Tyranny of the Majority

[lsitongia]

What is the Democracy Earth position on this concept? Is the majority always right? Here in the USA, we saw our mechanism, the Electoral College, once again fail to be used correctly. I think the only way to protect from tyranny is that everyone is well educated, can voice their understanding of the relevant knowledge, and have a chance to act upon that knowledge.

Regardless, this concept is an important one, is frequently a counterargument to Direct Democracy, and should be formally addressed in the Manifesto.

[SFSandra]

Agree that an education populace is the best protectant against tyranny (and any kind of violence). The concept of mob rule is discussed in Section 2.6, summing it up here I would say that the aim of liquid democracy - the mission of its delegative mechanisms - is to achieve the greatest amount of legitimacy while empowering the most knowledgeable voices in any community.

[metamerman]

IMHO you two have made three fundamental social engineering mistakes in your posts: 1) "Tyranny of the Majority" is not a thing. If you actually look at the data, you'll see that every proposed example of this phenomenon fails the "majority" part of the description. What they invariably actually are examples of are "Tyranny of the Active Participants". "Active Participants" being vastly more likely to be SDAP (http://www.matchism.org/) and so prone to aggression/prejudice/etc. The true majority are neurotypical (i.e., not SDAP) and so are far less likely to exhibit these characteristics. Therefore we don't need to solve the "Tyranny of the Majority" problem at all and what we actually need to solve is the unequal participation rate problem. 2) Proposing changing The People instead of designing the system to work with them as they are is the hallmark of an amateur social engineer. While it's undoubtedly beneficial to both the individual and society to provide everyone a high level of education, any system that requires this before it will work properly is doomed to failure (due to the chicken and egg problem, if nothing else). 3) Liquid Democracy doesn't work, and in fact has fundamental design flaws. See my "Critique" in the "Issues" section for a description why that is.

Unfortunately SSC (and this paper that describes it) doesn't address any of these issues and AFAIK there is only one system that addresses all of them: https://www.proxyfor.me/

[crpancorbo]

It looks like we pinned out a problem with education, but we need to redefine some concepts in education:

Originally our educational system was designed and developed as the modern nation state and at his service.

We put trust, effort and money in educational institutions, but they are as corrupted as democracy itself. Even to the point were it doesn't fulfill the social "contract" of education helping the economy, democracy, a search for jobs, personal happiness, trust in sciences...

The same way Blockchain can disrupt the bankings system or democracy. We need to find a way to use the power of trusted value for education. To democratize it and make it efficient. Where society can decide what this education would look like, but in a very informed way that adds freedom and responsibility to the system.

I am working in this concepts already and have many ideas on this topic. I would love to see some more references to education in the Manifesto but I'm clear about where it would fit in and if it will at all. Any input?

[BarnabyThing]

metermerman Interesting points. Looking forward to reading further.

Two separate studies in the UK showed that a very small % of politicians understand the fundamental issue of how money is created. http://positivemoney.org/2017/10/mp-poll/

The education chicken and egg thing: By participating in the process, by learning directly from each other, by bypassing narrow perspective vested interest media channels people will become aware of the existing solutions available to tackle global problems. http://globalpeoplepower.org/many-minds/potential-global-policies/

[metamerman]

I'm not sure why you'd consider the projects listed on "globalpeoplepower.org" to be an education issue: None of those things seem to me to require changing people (via conditioning, or even general education). The real problem with all of those things (and a great many others) is that our current decisionmaking systems don't present them as options to The People, nor indeed do they even allow The People to actually participate in the decisionmaking process at all. If we don't change the decisionmaking system such that everyone is equally represented (i.e. true democracy), no amount of good ideas is going to amount to hill of beans. Fortunately doing this doesn't require reeducating or reconditioning the entire population, we just have to create a better system and facilitate people using it (and this "facilitation" is merely on the level of teaching them how to use an app, not teaching them how the economy works ;-). Unfortunately, as I've pointed out several other places in these forums, Liquid Democracy is not that better system and so this whole SSC proposal is just off in the weeds when it comes to actually addressing any of these public policy issues.

[crpancorbo]

I can agree with you to some extend, but remember where we come from in terms of Nation States and their educational systems. Is not a matter of serving a new need, but a matter of adapting the services that Formal Education will provide in a true democracy. For example, conditioning or reconditioning minds might have to be scaled back.

On Jan 21, 2018, at 3:02 PM, Scott Raney notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm not sure why you'd consider the projects listed on "globalpeoplepower.org" to be an education issue: None of those things seem to me to require changing people (via conditioning, or even general education). The real problem with all of those things (and a great many others) is that our current decisionmaking systems don't present them as options to The People, nor indeed do they even allow The People to actually participate in the decisionmaking process at all. If we don't change the decisionmaking system such that everyone is equally represented (i.e. true democracy), no amount of good ideas is going to amount to hill of beans. Fortunately doing this doesn't require reeducating or reconditioning the entire population, we just have to create a better system and facilitate people using it (and this "facilitation" is merely on the level of teaching them how to use an app, not teaching them how the economy works ;-). Unfortunately, as I've pointed out several other places in these forums, Liquid Democracy is not that better system and so this whole SSC proposal is just off in the weeds when it comes to actually addressing any of these public policy issues.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/DemocracyEarth/paper/issues/277#issuecomment-359289547, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AgliRJw0tmn0kbzSZdYKC6JPdo_VgDiUks5tM8HqgaJpZM4QFaa-.

[BarnabyThing]

The more I participate in designing global grassroots governance, the closer I feel to the whole of humanity and the living planet. Life circumstances are conditioning me. Anyone offering me a new system within which to take part does the same.

I agree that "our current decisionmaking systems don't present them as options to The People" and that creating one that does, through peer-to-peer learning, will. That in itself will further condition me and everyone else.

Re, apps and understanding economics, I disagree. If I don't fully understand a process, I would like to delegate my vote to someone whom I believe does. That said, I haven't read your main proposals yet. Doing that now!!! Very interesting...

[BarnabyThing]

See my git issue: Campaigning strategy for world-centric meme platform whilst acknowledge, honouring, including yet transcending ethno/nation-centric meme. #318

[metamerman]

@BarnabyThing wrote:

If I don't fully understand a process, I would like to delegate my vote to someone whom I believe does. That said, I haven't read your main proposals yet. Doing that now!!! Very interesting...

Hopefully if you've read the documentation (Help system) in https://www.proxyfor.me/ you now understand why your first statement doesn't make any sense: Expertise isn't even the issue, the problem is our inability to predict how the people we delegate to will vote, or even whether they will vote at all. This is why the LiquidDemocracy (LiquidFB) system failed to work as designed, and why the system proposed by DemocracyEarth will fail for exactly the same reasons: Neither of these systems address the fundamental problems with delegation in direct democracy. While the LiquidFB designers at least had the excuse that they were just experimenting and so didn't know that it would fail so badly DemocracyEarth doesn't have this excuse: Recreating LiquidFB without fixing (or apparently even acknowledging) the fatal flaws in that system is just a waste of everyone's time.

[BarnabyThing]

I skimmed some of it. I have child a little time. I was interested in your ideas of Social Dominators, Authoritarians, and Psychopaths and Neurotypicals. I am presently reading, actually, listening to Audible The Patterning Instinct By Jeremy Lent. To me Maslows Hierachy of Needs seems pertinent and Spiral Dynamics but with some reservations of it's use regarding the latter.
Please point me to evidence of the failings of Liquid Democracy.

[metamerman]

The SDAP stuff is important to understanding why our existing misrepresentative democracies don't work (the people that serve in them have personality characteristics that make them unlike the people they're supposed to be representing and so they simply don't vote like we would). But you don't have to know all that to understand and appreciate how https://www.proxyfor.me/ works.

Some German researchers did an excellent job documenting how the German Pirate Party's LQFB system worked, and how it failed to achieve any of the most important goals Liquid Democracy sets out. You can read it at: http://www.matchism.org/refs/Kling_2015_LQFBforPP.pdf

That paper provided many of the key insights that led to the development of https://www.proxyfor.me/, which I believe solves all of the problems that caused the LQFB system to fail (and will of course cause Democracy Earth's current proposal to fail because it is doesn't address any of those flaws in LQFB). Those points are:

1) There was only about a 20% voting rate overall. This is extremely dangerous because what they've done is re-create oligarchy: "Government by the active participants". The "active participants" in any system are psychologically very different from the population as a whole and so end up making public policy decisions that are a poor match for them. For example, authoritarians and other conservatives have significantly higher participation rates in all democracies, which is one big reason why public policy so often appears to us neurotypicals to be prejudiced, tribalistic, and aggressive.

2) Only about 3% of votes ended up being cast by delegation: People didn't understand the system, couldn't find good representatives, and in many cases the representatives they chose didn't vote and didn't delegate, simply wasting the vast majority of The People's power.

3) Even if their chosen delegates did vote, the correlation between the votes of those delegates and the delegator's other votes was little better than chance. This is key: Delegation isn't about capturing expertise, it's about choosing someone who would vote like you would if you had the time to thoroughly research an issue (albeit possibly including years of education to gain the "expertise" necessary to understand the issues). But to the extent delegation worked at all in LQFB it devolved into misrepresentative democracy where "super voters" acquired power not by being able to cast these "correct votes", but merely by being popular.

Again I recommend at least reading the help system in https://www.proxyfor.me/ which includes more on all of these things and links to the science that backs up the design decisions.

[mardukasoka]

I think limiting access to the democratic process for those not qualified nor interested enough to vote on an issue is a good idea. Trump has shown that even America was totally unprepared for the onset of idiocracy, and regulatory agencies such as the EPA FDA and FBI are prominent public victims of such greed and ignorance taking power in America. kialo.com might lend a solution to mitigating the ignorance and dynamics of mob mentality, by requiring at least debate, an improved idea would be informed debate where votes that obviously reflect an inability to understand the topic of discussion are eliminated as being irrelevant. The idea being that once experts have reviewed a proposal and agreed, the debate is made available publically, for comment and voting. The Pirate Party review of liquid democracy was insightful and it would be a waste of everyone's time if DE did not adjust for such identified failings in the model.