum ad absurdum), we can say that, nobody would give any pause, everybody would talk constantly, even while they have nothing more to say they would continue telling random things to have the time to think what to tell next, since it is really hard to get into the line of speech, because the trust would be destroyed. Then you would definitely need a moderator that will decide who will talk.

In our example, interruption, which is seemingly the same tool in both cases, became right or wrong according how the people in the group are using it when it is allowed.

Looks like diversity of pressure groups that represent every kind of concern is a good thing, but this freedom should be used in a mature way. Otherwise everything becomes suboptimal, and leads to less freedom.

Let’s talk about our diversity model in a simplistic two dimensional way, and see how it was modeled by Aristotle and Hegel.

When Aristotle talks about virtues, he gives an example about braveness. Braveness is not trying to save everybody which might end up with death, which is recklessness. Braveness is not staying away from every occasion that somebody needs help, which is cowardice. It is somewhere in the middle, not the exact middle, at a point we can call as a golden mean. We find the golden mean by trials and errors.

So as we see, we are discussing values here, our value is braveness, and we need to know where we stand. Think that we are not discussing braveness of an individual, but we are discussing braveness of a group of friends. We could have two groups in that group of friends with two different concerns, security and justice. The good guys would defend intervening in every situation that somebody else is in danger, and security concerned people would tell that we should stay away from everything. After sometime each group would change their minds, not coming to an agreement but having a softer version of what they thought before. By time, both groups would have lots of different version of their theory, and at the end there would be an agreement in the golden mean that we talked about. This is what Hegel was talking about, while by his dialectical method. Two groups will raise two theories, they will argue, test their theories against each other, then come up with more moderate two theories, discuss again, and at the end they would come to an agreement.

Well, you might have a wild guess that it doesn’t necessarily happen that way always. For such a flow, people need to know how to discuss. If the way people discuss is not constructive, it will end up with an unstable discussion that goes nowhere, and it could even end up with violence.

The best way to handle things might be giving equal rights to everybody for having freedom of speech right? So that people could reevaluate their thoughts depending on what they heard. But is there a limit for that?

Suppose that you are in a group of five people. Somebody has a proposal, from now on every decision will be taken as a group, depending on majority of votes. Whatever decision that takes three out of five votes is valid. You want to go for lunch, three people vote for pizza, everybody goes there. If three people want something that the other two is totally not ok with, they negotiate and find something more suitable for everyone to get a better political support, so that the system can sustain.

Nice life for a while. Then somebody convinces two other guys, and says “Lets have another voting, i propose that i should decide everything from now on”. Does that make sense? Can you use freedom of choice for tearing the freedom itself down? Apparently, in a democratic system you are free to choose and speak, but not free to take freedom of others.

This is called as Karl Popper paradox of tolerance. If you tolerate intolerance, you loss tolerance. It is easy to understand this concept with five friends example, but somehow it becomes really hard for people to get it when we are talking about millions of people living in a country. Well, we learned that freedom of speech or freedom of choice can’t be used for destroying the freedom (Intolerance). This breaks our rule of respecting the seek of consensus.

But should intolerance be suppressed absolutely?

There is a tradeoff, when you start putting pressure on things, it is hard to define the border. Where will you stop? The problem here is, once you give the ambiguous power of deciding what is intolerance and oppress it, you never know how that power will be used. It needs to be used sparely, so we need to define a hard border, which will be used only in the case of an eminent danger. If intolerance is insignificant and society is able to handle it itself without anybody getting hurt, it might be actually good to let it talk without causing violence and direct disturbance, so that society can cure its problem itself, and nothing stays as a hidden threat. There is one thing though, intolerance needs to be publicly marked as unwanted while the discussion continues, so that you don’t end up with masses that get frustrated with hypernormalization, or worse; an actual hypernormalization. If something unacceptable like nazism suddenly gets a wide acceptance after being let to speak because people are not able to identify the object of ostracism, it needs to be even put a stop to.

In order for a system with free speech to sustain, a major portion of the people with voting power should learn/agree that they don’t have the freedom to change the system to a totalitarian system, which doesn’t happen in a day if you are switching from, let’s say, a monarchical system. You need the mindset and institutions (tools) to evolve by time. It is a long journey. Though it will never evolve if you have never started. And… this is a topic for another article.

Well, let’s summarize

Diversity that always seek and respect consensus, trying to use correct methodology in a correct way, and constantly tries to improve without dangerous jumps is the key, in any scale of decision making.