Credible Neutrality

to build efficient, pro-freedom, fair and inclusive institutions that influence and govern different spheres of our lives. And that principle is this: when building mechanisms that decide high-stakes outcomes, it’s very important for those mechanisms to be credibly neutral

In a well-functioning mechanism, the decision made by the mechanism is both efficient - in the sense that the decision is the best possible outcome given the participants’ preferences, and incentive-compatible, meaning that people have the incentive to participate “honestly”.

We are entering a hyper-networked, hyper-intermediated and rapidly evolving information age, in which centralized institutions are losing public trust and people are searching for alternatives

a mechanism is credibly neutral if just by looking at the mechanism’s design, it is easy to see that the mechanism does not discriminate for or against any specific people

The mechanism must also be obvious to all and it must be clear to everyone participating that everyone else participating also knows this. This is called Common Knowledge.

To achieve this kind of common knowledge of neutrality, the neutrality of the mechanism must be very easy to see - so easy to see, that even a relatively uneducated observer can see it, even in the face of a hostile propaganda effort to make the mechanism seem biased and untrustworthy.

There are four primary rules to building a credibly neutral mechanism:

Don’t write specific people or specific outcomes into the mechanism
Open source and publicly verifiable execution
Keep it simple
Don’t change it too often

Most bits of information in the output should come from the participants’ inputs, not from hard-coded rules inside of the mechanism itself.

And if we adopt an uncompromising narrow-sense neutrality purism that says that only extremely credibly-neutral mechanisms are acceptable, then only those problems for which such mechanisms are easy to create will be solved. The community’s other needs will see no systematic support at all, and so broad-sense neutrality suffers.

the principle of credible neutrality, must also be augmented with another idea, the principle of efficacy. A good mechanism is also a mechanism that actually does solve the problems that we care about.