Scaling-up
The current target group of Program Interdemocracy is school-going adolescents, but the ultimate goal is full societal inclusion. Scaling-up is not epistemically linear and introduces the risk of compositional distortion.
- Phased skew: Scaling proceeds from structured cohorts to semi-structured, voluntary, and self-selecting and selected groups.
- Directional asymmetry: Compositional asymmetry can tilt toward “anywheres” (bias toward proceduralism and technocratic framing, amplifying undemocratic liberalism) or “somewheres” (bias toward responsiveness and majoritarian claims, amplifying illiberal democracy).
- Systemic oscillation: The phased skew and directional asymetry reintroduces democratic distortion through participation variance, uneven motivational intensity, and politically salient representation gaps, causing the system to potentially swing between more populistic phases (high responsiveness, low procedural stability) and more technocratic phases (less responsiveness, procedural rigidity).
Addressing the challenges
To address these scaling-related risks, transparent monitoring metadata on participation density, demographic distribution, and variance patterns need to be provided. A Joshua Greene-inspired metaframe is to function as a second-order, meta-normative constraint to dampen oscillation amplitude. The goal is to design a system that can metabolize distortion without collapsing into entrenchment. The metaframe needs to provide a shared evaluative metric to prevent any temporarily dominant outgroup from structurally reshaping the system. The metaframe should be explicit, publicly accepted in advance, procedurally embedded, transparent, rule-based, and constraining all factions symmetrically.
- The metric functions as a second-order constraint, evaluating outcomes on two levels: (1) by cross-group impact on experienced autonomy, belonging, and achievement, and reduction of suffering; and (2) against core liberal-democratic principles: impact on the level of responsiveness and procedural rigidity.
- The metric applies to the outcomes of the agenda-setting process (topic selection, question design), the recommendations-setting process, the metric interpretation (defining what counts as autonomy, belonging, achievement, and suffering), and the phasing of scaling (deciding when to introduce specific groups or how fast to scale).
- The cohort applying the metric is school-going adolescents. They are diverse by definition, rotate as a cohort, have the longest temporal skin in the game, lack entrenched institutional power, and exhibit peak neural plasticity making them least vulnerable to naive realism as a group - individual naive realism is less relevant since it does not undermine Surowiecki’s input preconditions while in-group naïve realism resulting from their age-related conformist tendencies is dealt with by Interdemocracy didactics.
- To prevent adult influence over the application of the metric, facilitator rules are immutable.