In contemplating the utility of Tau alpha I have discovered a practical dilemma. This dilemma is based on the fact that decisions have weights and or sizes. All decisions are not of equal size and even if you do scale discussion the dilemma still remains when decisions are what I call public decisions. A public decision is a decision made under transparency, where every process made by the decision maker is up for unlimited lifetime review, where every decision or choice in that process may have to be justified in the court of public opinion as well as in the court of law.

The influence of the court of public opinion on decision makers

Public opinion can be tracked by the analysis of sentiment. Tauchain for example may allow for opinion maps which can help a lot to make decisions factoring in current public opinion. In general it's not global public opinion which counts but more the public opinion of your social network. Global public opinion is likely to be contradictory and there are billions of people with competing opinions. The opinions of people who are your friends, who are of your demographic, who are likely to be your friends in the future, are what I would call part of the personal public opinion network. This network has opinions which just like how politicians care about what voters want, or the child might think about what parents and peers want, in the context of something like Tau we have a community forming and that community shares a stake in the future of the project, and the opinions in that community are from a nearer social distance than the opinions of those who have no interaction with that community.

The challenge is that while there are other communities, these other communities still are capable of and willing to hold accountable people who make decisions they disagree with. Many activist networks, many different religious groups, have very strong opinions about certain topics, and have no compunction at all enforcing their feelings extra-judicially.  These groups who seek justice may be right or wrong, but the point is as decisions get bigger and effect more people, the ability to make the decision without the influence of outside groups is going to (I predict) become more difficult.

Because a public decision is very public (on the blockchain potentially forever), the decisions may take on a timeless quality which I highlighted in one of my previous posts. Do we even have the tools here and now to make these sort of timeless high quality decisions? I think maybe Tau can help achieve consensus and perhaps early on during the alpha there will not be that much influence from outside communities. If Tau becomes a big deal, as Bitcoin is now, then just as there is huge debate about Bitcoin updates and what Bitcoin should be, we could also see great attention and debate brought to Tau, which could disrupt the decision making process unless there are some formal procedures agreed upon relatively early on.

The influence of the court of law on decision makers

A decision can be perceived as morally right, as ethical, as in the best interest of the community, and still there could be some threat of a lawsuit or regulatory threats which could block the decision from being made. Legal pressure on the decision makers would likely act to block controversial or legally risky decisions from being made even if the community sentiment is in favor of it. This is actually a major problem because there are different legal systems and jurisdictions all around the world each who have their own notion of justice. There are different laws, different punishments, and a decision maker who has to make a very big controversial decision may have to factor in all of these legal and political factors making the decision much more challenging.  It is not merely what the decision maker and community perceive as right or wrong, it's also about what is legally risky or not.

The dilemma, when the court of law and the court of public opinion diverge

This happens quite a bit and this in my opinion is the source of the dilemma I speak of as the main discovery of this article. The fact that you could be requested to make a decision, where the community wants you to decide in favor of it's sentiment based on clear public opinion data, but the legal team, the international laws, make the decision personally costly to the decision maker. These personal costs on the decision maker is a dilemma because the decision maker no matter what decision they choose is at risk of upsetting people of influence. The fact that the decision is public also means that the decision maker could lose long term credibility if they make a wrong decision on a critical issue.

An example would be the decision made by the Ethereum ecosystem during the DAO crisis. The DAO was both legally risky, and technically risky. The DAO failed, a hacker stole from the participants, and it was becoming both a legal and moral crisis. They resolved it by making a controversial decision which was simply the least bad option, but this resulted in a fork. From this example we can see that it is easily possible for a community to divide over a decision, and we can also see legal pressure as well as moral pressure can influence decision makers.

Conclusion

Who should own a public decision? The bigger the public decision is the less it should be owned by the decision maker in my opinion. A decision maker who makes a decision because they feel like it, or on intuition, will have a difficult time making a big public decision and justifying it because they felt it was right. This is why politicians can't simply do whatever they feel like because they do that and they usually get perceived as a tyrant. The decision maker is in theory supposed to represent the interests of others. In the Tau context this could mean the decision maker is speaking on behalf of members of the community and if this is the case then the decision maker is a community servant, and the sentiment of the community matters a lot for this service. The influence of outside communities, of lawyers, is also important to consider, and for this reason advisers might be critical, but once again if a decision is made exclusively by one person it's a lot harder to justify it than if it's made by a team of people working together for the best interest of society.

How will Tau help to scale decision making and not just scale discussion? A discussion even if you have it, does not necessarily resolve intense conflicts, disagreements, etc. It certainly can identify the disagreements, but then eventually a tough decision has to get made and how do we go from discussion to deciding is a mystery to me. It's not a mystery in the technical sense, but when you consider that the pressures can influence the decision maker to change their views and modify their choices, this raises the question of whether the discussion will lead to high quality decisions? I think in situations where the decisions are not controversial it can and likely will lead to high quality decisions but there will be situations where the decisions will be very controversial but to move forward the community will have to choose.