###Educated subsets, relation to power An open question which individual worlds will have to ask is: do you concentrate judgment in the hands of an educated few, or do you allow everybody to judge?

Educated subsets, relation to power

An open question which individual worlds will have to ask is: do you concentrate judgment in the hands of an educated few, or do you allow everybody to judge?

###Educated subsets, relation to power The role of lawyers in the ROS is simply to make sure that all of your appropriate discounts have been applied; in the SOS we can imagine that they have a much richer goal as rhetoricians, trying to build up a crowd-moving speech that would sway people to thinking that you had maintained the spirit of the community.

This also, however, applies to the people doing the judgment. There is a trade-off here, a very important trade-off. The more independent the judgment-facility is, the more efficient society as a whole is (division of labor), but also the more risk that they will absorb authority into themselves. An educated minority passing judgments for the sake of the community has definite advantages over the community doing the same, as the society gets larger than about 100 people.

There is a sliding-scale between the dictatorial (leaders are exclusive judges) and democratic (everybody is a judge) extremes in the relationship between leadership and judiciary. We can't say whether the SOS would be on one side or the other of this scale: it depends on what world you want to build.

So even on the far-SOS side, we have these fundamental questions of "who are the judges, how many of them are there, are they educated or just chosen at random from the population at large, and do they wield any further political power or not?" that must be addressed -- and they might be addressed in any number of other ways.

As such a system grows, its main growing pain will be that not every member of the community can have an explicit "good/bad" status known to every other member of the community! To rectify this, we can imagine that technology saves us, and expect that the news periodicals essentially turn into "eBay reviews" of every person in the society. From the moment that some woman walks into your store, there is some pop-up on your screen saying "she has 4.5 stars among 80 reviews, but only 4.0 stars among the 70 who are not immediate family and friends." Part of this would probably be voluntary microchipping, with people who refuse the chip being regarded widely as dangerously untrustworthy, and politicians routinely campaigning that they'll protect you from unchipped hooligans.

###Educated subsets, relation to power An open question which individual worlds will have to ask is: do you concentrate judgment in the hands of an educated few, or do you allow everybody to judge?

This changes the role of lawyers. In modern law, of course, the lawyer's job is to know the entire history of the application of the law, as well as what legal principles should be brought to bear in this particular case. The role of lawyers in the ROS is simply to make sure that all of your appropriate discounts have been applied. In the SOS with some sort of community-judgment we have to think: if there's an educated subset then the lawyer is still somewhat like our lawyers: but if there's not, then a lawyer has a much richer goal as rhetoricians, trying to build up a crowd-moving speech that would sway people to thinking that you had maintained the spirit of the community.

The numbers game also applies to the people doing the judgment. There is a trade-off here, a very important trade-off. The more independent-of-society and small-in-number the judgment-facility is, the more efficient society as a whole is (division of labor), but also the more risk that they will absorb authority into themselves and become a political power. An educated minority passing judgments for the sake of the community has definite advantages over the community doing the same, as the society gets larger than about 100 people: but if it has power then it buts heads with the powers-that-be in the society. The Popes were a small powerful moral authority throughout the late Antiquity and Medieval periods of European history; they often had power-clashes with the regional kings and other elite.

Speaking of power, there is another sliding-scale between the dictatorial (leaders are exclusive judges) and democratic (everybody is a judge) extremes in the relationship between leadership and judiciary. We can't say whether the SOS would be on one side or the other of this scale: it depends on what world you want to build. (They are not completely independent questions, of course: if political power = judicial power then the number of judges is just the number of political officials, so if it's a democracy then everybody is both a political and judicial authority, or if it's a dictatorship then the dictator is both a leader and a judge.)

So even on the far-SOS side, we have these fundamental questions of "who are the judges, how many of them are there, are they educated or just chosen at random from the population at large, and do they also lead others or not?" that must be addressed -- and they might be addressed in any number of other ways.

As such a system grows, its main growing pain will be that not every member of the community can have an explicit "good/bad" status known to every other member of the community! To rectify this, we can imagine that technology saves us, and expect that the news periodicals essentially turn into "eBay reviews" of every person in the society. From the moment that some woman walks into your store, there is some pop-up on your screen saying "she has 4.5 stars among 80 reviews, but only 4.0 stars among the 70 who are not immediate family and friends." Part of this would probably be voluntary microchipping, with people who refuse the chip being regarded widely as dangerously untrustworthy, and politicians routinely campaigning that they'll protect you from unchipped hooligans.

An all-too brief summary of the Socratic dialogues

Very similar to the above idea was democratic Athens. Athens was a tychocracy, a rule by the lucky, as well as a direct democracy where every adult man had a say. There were 10 tribes recognized in Athens and each one had 35 days a year during which they ruled via 50 people chosen by lot, who would randomly take turns "presiding" over that council. Furthermore, there were 9 chief judges (the Archons) also appointed by lot, and the "Ecclesia" or "Assembly" was a regular gathering open to all Athenian men to hear, speak about, and vote on decrees which would affect Athens as a whole. There's a lot of material to cover if you want to know more.

Athens had a very important role for "philosophers" as the lawyers/rhetoricians of the Assembly; this was how the Sophists are displayed in the Platonic dialogues. These "lawyers" argued in front of the Ecclesia with whatever wordplay they could muster to get their clients out of trouble.One Sophist, Gorgias, is even so bold as to have written The Encomium of Helen, a defense of Helen of Troy, the "face that launched a thousand ships" (the villainous woman in Homeric poetry whose pivotal immoral act of infidelity led to a massive war, the Trojan War, containing the deaths of countless heroes and kings). The implication, of course, is "if I can get Helen off for starting a war, I can get you off too, whatever your crimes are." In the dialogues the Sophists are drunken fun-seekers who basically think: there is no greater truth, isn't it great how we can play these word games, oh I'm so clever now that I can argue anyone into nonsense, because really there's all sorts of ambiguity in language, ahahaha. One pivotal tactic, for example, is that they often define terms by example, exploiting the ambiguity created by the word "good" in "a good knife, a good life, a good wife." Socrates hates this and wants something closer to mathematics: if you want to define a term, I'm going to ask you for something which everything which everything inside that set has, but only those things have: "if" and "only if".

So in Athens there are rules, yes, enforced by the tychocracy and often made by the democracy, in a complicated mess which was easily swayed by inspirational speeches and rhetoric. That rhetoric often dipped down into dirty word-games and surely tarnishing reputations also occurred.

Another thing to learn is that there doesn't seem to be a difference here between criminal and civil judgments, unless I'm horribly mistaken. It seems like the only time the Ecclesia would legislate something is if one man had a beef with another man: they would resolve the dispute. So it'd be interesting to instead write out a system which was sufficiently modern to need things like speeding tickets where there must be some group whose job is to say, "no, you are doing the wrong thing for everyone," even though you're not offending anyone in particular.