An important consideration here is trust. Governance is _easy_ for small groups of people who are generally aligned on goals and expectations (and on scope of interaction; my boss can’t tell me where to go on vacation, only some negotiation of when). I have to ask my boss for any major purchase or travel, but I have a very high degree of confidence that he will approve anything I request (or suggest a better alternative), and this is because he has a high degree of trust that I won’t try to sneak a wasteful or harmful purchase past him.
The adversarial cases are _much_ harder. Most attempts to minimize cost of compliance _also_ expose opportunities for un-enforced non-compliance. And as the number and diversity of agents being governed (or claiming to self-govern) increases, the likelihood that there are adversarial in addition to cooperative agents increases very quickly. Other things that increase the probability of adversarial governance (or semi-adversarial; any time the rule is being followed only based on rule-enforcing consequences, not because of actual agreement that it’s best) are weirdness of topic (rules about things that differ from that group’s norms), intrusiveness (on both dimensions: how often the rule applies and how difficult it is to know whether the rule applies), and opposing incentives (which can include stated or unstated rules from a different authority).
An important consideration here is trust. Governance is _easy_ for small groups of people who are generally aligned on goals and expectations (and on scope of interaction; my boss can’t tell me where to go on vacation, only some negotiation of when). I have to ask my boss for any major purchase or travel, but I have a very high degree of confidence that he will approve anything I request (or suggest a better alternative), and this is because he has a high degree of trust that I won’t try to sneak a wasteful or harmful purchase past him.
The adversarial cases are _much_ harder. Most attempts to minimize cost of compliance _also_ expose opportunities for un-enforced non-compliance. And as the number and diversity of agents being governed (or claiming to self-govern) increases, the likelihood that there are adversarial in addition to cooperative agents increases very quickly. Other things that increase the probability of adversarial governance (or semi-adversarial; any time the rule is being followed only based on rule-enforcing consequences, not because of actual agreement that it’s best) are weirdness of topic (rules about things that differ from that group’s norms), intrusiveness (on both dimensions: how often the rule applies and how difficult it is to know whether the rule applies), and opposing incentives (which can include stated or unstated rules from a different authority).