On 6/28/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On 6/27/07, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
The only workable concept of consensus I've ever discovered is stability. If hundreds of people edit a piece of work in good faith over a long period, what changes least over time may be presumed to be there by consensus. However even the most apparently stable elements of a work may be deposed quite easily. The result may be a new consensus or, in other cases, a period of instability where the new version and the old version compete.
This is easy to game. Just find a situation where dropping the work of the hundreds of people is easy, but restoring it is orders of magnitude more difficult. Drop their work and then claim a new "consensus" because it isn't restored.
In my view of things, the stability of the new system provides it with a competitive advantage. Short of applying some kind of compensatory gearing, which I think would be unworkable, there is no way of nullifying the advantage of simplicity.
There is a tension between this gradient towards simplification and the natural tendency of thousands of individuals working roughly in concert to produce byzantine complexity.