Merge pull request #528 from lauerj/main

Pull request responding to issue #175

contents/english/05-00-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md

@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ While a human rights operating system is the foundation, the point of the system
 
 While we have titled this section of the book "democracy", what we plan to describe goes well beyond many conventional descriptions of democracy as a system of governance of nations.  Instead, to build ⿻ on top of fundamental social protocols, we must explore the full range of ways in which applications can facilitate collaboration and cooperation, the working of several entities (people or groups) together towards a common goal.   Yet even these phrase miss something crucial that we focus on: the power that working together has to create something greater than the sum of what the parts working together could have created separately.
 
-Mathematically, this idea is known as "supermodularity" and captures the classic idea from Aristotle that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts".  Given our emphasis on diversity, what "greater" means here is context specific, defined by the norms and values of the individuals and communities coming together.  Furthermore, our focus is less on people or groups *per se* than on the fabric running through and separating them, social difference.  Thus, what we will describe in this part of the book is, most precisely, the way how technology can empower supermodularity across social difference or, more colloquially, "collaboration across diversity".
+Mathematically, this idea is known as "supermodularity" and captures the classic idea from Aristotle that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts".  An early example of the quantitative application of supermodularity is the idea of "comparative advantage", the first comprehensive description of which that we are aware of presented by the English economist David Ricardo in 1817.[^Ricardo]  "Comparative advantage" says, roughly, that overall welfare will be maximized when all trading partners specialize in making their most efficient product, even when some other partner can make *everything* more efficiently.  Comparative advantage is understood as an 'economic law' stating in effect that there are guaranteed gains from diversity that can be realized through the market mechanism.  This idea has been extremely influential in neoliberal economics (see Social Markets 05-07), although later iterations are more sophisticated than the Ricardian version.  Given our emphasis on diversity, however, what "gains" means here is context specific, and will be defined by the norms and values of the individuals and communities coming together.  Furthermore, our focus is less on people or groups *per se* than on the fabric running through and separating them, social difference.  Thus, what we will describe in this part of the book is, most precisely, the way how technology can empower supermodularity across social difference or, more colloquially, "collaboration across diversity".
 
 In this chapter, which lays out the framework for the rest of this part of the book, will highlight why collaboration across diversity is such a fundamental and ambitious goal.  We then define a range of different domains where it can be pursued based on a spectrum of depth and breadth.  Next we  highlight a framework for  design in the space that navigates between the dangers of premature optimization and chaotic experimentation.  Yet harnessing the potential of collaboration across diversity also holds the risk of reducing the diversity available for future collaboration.  To guard against this we discuss the necessity of *regenerating* diversity.  We round out this chapter by describing the structure followed in each subsequent chapter in this part.
 
@@ -118,6 +118,6 @@ None of this is inevitable and of course there are many stories of intersections
 
 In this part of the book we will (far from exhaustively) explore a range of approaches to collaboration across difference and how further advances to ⿻ can extend and build on them.  Each chapter will begin, as this one did, with an illustration of technology near the cutting edge of what is possible that is in use today.  It will then describe the landscape of approaches that are common and emerging in its area. Next it will highlight the promise of future developments that are being research, as well as risks these tools might pose to ⿻ (such as homogenization) and approaches to mitigating them, including by harnessing tools described in other chapters.  We hope that the wide range of approaches we highlight draws out not just the substance of ⿻, but also the consistency of its approach with its substance.  Only a ⿻ complementary and networked directions can support the development of a ⿻ future.
 
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+[^Ricardo]: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, London, John Murray, 1817. 
 [^Disanalogy]: One possible disanalogy is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics implies that in a long-term and broad scope sense, regeneration  can never succeed.  Whether the same applies to diversity is less clear, though given how long term the relevance of the Second Law is, the analogy is quite strong for practical purposes.  In the long run, we're all dead.
 [^Levi]: Cite Levi-Strauss here