Hello my friends, with the recent passage of the Better DAO Decisions & Aligned Incentives Proposal we’re kicking off our sessions today! We’ll discuss Carroll Mechanisms and their use in the Negation Game and ask questions of Philip Brown and myself about the product and research directions
Add these meetings to your calendar here.
Hi @connormcmk !
Thank you for hosting the kickoff. Are the recording/transcripts going to be posted?
Thank you in advance.
Hi Miana!
Yes! Please find the recording and transcript for Monday, Aug 18 here:
Every Monday at 16 UTC we do a live working session between Philip Brown and I as we work-in-public on the design of Carroll Mechanisms.
This Monday, August 25, 2025 @alexsotodigital, @antoine, @Sixty, Carmen Garcia, @coffee-crusher, @Jamilya, @JuanRah, Manuel González, @Mercy_wairimu, @mexi, @Curia, @Tino, and Varit Ruangsiri. This week we opened with a governance failure story (Walkerton water crisis) to highlight the stakes of governance. Philip framed our research focus: build the smallest workable Carroll Mechanism model and test it with agents who have vested interests, not just neutral ones.
Using school start times as a case study, we explored how points, counterpoints, and causal weights (q) can structure reasoning beyond simple yes/no markets. Community questions raised the need to prevent popularity contests (thank you @alexsotodigital), setting us up perfectly for next week’s deep dive on epistemic leverage.
Thank you for the recording and transcripts
TY for trecording, will look at the end that I missed!
Antoine
Recording and transcripts from the meeting today:
Recording
Transcript
Recording and transcripts from the meeting Monday:
Recording
Transcript
We’re trying a new rhythm: weeks 2 & 4 are community-oriented updates; weeks 1 & 3 are research deep dives.
I opened with the California high-speed rail story to show how big projects can drift—costs balloon, plans get rigid, and course corrections come too late. Our aim is to build “decision markets” that reward people for surfacing useful evidence early, so plans can adapt before money and time are wasted.
Philip walked through a simple live demo showing how a proposal and its objections can be weighed together, with encouraging signs that stronger, well-supported points naturally matter more than weaker ones. The group discussed keeping the system open to everyone while still easy to use, and how to handle multiple competing ideas without confusing people.
Next, we stated an intention to refine the way we score relevance, continue UX testing in Thursday “proposal bonanzas,” and share progress in the next community session.
Recording and transcripts from the meeting Monday:
Recording
Transcript
This week’s community session focused on epistemic leverage—how to give more weight to people who share not just their opinions, but also what would change their minds. Connor opened with the Challenger disaster, showing how organizational pressure silenced engineers and led to catastrophe. The lesson: experts need real voice, and incentives must align so that speaking truth carries more weight than going along.
Philip introduced a first draft of a new “epistemic leverage action”: a way for participants to gain extra influence by taking on risk if their stated reasoning proves wrong. The idea is to encourage people to reveal the conditions that could falsify their beliefs, much like science does. Community discussion (led by Alex Soto and others) highlighted two key points:
The group closed on an optimistic note: epistemic leverage could make principles like fairness or equality reusable building blocks in governance, giving them real weight in collective decisions. Next steps include testing the leverage design further, exploring UI trade-offs, and continuing to refine how cultural values and incentives intersect.