Choice principles

Magicians Primordial Soup
1

Short epigrams, mantras, and other brief reminders can serve as choice principles. They don’t necessarily tell you what to do, but give you things to consider because they matter to - even define - the community. Some I like are these

  • We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
    We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
    – David Clark
  • Our leaders are but trusted servants, they do not govern.
    – Alcoholics Anonymous
  • Anarchy is law and freedom without force.
    – Immanuel Kant

What are yours, and why?

3 Likes
2

“Let’s make things suck less”

There is work every day in getting out of bed, as there is in writing things down, suggesting improvements, dreaming of the future. There is an understanding and agency linked in part to open source and open dis-organizations that gives us both permission to make changes and a responsibility of adopting a code, a document, or a process and maintaining it for our own sake and utility, as well as for others.

“Free as in puppies”

This expands on the classic “free as in beer” (this thing doesn’t cost anything) and “free as in speech” (you have some rights around this thing) to underline that free code (or anything) means that you need to put in the work to care for and house train the puppy over time.

1 Like
3

On the “suck less” side, the top level of this forum is horribly cluttered. Is there any hope of refactoring into a stable set of top level subjects, and organizing mostly by rings below that? @jpitts

4

“Free as in puppies”

Ming used to call the younger devs “puppies” :wink:
They’re free to attempt what they don’t yet know to be impossible. And sometimes succeed.

5

“Be the freak you wanna see
Just don’t follow me”
– Death Grips, “Hacker”

This reminds me of the old Pantera “be yourself, by yourself” line off of “Walk”, but slightly more directed at actually standing out and being “the freak” you wanna see in the world, and not to blindly follow idols. It definitely resonates with the cyber-libertarian in me.

6

“down with the elite”

7

Hey Greg! I wrote up some things on options that people have to control their experience of the forum:

8

Ah yes, the Categories view is much better organized. Then the question is whether it can be the default for non-member – putting our best face to the world.

9

Filed as an issue here: https://github.com/ethereum-magicians/scrolls/issues/19

I don’t know if Discourse has that setting, I’ll experiment on my own site.

10

“Code is Law”

One of the important ones

11

Code is code. Law is law. :wink:

“To live outside the law you must be honest.” – Bob Dylan

1 Like
12

Yeah, as a user I can get what I want, my concern is newbies coming by and just getting lost. I guess if they just click “Categories” it gets more clear.

13

“Consensus is Law”

Code bends to our will, not the other way around.

14

My principles appertaining to “blockchain”:

  • Find understanding before judgment.
  • Understand something with different intellectual lenses.
  • The key properties of blockchains exist on a spectrum. They include:
    • Reliability, Transparency, Immutability, Liveness
  • The key properties of public blockchains also exist on a spectrum. They include:
    • Decentralization, Incentives, Non-Interference, Commons
  • Management of a commons requires cooperation.
  • Cooperation can be improved if has a well-designed governance process .
  • Humans are in charge. But we should be open to widening participation as it becomes practical :slight_smile:
15

@gregc I was recently looking into a navigation top bar, this should not be too difficult but a matter of time/effort. In the meantime we can revert to the category view.

This is the issue for the fix: https://github.com/ethereum-magicians/scrolls/issues/19

16

Thanks @jpitts (thanks to 20+)