I totally agree with you. Instead, we should have really good community engagement in the process of developing changes to the IC. Motion proposals seem to provide an excuse for not doing market validation.
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Why would you have to provide updates at all, let alone “all the time”? Are your core principles really that fickle?
As for your other issue about “no path to code”, I personally don’t think that is the real issue here for DFINITY. However, even if that excuse were true, code could certainly be written to strip names and/or followers from neurons that have not disclosed their core principles to the minimum required extent. So a “path to code” does exist even if it is never formally implemented.
You said that named neurons would need to “continuously disclose their principles”. That’s why I said “all the time”, because continuously means approximately the same thing.
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Very good questions @LightningLad91.
I think at this point in the dialogue it will be helpful to reveal a bit more about my own thinking before I explain more of DFINITY’s.
1. My own thinking
I was originally in favor of voting YES on proposal #96475 before and I subsequently changed my mind after internalizing @bjoernek 's argument. So I had a lot of the same questions you have and I also had time to interrogate my own thinking and @bjoernek 's argument. Ultimately, I was swayed by the argument. This of course is not unique (specially in this case where Bjoern was the closer domain expert since he had put more time to think on it). I have both swayed and been swayed many times at DFINITY. ICP is very important to us so folks analyze things.
As a DAO, it is important to me that folks have healthy dialogues to explain their positions and folks feel free to make their own mind.
2. To answer your specific questions…
I do not have a grand strategy for explanation, so it is best to just lay out each question and answer it as honestly as I can.
No, this is an understandable interpretation of what DFINITY’s “code to path” is, but not what we intend. The tenet is more akin to:
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A proposal for websockets support (with no architecture or code samples) is a feature and would pass the “path to code” test because it is feasible (which is the other DFINITY tenet, “faster than light consensus” is not). Now, DFINITY may agree or disagree with the feature itself, but it would pass the “path to code”.
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A proposal to change a tokenomics parameter would similarly have a “path to code” (regardless if the proposal was all tokenomic analysis), independent of what DFINITY thought.
Inversely…
- Proposal #96475 was a proposal to make future proposals about how to think about future feature proposals. I am not trying to paint a caricature, more laying out how many degrees it was from a concrete feature. To be perfectly honest, this was a bit too meta for the tenet. If you squint you can argue it falls within the “path to code” tenet (that was my original position), but it was a stretch so I changed my mind as well. Now, i have probably submitted proposals that would not pass this tenet in today, so I am in no way criticizing folks, just saying DFINITY’s bar changed.
However… NNS is permissionless, if someone wants to propose a feature X and then explain with their own principles, they totally should!
This is why DFINITY’s position is much simpler than people may interpret: it has a list of filters that make it a default NO.
To quote @Manu who once described it very well:
This is why a NO is more of a cultural default to DFINITY, unless it believes a YES is very important.
This is an example of “raising the bar” on the tenets.
Ironically (and I really do mean ironically), this organizational conservative temperament of only voting YES when absolutely convinced/necessary is part of the initial intent behind these proposals in the first place. DFINITY cannot control other entities so it is fair to say it is just consistently raising the bar on its YES votes… and also trying to communicate the intent of the NO votes. Sometimes a NO vote may be because it did not understand it, it was too far from a path to code, its infeasible, etc…
This is one reason @bjoernek added:
We DO think it was a good faith effort. It just did not pass our internal bar.
As someone who changed his mind on this, I can appreciate some doubts so I can share my own journey thinking about this.
3. Relation to past proposals
I do not think early proposals had a baked philosophy or tenets. Patterns are still emerging as we learn. I wrote the rationale of a lot of proposals last year so I can say that some thinking has changed, but mostly it has been revealed by each proposal, each vote, each community conversation. Every proposal helps us understand more and more about we care about and do not care about, so still lots of room for case-by-case analysis + iteration.
4. Conclusions
We envision a world where many entities have different goals and principles in running this DAO.
This is one reason, I think it is most helpful to explain DFINITY’s position and vote… instead of trying to convince folks to change their own.
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I am sorry for not having the energy to participate in one of the hundreds of decision-making threads in IC. Nothing personal, I am not participating in a lot of them and by the looks of it, nobody is. What I can afford to do is spend some time reading the most popular forum threads and proposals and give feedback everyone is free to ignore. Additionally, I didn’t ask for a proposal that results in a signed document potentially admissible in court and thus I didn’t participate in the proposal preparation. You can agree, nobody loses their vote or ability to post in the forum, because they didn’t show up in prior meetings.
I am sure you mean well. However, I got the feeling this thing is way more complicated than it sounds to be. If we use the NNS to produce documents, then I doubt developers, entrepreneurs & investors are the ones who should be voting. More like a DAO full of lawyers is required.
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Thank you for your thoughtful response. The decision make more sense in the context of Manu’s statement. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this “path to code” concept. I’m sure I’ll develop a better understanding with time and experience.
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I appreciate your reply @LightningLad91 . Thank you.
Fwiw, and no disrespect to my Haskell friends who love abstraction 
… once someone pointed out to me the many degrees of abstractions the proposal had, I did start to see it differently.
Now I chose “haskell” deliberately since its obviously a programming language. You can have very very abstract code. So one’s comfort level with how abstract a proposal is definitely a subjective one. I do not fault folks for wanting more concreteness nor do I fault folks for having more taste for abstraction.
But yeah this paragraph kind of explains how even i (who have submitted some very abstract proposals which DFINITY may vote NO in today’s world) came around to thinking…
Hope that is helpful.
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I don’t really agree with this statement; but, I do understand the point you are making.
I would argue that motion proposals (global context) are meant to be used as a tool for organizing groups of people around an idea and often start at a high level of abstraction in order to move everyone towards more concrete action.
In my experience when a minority of members propose a very opinionated proposal it tends to create waves and fracture trust within a group.
Motion proposals are a very sensitive topic for me. I have to admit I’m not a fan simply because there is so much opportunity for abuse by power players. I do wonder when we may just call it quits on this part of the experiment and move towards only allowing technical proposals to be put forth.
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Being Censored on twitter raising these issues by being reported so others are unable to see my tweet
Ive raised it in all decentralised Socials and will be re-raising it for a few days
I don’t disagree. I think this is a reasonable and fair way to think about it. At the risk of coming off as “weak-minded” and one who changes their mind too often, it is certainly is a good point. I need to weigh that in as well and think about it some more as you are doing as well.
Truth is that this proposal definitely strained our “code to path” tenet internally because it was way too broad and abstract, but hey… maybe we are wrong and we iterate our own thinking (as I did in this particular proposal). Our current direction is towards “higher bar for YES”.
This is why these dialogues are important.
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Neuron followee reset any day now guys its a dfnity top priority after all
: >
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Note: You could route around this by proposing a replica or NNS system canister upgrade that implemented it. If you want >2/3 you are going to have to apply it to replica and system canister topics as well.
I think they have value, but we could change the name to polls and drop the voting reward to weight 0 so they don’t affect reward. Participation would be voluntary and likely more reflective of the community paying attention. Maybe don’t allow following on the topic…or publish both the active votes vs passive votes…that would be interesting.
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ICDevs is voting reject mostly because we are following dfinity. This only has a tangential effect on devs(obviously subjective and there are certainly arguments to be made both ways), but when surveyed for opinions, the dev board was not very committal and I don’t think there was much momentum toward favoring it.
We love the work that @aiv put in and we think we should still do the work to come up with the principals and a type of “score card” that named neurons can publish stances on. We’ll be happy to participate.
Generally we’re interested in a spirit of subtraction where the NNS does less and less as we get to know the network better and better. There are obvious network functions necessary to be governed via the NNS and those have that execute real code and do real things. They are deterministic much like the code we write for the IC. That really should be our focus here. Help the community understand and become experts in those mechanisms so we have more than one hand on the steering wheel.
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More evidence that when you look past the nice and fancy words, the actions show the bias and the hesitancy to do anything about centralisation i.e. the preferred state
I’m sure implementing Followee resets which have been voted in, go against Dfinitys current agendas
Don’t really even hear it talked about
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It shows the freedom to choose which side to vote on depending on new information, revised stands, nuances of each proposal. Voting in a certain way is not a contract with observers that you must always vote that way.
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Very disappointing voting.
I am also waiting patiently for resetting followees
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Just the other day, I insisted there was no censorship of alternative viewpoints on this forum and today I see a post from @Arthur flagged! This is shocking, he’s a stalwart member of the community, and his revelation about legal threats was important. If it’s untrue any such threats were made, the Foundation could respond by saying so, but simply flagging is clear censorship.
Second, Dfinity’s primary explanation for its ‘no’ vote is deeply unconvincing. The secondary argument is better than the primary one, though not strong enough in itself to justify a ‘no’ vote. Maybe, Dfinity should have abstained on this one. And I say this as someone who does not support the Ethos idea, for reasons explained in the original Ethos thread.
Update: on further consideration, I take back the word ‘censorship’. Since most community members can flag posts, and we do not know who did in this case, it is wrong to blame mods or Dfinity. I am leaving the comment up because of the other content in it, which remains valid for me.
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Are folks in this thread calling a flagged post censorship, or was a post actually scrubbed by some forum admin?
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A flagged post isn’t censorship, I’m pretty sure we all opened that post and read it anyway.
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Anyone who’s signed in can flag a post that they find offensive, and it seems within reason that someone would flag as offensive a post referencing Old Yellar in relation to another human being, without some alterior motive.
Just trying to understand the depth of this censorship claim. It isn’t well evidenced in the body of this thread.
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I had to scroll up to review. I had just woken up when Arthur originally posted and there was indeed a deleted comment from him.
That said, I don’t recall if it was deleted by author or something else. It’s not actually there anymore.