Dealing with might not necessarily being right

[sekon]

Hello, Any system that aims to improve upon the current ballot system for any thing (voting representatives, getting consensus,etc) should in my opinion, factor in the possibility that having the largest margin of what ever is at stake on their side, are/is not necessarily right. On a school playground for example, such behaviour could be termed "bullying". I suggest a modular interface to help people put in/fine tune something analogous to perfect competition, as a feature. In the interest of fairness, it should have some infrastructure to prohibit a small vocal minority to hijack "progress". Note: Any features to detect possible malicious agents, is not explicitly included in this feature request.

[Maximiliaan]

This is something I was thinking about as well, and I agree, although i'm not sure what that would look like in practical terms. "factor in the possibility that having the largest margin of what ever is at stake on their side, are/is not necessarily right", - we need to really Iron out exactly what we mean by this as well, because we are starting to dive into the philosophy of what democracy represents here. And in theory, truth via majority consensus is the name of the game.

[sekon]

Hello, Thank you for your reply. I would propose an interface to test if the voter is making an informed choice. Another would be to let people watch the "other sides view" and then let them re vote. Pros: You can be some what sure that participants have made some sort of an educated guess. Cons: But if the number of voters is large for example, we might run out of questions to ask/make it really easy to "collaborate". It could also be selective purge people who you don’t want to participate. In other words it would not be totally "inclusive" (people with disabilities,etc could be unfairly targeted)

[Maximiliaan]

Thats something I actually heard about at a Meetup recently. Quiz the voters on the basics topic. Its feasible. And I like the idea, But we would need to be careful as it also could allow who ever is creating the vote and the Quiz a forum to push the ability to vote to a certain type of voter who is more likely to vote in the direction they want. Im going to think on this some more! Thanks for starting this issue!

[sekon]

@Maximiliaan sorry for the extra ping .. wanted to inform you that i was editing the post when you replied and added some more points. Your opinion on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

[Maximiliaan]

All good! I think you just basically hit my point again. It could be used to purge. Which again brings us back to the ethos of democracy. Theoretically everyones opinion is valid, regardless, and who are we to change that dynamic, for better or worse education of the general public is another systemic failure that is out of our current spec. Currently I see this as a feature that could be switched on or off and alerts the user and voters as to what dynamic they are introducing. Im going to wait for someone else to jump in on this too. :)

[neuman]

I really like this idea as an optional feature. The kind of thing you could switch on for certain situations where people actually have a responsibility to be informed like intra-company voting or votes within congress.

It does seem like it could be bad if used in a general election. Like Max says, in democracy every member deserves a vote no matter their level of awareness.

[sekon]

w.r.t an option of "Another would be to let people watch the "other sides view" and then let them re vote" that i proposed earlier, the backfire effect should be taken into account ( Just read about it today ... http://www.skepdic.com/backfireeffect.html ). Again i am getting into " I really dont know what i am talking about" territory. Other can feel free to eloberate.