Grace Rachmany
Task
Status
Date
Feb 7, 2024
Completion Time
Email
Interviewer
Segment
User Details
Subject info
- Grace (Rebecca) Rachmany
- Role / Job title: governance systems designer
- Experience
- Purchase summary
Company info
- Tomi + Singularity Net + ???
- Size:
- Type:
- Maturity
Interviewer Observations
Grace emphasized the importance of sensemaking, active listening, and immutable records in organizational decision-making. She highlighted the challenges of sensemaking in a post-truth world and the need for critical thinking and appropriate information to reach accurate conclusions. Grace and Artem discussed the challenges of decentralized decision making, particularly in evaluating the quality of decisions made by a larger group of people. Grace suggested using AI to process community data and create a more inclusive decision-making process. Artem emphasized the importance of establishing formal discussion channels for LLM proposals and capturing the best ideas for transparency and accountability.
Outline
Decision-making tools and their limitations.
The challenges of sensemaking in various contexts.
Organizational design and decision-making.
Decision-making, conflicts of interest, and transparency in a grant round.
Improving knowledge management and collaboration in web3 development.
Formalizing decision-making processes in a community.
Decentralization and community involvement in blockchain projects.
The limitations of AI in understanding human nuances.
Using AI to understand online communities.
Notes
- nobody votes
- …
- there are much better approaches to decision making than voting
- decision making tool (don’t remember the name, Canadian), digital democracy tools
- civic tech existed before DAOs, but web3 people did zero time to study it
- popularity isn’t the same as wisdom
- Griff Green is pretty much a conventional politician
- re-invented the crappy old democracy model
- truth is often unpopular (I’m surprised how popular I am)
- people respect my opinions but implement them infrequently
- problem with sensemaking: lack of appropriate info to start with
- with citizen assemblies they give people a packet of info, so they start at the same playing field, they can make decisions
- but the power is in the hand of those who make those packets of info
- so many people think that what they see on their screen is informative, and more than what their gut feeling (pandemic as illustration)
- if you live in a world where people are willing to trust this more than their own eyes, you’ll always have bad sensemaking
- you’ve got popularity contests of ideas or who gets the money (not critical experiments)
- small scale sensemaking has the same problem
- when I did my MBA they told about survival exercise about a group of students, they had to choose items they would use, there was a guy, ex navy seal, who was internally powerful, he said this is what we should take, they didn’t know his background, they didn’t enquire why he suggested those items, eventually that group picked the wrong items, the teacher asked why, and the guy said they would die in the desert, they wouldn’t listen me
- just being asshole MBA students who didn’t want to listen
- another thing is we don’t do a good job of having organisational memory (we think we have a record of stuff but we don’t)
- if we look at extremely large % of proposals, all of them are made without proper problem statement and solution definition (success criteria)
- maybe it will be implemented or not, it will be good or bad, but the definition of this will be in someone’s head
- one of the things you want to do is experiments and compare the results to what you wanted to happen
- we get to a point where more people are involved in the decision,
- how do we know it was better? what is the measure?
- we want a council of 5 to make decisions, 5 is the measure of decentralization, how do you what they did was of better quality
- you can have multiple experiments, council of 5 or 10, we can use Polis to sensemake, but we still don’t know whether it’s good or bad
- and it might be something more long-term, the success can happen after the money has been allocated and the work delivered (retrospectively)
- …
- I compare these things to my body, it has great feedback loops
- I’m sitting here, paying attention, but my hip hurts, or my foot falls asleep — immediately I know about it
- the feedback on chocolate cake is not that great, the consequences are delayed
- we are not testing enough things and we don’t see enough things as tests and we don’t talk about conflicts of interests nearly enough
- I’m on the supervisory council of SNet and people are sick of me talking about it
- certain amount of budget is our regular retainer, and certain amount for rewards to others, and we can decide how to spend it
- we were elected and the budget was given to us as elected officials, it was stated we could pay ourselves, but still — I have some bandwidth, I need some money, I know I can do this stuff for council and it’s a conflict or interest
- we hired Dr Nick to write the blueprint, even tho I’m qualified, but we decided to hire him to write RFPs
- who has kept the record that this council or Grace individually have done things that clearly demonstrate that we’re willing to not be corrupt with this small amount of money?
- our sensemaking is hindered by our knowledge management
- …
- documentation of AI bots?
- almost none of the tools developed so far is of any use to anyone
- UBI program for smart people
- all the mistakes we’re making are inside the lab
- …
- Polis is confusing to use, I couldn’t even use it
- the lowest common denominator is always the best solution
- it’s not going to give you innovation, but in complex problems you need a lot of innovative ideas
- I don’t think any of these tools help with compromising and real collaboration (e.g. three people put up competing proposals, let’s get them in one room and see… I don’t think those tools are doing anything like that)
- which part of proposals is good, which needs improvement
- I’m quite good at designing systems specs but I can’t program
- so the best system designer can’t apply
- sensemaking is designed in the same way where you have to be good at proposal writing and programming
- AI can do this — identifying people, reputation is important, devil’s advocate is part of sensemaking (but there’s no way to compensate them in DAOs), you need risk assessment person, “that person is unpopular, they waste time”
- …
- for an outsiders like myself it’s very hard to know who to ask or how to ask the community
- Esther is the name the person in charge of SNet decentralisation
- with their ambassador program… they had a number of discussions
Action Items
…
Artem to interview Esther about Tommy's community sensemaking process.
Grace to send Artem the name of the Canadian decision making tool she mentioned.
Grace to provide Artem with a report on different digital democracy tools including civic tech.
Grace to invite Artem to design sprints to provide system specifications.
Sensemaking in DAOs is designed in this weird way, where you have to be good at proposal writing, and good at [technical stuff]. But that's not the norm! And there’s no way to bring the best people together, if you had a really good way to understand… there’s an organization in which I can identify the best programmers who deliver and I can identify the people who are the best at writing proposals and the most innovative, and reputation is really important. And the devil's advocate is part of sensemaking, right? But in a DAO, you have no way to compensate [this role]. But you need them, you need the risk assessment person, someone who would ask “what could possibly go wrong?”, and then write down a list of what could go wrong, which would get implemented in your product, and it wouldn't go wrong. But that person in a DAO is just unpopular, and wastes a lot of time.
And also in discussion forums… reputation is key. It would be beneficial for myself and for Arbitrum for me to participate. But I don't have time for politics. I'm busy! So if Artem says “We'd like to talk to you, can you contribute to Arbitrum DAO discussion? Can you join our Discord channel? Campaign for something, submit a proposal, blah, blah, blah…” I would say no, I can't. It's not a meritocracy really. Because politics is such an important part of it. And that's why you have professional politicians, and then you have people like myself, who just can't be bothered. The best people are too busy.
And then let's say you did get them into a Discord channel, to have this discussion. How would a DAO weight [their opinion]? [With the system we have], the way a DAO would weight my discussion is “that person is not in our community, and they're a pain in the ass, it was nice to listen to them, they came in as a guest speaker”, but I'm not going to have any voting power in the community. I'm not a delegate, I don't hold any ARB. I would have to hold ARB in order to have any influence. And I don't want to hold ARB! Alright, if somebody gave me some ARB, and said “please join” or “listen, we're going to make sure you at least get compensated for your time.” As you can see, it's not about compensation for my time. It's just the amount of time I would have to dedicate to Arbitrum in order to get to the part of the community… you don't have that in normal organizations. Can you imagine if that's how you hired your marketing team in a corporate environment?