Digital governance: Rule by concensus

[Loren Pechtel]

It's a great idea but it requires a population raised and educated to do it.

Now most of education is learning to follow capricious orders. Learning to be a lowly peon in a hierarchy with no say, not a thinking individual.

You'd be surprised to know that we don't have the strict hierarchy that you claim. In fact, many many companies are following bottom up design, empowering employees, vertical decision making, and etc. Companies more and more want employees to have an ownership share in the company, want them to be empowered, want them to be able to make quick and informed decision making.

The problem that you don't see is that not everyone has the knowledge to make the informed decisions equally. I'm an expert in finance (and somewhat dangerous when it comes to marketing.) But I'm completely clueless when it comes to engineering. In companies where I am a partial owner, I'm the decision maker in finance (with input from the partners). The assistant controller with 3 months of experience in finance does not have the same authority that I have. But in engineering, I stay the hell out. This is why version of how a company should exist (a collective with equal decisions making by the members of the collective) doesn't work. In a pure collective, decision making is too slow, too cumbersome. And those who lack experience don't always make the correct decision.

Just my take...

Yup. This is the fundamental failure of direct democracy. Professionals generally know what's outside their realm and who to defer to. A crowd doesn't. The reality is that those who know little of a field don't realize what the field entails and thus don't realize the extent of their ignorance.

And there aren't enough hours in the day to be a professional at more than a few fields.

 

[LordKiran]

1. Maybe not absolute concensus but yes I do. The idea here is that the easier you make it for people to communicate substantively and exchange information the easier consensus becomes to reach. The biggest barriers here are cultural and social. For these ideas to work requires a population that holds values along materialist lines, a population that values intellectual institutions, can discern good data from bad and has some basic understanding of reading statistics.

Large groups will always have holdouts. They simply won't reach consensus.

2. The removal of inertia can be a good thing, it means bad policies can be rectified faster and makes society as a whole more flexible and reactive to change.

It makes it easier to remove bad things but it also makes it easier to do bad things. A lack of inertia is what results in abominations like the Patriot act.

3. Are those laws drafted by individuals or collectively? Are they often changed moment-to-moment with the intake of new perspectives and information as would be possible with the above method?

You think they weren't originally designed by a group??

4. This is what makes mass involvement so important. A multitude of perspectives alongside a system that makes reaching relative consensus easier would be a good thing in my book.

I suggest reading You-Tube comments for seeing what the average input would be like.

5. So our current election process? Not exactly a big difference in that regard, but then you wouldn't need elected officials making all the decisions.

While charisma is certainly a factor in our system the inertia makes performance important also. When you remove the inertia you shift things greatly towards charisma.

6. This is clearly future focused, I doubt we'd ever see something like this in our lifetimes if at all, so who's to say where tech would be if/when this becomes more feasible?

Not a rebuttal at all. It's still going to be underfunded and fail. Us IT people have enough trouble getting adequate funding out of management. Getting it out of the people at large would be hopeless.

1. Would you agree there is a difference between "General consensus" (As in: Scientists have reached general consensus that Climate change is real.") and "Absolute consensus"? You don't need literally everyone to be on the same page, just almost everyone, which becomes easier and easier as it becomes easier for people to try their ideas and see them succeed or fail in real time.

2. The problem with the Patriot act is that it's still around, because our current way of governing by proxy is insufficient for making real the will of the people in a timely fashion.

3. A small insular group of interested parties isn't the same as policy being drafted, revised, edited, and passed communally from start to finish.

4. As a counterpoint I direct you to websites like this one. Youtube is not built from the ground up as a method of communicating ideas, it was built as a way for soccer moms to share videos of their kids playing sports.

5. I don't see how that's true. Our current system doesn't favor results, it favors ideological rhetoric and incumbency.

6. Because a lot of the people still in charge of things are outdated old guard types who largely aren't technologically or future minded. The people in congress actually had to have it explained to them why having a government mandated backdoor into everyone's Iphone was a bad idea when it's immediately obvious to pretty much everyone from my generation.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But is this as much of a problem when people are living more interconnected lives everyday where information is readily available? Think where we'll be 100 years from now? Who's to say we won't develop brain augmentations by then that expand human memory and recollection abilities?

Basic information is readily available.

And note that the side with the loudest voice often isn't the side that's right. Rather, the loudest voice tends to represent who gets the biggest benefit--without regard for external costs.

Consider, for example, a local issue that's been going on for 20+ years here. Specifically, the licensing requirements for practitioners of traditional oriental medicine. Nevada has considerably more strict licensing requirements than many states. Various groups lobby the legislature saying they're too strict. Lets look in a bit more detail about what's going on, though:

The ones that want the licensing requirements lessened are mostly schools teaching oriental medicine. They don't like the fact that their students aren't getting licensed here. Who is on the other side? There's no business that benefits from the strict laws, just a few small associations of licensees. Furthermore, most of the licensees are older and will be retiring before degrading the quality of the profession would have much effect.

The reality of who they are trying to get licensed: When my wife took her license exam there was another woman there. This woman kept trying to ask my wife questions on the exam--somehow she thought that using a language the proctor didn't understand would let them converse. I believe this is the same woman that a member of the board said bombed every section of the exam. After her abysmal failure, what did she do? Go back to her practice in California.

 

[LordKiran]

But is this as much of a problem when people are living more interconnected lives everyday where information is readily available? Think where we'll be 100 years from now? Who's to say we won't develop brain augmentations by then that expand human memory and recollection abilities?

Basic information is readily available.

And note that the side with the loudest voice often isn't the side that's right. Rather, the loudest voice tends to represent who gets the biggest benefit--without regard for external costs.

Consider, for example, a local issue that's been going on for 20+ years here. Specifically, the licensing requirements for practitioners of traditional oriental medicine. Nevada has considerably more strict licensing requirements than many states. Various groups lobby the legislature saying they're too strict. Lets look in a bit more detail about what's going on, though:

The ones that want the licensing requirements lessened are mostly schools teaching oriental medicine. They don't like the fact that their students aren't getting licensed here. Who is on the other side? There's no business that benefits from the strict laws, just a few small associations of licensees. Furthermore, most of the licensees are older and will be retiring before degrading the quality of the profession would have much effect.

The reality of who they are trying to get licensed: When my wife took her license exam there was another woman there. This woman kept trying to ask my wife questions on the exam--somehow she thought that using a language the proctor didn't understand would let them converse. I believe this is the same woman that a member of the board said bombed every section of the exam. After her abysmal failure, what did she do? Go back to her practice in California.

Fair enough but this barrier like all the others is not insurmountable. Think of how things are now, people are having difficulty knowing who to trust or who to listen to, this might seem like a point against me but think what this represents in the bigger picture: A necessity. People need reliable, easily sourced font(s) of credible and understandable information. So how long until someone provides?

 

[Harry Bosch]

Well, could you be more specific? In my experience, for the majority of owners, making decisions at an ownership level is a full time job (depending on the size and complexity of the company.)

Well what else are people going to do with their time once automation replaces a large enough segment of the population? Sit around and drink themselves to death?

Oh man, I'd love to sit around, take it easy, and drink all day!

 

[untermensche]

Employees possibly might be given some decision making power. But the fact that they are given the power proves there is really a greater power and that power in actuality can override any decision made by workers.

The hierarchy is absolute in most corporations. As absolute a dictatorship as has ever existed.

As immoral an arrangement as has ever existed.

Dude, you missed my point completely! Let me try again, if you and I were in a two person collective that was writing a book on the Spanish revolution. You've probably read thirty books on the subject and thought about it for years. I've read one book on it. Do you think that in a collective, that it would be great if we had an equal share in the direction of the book?

Anarchists are not much interested in such trivial nonsense.

We have these huge dictatorships, absolute dictatorships, destroying the planet.

Driving the human race towards extinction.

Talking about lemonade stands is pure distraction.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Dude, you missed my point completely! Let me try again, if you and I were in a two person collective that was writing a book on the Spanish revolution. You've probably read thirty books on the subject and thought about it for years. I've read one book on it. Do you think that in a collective, that it would be great if we had an equal share in the direction of the book?

Anarchists are not much interested in such trivial nonsense.

We have these huge dictatorships, absolute dictatorships, destroying the planet.

Driving the human race towards extinction.

Talking about lemonade stands is pure distraction.

Correct. I agree. That is the problem with anarchists: they aren't interested in a direction. They aren't interested in serving the customer, being efficient, providing a service, and etc.

 

[LordKiran]

Well what else are people going to do with their time once automation replaces a large enough segment of the population? Sit around and drink themselves to death?

Oh man, I'd love to sit around, take it easy, and drink all day!

Hey that's fine, but I am of the mind that collectively people's time would be better spent on tending to matters of the state given how poorly our proxies tend to perform.

 

[bilby]

You seem to be proposing more of the problem as the solution: further banding together scared, ill-informed people and somehow good decisions will come of it. Time was all they had was their televisions to scream at. This kept them largely disjointed. Now these ill-informed emotional train wrecks can communicate in real time with one another, and you think improving upon the rural infrastructure is a good idea. And when this pool of ill-informed people ultimately make bad decisions for their communities, do you think they will see where they went wrong? Of course they won't. Because it's not just that they are generally less educated than their urban counterparts, it's also that they are less traveled. Their opinions are inbred to the communities they have spent their entire lives. (I don't think we give this statement the credence it deserves.)
People need to be governed, either from within or from without. Our problem is not the biases of thought, the corruption of the mind. It is that we have not insulted our governing officials from corruption. I do not believe we are incapable of governing our society. I also do not believe we should be ruled by averaging out the opinion of the masses. Our problem is we are not enabling and encouraging the best among us to govern.

Thats fine, let them try out their ideas in their local communities, let them fail. Let them learn from their mistakes when they do fail. When the voter is directly responsible for the policy of their town, who will be left to blame when they fuck everything up?

When did you last encounter a town populated mostly by people who are able to admit when they fucked up?

 

[LordKiran]

Thats fine, let them try out their ideas in their local communities, let them fail. Let them learn from their mistakes when they do fail. When the voter is directly responsible for the policy of their town, who will be left to blame when they fuck everything up?

When did you last encounter a town populated mostly by people who are able to admit when they fucked up?

They won't have to. The results will be what they are. People don't want to live like hell, no matter how much they might want to be right about something, at the end of the day caring for your kids trumps such a petty conceit.

 

[bilby]

When did you last encounter a town populated mostly by people who are able to admit when they fucked up?

They won't have to. The results will be what they are. People don't want to live like hell, no matter how much they might want to be right about something, at the end of the day caring for your kids trumps such a petty conceit.

Your optimism is touching, but I fear it is misplaced.

Vast numbers of poor Americans have been voting against their own best interests for decades. They don't want to live like hell, but they don't understand that their condition is, in part, due to their own voting choices - and there's no reason to think that this would change if voting choices were more direct. Probably quite the opposite.

You seem to be starting from the premise that democracy is fundamentally a good thing - that the more people are in control of their communities, the better. This premise is deeply flawed.

There's a spectrum of possible governance models, from dictatorship, where all decision making lies with a single individual, through to direct democracy of the kind you describe in this thread. History suggests that neither end of this spectrum is a good place to be; and that the position of the OECD nations (aka 'first world') provides a near optimum balance between populism and imposed control. Representative democracy works, and it works best with moderately frequent elections (no more than about five years apart, ideally not closer together than about three years), a moderate number of political parties (ideally four or five), and a preferential electoral system (rather than first past the post, which tends to devolve into a two-party system). More direct democracy - such things as Citizen Initiated Referenda, or direct citizen voting on proposed laws - tends to work less well.

Your only suggestion for why your new proposal would work better than in past attempts to increase direct democracy is that people now have the ability to be come better informed; But the fact is that the potential for a more informed public is far from being the same thing as an actually more informed public - most people don't care, and most of the people who DO care are Dunning-Kruger sufferers, enthusiasts, extremists and nutters.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Fair enough but this barrier like all the others is not insurmountable. Think of how things are now, people are having difficulty knowing who to trust or who to listen to, this might seem like a point against me but think what this represents in the bigger picture: A necessity. People need reliable, easily sourced font(s) of credible and understandable information. So how long until someone provides?

And you are in effect turning society over to said font. I certainly hope it's utterly trustworthy--not that I think there's any hope of that. For all practical purposes you have created a dictatorship.

- - - Updated - - -

Dude, you missed my point completely! Let me try again, if you and I were in a two person collective that was writing a book on the Spanish revolution. You've probably read thirty books on the subject and thought about it for years. I've read one book on it. Do you think that in a collective, that it would be great if we had an equal share in the direction of the book?

Anarchists are not much interested in such trivial nonsense.

We have these huge dictatorships, absolute dictatorships, destroying the planet.

Driving the human race towards extinction.

Talking about lemonade stands is pure distraction.

In other words:

Anarchists are not much interested in actually solving the problems. Removing the organizations you blame for them will magically make everything work, there's no need to figure out how it actually will work.

100% religion.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When did you last encounter a town populated mostly by people who are able to admit when they fucked up?

They won't have to. The results will be what they are. People don't want to live like hell, no matter how much they might want to be right about something, at the end of the day caring for your kids trumps such a petty conceit.

You're assuming people will realize they fucked up. That is not that common a skill. Far more common is to find someone else to blame for the failure.