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Dec. 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:40
541 Who Watches the Watchers?
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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
It is the 4th of December.
It's lunchtime. I'm just going to go and grab a snack.
And I wanted to get a few ideas in.
We'll see what the wind does with all of this.
But I wanted to get a few ideas in at least.
But I wanted to chat about some sort of idea that popped up yesterday in the show, the call-in show.
And I wanted to chat about some ideas that I had and have had for some time.
I haven't got around to doing them on the podcast yet.
And this is specific to sort of DROs and the question, which is pretty considerable for a large proportion of debates within society about political power and the state and so on, which is this question which has been around forever, which is who watches the watchers, right? So, if you say that...
A potential for corruption and abuse occurs in every human interaction, then you are faced with a rather challenging problem to solve.
And the challenging problem to solve is if abuse can occur in just about every single human interaction, then how do you set up a society with the goal of Eliminating, or at least reducing, the capacity or possibility for this kind of abuse.
Now, of course, we do have to recognize that abuse is more than possible, but under certain conditions virtually inevitable in human relations.
And those conditions are things like a disparity of power, a monopoly on the use of force, A lack of consequences to destructive behavior and a profit which arises from the forcible removal of resources through these disparities and through the sort of centralized state mechanisms and through all of that sort of stuff.
So, I think we first have to recognize or respect the premise that these abuses can occur and under certain situations are going to inevitably occur and inevitably escalate.
So one of the things that we know, which is a problem with the existence of the state, is that the government will not only take resources from people, but because every time it takes resources from people, it ends up with more people that it pays off, and it continually needs to pay off more people in order to gain access to political power and to appease those who are already part of the political paid process.
That the more power it gets, the more power it needs.
And of course the fundamental problem occurs that the money that is taken from citizens ends up being paid to those who are willing to use force on behalf of the government to collect even more resources from citizens.
So it really is a bit of a death spiral in terms of escalating power.
So it's sometimes said that anarchists are not sort of pie-in-the-sky idealists, dewy-eyed people.
What's the Pollyannas who are just nothing but optimistic about human nature, but I would say that quite the opposite is true, that anarchists, at least market anarchists, recognize the capacity of human beings to harm each other, particularly in situations of disparate power,
and therefore it is really the case that That by recognizing this fundamental corruptibility of human nature in the exercise of power that anarchists work so hard to try and come up with viable theoretical social situations or political power situations or economic power situations more appropriately wherein this power, this abuse of power is kept to a minimum.
So the question which is always something that has Trouble me ever since I was a kid.
The question sort of fundamentally is, who watches the watchers, right?
That's sort of the big thing that goes on.
Who is going to watch the watchers?
And any time that you say corruption exists, then you need some sort of mediating power or mediating incentive or mediating mechanism with which to continually work to dissolve corruption.
That power, right?
So think of power like a plaque.
A plaque is going to inevitably accumulate on your teeth and you need the toothbrush of anarchism to continually remove the build-up of plaque.
The build-up of plaque is inevitable because we've got to eat.
And so the question is sort of what is the countervailing force or power or tendency or possibility within society that is going to bypass this sort of issue Or this possibility of this inevitability of the accumulation of power.
Now, I touched on this yesterday in the call-in show, but I'd like to mention a little bit more about it now so that we can look at it in a little bit more detail.
Now, the example that I used yesterday I think is worth exploring in a little bit more detail.
And that example was that we have, let's say, a television station and an advertiser.
Now, a television station is delivering eyeballs to the advertiser, and so when it comes to analyzing what's going on in this television station situation, the television station is going to have a very high incentive to maximize or to report to the advertiser that the largest conceivable number of eyeballs are available to the advertiser,
and that's going to raise the price of what this guy He's able to charge vis-a-vis this advertiser.
Now, conversely, the advertiser is going to want to get more eyeballs than he's paying for, so he's going to want to have a lower estimate of what's going on vis-a-vis the number of advertisers that are able to be delivered, right?
So, they definitely want the advertisers, they just don't want to pay that much for the advertisers.
Let's take a short break and get my lunch.
So, the argument that is sort of put forward by the theory of anarchism is sort of the argument that the only solution to the problem, the only sort of long-term and viable solution to the problem of exploitation and of the only sort of long-term and viable solution to the problem of exploitation and of corruption is
right? The first is that you have to make sure that the people who are using violence are responsible for subsidizing all of the costs of that violence, right?
So, obviously, if you pay somebody to be violent, then those who are amoral, who are generally drawn towards making decisions based on mere and fairly immediate economic calculation, are going to be more violent and are going to be more prone to using to force.
I guess the two are the same, sorry, slightly redundant.
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.
But similarly, you want to make sure that not only do the people who want violence pay the entire cost of that violence, which is going to make the entry cost of violence, the barrier to entry will be higher,
but you also are only really going to be able to dilute or dissolve The issues or the questions around corruption by having a dissolution or dissolving of authority into competing self-interest.
Right? Competing self-interest is really the only way that the problems associated with corruption can be mediated or can be controlled.
So, in the example that we were talking about, where we have a television station that wants to pretend that there are six million people watching every nanosecond, all of whom are dying to buy the products that the advertiser wishes to advertise, whereas the advertiser wants to only pay for one of those, or ideally none, and have it be free, eyeballs, how is it that this is going to get resolved?
Well, the traditional way of resolving disputes in the sort of idea, which is very common, that the children, sorry, that the citizens are like children and the state is a parent.
So, in that sort of paradigm, the children are considered to be unable to resolve their own disputes and therefore they need a parent to arbitrate between them.
So, in the traditional sort of socialist or fascistic or communist model, Well, I guess there'd be no advertising or something, but let's say there was.
What would happen is, people would say, well, these two people have opposing self-interest.
And that opposing self-interest is going to cause them to lie about...
So basically, to either overcharge or undercharge, or underpay, to lie about the number of eyeballs delivered by a television station.
So what we need is we need a government to tell everyone how they should resolve these disputes.
Now, of course, there is a blinding collapse of logic that occurs in this formulation, obviously, right?
Because if the advertisers and the television stations are composed of human beings to whom self-interest is going to cause a fudging or a mess-up of The data that they're trying to convince each other is valid.
If a group of human beings is going to manipulate and be untrustworthy because they have self-interest at heart, then the promotion of a third group to resolve the dispute doesn't solve anything.
If these two poisons are going to kill you, a third poison which is more powerful is not Going to cure you, right?
This is the fundamental problem with the state and this is why I fight so hard against the institution of the authority of family insofar as that the authority of the parents is considered to be a given, the moral authority.
Because if you believe that authority has virtue by nature of it being authority, i.e.
parents or priests or God or whatever, then You're going to be inevitably drawn, you know, like a snail down a slippery slope.
You're inevitably going to be drawn towards this impatient authoritarian approach to problem solving, i.e.
wherever there's two groups or people who have conflicting aims and are untrustworthy because of those conflicting aims and conflicting self-interest, then we invent some magical Ideal, perfect, moral group that is going to justly arbitrate these disputes.
That's completely illogical.
The degree to which groups are untrustworthy in society based on conflicting self-interest is the degree to which government is not viable as a solution.
As I've sort of mentioned before, if citizens can productively resolve their disputes without resorting to force, Then you don't need a government.
If citizens are considered to be trigger-happy sociopaths who will shoot everyone down, then you simply can't have a government, because that's exactly who the government is going to be populated by.
You can't invent this sort of third party composed of idealistic and perfect and wonderful people.
I mean, you can, but it's just false, right?
It's just completely false.
It's like... There used to be, I think it's probably still floating around, some description of project management processes within a company.
And, you know, high hopes followed by dashed expectations, changing specs, blame, recrimination, disaster.
And then, you know, there's this big cloud and says, here, a miracle occurs and the product is delivered on spec and on time.
Well, of course, the whole issue of the state really rolls around that central, magical insertion of here, a miracle occurs, right?
So... This is sort of the argument that is fundamental against the state.
So, naturally, the free market recognizes this conflict of interest and the desired French number is based on this conflict of interest.
Perfectly natural, perfectly eminently solvable problem.
And so clearly, what has to occur in order to solve this problem is that the advertiser will not trust the demographics produced by the television station.
The television station will not trust the demographics produced by the advertiser because of the conflict of self-interest.
And so, what's going to happen?
Well, you're going to have to appeal, if you want to solve this problem at all, and of course people do regularly, you're going to have to defer this decision to a third party.
Now, the third party's self-interest is in the accuracy of the information.
And that, I think, is the solution that the DRO model brings to the problem of corruption.
That the third party has self-interest only in the objective accuracy of the data.
Right. So, this is why conflict of interest in business is considered to be, I guess in politics, at one point it was upheld, is considered to be such a negative thing.
Because conflict of interest clearly...
It's going to cause biases in the collection or dissemination of data or, you know, many other sort of metrics, just about any other sort of metric you could imagine.
And so what happens?
Well, you need to have, where you have conflicts of interest in this kind of way, this third party whose interest is in pleasing both parties, in other words, with using methodologies and having an independence from the outcome.
Dependence on the outcome that's separate from the self-interest.
So here's what I mean by competing self-interest.
So when you have, I want low eyeballs, I want high eyeballs, I want the most accurate eyeballs, those are the competing self-interest that is sort of humanity's best hope for productively and proactively dealing with this issue of corruption and falsehood and so on.
Now, who watches the watchers?
Well, the watchers only need to be watched if we accept that their self-interest is not in the realm of truth.
Right? So, if we say that self-interest is going to cause a bias, then of course what you need, and this is what the free market regularly supplies, is you need a party whose self-interest is the eradication of bias.
So you pay people to dedicate themselves to the eradication of bias.
You basically pay people to have a bias towards no bias.
That's who have no direct financial stake, who have no particular desire or goal and have every incentive not to pursue this, right?
So you would not really very likely have a business plan that involved setting up some sort of research group or research arm That would, you know, build itself for 20 years and develop a sterling and stellar reputation and so on.
Unless you're Arthur Anderson maybe, but it would not be a very good business plan to then say, well, we're going to now cheat on this, that or the other metric in order to get bribed.
It's a possibility, of course.
It's absolutely a possibility. In order to get bribed to provide information or an analysis that person X wants or something like that.
That's not really a very sensible approach.
And of course you're going to want internal checks and balances so the companies that do the ratings of the number of eyeballs delivered by the television station are themselves of course going to have to have metrics by which their behavior can be judged.
And all of these sorts of good things will be in place.
I know that people are sort of drawn to this top-down, sword-heavy, guillotine-like solution, where you just appoint one group to arbitrate the disputes of everybody else, and that's sort of the idea behind the government.
But, as I said before, it's an escalating logical problem, in that if people are mild and will resolve their disputes generally peacefully, you don't need a government, and if they're so self-interested and irrational and hysterical and prone to violence that You know, you believe this external third party is necessary, then you really can't have it at all, right?
So that seems to me a particularly important aspect of trying to figure out how best to resolve disputes within society in a way that's productive and positive and sustainable, right?
Sustainable is kind of key.
There is no...
You know, magical one-time solution to the problem of human conflict.
There is competing self-interest.
It's sort of like in the interest of war, right?
That, as it turns out, the way that you stop war is you give all the countries in the world a nuclear weapon.
That's how you stop war.
That is how war has been stopped in the past and that is exactly Why Western Europe and so on are peaceful and why Russia and America had these proxy wars, of course, but these wars were held in countries that themselves had no nuclear weapons.
So, you know, as it turns out, a competition and an equality of opportunity, in this case for the mass destruction of other people's countries, is sort of historically how you'd look at it and say, well, this is how the problem of war is solved, is mutually assured destruction.
So, the balance of power, which is what England always strove for a thousand years to maintain in Western Europe, not very successfully, but the balance of power is how you achieve stability.
It's not intuitive, right? I mean, like most things that are true and important, it's not intuitive, right?
But the balance of power is exactly how you achieve equilibrium within the field of resolving conflicts.
And that's why I think that the DRO model is so interesting, at least for me, hopefully for you as well, in that who will watch the watchers?
Well, those who are paid for their objectivity, whose self-interest is in the abdication of specific interest, of specific self-interest.
So, one of the things that you would do, this of course is very common in experimentation, but also in marking, right?
I mean, is that if you have a belief that a professor is biased towards a particular student, then you have someone else mark that student's paper without seeing the name or something like that, right?
So, again, you're sort of removing the subjectivity, removing the irrational preference, all of these kinds of things.
are very well documented and understood in other fields, right?
The double-blind test in the marketing of drugs, the elimination or at least the attempt to eliminate the placebo effect and so on.
Ways of undermining or removing the capacity for bias to skew results is a very well-known phenomenon, of course.
And this is why in RFP submissions businesses they often will go through a series of objective metrics and so on.
Comparisons with weightings and numbers and Because the whole idea or the goal is to get rid of this problem of subjective preference, which is, of course, what leads to conflict among people who don't have sort of internal standards of ethics, or at least not very good ones.
So that's sort of, I think, what is so interesting about the DRO model and why I think it's got such potential to be an answer.
It may not be the final answer.
There may be other ways of doing it that we can't even think of yet.
But it is one of the things that I think has A very good shot at dealing with this problem.
And this is why I sort of say that the state solution is definitely not going to work.
I mean, without a doubt, the bias does not get eliminated when you have universal power, right?
I mean, and when you do not face repercussions for your actions, as we all know, and politicians steal and thieves, they're thieves and the The police brutalize, and they never face any particular consequences for their actions every now and then, but not very often. It certainly makes the news.
So I would say that that's why I think this approach is so interesting, and I certainly look forward to people's response.
It is a fascinating problem, and there may be other alternatives, but I think this is a pretty good model for work.
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