herbstephens
commented
6 years ago Thanks, @bixiou for your comments, suggestions and critics - always welcome!
We certainly recognize that democracy is a work-in-progress .. and very much welcome suggested changes. We fundamentally welcomed such by publishing directly to GitHub .. after a lengthy process of drafting and revising by the core team, advisors and others. And the paper remains an open source document.
At the same time .. yes, there are many ways we can be more democratic ourselves .. and we are always looking for ways to improve democracy! :-)
bixiou
itaeon
First of all, congratulations for this project, it's both necessary and well done.
Now, here are some precise remarks on the white paper:
In order to preserve the feature of secrecy, secret vote should be enabled for delegates, at least up to a certain number of delegations (say ~20). Indeed, imagine I let my sister vote on one domain, I don't care what she's gonna vote, I don't know the domain, and I trust her, that's why I delegate to her (and I can still ask her if I really want to know / or vote myself if I really know what to vote). But she doesn't want that her boss knows her political opinion, so it's better to keep her vote secret.
Blur the number of delegations (e.g. 'between 1 and 5', 'between 3 and 10', etc.) instead of revealing the true number, to avoid pressure. Indeed, one could threaten another: if you don't delegate, I'll see it and I'll retaliate.
Don't penalize the concentration of votes. The principle 1 person = 1 vote is crucial in democracy. If many voters legitimately trust an expert on a domain, why reducing the voting power of these voters? This is unfair and can be dangerous. Indeed, imagine that a group of interest (say the notaries) promote actively a technical piece of legislation that all other people would oppose. Say those other people have all delegated their vote on these technical issues to their favourite union or political party (and say there are only few such organisations). Then the thousands of notaries will be able to pass the legislation, just because there are 'only' 5 organisations (gathering millions of delegations) that is opposing them.
Allow people to vote on any issue. It is not clear in your paper if it's the case. But what I have understood is that any voter can only vote on a limited number of issue per year (and possibly spend several tokens on a given issue, that also was not clear). It would be a restriction of citizens rights And it would benefit enormously private interests: any group of interest would spend their tokens on issues that greatly benefit to them and slightly disadvantage all others (but not sufficiently for them to spend tokens on the issue). If the willingness is to allow people to have more weight on their prioritarian issues, there are other methods, e.g., apply your system only with a yearly amount of extra tokens (in addition to the unitary token spendable on each issue), spendable in any fraction (so that with 5 token I can vote on ten issues with weight 0.5 or on one issue with weight 5, e.g.).
!! Do not consider upvote in a discussion as a delegation. I am not sure this is the case, but that's what I understood from the text. This would be a bad mixture of functionalities: discussion must only serve the political debate, the sharing and making of opinion. It should not be used as a voting device. If an upvote means a delegation on the issue (not even mentioning the appropriateness of such a meaning), this implies that one cannot upvote different interventions in the discussion, which makes no sense.
proof of identity must rely on biometrics or on existing centralized datasets (such as IDs), otherwise it will be too easy to create a replicant (shave, put glasses and make up...). Why not simply save a hash of the ID number in the blockchain? The viewer of the cam-video would then just have to check that the (hash of the) ID of the guy corresponds to a valid row in the database. With some cooperation with national authorities, we could verify that all (hash of) IDs are valid.
Finally, your white paper is futurist: it is surely valid for the 22nd century, when everyone will be connected and educated, and it is a good thing to think ahead of time, prepare and test the ideal society. But the world moves slowly, and earth democracy is urgent. Hence, we must probably find a less techy and more realistic way to connect people and have global democracy, as a complement to your solution: the 'in real life for lay persons' global democracy can be connected to your platform and interact with it! I am just saying: if you want a bengladeshi farmers to vote on climate change or global redistribution, don't expect them to be litterate and have a smartphone with data connection first (or make it explicit that your project can only work in at least 50 years or only among educated persons).
A last remark: you may want to let more room for change in your white paper. The reader has the impression that it's a well thought immutable system, contradicting somewhat the principle of democracy, which is that the framework is always subject to debate and revision. So you may mention a democratic process to revise your white paper ;-)
Don't hesitate to contact me for further discussion, I have another view on what should be done to achieve a global polity, and I am sure we'd have a fruitful exchange: lesgrains@gmail.com.