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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

I'm strangely moved by this whole thing. It's a pretty decent status check on where we are with democracy ATM. I'm not against democracy, but I do think we need to pay attention to what it can & can't do.

On one hand, this has been a model of democracy. A primary election agenda and referendum. The phrasing of the question was simple, clear and unbiased. The "will of the people" won over the will of the ruling structure. Most politicians and the main parties (especially before the opportunists jumped in) were against leaving. So was the financial sector and most big businesses.

OTOH, some of the problems inherent in democracy were also on display. A "right to my opinion" emotional public moved by very emotional arguments. Lies, untruths and misleading truths were the most prominent arguments on either side. A majority of the discussion was stupid.

We haven't figured this shit out yet. Kings anyone? How about the best wrestler gets to be in charge? ideas?

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> We haven't figured this shit out yet. Kings anyone? How about the best wrestler gets to be in charge? ideas?

As a Swiss citizen, I think the swiss system is very close to perfect in this regard.

Sure, emotional and stupid arguments sometimes prevail, but most of the time the people make the perfect decision. Public discourse is most often also very rational, more so than most world parliaments.

Irrational arguments have been a staple of especially the British political system. I am amazed at the low level of discussion in the UK even by their representatives.

Direct democracy is something that has to be done regularly, otherwise you end up with situations like the UK or California.

Switzerland is also much smaller than the UK or California in most respects.

This is a curious claim, so I did a little checking.

It turns out that Switzerland is smaller than the Los Angeles metro area both in GDP and population.

Are you sure?

It seems it's comparable in size, but not smaller

Take a look http://mapfrappe.com/?show=40241 (it's a rough sketch of Switzerland but the size should be right)

Edit: yes, I think parent meant population, not actual size

You're right that Switzerland is physically bigger than the LA metro area. I didn't compare land masses.

Edit: Also, Wikipedia is possibly a better source for comparing sizes of landmasses.

>Switzerland is also much smaller than the UK or California in most respects.

This comes up all the time, especially in "Why can't the US do X?" discussions but isn't it just the equivalent of shouting down with "That will never scale!"

Of course it might not be exactly the same. Maybe the bigger country will need more servers spun up or a tweaked algorithm (to continue the analogy), but just saying a country is smaller doesn't mean things are a No before even being tried. I'm assuming there were railroads across other smaller countries before the US had the transcontinental railroad too.

Maybe the bigger nation just shouldn't be so big?

Hence, the "states" part of "United States".

It was my understanding that the effectiveness of direct democracies has been inversely related to size of population throughout history...

So, specifically in the context of discussing direct democracy, size does matter.

That is a good point, but, how many of those democracies took place in the era of fast communication by locomotive, telegraph, email, SMS, the long distance phone call, Skype, and others? Surely there is a difference between the Roman Empire being stretched and sending messages by foot and FDR addressing the US by radio.

This is a fair point, but the largest issue (IMO) wasn't directly related to communication time...rather it has been the risk of Tyranny of the Majority.

Even in the relatively recent founding history of the United States, the Federalist Papers discuss and try to address a variety of issues which can lead to this outcome.

And ultimately, I think this is what we see with the Brexit outcome and the current Trump campaign in the US. These aren't "new" concepts...throughout history we can see similar outcomes for similar events with similar reasons.

You raise an excellent point though, which is with the ease of communication in the modern era, why don't we have a more informed public? This is something I have thought about trying to tackle with a side dev project...but the issue is complex and difficult to address directly.

Side note, I believe the Roman Empire was a Republic, not a Direct Democracy :)

Nit pick: the Roman Empire was founded after the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar overthrew the senate.

> Nit pick: the Roman Empire was founded after the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar overthrew the senate.

Nit pick: the Roman Empire, in one sense, was founded while Rome was still ruled by the Republic; in this sense, the Empire is the metropole-periphery arrangement with Rome proper ruling as the metropole and the various provinces as peripheries.

In the other sense (the sense of the Empire as a form of government within the Rome rather than the relation between Rome and the provinces), the Roman Empire was founded when Caesar Augustus was granted a variety of lifetime powers by the Senate.

In either sense, it was not founded by (or during the life of) Julius Caesar.

Switzerland also has a much higher literacy rate. That makes it a lot easier to get an intelligent decision from the public.

LA for example is only about 66 percent: http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed33a.htm

what part of California are you referring to?

Probably Marin.

They're referring to California's statewide referendum system so the answer would be "all of California".

well he's making it sound like a bad thing, so I wanted to know what exactly he meant.

Prop 8, for example.

Or Prop 13.

(for context to the unaware, these are generally regarded as terrible policies)

"generally"

Prop 8, officially titled Proposition 8 - Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry, was a statewide ballot proposition in California. On November 4, 2008, voters approved the measure and made same-sex marriage illegal in California.

On June 6th, 1978, nearly two-thirds of California's voters passed Proposition 13, reducing property tax rates on homes, businesses and farms by about 57%. The Environment Prior to Proposition 13. Prior to Proposition 13, the property tax rate throughout California averaged a little less than 3% of market value.

The most salient and controversial facet to Prop 13 wasn't the immediate rate change, but the cap on increases when a property was continuously owned.

To me worst part wasn't the cap itself - I think it's fair for residential properties, but that it was also applied to commercial properties.

The interesting thing about Prop 8 is, a few years later, the outcome of the vote has been totally reversed, same-sex marriage is the law of the land, and it now has solid majority support. The will of the people can change in a short time. You could imagine a similar outcome for the Brexit vote, if it weren't such a permanent change.

Probably the part where we can amend our state constitution with 50% + 1 on ballot initiatives.

How about dynamic voting? Let voters change their vote in real time up to the final second or to a percentage cut off.

Mathematically, 1-(1/e) percent is the ideal cut off (~63%).

> Mathematically, 1-(1/e) percent is the ideal cut off (~65%)

What? can you explain?

(~63%)*

And yes, what? Do explain!

In the British Parliament, there are lines which separate the MPs on the two sides. These lines are a bit more than two swordlengths apart, to prevent them from stabbing each other.

Wouldn't it be enough to have them just a bit more than one sword length apart? I suppose that's part of the reason for the London housing crisis.

And the Speaker has a nice big heavy club just in case...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/82544.stm

This is regarded as a bit of a myth. Search for swords in this official PDF https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-information-offi....

MPs have never been able to carry weapons in to the chamber so if it was a rule it's a bit silly (which doesn't mean it's not true given how silly the rest of the UK democracy is).

They do still, to this day, have a loop on the cloakroom for hanging their swords on though so it's not totally out of character.

The UK is a much more divided society than Switzerland, in terms of the base level of income and education. The median income in Switzerland is double that of the UK. Education is harder to compare, but you can't really expect the same level of discourse

I remember listening to a Ted talk where the speaker basically said, Get income inequality in check by whatever means and most of your problems go away.

Get hold of a copy of Tony Judt's Ill fares the land. It has references to the correlation between inequality and many measures of 'problems' and tries to make the case for a causal link. Also explains philosophical background.

Thank you for the recommendation. I will check it out.

Certainly large amounts of some kind of equality is needed for a democracy to work.

Barely!

The point in discussion, everyone likes equality in a way they having it, without they having to do anything about it. Or in other words making the rich poor in some way. Wasn't this what communism was all about.

The real issue is equality in access to basic resources, which is by and large there already. Beyond this you need to let people win and lose on merit.

You don't go around paying the same money for a haircut and brain surgery. That sort of equality doesn't work. Or to be more precise that's inequality of a very worst kind.

>get income inequality in check by whatever means and most of your problems go away.

Is that a cause or an effect though? As in, if your society evolved in such that "most problems" don't exist or aren't serious, then maybe as a consequence there isn't a lot of income disparity. But that doesn't necessarily hold in reverse. Making incomes equal by some method doesn't necessarily make the problems go away.

https://philoofalexandria.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/reynolds-...

It's also very hard for a poorer or even middle class immigrant to move to a place like Switzerland because the cost of living is so high. This creates an environment of unanimity you wouldn't see in more diverse cultures like the U.S. or the U.K. I think that's largely why Switzerland and the Scandinavian states get accolades from U.S. politicians (not as much division.) But they don't seem to get that the cultures are no where near as diverse and thus the politics are not anywhere near as divisive.

That's not a criticism of diverse cultures, more of states living in relative unanimity being in a bubble.

Well, it's not like the swiss didn't have their fare share of ethnic issues in th past. Keep in mind that Switzerland is linguistically diverse.

The difference is that because of direct democracy and every male being armed to the teeth, the government steps in and tries to reduce inequality. That way democracy works again. I mean, Jura used to have straight up ethnic riots.

It's also not like your 'perfect' system wasn't financed by of the dirtiest money humanity has ever seen.

Switzerland should be compared with their closest money ~handling~ competitors : Cayman Islands and the Channel Islands.

>that's largely why Switzerland and the Scandinavian states get accolades from U.S. politicians (not as much division.)

I have to disagree with you. I have a lot of friends in Sweden that do nothing but complain about the immigration crisis they are facing. In fact one of my Swedish friends is here in the US now looking for a job because immigration has become such an issue in Sweden. She can name many immigrants she knows that are collecting more in welfare from the Swedish Government than what a Doctor makes... That's kinda fucked up if you ask me...

I don't disagree with you in terms of -now-, I mean historically. The Syrian refugee crisis has changed demographics in Europe in a way that I don't think we've yet seen the full ramifications of.

Oh we do, it's just you're called out as racist when you point it out.

See, that kind of comments don't contribute anything to the conversation.

All you're doing is portraying yourself as a victim and hijacking the issue back into the bullshit "are we too pc" debate again, which quite frankly most people are already sick of.

In Sweden: Swedish citizens really are the victims and their society has become too PC. It's not like here in the US.

If you hang a Swedish flag outside of your house you are automatically deemed a racist by your community. ANY semblance of pro-sweden is viewed as unfair by the immigrant community because they aren't swedish, because they aren't included. They've create a culture of everyone is a victim, citizens and immigrants.

It's really a fucked up situation. A situation I hope never comes to the US.

> She can name many immigrants she knows that are collecting more in welfare from the Swedish Government than what a Doctor makes...

Really? I have seen plenty of claims like that, and every time, they turn out to be false.

And how much exactly does a "doctor" make? Lönestatistik.se lists between 12k and 180k SEK/month. Quite a span.

So your friend can't get a job because... there are immigrants who are collecting more in welfare than doctors? Is that how welfare works now?

You've somehow managed to put the phrase "they're stealing both our jobs AND our welfare" unironically in the same sentence, kudos.

> The UK is a much more divided society than Switzerland, in terms of the base level of income and education. The median income in Switzerland is double that of the UK

There's also the population size difference. London alone is larger than Switzerland, and that's not even all of England, let alone the whole UK.

> Direct democracy is something that has to be done regularly [...]

I think there's a lot of truth to this. When referendums are seldom, I believe there's a real risk of them turning into spectacle. (And at worst, a weapon for use by nationalists and fascists, like what happened in Germany in the 30s.)

When they are regular, and limited, and like in Switzerland not something pulled on a whim but actually requires some work to call, they might just work. But that also kind of assumes an informed electorate, which is perhaps the main point here – the electorate hasn't been very well informed, either way.

> When they are rare, and limited, and like in Switzerland not something pulled on a whim but actually requires some work to call, they might just work.

In Switzerland you essentially vote on 2-5 issues every quarter. I think this very regularity has educated the people.

It also helps that by law, if you vote on a proposal that would increase spending, you aso vote on how much your taxes increase. In the case of the Gotard Tunnel it was 1.6% increase in income tax for several decades (if I'm not mistaken). Swiss even vote on buying fighter jets, etc. You would be surprised how well it works.

All that said, the swiss constitution actually states that it is the job of the government to make sure the people have a good standard of living. So many social policies which would be difficult to get through constitutionally in lets say the US are rather simple in the Switzerland.

My only big nitpick in the swiss system is the lack of minority protection an little to no checks and balances by the supreme court on referenda.

Sorry, that should say "when they are regular" – not rare. Have edited my post.

Do you find the regularity of referendums naturally makes people more inclined to be educated on the issues at hand? Anecdata obviously, but nevertheless interesting.

Most definitely, yes.

That, and the fact that there is no real parliamentary opposition vying for as many populist points. (see my other comments in this thread).

As a Californian, I am genuinely curious what you think is the problem with California at the moment?

In Switzerland referenda are a very institutionalized and regular decision making tool. It is mostly used to get rid of political gridlock and making sure special interests don't filter out the will of the people (director proposal). That, combined with the fact that in Switzerland there is no real parliamentary "opposition" (everybody voted in forms the government) turns the whole game into a problem solving process rather than political one-up-man ship. You essentially don't need an opposition anymore to keep politicians in check, that's what the people are for.

Ballot props are far more regular in CA than headlines suggest. The requirement for signatures keeps dropping as voter turnout drops, and it doesn't take that many resources to get something on the ballot. An appealing title and description make it fairly easy to get a lot of maybe not so great spending passed, despite reasonably good efforts to keep voters informed. I don't know that the overall function is that different from what you describe, given that there isn't really a strong opposition party in the state, but it is hard to get the majority of people to really think critically about 5 different obscure spending packages.

I think he was referring to the madness that occurred from the governor recall and revote a few years back, which would be like a major referendum

Well for one, I hear it's on fire a lot.

I think the Swiss system is pretty good, but I don't know about the Swiss people. Are they smarter than other citizens? Are they less vulnerable to populist propaganda?

I also think this is something that works best on "smaller" scales - that is, not on the scale of France, or the UK, or Germany, but on the scale of Switzerland, Luxemburg, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, ...

Swiss culture is very small-c conservative, with heavy value on making rational, pragmatic decisions. It is no surprise that they have a system which reflects that, and performs well for that population.

Very conservative and paternalistic. Swiss women only got the right to vote in 1971. Is that indicative of a rational population?

Rational, democratic process can be conservative and slow to adapt.

I'm from the UK, I'd definitely agree that the Swiss model of democracy is better than what we have here.

The only model I'd suggest that may be even better than direct democracy is liquid democracy (which is a close relative of direct democracy), but seeing as no countries have adopted it I'd say the Swiss model is the best example of how an effective democracy functions.

For those interested in learning what liquid democracy is, this is a brief introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg0_Vhldz-8

Right, but all those are inherent to the people of Switzerland. The same system in, say, Italy wouldn't get those results.

I am amazed at the low level of discussion in the UK even by their representatives.

Here in the US, I find myself wishing political discourse would rise to the level of the UK.

Watching the BBC last night was like drinking better beer. I couldn't believe how much better it was, not just the broadcasters but nearly all the guests. The only bum note was the poor fellow who had to do a vaudeville act with hand-waving and silly magic graphs, and that was the one obviously CNN-derived bit.

We've had silly magic graphs for years!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/swingometer/

Here's a clip from 1979 http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/swingometer/11202.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8646445...

Oh dear, I'm sorry for misimputing the magic graphs. I did feel sorry for Jeremy; he looked like a giant stooping over the blue and yellow gardens of the little people. The rest of the broadcast struck me as brilliant relative to what we have to endure over here.

The first time women had the right to vote in Switzerland was 1971.

Quite far from perfect in my view.

I've read Rousseau (who was Swiss) and was fascinated by his assessment that representative democracies lead to parties which lead to factions which leads to self-destruction; that the only viable form of Democracy was direct plebiscite, as often as possible. CH still operates this way.

A minor clarification: Rousseau was not Swiss. He was born in Geneva, but Geneva didn't join the Swiss Confederation until 1815 (many years after his death).

A system that led to women not being allowed to vote until 1991 cannot be considered acceptable, much less perfect.

I don't think I have a better alternative to direct democracy, but it's not perfect either. I'd like to point out that the Swiss system is very far from perfect for the same reasons other systems are. Did everyone forget about the horrible minaret vote?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_minaret_referendum,_2009

And that was a constitutional amendment referendum!

Democracy is fine. The intellectual class just needs to learn to respect it. There is pretty much nothing that deserves to be decided by the will of the people--their values, their emotions, their world views--than the question of "what body politic do I want to belong to?"

The deep irony of the anti-Brexit narrative is that the same people would froth at the mouth if you said "India would've been better off economically if it hadn't separated from the British Empire." Whether or not that's true, it's an argument--like the anti-Brexit rhetoric--misses the point completely.

Honestly the India comparison is "slightly" exaggerated.

British people could vote for European MPs. It's not like the UK was colonised by Europe.

There is devolution of sovereignty but you're gonna basically end up with that with the kind of trade pacts the EU demands anyways.

Lots of symbolism involved of course.

I'm not saying it's literally as bad as colonization. But the symbolism is useful in showing that the focus on economic impacts is utterly misguided. Democracy isn't about optimizing for economics; it's about people deciding how they want to be governed. "Who should be able to tell me what to do?" That's a sacrosanct decision! It shouldn't be made by bureaucrats and intellectuals looking at the impact on currency prices.

The EU does not "govern" Britain in any meaningful sense, but I agree the "independence" strawman was a strong motivator for the separatist movement.

It does: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=URISERV%3...

> The regulation is directly applicable in all EU countries. This means that it:

> - applies immediately as the norm in all EU countries, without needing to be transposed into national law,

> - creates rights and obligations for individuals and they can therefore invoke it directly before national courts,

> - can be used as a reference by individuals in their relationship with other individuals, EU countries or EU authorities.

While the regulations apply instantly, it's because national gov'ts passed laws saying "You need to follow european regulations".

It's like how the FCC can change regulations regarding radio usage without passing a law. You're just delegating rule-making

The Leave campaign spent plenty of time telling people that the UK would be economically better off without the EU, £350m per week better off. Lots of bullshit about how if it weren't for the EU they could afford to support farmers and so on. People voted against it because they think immigrants are taking their jobs and EU regulations are driving British producers out of business.

I know the point you are trying to make but India wouldn't have been better off economically under British Empire. British decimated the Indian economy

http://www.thehindu.com/2005/07/10/stories/2005071002301000....

As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952.

Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income

> India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952.

Not sure how useful this statistic is - it's including the collapse of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700's. British company rule is usually dated around the mid-1700's, with the British Raj starting in the mid-1800's. We're also looking at percentage of the global economy, so it's not clear how much of this is a decline in the Indian economy and how much is it not growing as fast as other countries.

Think of it like this: India is a company and you are the CEO. The market is disrupted and you sat on your ass - will the stock holders be happy with you because the stock price went down, but hey - you were still doing the same thing for 100 years with no change, so congrats?

A State is the same as a company, except worse - they have an army and a monopoly on violence. After a war, when a king takes over, they tried to integrate with the new people, marry into them and in this way eventually begin to rule them. That began to change when people’s skin color was drastically different. The term Colonists was invented to convey how race got into the mix. The British were never a Raj (kings), they never ruled over India in the traditional sense of the word. They were colonists - they colonized and decimated the Indian economy.

Forget the economy, they decimated the population:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India#Scholarly_opin...

Except that Angus Maddison's estimates are a wild speculation based on hand-waved assumptions and 'extrapolated' data.

That's comparing apples to oranges though. China was also huge at the time, and no Europeans were there to screw it over. Yet, they were irrelevant by the turn of the 20th century.

(If you really want something to point fingers at, try the habits that stem from the cultural and religious landscapes. You can't erase millennia worth of those overnight.)

Europeans didn't screw over China? Come on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

Europeans screwed over every single country they could.

>> We haven't figured this shit out yet.

It depends on whether you view democracy as a process to perfect society or mitigate against social harm. If you think democracy should perfect (or even just improve) society, it will often seem ridiculous. Knowledgable voters don't determine the outcome of elections and referrendums, and instead the mass of voters who understand the least about the issues at hand determine their outcome. From this perspective, Aristotle's was probably onto something when he thought democracy was better named ochlocracy (i.e. 'mob rule').

However, if you understand that the purpose of democracy is to mitigate against social harm, then the drawbacks make sense. This would be the perspective of Alexander Hamilton and co. in the Federalist Papers. The tendency of political parties and factions, this view claims, is to benefit themselves at the expense of the greater society, and in fact often harming the greater society (e.g. North Korea). Assuming parties will seek their self interest at the expense of the common good, democracy is an institution which means the best interest of the parties is to get people to vote for them, which means they have to do things people actually want. From this perspective, democracy is certainly a problematic process but brings peace and prosperity because it tends, on the whole, to align the parties self interest with the perceived good of the society.

Democracy works just fine, but it needs _some_ responsibility or bad stuff happens.

These last 5-10 years have been horrible for the EU. On the hight of this current migration crisis, the UK decides to hold their election.

If I didn't know Cameron was pro EU, I'd see it as a completely UKIP-skewered dickmove. The UK is letting go, just as the "tug-of-war" gets even more hairy.

There's a lot to be critical about with the EU, but going our separate ways isn't the solution for Europe vs the world. And at the height of this crisis it is just... cowardice? I don't know.

I think one solution is to hold the vote open for an extended period of time-- weeks, say. Keep an updated tally going at all time.

That way, it's not just a high-stakes, one day event. Everyone will have a chance to vote, and nobody can (rightfully) say, "I wish I had voted, it didn't go the way I wanted" or "If I had known, I would have voted". You will know, and there will be time for you to vote still.

If I understand correctly, there were heavy rains that affected the turnout for this vote. Should something this important really be that affected by the weather?

That's an interesting idea, could you change your vote?

There was a lot of rain. Flooding / trains cancelled - biggest thunderstorm I've seen in the UK since moving here 13 years ago. In this case I think it probably made a difference, because those that were fighting to leave were more likely to turn out.

I go back and forth on changing your vote.

Arguments for would be learning something new, or breaking information during the period of the vote. For instance, if a news story broke about a politician, or something hidden in the wording of a bill would be highlighted, then one might want to change their vote.

Also, propaganda/information campaigns would ramp up towards the end of the vote, which could be good or bad.

Arguments against are basically logistical burden and opportunity for fraud. It's simpler for one vote, cast in stone.

There is a huge logistics issue with the poll spanning more than one day: cast votes must be kept safe. The longer the voting period is the more expensive it becomes and more prone to tampering results.

I agree with you about the logistics; it might be a better idea for an online voting system (which carries its own set of concerns).

However, assuming one cannot change their vote, I disagree that there is more opportunity for tampering. Each count of the vote is basically a statistical sampling, and it should stay relatively the same.

Here in the US, all elections are handled locally, at the county level. If there is fraud, it's hard to detect the day of the election, so the fraudulent vote becomes part of the official ballot count. Sure, months later, poll workers, voters, and politicians can be prosecuted for election fraud, but at that point, the election has already long been decided. It's very rare that a real recount is held that becomes the actual result. It's easy for fraud to become the accepted results.

However, with a long voting period with daily rolling counts, there is more opportunity for scrutiny, statistical methods, recounts, etc. If anything funny happens, it will be easier to detect with more time, and prevent it from becoming the official results.

Democracy works when those participating are both educable and rational.

Monarchies, Dictatorships, Oligarchies work if the ones in charge are educable, compassionate, and rational.

Democracy wins out a little since the checks and balances of rule by a majority tend to make it a little bit easier to counter the worst excesses of rule by a few. So as a working base it's a good starting point.

Republics are even better since they make it possible for rational actors to prevent the worst consequences of demogoguery and mob rule.

Nothing is perfect though they all have weaknesses. You can't fix government without fixing people. And that doesn't look likely anytime soon.

FDR summed it up pretty nicely in this quote:

     Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their 
     choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard
     of democracy, therefore, is education.

And it seems that a lot of Britons requires exactly that: education before making a wise decision.

[1] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/franklind402955.h...

Are you trying to imply they didn't "make a wise decision" or perhaps that your political opposition is stupid?

This is being widely reported: "The higher the level of education, the higher the EU support".

> "According the polls, university graduates were the most likely people to want to remain in the EU - while those with a GCSE or equivalent as their highest qualification were more likely to back Brexit."

> "Those with no education tended to vote Brexit"

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/eu-referendum-how...

That doesn't really mean "smart people vote for remain", could just as easily be because EU membership has different impact for different classes.

During the UK EU referendum, I realised something about politics... When people don't know enough about the issues, they'll vote based on the emotional framing of the issues. This makes them incredibly predictable, and I'm talking about people on both sides of the debate. On the Leave side, uninformed voters were drawn to a protectionist mentality. On the Remain side, people were drawn towards a collaborative mentality.

If people are happy to be low information voters, it almost doesn't matter what the other side is voting for, you'll never consider it, you'll just fall in line with what your peers are likely to vote for. There are many formally educated people I saw fall for the low information voter trap, so again this cuts across the board.

If I ever run for office, my lead policy is going to be free puppies for everyone. If people aren't smart enough to take opposing viewpoints seriously then you may as well cut to the chase and appeal directly to their emotions, and pretty much everyone loves puppies. ;-)

Uneducated ~> poor, Educated ~> wealthy.

Don't you think opposition to mass immigration policy supported by the pro-EU side might have something to do with lower income/education class voting leave? Something at all... maybe a little bit?

Perhaps, though you might not have noticed it, they were voting their self interest?

Is it surprising that highly educated class wouldn't feel threatened by importing more low-skilled immigrants?

I'm simply illustrating that, it's not as simple as the smart people supported remain, so that's the smarter choice. Smarter for whom?

well, thats not what he said though.

he specifically mention well educated. not wealthy, smart or whatever and put numbers on his claim. you on the other hand just put words into his mouth which he didn't actually say...

If economics and prices were the cause of the crisis you would expect people's voting patterns to vary based on whether or not their profession's job pool scales up with population count. Yet I expect even most of those liable to be out of work if construction slows down with population growth to have voted to leave.

I think it's too easy to get lost in the details.

Look at the map. London wanted in. Scotland wanted in. The rest of the country is dissatisfied with their state and want out. Look at the US map and you see similar things.

You can call the populace stupid and ignorant, but by doing so you're displaying your own form of ignorance. Lots of facts and figures and economic models can be used to say that everything is just peachy, but the ground truth tells a different story.

The major fallacy at work here is that in-or-out may not be correlated with solving the problems of the dissatisfied portion. Out may well make their problems worse rather than to improve their state.

It may make their problems worse, but the status-quo has been failing to make things better for decades, so they are willing to take a risk.

Change for change's sake is rarely a good idea. It helps if you have a good idea that things will be better after the change you propose because you can see some causal chain leading to that better situation.

This is only true if you are in a position of having enough power and resource to perform that analysis.

If you don't have that resource or power, change for change's sake is rational.

Put another way - when you know your leaders are taking you in the wrong direction, then a random alternative is a rational choice if it is the only other option.

People react to things in different ways. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my friend, whether or not that actually makes sense.

Look at the reaction on a forum like this which represents the upper middle class business-oriented citizen towards the societal impact of tech. Globalism is seen as an opportunity here, not a threat. Politicians, media, academia and business have told millions of people that things are great, but they are the problem -- they lack education, skills, wherewithal and have expectations for prosperity that are misaligned with reality.

So they lash out. They think to themselves "If some douche from the Bank of England or the Conservatives doesn't like this, that's good enough for me." That's democracy -- it's a messy business.

Is that a "good" reaction? History will judge. Depending on your POV, the crowd is either wise or rabble. But -- the critique that democracy is somehow broken is an incredible leap of ignorance. We (speaking from the US perspective) have been offered a sham of a democracy that isn't meeting the needs of many. We're very fortunate that we live in an age where peaceful democratic revolution results in a bad day/weeks for stocks. A hundred years ago, you'd have mobs in the streets and soldiers with bayonets shooting into crowds.

My favored election procedure works like this:

Every citizen takes a standardized test when they reach the age of majority, preferably Raven's matrices. This test would be used for scholastic and career purposes, aside from government.

A representative body of 150 people is randomly selected from those in the top 0.1 percent every N years. The IQ test filters for intelligence, obviously. Random sampling serves as an anticorruption mechanism, increasing the cost of influencing leaders before they are elected. It also strongly reduces the incentive to game the test. And unlike most other election procedures does not maximally select for those most interested in fame and power.

These representatives are given very, very high salaries so there is significant incentive to take the position.

This is so wrong on so many levels.

1. IQ test has been shown not to represent actual "intelligence"

2. Intelligence does not mean justice, fairness or anything else.

3. Conflict of interest. What if the so called "most intelligent" people have some interest in the voting?

4. Trainning. I'm pretty sure anyone could end up in resulting a genius by trainning on problem sets for IQ tests.

5. Being smart doesn't automatically make you a good people. Smart and asshole are not mutually exclusive.

Although I believe there is value to the IQ metric, I agree with you that raw intelligence should not be the way we choose our governors/reps/etc.

As if democracy didn't have enough struggles, telecommunications (and especially television) have forever changed the way that the people choose their representatives. Superficialities are much more important now than they were pre-1960, and everything we get is filtered through the media outlets that control the television broadcasts; if they dislike someone, all they have to do is repeatedly re-broadcast a single unflattering yelp and that person's prospects are done. [0]

We need to learn to deal with that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwkNnMrsx7Q

1. IQ tests are very good proxies for intelligence. Despite decades of ideology-based objections, the relevant fields have reached consensus that IQ does measure a general factor of intelligence, and it is a good predictor of future scholastic and career ability.

2. My system isn't an alternative to perfection, it's an alternative to democracy which is decidedly imperfect. Intelligence is likely a better proxy for pro-social attitudes than the ability to navigate political institutions and then trick a bunch of people into voting for you.

3. Again, compare this not to perfection but to what we currently have.

4. Training for IQ tests has very limited returns. But as I specified, the test will be used outside of politics, too. In fact its most common use would be by academic institutions and employers. Because of this, most people will have incentives to train to whatever extent possible. Thus the test becomes slightly less G-loaded and slightly more a test of conscientiousness, but any plan to train up a bunch of corrupt lackeys would have very poor expected value.

5. Again, compare not to perfection but to what we actually have now.

I find it silly that you're so willing to do away with voting without entertaining changing the voting system itself.

Oh that's awful. The only saving grace of such a system, would be that it would be quickly violently overthrown by basically everyone.

Who writes the test questions? Who administers the test? Who grades it? How random is the random choice? Who determines what cutoffs to use as the population size changes?

You'll start to see gaming of the test, where those with resources either get involved in the administration or devote their time to perfecting their offspring's change of getting in that top 0.1 percent. Eventually, those without resources will be wholly unable from achieving scores necessary to be in the top 0.1 percent. You'll have an entire class of people who will either be part of government or feasibly able to join as members die, retire, or finish their terms. They will self-seclude as they have little to gain from interacting with the 99.9%.

As I specified above, it's vital that the test be used outside of politics, too. If employers and academics institutions rely on the test for admissions, this would provide pressure to keep the test bound to IQ. If we further specify the test must be symbolic like Raven's Matrices, I think there is a good chance we could keep the test g-loaded.

As for your second point, random selection is a vital to mitigate that possibility. A publicly verifiable source of randomness would be ideal.

I like the random selection part as anti-corruption measure. But the top 0.1 percent IQ filter is not very democratic. You can train for those (if you have the time and money) and there will always be some cultural bias built into the test. It's uncomfortably close to excluding a whole race or sex.

Do you think it's impossible for a non-democratic government to be just? Do you think it's possible for a democratic government to be unjust?

I've long thought an entirely random selection "civic house" in legislative branches would be an interesting check or balance to the current interests and status quo. Make serving for legislature something like jury duty in that you just randomly might be asked to do it for a few months. In the age of internet communications you can presumably do it in such a way that the random selectees will not see much impact on their "normal lives" and jobs... in fact that could be a useful selective pressure against certain forms of politicking ("I can't listen to this filibuster all night, I have to actually work in the morning.").

I'm guessing a lot of minorities and immigrants would be left out of representation. Who decides what's on the test, how do we decide that it's fair and not used just to justify that people conform to marketed opinions? How does this test help against those that are disenfranchised and without privilege? How do we challenge those with privilege and power and their positions and goals?

This test sounds incredibly dystopian.

How could Raven's Matrices be culturally biased: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices

>How does this test help against those that are disenfranchised and without privilege?

In the best possible way. By providing them with a competent government.

>How do we challenge those with privilege and power and their positions and goals?

Could you expand on that without using the term "privilege."

Your argument is that this proposition is valid notwithstanding the very real power struggle in society. Why would one want to even put someone through something as humiliating as an intelligence test to determine their rights. It reminds me of the reading tests during segregation to suppress black voters. If we would have implemented this test then, tell me would they have a fair chance in society?

At least from my perspective, the government is fair game for everyone. Already our best and brightest are working for us, however power is incredibly corrupting. The issue isn't the voter, it's the system that seeks to suppress and deny the will of the voter. The voter should have full responsibility, just like someone who decides to take unsanctioned drugs

Why would you put someone through something as humiliating as a college education, and their final exams? Presumably you want a measure of their knowledge and capability. In my system, no one has the right to become a representative. It's a job like any other, that requires non-standard admissions procedures (namely random sampling) to avoid corruption. I'm unsure if traditions could be enshrined to make my system stable, as it doesn't have a fiction as beautiful as the people's will to justify its existence. But I do think it's worth considering.

So how do communities gain appropriate representation in your system? Does everything come down to a test?

Maybe there could be 2 parallel branches, like the House and Senate, one of which uses this random sampling / testing system. The other uses something resembling a popular vote.

Well when I originally thought this was satire I was ready to upvote.

What you've described sounds like a significantly worse implementation of the fundamental idea behind Plato's philosopher-kings.

Put simply, systems like this deny the population the right of self-determination.

You do realize this is not an "election" procedure, right? "Election" implies that some group of people is choosing their rulers or representatives. Given that this obviously disenfranchises the vast majority of the population even more than now, I must infer that you don't consider the popular will a factor that should play a major part in government.

Also, even granting that IQ tests are as reliable as you assume, you still need to justify a few things:

- Why do you assume the comparative advantage of these extraordinarily IQ people is to spend time as a representative, rather than in academia, science, business, non-elected positions in government, etc? I'm not convinced that the 0.1% most intelligent people make a particularly better voting body than the top 1%, or for that matter the top 15% percent, which certainly includes the majority of our elected representatives today.

- It's been argued that rationality and intelligence in the sense measured by IQ tests are not particularly closely correlated, so I'm not sure why extreme quickness of thought should be privileged in particular for representative positions. Related to that, there seem to be a large number of high-IQ cranks that I wouldn't want to trust the fate of an entire nation to -- for example, Mencius Moldbug.

- Do you have any particular reason to believe that the high IQ members of this body would vote for the good of the entire nation, rather than in their own interests (granted, you've already privileged them with your proposal to use IQ tests pervasively in society)? 0.1% of the US is 320,000, and though your mechanism might prevent the small number of representatives at a given time from enriching themselves to Third World-dictator standards, I don't see any reason they wouldn't grant all 0.1% highest IQ people a $1m per-annum -- it would only cost $320b/year, less than 10% of the 2016 federal revenue.

This mostly sounds like a technocratic wet dream to me -- you could have Robin Hanson rule the U.S with no opposition at all.

The problem with democracy is the people are easily influenced by false truths.

I'm all for democracy, but I also realize that a well informed vote and an uninformed vote are equal and therein lies the problem. It's not really something that can be fixed within a true democracy.

Isn't that a problem with all forms of government? That the people in charge can be influenced by false truths?

When there are "people in charge", them being misinformed is the least of one's worries. The bigger problem is that they are very well informed about how their actions affect their own interests.

Actually being misinformed is the top worry. That's why we have intelligence agencies.

Sarcasm?

I don't know, it seems that people of all political stripes believe that the politicians in other parties are grossly misinformed. I could point to countless examples to politicians in my party and others.

Not with God Kings & Theocracy, their truth is the truth by definition and will override any preexisting truths.

The false premise in your post is that "being well-informed" would lead you to a particular conclusion. Governing isn't like building a dam. You'd be insane to build a dam by getting random people on the street to design it. But the principles underlying governance aren't predictable like the principles underlying engineering. You're not going to find prominent engineers at leading universities disagree about whether concrete with a particular compressive strength will hold back a particular amount of water. Yet, you had a number of prominent economists on the pro-Brexit side: http://www.wsj.com/articles/pro-brexit-economists-make-case-....

At the end of the day, on most issues (obviously there are exceptions), the "informed" class is just guessing or following a particular ideology. Was NAFTA good for the average American? 20 years later economists still can't definitively answer that question!

>>At the end of the day, on most issues (obviously there are exceptions), the "informed" class is just guessing

Decisions based on educated guesses are always preferable to those based on emotion and sentiment.

edit: stop downvoting me based on emotion and sentiment!

This is why you have republics. Even moreso when you can get the people to elect representatives based on familiarity and quality rather than propaganda.

Someone whose job it is to run the country should be much more informed than people who only make political decisions once every couple years for major policy decisions involving the whole country with ride ranging ramifications.

I think its the same argument communists make - that the USSR, China, Cuba, etc have all been failed states that never were what Marx and Lenin intended, and they devolved into totalitarian dictatorships rather than becoming the socialist paradise the ideological founders wanted.

In the context of republics, a similar argument stands. We should have representatives with empathic relations with their constituents going both ways - the people should be picking the best amongst themselves to rule, but most existent democracies have devolved into elites picking the leaders and voters having no relations whatsoever with their own leadership, which was supposed to be the entire point.

There are a large number of issues for which there exist equally well-informed arguments for both sides, or that there is no actual 'true' answer to be chosen.

It's pie in the sky, but I'm interested in the idea of "immediate delegation representative voting" (that's a phrase I just made up because I don't know if it has a formal name). How it would work would be that you still have your default elected representative for most issues, but on a per-vote basis, a citizen could override the default and designate an alternate representative for that vote, including themselves.

So if a citizen felt that a particular person was a better expert on an issue then their representative - they could designate that person to study the bill/policy in depth and cast their vote.

One effect here is that if multiple citizens delegate the same people, then those delegates could spend more time studying the issue than an individual voter. Another effect is that we might get representatives for issues (other than our normal political reps) who would collect voting blocks which could bypass the normal political lobby money path.

As with many human endeavours, it might turn out to be an even bigger circus, but being able to selectively bypass one default representative has the nice potential of short circuiting the pattern of currying favors with entrenched politicians. The approach is sort of a hybrid of direct representation while still allowing 'expertise' to come into the system.

I thought it was remarkable that the course of an entire nation can be so greatly changed by a 51.9% victory in a single vote. Seems like such an important change should require a supermajority of some sort. (And, of course, the original choice to join ought to have as well.)

People are fickle and easily divided. For normal elections, we hold them regularly, and that gives people a chance to correct their mistakes or change their minds. But for something like this, there isn't going to be another vote in a few years where people might decide to go back, it's likely to be once and done, at least for decades. The bar for change should be higher when it's like that.

I agree. It seems like a 2/3 majority would have been better.

I'm wondering if someone can fill us in on the history of the UK's entrance into the EU. Was there a vote at all? It seems complicated by the whole European Community thing.

Great question. I perused Wikipedia a bit, and it seems like the relevant event would be the UK joining the European Communities, which eventually transformed into the EU. The UK government directly decided to join, but a referendum was held two years later, and "stay" won with 67% of the vote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Commun...

The formal entry into the EU was done with the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 and didn't have a referendum, but it was basically a direct continuation of their EC membership. Although I imagine someone opposed to EU membership might argue that this was the most important point, and the people did not have their say in it.

The EU has evolved over the years. The UK joined the EEC (a predecessor to the EU) in 1973. In 1975, there was a UK referendum about whether to stay in the EEC, where 67% of voters chose to stay. Since then there were a number of treaties which expanded the economic and political reach of the EEC, including the Maastricht Treaty, agreed upon in 1992, which was when the EEC became part of the newly formed EU. Whilst some countries held a referendum over the Maastricht Treaty, the UK was not one of them.

Since 1992, it could be argued that the biggest change to the EU was the Lisbon Treaty. You can read more about it here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon

To be clear, between 1975 and 2016 there were no UK referendums on EU membership, so technically yesterday's vote was the first time the UK public was consulted about being a member of the EU. In contrast to the EU, the EEC was much smaller in scope, though it's clear that the architects behind the EEC always intended it to become a much bigger political player.

"There will be no peace in Europe if the States rebuild themselves on the basis of national sovereignty, with its implications of prestige politics and economic protection…. The countries of Europe are not strong enough individually to be able to guarantee prosperity and social development for their peoples. The States of Europe must therefore form a federation or a European entity that would make them into a common economic unit."

Jean Monnet, 1943

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Monnet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Monnet

It's also not 51% of the population - it's 51% of the turnout, which may well not be representative.

On the other hand being a member of the EU is very serious business from a constitutional point of view.

Given this point of view it seems just as reasonable to require a super majority for staying. I.e. unless the wast majority is comfortable with deligating (a very significant amount) of power to the EU, why should it be allowed?

I'm proposing that a supermajority should be required for changes either way. Since the UK is already in the EU, you'd need a supermajority to leave. This builds some hysteresis into the system to reduce short-term swings.

Note that a referendum was held shortly after the UK joined the EC, and that was 67% in favor of it.

What prominent lies from Remain? There was a lot of what people were calling scaremongering, but if you look at the markets it looks like it was pretty accurate. I've seen thorough takedowns of blatant lies from Leave, but haven't seen anything similar for Remain.

https://www.facebook.com/WTFlockNews/videos/1132580646806052 Nigel Farage made direct, public claims that the "money going to the EU" would be redirected to the NHS. An hour after the referendum he went on TV claiming that his adverts aren't what he said. This is just the most recent, flaming pile of noxious vomit to come from him but not the only one.

EDIT: I completely misread the parent post. My bad! :)

"What prominent lies from Remain?"

Farage was campaigning to leave.

Yeah I completely misread the parent comment. My only defense is that because of the time difference I was up very late last night watching coverage of this, so I probably need some coffee XD

GP was asking about lies from Remain's side. Most of the filth and bilge we've been seeing has been racist, xenophobic bigotry from the organisers of the Leave campaign, speaking to populist fears and dreams. Reminds me a lot of Trump's campaign here in the US.

Full Fact, an independent fact-checking charity, have been critical of the campaign on both sides.

https://fullfact.org/europe/

The markets are in panic mode for the moment, but it will recover, it always does.

Are you buying GBP futures then?

UK or US markets? The S&P 500 is down 3% at the moment, that's not panic. Panic is more like 10 - 20% in a day (UK was down 9% at one point), or 5% every day for a week like in 2008.

Being "the best wrestler" is basically Trump's campaign strategy so that concept may well be tested soon

This will no doubt give Trump some twitter scale ammo, given his bickering with the UK, who discussed banning him.

He's already spent some of it hilariously on completely misinterpreting the results vis-a-vis Scotland.

Not sure, but I think that may have been a reference to "Idiocracy", the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

The president of the future is a professional wrestler, iirc.

He was actually also a porn star. I see that coming during my lifetime.

Relevant https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2016/03/AP_0...

You're against democracy because people had the right to decide what was in their interest and not the government or big business??

That's fallacy.

The big business that decides is the media.

The media is a big business owned by special interest and wealthy elites. Obviously all the scare tactics used in the media did not work on the voters.

I think it was exactly the opposite.

I'm curious, I'd like to hear more =)

Our biggest newspapers, the Sun and the Daily Mail, have huge political influence here. They were both strongly pro-Brexit, as was the Telegraph. They've also been anti-EU for decades.

That was my impression, thank you.

My take on it is that direct democracy doesn't make sense for this type of complex and nuanced decision. The general population isn't in the business of politics and scare tactics on both sides aren't going to educate them on the nuances and detailed implications of a decision like leaving the EU. That's why we vote for representatives who make it their job to understand, and vote accordingly -- representative democracy and direct democracy are two different things.

People feel qualified to weigh in on any political issue because that's always been that narrative. I see it asking the general population, without any further information to vote one day or whether Apple should move factories out of China. You know literally nothing about what's going on, so how could you possibly make that decision for Apple? That's up to their board.

What about decisions like electing the leader of the free world? The most powerful person on earth? Should that be left up to every day people?

I think that people should be able to make big decisions that effect them. Direct democracy is more useful than ever, the elites use our republic to manipulate people more than ever. They game the system and with no balance or checks on their power.

IMO its as easy for the elites to manipulate the public via media as it is for them to manipulate elected representatives and the latter is easier to address via checks and balances, though nobody seems willing to put them in. Elections are in the public interest so campaigns should be solely funded by the government, not by private backers. Private parties should not be able to run media campaigns on behalf or against individuals. Lobbying would be rendered useless.

Further, certain other countries do not in fact vote directly for their 'most powerful person' -- in Canada, you vote for your representative locally and the party with the most local representatives sends their leader to be Prime Minister, and even there, the Governor General in Right of the Queen has final say just to make sure.

I think as noble as 'I get to decide what matters most' is, it's worthless when issues reach the kind of complexity that requires specialization in your field. As another poster mentioned above, you don't vote on what kind of medicine a child gets, you leave that up to a doctor -- a professional. Now feel free to pick that professional!

But in politics and economy per se, there is no right decision. There is no such thing as a utopia or path to one, social and economic order is in a constant, violent evolution. Politicians just manipulate this struggle instead of heal it. If you can accept that you can't control adult children, why not accept that you can't control people?

And that's not entirely false, parents can decide what medicine and procedures to put a child through. Doctors aren't all knowing, they make many mistakes and are even in the favor of special interests like pharmaceutical companies.

But what's a "media campaign"? Does this include social media? How about public speeches, broadcast on youtube?

This distinction seems arbitrary and basically restricts the ability for someone or some association of people to promote their ideas.

IMO it was close enough that "the people" did not decide. Roughly half of the people decided.

I'm in the US so I am a little too uninformed and probably not heavily affected by this to take one side or the other. But knowing what I know I am surprised that this didn't need a 2/3 majority to pass or something similar. Given the result you have roughly half of the country upset by this and in some areas like Scotland, London, etc. you have a majority of people upset by the outcome.

Over 1 million more people decided to leave. Percentages say one thing, but over 1 million people is a huge number.

> We haven't figured this shit out yet. Kings anyone? How about the best wrestler gets to be in charge? ideas?

I have been reflecting about this for a long time (as Venezuelan I witnessed how people can be manipulated and divided easily)

I have this crazy idea that countries should provide a "voting license" that would require the study of the matter to be chosen previous to the election process. The motto should the same that driving... It is a privilege not a right although everyone has the right to apply for it

Unfortunately, this proposal has its own set of problems. The southern United States had such a system for a long time, and in practice its only use was to keep black people from voting. I doubt that exact problem would happen again, but "voting licenses" come fraught with peril that they will be used to keep out the opinions of the "undesirables", whatever they may be at the moment.

Democracy can work but we all need to practice and support it.

The citizens need to have leftover mental energy and time from everyday life to think and learn about politics, form opinions and engage in discussions with each other. Academia needs to be heavily invonved to provide unbiased, politically independent facts, pros and cons for each choice. And there may be a role for online platforms as well to support direct democracy, proving information and a forum for discourse.

We cannot trust academia, they are a special interest in their own right. Their power depends on bureaucracy and big government, not to mention that their field is incredibly undemocratic itself, lots of research is funded or excluded depending on the political flavor of leaders.

Indeed, academia as we know it is somewhat broken. We can either fix it or replace it completely (eg. by some crowdfunded model) and give it a new name.

Either way, democracy would greatly benefit from an independent information source. While there are some purely subjective decisions to make in a society, a lot of them have some objective underlying facts (eg. is smoking harmful? is there a global warming?). Without an independent information provider, there's no way the average citizen could cast an informed vote on these matters.

+1 a million times. Maybe we should have an AI consult the voter before voting

>>The "will of the people" won over the will of the ruling structure. Most politicians and the main parties (especially before the opportunists jumped in) were against leaving. So was the financial sector and most big businesses.

If you want to do X, just because people you hate don't like to do X is really a very wrong way to be making decisions about anything.

In general this sort of behaviour doesn't lead to a good ending.

Plato was always cautious of Democracy. If you are interested I would recommend give his "Republic" a read.

In it is suggested a form of government called epistocracy. It has a lot of merit in my opinion. The basic principle is 'rule of the knowers'. We elect knowledgeable people into power and let them make decisions. We don't vote on what medication a sick child should get, why should we vote on what remedy a sick economy needs? Let the knowledgeable that we have chosen make the prescription.

Philosopher Kings. Full of virtue, detached from ego, completely dedicated to the expansion of the common good.

If only.

We already have the knowledgeable in power, the banks.

They understand how global economics works better than anyone and they manipulate it to their own ends and to the detriment of all others.

You also have Heinlein's concept from Starship Troopers: only those who have committed a year of their life to serving the common good for no pay (food and accomodation covered) earn the right to vote. If that "public service" was of non military nature (unlike in Starship Troopers), I think it would be an interesting system.

On the opposite end of the scale is the concept of Demarchy, found in several SciFis, where there are no elected politicians, and technology enables everyone to vote on everything constantly.

We basically already have this. During the economic crisis, there wasn't a lot of voting on how to save the banks. It's interesting whether brexit and trump will really have that much of an effect, or if we are already mostly living in a technocracy.

England also has the house of lords.

We should just put machines in charge. I don't trust any humans to rule over me anymore. Power corrupts, absolutely

Could work (because better decisions were made), or could be terrible (because people stopped feeling responsible).

We should try it :-)

Math is already in charge of society. More math would be good for all of us

Time to assemble all the evidence in both directions from sci-fi (such as most of Star Trek: TOS, some of Futurama, etc), feed it into a deep learning algorithm and see if it models a better machine society or a worse one. I trust this is a useful first case to test this hypothesis. :)

This algorithm needs to be very crafty to avoid manipulation. We'll have to constantly re-adjust the weights

Plato's Greece doesn't take into account multi ethnic/racial/religious community. The people who are in charge of healing the sick economy would end up trying to build their utopia without realizing how the common man is affected.

A Republic works nicely. Many issues are too detailed and complex for referendums. That's why we elect people whose only job is to study those details. Otherwise, we make policy decisions based on who has the best propaganda that incites fear or hatred.

Disclaimer: armchair politik.

Benevolent dictatorship. Someone who can think better than mostly everyone and is dedicated to service to the nation above all else.

In theory (s)he always makes the best decision because (s)he is not swayed by excess emotion and is able to keep the best interest of the nation in view at all times.

Another option arises if we have a truly objective test of benevolent rationality (yes I just made that term up now), then we could weight votes by this measure; this will change political rhetoric from emotional to rational and it would encourage all members of society to become more rational.

A reasonable strategy, so long as one accepts from the outset that no human could be a sufficiently competent dictator, and even if occasionally someone was 'close enough' then succession crises would de-stabilise the system.

We need to design and build our own benevolent dictator, and then keep it running and upgraded as needed :-)

This is the smug style in the new politics.

The notion that the people don't know what's best for them.

Bottom line is the working man hasn't cashed in like the global elite and their sympathizers.

Essentially the left wing showing its true face. Gov't decides, citizen obeys

It's worth noting that the entire context of this discussion about democracy is an article that could be an effort by the Post (an arm of the neocon establishment) and Google (ditto) to spin a perfectly legitimate albeit narrowly-decided exercise of self-determination as a catastrophic blunder by idiots. Of course they would say that.

So I was thinking today, we could weight the votes by life expectancy. The fewer years left in your life, the less your vote counts.

In this case I wouldn't have to go home and explain to my children why it is that they probably won't be allowed to go and live in Europe for a bit when they hit their 20s anymore.

That would be a pretty one-sided weighting. And it penalizes not only age but education and "wisdom" (assuming these are correlated).

I think for the majority of the population, it does

So I imagine that mens votes would count less than womens, at a particular age, and similarly for people in high risk occupations or who are obese or who have a fatal disease.

They can still go and live in Europe, not a big deal

I do not think you'll have to explain them that they will be just as welcome as everybody else.

What are you talking about? Prior to Brexit, British citizens could live and work in European countries without qualification. This is not true for the rest of the world.

There are millions of non-EU born people living and working on EU soil today, the future will not suddenly change to where UK citizens will not be given the same opportunity to move to the EU than we afford the rest of the world.

Still, what are you talking about?

British youth will have worse opportunities for working in Europe than they now do, and parents who voted to leave will have to explain that to their children.

The original comment read:

> they probably won't be allowed to go and live in Europe for a bit when they hit their 20s anymore.

You write:

> British youth will have worse opportunities for working in Europe than they now do

Which is something else.

I wrote it in a rush a phrased it poorly / overly strongly. I meant it in the spirit of it being definitively harder to do than it is now.

Agreed, those with hazardous occupations should be disenfranchised.

Does democracy not scale very well when the population is too large to personally know your representatives?

Representation is itself a scaling hack :).

Plato and aristotle had the perfect number at 5000, the number of people who can hear a speaker in a forum. Plus, their slaves, servants, women and other property.

Maybe politicians should have to pass a semi-"objective" process that is like the ideal for university admissions. They have to demonstrate (in a formal way, not by spending millions to broadcast their message to the people) that they are smart and prosocial.

I don't actually doubt most of the politicians are pretty smart. Cameron elegantly managed to use the promise of an EU election to form the first majority government for 30 years. Now Boris Johnson managed to use the election to get Cameron to resign and possibly tale over the government himself.

If only they used their smarts.. smarter.

If governments and supragovernmental bodies didn't wield so much power over our lives, the outcome of elections wouldn't matter nearly as much.

I for one welcome our new robot overlords

This may be a good time to question whether all votes in a democracy should be weighed equally, and how technology can make a difference to solve the problems of modern democracy.

Most modern democracies are representative democracies with aspects of direct democracy (in the form of referendums) using some sort of voting system. I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea of a representative democracy, but that most problems arise from the way the voting system is commonly implemented.

As far as I know, all modern democracies implement their primary voting using votes with equal weight. Some democracies, like the United States, have a layer of indirection (the electoral college), but still their primary votes are all weighed equally. While all people should be equal in the eyes of the law and with regard to human rights, there are good arguments that political votes should not be equal. Even with an equal total say for all citizens, it should be possible to weigh different topics that they have a say in towards areas that they are best qualified to make decisions about.

Imagine a political system where all citizens get to vote on representative experts per subject, with an implementation similar to PageRank. People who are indicated to be more qualified for a subject through both historical metrics (previous votes) and objective metrics (qualifications like a degree or work experience) get a stronger vote on representatives for that subject. The elected representatives could either advise politicians (in a binding fashion) or make political decisions directly. This system could strongly reduce a large problem of current democracies that the Brexit vote highlights: all people get an equal say about all issues, regardless of their ability to make qualified judgments about those issues.

Of course there are significant problems with such a weighed voting system, primarily how to make a system that weighs each person's vote fairly and accurately, and who gets to decide how the voting system itself works. This is where modern technology could play a role: by designing a digital voting system that is simple to understand and transparent, so that it can be audited by average citizens. In order to work well, I think this system should be strongly based on the scientific method and should therefore evaluate empirical evidence, instead of emotional sentiments. Another important aspect would be to learn from history, instead of overlooking its lessons. This means the system should be strongly based on political systems that have been shown throughout history to work best, like democracy. It also means that the system should avoid the historical pitfalls of political systems, like concentrating power to a specific group of people.

It would be great to know whether HN thinks that such a system could be designed, or that these ideas are utopian and wont work.

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