Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network
tdcommons.org
tdcommons.org
...or so I thought. There are several problem with direct democracy: (1) Most people are not expert at things like foreign policy, economics and so on. (2) Many people can be heavily influenced to vote either way by creating powerful PR campaigns. (3) Most people have no time or capacity to digest tons of dense information to get the background. (4) Some information needed to make decision must remain classified.
This paper actually proposes a viable option here that works around many of the above issues. Instead of delegating all decisions for next 4 years to one person, we delegate case-by-cases and for arbitrary time length. This allows, for example, for a real economist to be elected to make a economy decision or nuclear scientist to be elected for Iran deal like decisions and so on. It might work. The bottom line is that we can get rid of arcane pre-Internet political system of senators, congressman and presidents.
Cost of physically tally votes isn't the reason the US is a representative democracy. The mob is inherently irrational, stupid and over reactive, which is why the founders settled on representatives. Case-by-cases voting also doesn't solve this problem, even with the internet.
This was the main thrust of the monarchist argument against representative democracy. Most dictators have used it too.
The other one is that people "are not ready" for more democracy but maybe they will be one day. Mubarak favored this excuse - that is, before murdering demonstrators in cold blood who had the gall to ask for it.
Saner decision making:
Switzerland > US > Egypt > North Korea
Level of democracy:
Switzerland > US > Egypt > North Korea
I used to think Singapore was a good example of "benevolent dictatorship", but after living here for a few years I've come to understand that this isn't the case. The ruling party has made some spectacularly bad decisions that they wouldn't have without more democratic accountability, and many of the good decisions they did make were stolen from the opposition (whomever they happened to be at the time).
Reads as if you are saying that nothing can convince you otherwise.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment or at least I think it should be put to the test more often. There's some wisdom of the crowd factors that would suggest the mob doesn't need to be smart on an individual basis but my main objection is philosophical in nature. It strongly object to the Plato ideal of elitists that rule over the dumb (be it for good reasons or not). I think the case outlined by Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (particularly book 1) is pretty solid.
Donald Trump is proving that sentiment right now.
More seriously, there's a difference between a crowd and a mob. Notably, crowd opinions are uncorrelated - everyone in the crowd comes to their own conclusion, and then they vote. Mob opinions are correlated. People whose opinion differs from the mob, even are intimidated into either changing their opinion or, at the very least, remaining silent. Thus the mob quickly converges on a single opinion, whereas the crowd maintains a diversity of opinions.
Voting is supposed to be secret. So I don't think what you say applies at all.
[0] https://edge.org/response-detail/23788
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
Education, and IQ aside, which I find both rather primitive measures (one is credentialist and the other is biased) - there is a Cost-Benefit analysis involved in the decision to have children, that many are not participating in to begin with. I find the above two links incorrect in that _education_ or _IQ_in_general_ can be true measures of "real" intelligence. however, their argument still stands.
The point I'm getting at is Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N > Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N+1, during and after the modern age.
NB: these are just my beliefs. I also find that IQ is not the most reliable measure for intelligence, given Flynn effects, given the biased nature in testing itself, and given more recent cognitive psychologies understanding of differing "realms" of intelligence.
Well, yeah. Decision to have kids is not rational. Decision to have a LOT of kids (an old coworker has 10) ipmay even be accompanied by religious delusions or some misguided notion that one has a lineage to protect.
I think we should not incentivize people to have children. No tax break per dependent. No tax break for saving towards your children's college. Basically, the only people who have kids should be people willing to take responsibility. Of course, we need to step up ways we take care of young people but it is the relationship between a society (through government I guess) and a young person. For example, easy, free of cost access to health care, easy, free of cost access to education, nutritious meals dad in school, and so on but no incentives for parents to have kids.
> The point I'm getting at is Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N > Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N+1, during and after the modern age.
I feel like this belief is similar to my previous ideas of a glorious past, almost a heaven we got handed down but were unable to keep up. We are looking at the past with Rose colored glasses. I mean surely the average man today is not as smart as Plato was has a mind to think in scientific processes as Lavoisier did. Now, I have to be careful of making a bad assumption that a newer generation is always wiser but I think I can safely say the newer generation has the benefit of hindsight.
Basically what I'm saying is while there seems to be a trend of decline, it might actually be a trend of enlightenment overall and we just see the top declining while we might not see all boats slowly rising.
It's not that simple. If your people won't breed, your civilization will die out, along with all its values, culture and legacy. That is, if it doesn't get conquered by another civilization before. Incentivizing "wrong" people to breed may be a danger, but disincentivizing everyone is even more dangerous.
Does it matter in the long run? All civilizations eventually die out. If it doesn't matter in the long run, why does it matter in the short term? Let's not pretend like we care about future generations. Clearly, the baby boomers don't care about what they have done to our generation. No offense but when people talk about culture, legacy,and pride all I hear is "keep grinding and don't stop to think for yourself, peasant".
I doubt the glorious Roman empire or the Egyptian empire were worth anything to ordinary folks living at that time
Does anything matter in the long run? Everything will eventually die out, universe included.
> Let's not pretend like we care about future generations.
Well, I honestly do.
> I doubt the glorious Roman empire or the Egyptian empire were worth anything to ordinary folks living at that time
I don't know about Romans or Egyptians, but as an ordinary low-to-middle-class citizen of a developing country I like it in here. Yes, the western civilization has a lot of bad aspects. But I like the stability we have, the progress we've been making. I want my children to live in an even better world, where various disabilities can be cured through the advancements in medicine, where people have some, if limited, time for intellectual pursuits, where there is a base on the Mars. Where people can believe in whatever god they want, or none at all, and generally don't kill each other over it.
So I apologize if I'm being too protective of the civilization I live in, but I like it and I want it to continue. For myself, my children and their children, and every other human too.
Science fiction, we can make happen. I'm afraid not killing over religion will turn out to be fantasy.
This assumes the obviously false position that culture, values, etc. are transmitted genetically, and exclusively so. If you want to assure survival of culture, you need to assure the spread of your memes; spreading your genes isn't essential.
I object in principle to elitism, which has its own shortcomings, but let's not pretend the mob would make good decisions. They'd ignore minorities and make seemingly smart but ultimately foolish decisions again and again on emotional grounds instead of from a position of logic and knowledge.
Any type of democracy relies on trusting the public to decide for themselves.
It is an old idea that education is the solution to this problem: "The commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty" -- inscribed outside the Boston Public Library, 1895.
Computerphile actually has a pretty good argument why we shouldn't use e-voting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
No, it is not.
Democratic reforms have always been won by fighting entrenched elites protecting their power and privilege. It has never been about the 'expense'. People without property, blacks, women, etc. were not prevented from voting because it wasn't cheap enough or because they were too dumb (not that that excuse wasn't used frequently).
Democratic reforms do not happen when everybody comes together to agree that they are a sensible next step. They happen when the masses fight and sacrifice with blood, sweat and sometimes their lives.
Our representatives aren't experts in foreign policy or economics or other relevant policy matters either (series of tubes, anyone?). They rely upon advisors. This is another source of unchecked power and privilege (particularly for the economics profession, which abuses this power ruthlessly and are often no more competent at running an economy than the average person).
Direct democracy is not available to us today because we didn't fight for it. It has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with a lack of activism (the kind which involves real work).
As a society we're actually steadily de-democratizing and moving towards a more feudalistic model where the decisions are largely made by legions of unelected financiers, elite economists and a corporate elite.
In addition to 1-4, I think there is another problem: (5) Individuals with a higher stake in the outcome have no way to express their greater interest (an individual might have a higher stake in gay marriage being legalized, but his vote counts the same as someone mildly opposed).
Systems like Quadratic Voting (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956) solve (5) by allowing voters to pay N*N dollars for N votes (25$ for 5 votes, 1,000,000$ for 1000 votes) and redistributing the funds collected per-capita to each voter after the vote is finished.
I wonder if you could meld Delegative Democracy with Quadratic Voting? What if individuals can buy N votes (expressing their interests appropriately) AND delegate their votes to another (allocating their interests to those most capable of making decisions)?
Delegative democracy seems to solve 1, 3, and 4. Quadratic voting seems to solve 5.
FM allows a vanishingly tiny minority to sweep up such a huge money-pile that their most casual whim carries more weight than millions of third world people's urgent desperation.
Also as a side note, if you're going to carry on with this narrative you may wish to confine it to an intra-national context where wealth inequalities are indeed measurable, as opposed to bringing the 'millions of third world people' (actually billions) into the picture who have experienced unprecedented increases in standards of living due to the expansion of market economies over the past century. Wealth inequality is increasing within countries, it is decreasing between countries.
I don't believe that the entirely of "the rich get richer" can be considered a distortion. It includes lawful things like improved access to investment. I also don't think that the "distortion" can be wished away; money is power over the use of resources, and thereby power over people. This includes the power to rig the law, assert monopolies, and control the machinery of the state, and always has done.
A paper system has hundreds or thousands of individuals, some percentage of them mutually hostile, who must be subverted in order to subvert the election.
A digital system is one stolen key, one bad sysadmin, one disgruntled programmer, from total compromise. They might be proved "safe", but they cannot be observed in the way that the mechanics surrounding a paper ballot can be.
And I'm not sure that immediate recall power is really an effective defense. Even in representative systems with transparency, few people make the effort to study issues and track voting records. And who would you delegate to instead? Someone you know even less about, probably.
A "grand election event" with primaries has the benefit of winnowing and focusing attention on a small set of candidates. Unfortunately that also tends to be those with the most money to spend.
AI. Get AI to sift through all the data, summarize it, and then select a set of best qualified candidates in the world. This same AI would also have global surveillance.
People are often crazy and politicians are often idiots.
Having some sort of large scale AI infra to help the government manage stuff to well integrate local, state, and federal into a cohesive unit with well defined boundaries and task ownership between the layers and departments would massively fix the US government.
And before someone says "no duh, our founding fathers said this", they never looked at it from the point of view of someone from our era that deals with large scale application design (because, well, it didn't exist yet).
I mean, what would go a long way is manufacturing a programming language to write laws in, so we could lint and compile time warn/error laws. That would be a good place to start.
Awesome! Would love logic and contradiction checking on the laws as a feature of such a language.
(Do you seriously believe that a field as nascent and murky as macroeconomics, coupled with the hectic state of public policy and political advisory -- that these same people can then turn around and write a magical AI to quick fix government planning as we know it?)
I mean, what would go a long way is manufacturing a programming language to write laws in, so we could lint and compile time warn/error laws. That would be a good place to start.
The law already is a formal language, and court procedure is also formalized and mechanical. The language of the law is such that it permits a high degree of fuzziness, so one can benefit from common law, case precedent, jury nullification and all sorts of nice judicial perks.
The "programming language for laws" that people on HN keep proposing will only fuck everything up even worse.
for the right class of people. the same "perks" turn into something much more sinister for the "wrong" sort of people. whether those be blacks or browns. the point is to have one set of laws that applies logically to all situations and to all people equally. Adding that as a constraint will either make the laws much worse or much better.
This is already the case. Codifying laws into some sort of PL is a complete diversion and redundant.
This is a quirk of the US Federal legal system -- independent circuits. Any sufficiently important matter is settled nationwide in US caselaw by the Supreme Court.
The law is incredibly consistent. You will, without recognising it, have hundreds or thousands of invisible interactions with it daily. It is incredibly robust in the face of massively variable outputs. No software product has ever come within a cooee of sustaining decades to centuries of uptime at a stretch in the face of sustained attack.
If you consider each change of a law as a break of the uptime (I mean: there is some "bug" in the laws, so it's changed), the uptime of, say, good embedded software is far better.
> http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/talks/armstrong.pdf (from slide 27 on)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#...
"In 1998 Ericsson announced the AXD301 switch, containing over a million lines of Erlang and reported to achieve a high availability of nine "9"s."
Additionally it is well-known that the AXD301 has live patching capabilities (which is not surprising, since Erlang has).
Don't get me wrong: software engineering has accomplished great things. My point is that the law has to face different, very fuzzy, unconstrained problems that cannot be simplified.
(Also I would've used the Space Shuttle software, that's my favourite high water mark. Or the seL4 kernel).
Laws are more like requirements than computer code. Almost every part of them is subject to interpretation.
On the few occasions where computer code has actually been treated as law (MERS, for instance), the result hasn't worked out so well.
This system can dampen other problems like Election Cycle Effect, high barriers of entry for becoming a candidate, voters focusing on superficial aspects of the candidate etc
- Enterprise site: https://www.agoravoting.com
- Community site: seems down (likely because they're refocusing on enterprise in order to survive after a few years of spinning wheels as an open source project)
- Source code: https://github.com/agoravoting
Unfortunately, their dev discussions have been in spanish and it's been challenging to follow as intently as I'd like :(
Voting, like crypto, is an area where I consider Open Source a strict requirement.
Privacy is addressed in the paper but I think the real issues with it are just glossed over. "You get to see how your delegate votes" is great and should absolutely be true, but there are two other sorts of privacy that matter: privacy from the electoral system itself, and privacy from closely related people.
In very Googley fashion, this paper seems to take for granted that of course you'd trust the system itself with the knowledge of your votes and delegates, and that its privacy-respecting duty is fulfilled by simply not broadcasting that knowledge to the unauthorized public. But that's a terrible way to run a government that at least partially relies on a secret ballot as a means of expressing dissent and effecting change in the government itself, for hopefully obvious reasons.
The other form of privacy that matters is on a much smaller scale. A delegate who can exercise the votes of an arbitrarily small number of people is also capable of ensuring they are exercising the votes of a specific set of people. An abusive husband/father/wife/mother/boss/etc can know simply from the count of votes they hold whether their victims are following through on their command, and via transitive delegation they can pool that power with collaborators.
Why?
That's not actually what Arrow's theorem proves. It just proves that a voting system cannot simultaneously meet four criteria. It doesn't prove that those four criteria should be required though. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is particularly problematic.
Kudos to them for respecting the Condorcet Criterion though.
In the paper, there is a successful vegan delegate who collects 14 proxy votes on food-related issues. I'm not sure how this delegate would vote on the examples, such as burger of the month, and flavors of frozen yoghurt.
A huge issue with implementing this practically on a large scale is identity authentication. Without a modern, digital government, we can't hope to implement anything nearly this nice.
We need an Estonia-like PKI for the US. Taxes, forms, passports, voting... everything would be so much simpler.
(edit: besides teaching people how to use it, that is.)
I am wondering about the effect it might have on standards bodies. Is it even possible to implement it there?
I think, delegating one's vote to a known expert would actually be a problem, not a solution. Just delegate it to a friend you trust, that knows more about some stuff than you do. He then may use your vote directly or delegate it further to someone he trusts.
What I fear in liquid democracy system is PR efforts that will be done to market "experts".
● Prove that delegates are a valid delegate of one or more other parties?
● Show that delegates voted a specific way? These are non-secret ballots. What happens in regimes for, as the saying goes, "votes have consequences"?
● Show that an individual's vote is going to a specified delegate and no others?
● Avoid selling of votes.
● Avoid creation of straw accounts or identities?
● Assure some minimum level of competence among electors.
● Provide accountability for voting actions? Elected representatives (theoretically at least) risk loss of office.
Edit: and one more: How does this address issues with bundled votes. E.g., actual legislatures don't vote individually on topics but deal with bundled issues, with riders and insertions on bills. The process is as much about architecting how things are voted on as who votes how.
On paper LD seems like a very good concept at least it seems superior to the current form of representatives. I'm not 100% convinced complete direct democracy on all issues isn't superior to LD. Wisdom of the crowds would suggest you don't have to be an expert on everything, the point about classified votes is a good one (of course one could argue these shouldn't exist but that's another debate).
...however LD also requires a technical solution which seems far easier to game and manipulate than old school ballots. Strong crypto + LD seems like the way to go but you'd need a key for each citizen and loss of keys will happen and need to be mitigated.
1) Bloc voting will be encouraged because delegation itself is unavoidably visible to the recipient even if only in delegate count. This could be exploited by abusers to take control of their victim/partner's vote, cults to hand everything to the guru, and so on.
2) A feature of representative democracy that's reviled and relied upon in equal measure is the ability of leaders, once elected, to take controversial decisions, or to stick by earlier promises, creating stability. If the power leaders exercise can change in real time, who could ever reach a decision eg: close the border in an epidemic?
Food is a pretty easy decision. Taxes and wages and so on and so forth have proved to be quite difficult for many people.
Republics work well because they break up the required duties among the people, so the amount of work required to vote is decreased. This allows them to have their own work outside of decision-making, even when decision-making is a lot of work.
Great way to pick food, though.
People would gain power just by being popular. Not in the sense of "popular democracy", more like "pop music". And then, just like today, we have figureheads that battle it out based on our elected opinions.
So what's the point? It removes the friction in voting by using the web, but that opens up the whole identity thing where computers can pretend to be people or people pretend to be other people and hackers and ads and so on and so forth.
Democracy generally works well the way it works now. Eventually something happens that pisses off the public, and they fight back. Otherwise, the politicians are stuck making the choice between "crap" and "crappier". And the world works pretty well.
If you believe that generally democracy works pretty well now then I agree that it isn't a good alternative.
If you don't believe that then it is an interesting alternative. that attempts to solve some of the problems that modern democracy doesn't. Like people who think differently about different topics and want their differing opinions to matter.
People who think differently about topics eventually have their opinions recognized. There are certain things that could never happen (e.g. mandatory gun buyback will never be looked into because of the 2nd Amendment in the US, although I hear it worked well in Australia), but beyond those, eventually, good ideas tend to bubble up. For years people demanded universal healthcare in the US ("it works well in Canada!"), and the politicians fought and raged amongst themselves to decide that yes, now is the time to implement it. And it seems to work.
If you want to change your country, don't try to make a new system to supplant the existing one. Try to fix the old one. Or at least vote in it, so your voice is heard in the meantime.
Seems like a silly objection, you could also vote for a scam artist for office under the status quo and that would be much worse than delegating your vote to one. At least with delegated votes most people wouldn't choose scam artists and the odds of scam artists/idiots winning office would be much lower.
> People who think differently about topics eventually have their opinions recognized.
This is simply not true, as 18th century Poland could attest if it hadn't been wiped out by it's own governmental paralysis.
> If you want to change your country, don't try to make a new system to supplant the existing one. Try to fix the old one.
This is contradictory. One way of fixing something that's broken is with a better system that has some fundamental differences.
This problem already exists. Liquid democracy does not eliminate it, but it should lessen it for a couple of reasons, but probably most importantly because it gives people continuous control over their delegation decision. Right now the election cycles themselves exert tremendous undue influence over political outcomes, an implementation side-effect that is not an inherent property of democracy or particularly reflective of the popular will. Liquid democracy ameliorates this side-effect.
For that reason alone, it is worth serious consideration.
Pretty sure everyone would take their vote back from politicians under pressure to make the difficult calls, and vote to hang the bankers and put off interest payments.
Just exactly how many people do you believe would actually do this if they could? Do you think all of the people who trust Ice T to sing to them would actually trust him to make decisions about foreign policy?
>People would gain power just by being popular.
No, that's how things work now. With a system like this you gain power by being trusted.
>Democracy generally works well the way it works now.
Are you in favor of a corporate takeover of government?
Delegation in liquid democracy solves this problem in much the same way that representation in representative democracy does. "Republic" is really neither here nor there: a Republic can, like the US, be a representative democracy or it can, be an autocratic dictatorship or just about anything else, so long as its not a monarchy. (Conversely, a constitutional monarchy can be a representative democracy in substantive form without being a democracy, e.g., as in the UK.)
At what point did we start believing that a country should have more decisions to make than every citizen can evaluate?
Except this isn't about running a society, it's about running a government. There's a major difference.
If you think about it, food is probably the most personal and least likely thing you'd delegate, as you have your own preferences and it doesn't require expertise in the subject. If it were for more serious things in which expertise is required, it's more likely people would delegate votes; for example, if there was a vote on the California drought using this system, I'd probably delegate my vote to a hydrologist, as they know more about the subject than I can reasonably gather.
"The ability to delegate voting power allows liquid democracy to scale to large groups as well as representative democracy does. People who have others delegating to them are much like representatives in representative democracy systems, becoming specialists for group decisions and voting with greater power. For example in Figure 2, many people delegate directly or indirectly to person H, making H a powerful delegate. Liquid democracy systems tend to be meritocracies. As a person becomes more of an expert on issues facing the group, more people trust and delegate to them. The increased voting power can incentivize them to further increase their expertise and effectiveness. The opposite effect occurs when the delegate becomes less effective. This feedback process gives accountability and curbs abuses of power.
"The ability to change delegations at any time eliminates many election-related distractions and distortions. There is no election-cycle and delegates must continuously prove their worth. And, they can do so in incremental manner, instead of wasting time and energy on all-or-nothing elections."
So OK. Did people actually take back their delegations? How often did people override and vote directly? Did the optimism work out in practice?
(Except for felons. They mostly can't vote.)
If I'm holding a dozen votes from friends, I'm kinda like a super-citizen with 12 votes, and so I take that job more seriously because trust has been placed in me -- no payment required. If someone is holding a thousand votes and dedicating more time, I feel people would start creating grassroots tools to get them compensated for spending more time understanding their issues. And so on and so forth, right up to the groups holding millions, who maybe start their own PACs or whatever the equivalent is.
But maybe I'm optimistic :)
Steve Hardt
'liquid voting' is only useful when trying to find the greatest, fastest consumption.