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@ david
2025-05-02 20:55:02
Maybe I should start out with a broader framing: how does a group of entities (meaning people but could be other things - aliens, AI, etc) achieve consensus? I’d say there are a myriad of different methods and a myriad of different things about which we strive to arrive at consensus. Some methods are centralized, some are decentralized, and some maybe a little of both, depending on what we mean by those words.
Rally around a king - that would be a mechanism centralized consensus on political issues. Nakamoto consensus is a decentralized mechanism for consensus on what to use as money. Another category would be linguistic consensus, like: what do I call this thing in my hand? A hat, a pencil, a shoe? The simplest most basic mechanism, and the one that I think we actually use the most, is basic WoT: I take a poll of my closest associates, calculate a weighted average of what they call something, and that’s what I call it. (That’s GrapeRank for vocabulary words!)