Well Tauchain certainly isn't the first and won't be the last attempt to formalize governance on the blockchain itself - anyone remember Tezos? Yup Tezos is actually coming back as T2 sometime this year. Last I checked Tauchain also had some issues too.
And remember, we had the DAO which wasn't a bockchain with its own governance encoded on chain, but an org on a chain (Ethereum) with its own governance in contracts. Problem was they could never get enough votes to decide anything and DAO became a quagmire of inactivity. Until the famous hack that is which drained it of millions in funds and famously sparked the Ethereum Classic and Ethereum fork forcing the human nature of Ethereum governance to front and center stage.
The problem seems to me, that law as code is fine if you can describe all the things you want to legislate as code. Think of the US constitution, and then think of the thousands, if not millions of laws that have been created underneath it to make it actually a practical system. How do you decide if one law in code is a legitimate law - a subclass if you will - of the original "constitution" that the system started with? Take for instance the first amendment - seems pretty clear right:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
But somewhere along the line we figured out there are limits to rights in the Bill of Rights - such at commercial speech is limited, obscenity is limited, yelling "fire" is limited, incitement to specific criminal acts is limited etc. and I would think most people would agree those are useful things. But however would you have encoded that in code?
You note the ambiguity of English language for expressing laws (gun rights advocates will spend hours arguing about the meaning of a comma in the second amendment because it suits their interpretation) but you didn't mention when the effect or cause that is to be limited is a very human thing. We all know that famous quote about obscenity from a legal case Jacobellis v Ohio:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
So what are we to do when a human can't even describe the thing and it takes a human to determine what is or isn't obscenity? Assuming people agree such things are necessary laws then how do we codify them? Do we train up a machine learning algorithm to get a high F1 score for determining obscenity and make that part of the blockchain? Or can we always call out to human-driven oracles who provide input to governance?
When your neighbor is having a loud party do we require a law that has expressly defined every environmental parameter of what defines a nuisance and have an Oracle feed all that data into the blockchain? Or do we just use an Oracle that is a front for human judges to resolve disputes - something like Kleros which offers a dispute resolution protocol and applies game theory to encourage good judging.
Whatever you think or happens I have to agree that blockchain governance is a fascinating field and arguably the most important one to be addressed and with the biggest potential for impact on human society. I honestly expect that in future years - maybe 50 years hence - we will all be living out our lives at the intersection of many blockchain governance strategies and fields. Everyone will be able to immediately asses what governance rules apply to anyone or any entity (including AIs) they interact with and act and transact appropriately. We might ever well end up with a constitutional convention that basically delegates pretty much everything to blockchain regulated governance. Of course people wishing to live like that will necessarily need to instrument the heck out of their lives - but by then no one will think twice about that and that could very well end up looking like living in an episode of Black Mirror as is already been implemented in China with their social credit system augmented by mass surveilance and monitoring of all communication: http://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4
I hold Tezos so of course I remember. Tezos has the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of other platforms like EOS or Ethereum. Tezos being self amending at least has the main component necessary for a smart constitution but it's not enough by itself. You need also the ability to create rules which are consistent, which don't contradict.
Is there a specific mistake of EOS you're thinking of? Or is it just a lack of on-chain governance? It is my understanding that the EOS constitution could be amended to include that in the future. As it is with EOS roughly following the Steemit model I think we have something that is a happy compromise between a completely automated on-chain system, the risks of a susceptible benevolent dictator in Ethereum, and economic and environmental disaster of miners uber-alles Bitcoin. I guess we'll just have to see how the community-blockproducer-constitution system works out.
I don't follow the governance side of Steemit too closely but I feel like it is reasonably successful - other than the internal economics that could skew how the message gets out when we need to vote for producers, plus the ability to game the system with multiple accounts.
Do Tezos or Tau do anything to try and create strong identity?
On the topic of filtering speech this in my opinion is what collaborative filtering can best handle. Filtering basically isolates the noise (what you would subjectively interpret as obscenity) so that it is not brought to your attention. So yes you can filter just fine and probably far more effectively with something like Tauchain because you could unambiguously and precisely define exactly what you consider to be the noise vs what you consider to be most valuable (and prioritize accordingly).
The point is you will not have to worry about contradicting yourself, or for example the situation where a person claims they believe in absolute free speech under specific conditions yet they don't because they don't vote in that manner? If you believe in absolute free speech then what is obscenity? Obscenity is the speech you don't want to see, the information you don't want to consume, the spam. Ideally no one should be forced to consume or see information they consider to be noise.
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Collaborative filtering makes a lot of sense but carries a risk with its propensity for creating bubbles, isolation, and echo chambers. Filtering out everything you don't like can make for a peaceful experience, but in as much as online life is now strongly influencing the real work - to the point that it definitely affects elections now - it leads down that path towards one of those Black Mirror dystopia.
People have a propensity to be afraid or wary of things they haven't seen before. It's a vestigial survival skill that manifests itself in xenophobia and irrational dislike of things we have no experience of. I'm sure if you moved someone from 100 years ago to present time and plonked them down in a big City they would freak out at what they see in terms of diversity, dress, social norms etc. But given time I reckon they would adapt - just like someone coming out of the Amazon or a remote tribal life. However if you just shut out the rest of the world you're never going to change. You're never going to think gay marriage is okay, or back in the day that women or non-whites should get the vote, you'd never hear or see their voices and opinions. You'd never know that a clear majority of Americans think marijuana should be legal. You'd probably never know anyone that had come out. You could be just stuck in your community filtered bubble of fake news and very narrow opinions that would almost always agree with yours.
That's what I'd worry about...
Dystopia is caused by other problems which I address. It's not enough to give every human a vote if people aren't allowed to be wise. Social media doesn't encourage wisdom building, or good decision making, or knowledge diffusion. Social media encourages people to make critical decisions such as who to vote for based on stuff like party loyalty, or conspiracy theories, or gut feelings, so we don't have a situation where people even vote in their self interest.
Risk literacy tends to be low in people. People cannot assess risk very well but then are asked to make important decisions involving risk. Making decisions under uncertainty is about analysis of statistics. We aren't all going to be experts at that but maybe on a platform we will want to follow the people who are.
When faced with newer and better knowledge the correct thing to do is to update your worldview. This is a simple rule which could be implemented (if you think of it like a rule). This is called belief revision in the literature.
The point being that humans are too limited in ability to analyze information. Information is all around us and goes to waste. We also work with inaccurate models of reality which functions to keep us from acquiring or building wisdom. If wisdom building is as important as wealth building then we should want to build it but there isn't any reward for being wiser.
In other words ignorance is rewarded often and the forces of behaviorism are at play. The positive reinforcement, the intermittent reinforcement, all are involved at locking us into inaccurate models of reality and keeping us involuntarily ignorant. So of course when it's time to make critically important decisions we decide like we would a beauty pageant, or any other superficial contest.
Collaborative filtering is really the only way. The best we can do is make each individual a better thinker and decision maker if they choose to strive toward it.
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I don't see how collaborative filtering fixes any of the issues you and I mention with social media. If I create an account on Netflix and select even one conspiracy theory or junk science documentary I'll be flooded with recommendations for like material my supposed peer group has collaboratively filtered for me. And the more I watch the more I will find. I would posit that life gravitates to local minima surrounded by inviting does lying the unselective in. These insular swamps stagnate and self enrich creating their own ecosystem and cultures. The human propensity for social activity makes it hard to escape - I've talked to many former members of religious cults (which is about all of them IMO) and they relate that first hand.
The current culture of treating knowledge and critical thinking is a depressing trend and stinks of rank centralised control. It doesn't give me much hope can shake up the playing field and and bust out some people from their festering puddles, pools, and swamps of circular and unreasonable thinking.
In my opinion a way for filtering to work is simple. Collaborative filtering (up and down votes, etc) combined with stigmergy (follow the voters who share your values). This will allow you to see more of what you want to see and less of what you do not. This will also allow you to direct resources toward what aligns with your values at all times (this can even be a rule).