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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Democracy is interesting because it requires you to step outside your own head, understand that there are people who hold different values and different experiences from you, and then mentally engage with them, holding your own doubt and revulsion at bay, until you can come to a consensus that's acceptable to everyone. It's a thoroughly unnatural and uncomfortable experience that can be both fatiguing and time-consuming. No wonder everybody predicts that it will fail - by definition, a democracy requires occasional subjugation to points of view that are alien to your way of life, and which point of view is often unpredictable and changeable.

But I'd much rather have it than any system of forced social roles, where there is one person or small cabal of people who make the decisions and everyone else knows their job is simply to obey.

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"...until you can come to a consensus that's acceptable to everyone."

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, democracy rarely seeems to come to any consensus that is acceptable to everyone, but rather serves as little more than a moral battering ram that the 51% can use to impose their will on the 49%. Perhaps one day people will realize that democracy, given its cultish appeals (e.g. "but don't you know other systems are worse!?") is simply barbaric.

Maybe technology will render nation-states obsolete within my lifetime. I can only hope.

Any ideas on how technology would render nation states obsolete?

nation states fight over borders to increase tax revenues. wars are governments jockeying to get bigger pieces of the pie.

the solution is to make the pie arbitrarily large.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Continue to broaden the scope of what can be transmitted securely and anonymously over the internet until jurisdiction over specific pieces of land approaches irrelevancy.

National borders will never be irrelevant. The meat and bones will always require a physical domicile.

"WAIT GUYS! Half A has 1 more vote than Half B. Looks like we don't need to do any science, let's just assume the people from Half A were right".

Democracy and religion share beds, occasionally, I might even say they were married on upon a time. Barbarism indeed.

Why do you assume all questions are answerable by science? Science says that if you assemble materials in a particular way you will get a solar panel, and if you assemble other materials in a different way then you get a toaster; it can't say which you should do.

Science says that a human being is a collection of genes which are formed at conception; it can't say anything about abortion, murder, capital punishment or self-defense. Those aren't topics on which it is competent: all it can do is inform discussions thereon, by affirming, 'yes, we are talking about a human being in this case, but in this other we are not.'

You simply can't address every issue with an appeal to science.

I never actually assumed that. The scientific method applies to systems which have a set of observables. Social science is not a second class citizen to natural science, as both society and nature are systems which can be observed. Therefore, it seems more prudent to ask "why" (i.e. applying the scientific method, or some more general inquisitive process) Half A and Half B disagree rather than simply assuming one half is correct and moving on. In the latter case, there is no learning.

> Social science is not a second class citizen to natural science, as both society and nature are systems which can be observed.

I honestly think social science is only slightly more scientific than astrology.

But even were it not, science is not capable of answering questions like what one ought to do. Sure, A & B disagree; it's interesting why they do; maybe they're both wrong; maybe they're both partially-correct; but what should be done about it? Science can only say what is, not what ought to be.

You have to make some philosophical assumptions (e.g. utilitarianism) in order to even think that science can provide direction, and even then you will get bogged down in questions like, 'what is the greatest good for the greatest number?'

As an aside to the downvoters: don't downvote if you think I'm wrong; please share how you think science can answer a question like 'ought we execute murderers.'

That's why real democracies have more than 2 [real/major] parties. Governments are a lot more interesting and concensusy when they're made up of 23%, 27%, 24%, and 26% for example. Suddenly there's no single majority to ram its will down everyone else's throat.

Except that cases are hardly rare where a small minority party becomes crucial for forming a government and winds up wielding power far beyond its numerical support among the population. And its not rare for countries to be unable to form a government for months or even years.

That's probably because their system is flawed.

In Denmark, we never have to wait for long. Whenever those in power want to pass something big or important in parliament, they seek a broad support - otherwise, it'll just get repealed whenever they lose power.

Everything certainly isn't perfect here (yes, it can be darn annoying when center parties hold too much power - but then again, it is a stabilizing factor), but healthy mechanics can get you a long way with democracy.

I feel a lot of people in this thread point out cases where democracy doesn't work. That's easy. But maybe it would be better to look for cases where it does work and learn from it.

It's much easier to agree on which cases are failures than which ones are successful.

Part of the problem with the US is that it is just so damned big and so diverse. I' not sure democracy scales well.

To take your example of Denmark; Denmark has less population, and half again as much area as Massachusetts. Comparisons between the US as a whole, and individual European countries don't always make the most sense; the more appropriate comparison would be to the EU, to have the same kind of multitudes of disparate people under a common banner.

God forbid society should invest in the interests of small minorities occasionally to win their support for the majority interest?

Imagine party A has 23%, party B has 28%, and party C has 49%. Party A and B join forces; they decide per consensus on how they would vote in parliament. Since they have together 51% and vote as one, they don't need to consult party C, even though it's the party with the most votes.

We have again a situation where 51% crushes the 49%.

That's only true if party A and party B agree on every decision, in which case you simply have two parties, "AB" and C.

Also, in some countries, there are way more than 3 factions (over a dozen in Belgium and the Netherlands), making it less likely that the same subset of parties will find itself in agreement every time.

The effect of having that many factions is that the majority part of parliament will always take the minority opinion into account because they know that, in the next vote, they may be part of that minority.

Of course, that is not a guarantee; I think it is part of a nation's culture. Other countries may value the short-term "let's win this vote" way above the longer term "we have to live in this country together".

That certainly seems the case in the USA, where "in four years time, we might end up with the shorter straw." doesn't seem to play a big role in politics (?anymore?)

its solvable by using consensus democracy rather than majority democracy.

The literal consent of the governed is necessary for government to be legitimate.

According to a definition of legitimacy concocted specifically to apply to a few selected forms of government.

I've participated in such structures before. Honestly, very few people have the time to go to 5-hour-long meetings on a weekly basis.

sounds like you were in the majority.

i have been in it also, and it works just fine. i certainly do not like to be in a minority where the majority gets what it wants and the minority is steamrolled.

A significant role of government is to manage conflicts. Conflicts, by definition, lack consensus.

Imagine Hal doesn't want Bill to build a fence (to make it fun, let's say Hal isn't even going to be impacted by the fence, he just doesn't like Bill).

How does consensus handle this?

Our current system tells Hal to sit down and shut up about what Bill does on his property. If consensus is the norm, Hal has a veto on Bill's fence.

An answer about requiring people to be reasonable in a consensus government is not very satisfying, people aren't reasonable.

consensus works by give and take. Hal and Bill don't just have to deal only with the fence. They have many more items they need to negotiate if they are to live as neighbors.

our current system does NOT allow Bill to do whatever he wants on his property.

our current system does NOT allow Bill to do whatever he wants on his property.

Of course not. My point was that it doesn't give Hal a veto over anything Bill might want to do.

In my experience the more common result is some kind of compromise that fails to solve the actual problem and leaves everyone dissatisfied.

You hope that nation-states will be obsolete within your lifetime? Seems to me that's a strange wish given the overwhelming evidence that we would then be faced with a global corporate feudalism from which there would be no retreat. Nowhere to run, no place to hide where people can live as they wish in a way they find congenial. The latter might be unlikely given that local laws could be easily rendered pointless if a powerful central authority elsewhere deemed them unacceptable. Only my view but I'd call that a dystopia.

You say 'democracy, given its cultish appeals (e.g. "but don't you know other systems are worse!?") is simply barbaric'. Does your "quote" rebut itself as you seem to suggest? What is your non-barbaric alternative to democracy?

> In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, democracy rarely seeems to come to any consensus that is acceptable to everyone...

To be fair to American democracy as originally described, supermajorities were required to make big decisions (Constitutional amendments). And power was decentralized between branches of government and layers of government (state and local governments had more authority than the federal government on some matters). This design was amended and eroded over the years. One of the consequences of the movement toward a simple-majority democracy is the 'battering ram' effect you're (justifiably) complaining about.

I'm actually beginning to think that we should require a 2/3 majority for simple legislation and a 3/4 majority for amendments. Maybe it'd help nip a lot of problems in the bud.

Or just create new ones …

The Athenians would say that we do not have a democracy but an oligarchy. The only way that they saw to actually make the government the will of the people was to select representation by sortition, i.e. drawing by lot, like jury selections.

I don't think that they were wrong in this regard. If we look at the demographics of the house of representatives, they do not come close to making a parallel of the demographics of the country. If representatives were selected at random, we'd have 51% women in the house, we'd have people from all economic backgrounds according to the current wealth disparity instead of only the wealthy. We'd need to actually focus our resources on education if we agreed that really anybody can be selected for representation. If the pool of representatives was large enough (larger than we have now, which is a limitation put in place to make party control easier), then random selection should always result in a representative body that is actually representative.

It doesn't work when the population is composed of different social groups with vastly opposite systems of values. Iraq for example (I was born in Iraq).

We can already see a similar thing happening in America with different ethnic groups not getting along well together. I think this will only get worse over time.

Pro Trump and anti Trump camps are really about how a significant number of whites are not getting along with a significant number of Hispanics (and other ethnic groups).

Unless of course those groups mix and form new ones. Unfortunately people like to self-segregate and push down others for their own cultural pride.

What you speak of is backwards. The answer to disagreement isn't for both parties to walk away in opposite directions, nor is it for one party to kill the other party. Disagreement is valuable in that it provides the world an opportunity to learn something. Your solution is to run away? That's seriously very sad, and I feel like crying that we still have people who think like this. The solution isn't crying, either. Many people are observed to get along with people who have different ideas, culture, and ethnicity. Perhaps a better solution is in education and learning.

Where does he say his solution is to run away?

He doesn't say it explicitly. But what can I imagine when someone speaks of ethnic groups as if they followed some sort of inverse gravity law?

> Disagreement is valuable in that it provides the world an opportunity to learn something.

Please stop. I dont want to have disagreement. I dont want to have this endless debate. I want to be left alone. I dont want people to make descision for me. I want to spend my brain cycles in my work. Not this. Please stop.

I can't tell if you're trolling or not. Disagreement is the way a society grows. If everyone agreed on everything, we'd be stuck in the dark ages. It's very simple. This happened with pretty much every advancement in science, most notably with Galileo. Strive to disagree. Don't strive for agreement, for then we are stuck in some sort of pseudotopia.

This is great and all in words, but in reality a lot of democratic decisions end up with really close counts like 51% against 49%. If you look at it like this, a majority is forcing the minority into something even though there is actually a significant number of people it effects who are against the motion. This is far better than a dictatorship, but it is a flaw and something that human society still needs to find a solution too.

What's the alternative, assuming that you can't reach into peoples' heads and change their positions on an issue? Regardless of the decision, you would still have 51% of the population in support of it and 49% opposed (or vice versa, if the system were minority rules).

If I could reach into peoples' heads, there's a solution: "mind your own damn business". If we didn't care so much what other people did, then we wouldn't disagree so much. And in general, I think the world would be a better place if more people did this. But some fraction of issues will always affect multiple people (that's the whole point of government, after all).

And besides, nobody's yet invented a mind-control ray, and it would be pretty icky if they did. (There's a certain irony to altering peoples thoughts so that they care less about what other people think...)

As I stated, there is no alternative as of today, and that is the flaw. Its not terrible flaw, and I think that the democracies on this earth are far better than any other form of government, but maybe one day someone will think up the alternative. Mind control though would just be an uber-dictatorship.

I think there's an alternative already available and sparingly in use today: certain decisions can require 2/3rds, 3/5ths etc. majorities.

For instance, any decision that will last for generations and impact profoundly in everyone's life, like secession or a "Brexit" should require slightly more votes than a majority one. Unfortunately it's only typically used by parliaments, courts and senates for constitutional change, never for popular vote on issues.

No, some countries use referendums for lots of things, like Switzerland. Including quite small things like whether or not to build new tunnels.

Simple majority has the advantage that it's fair. If you're going to start claiming that decisions that will "profoundly impact everyone" need higher than majority you're just going down the road to totalitarianism. Anyone can claim a decision they think they're on the losing side of is too important to leave to majority decision making. Then it's just about ramping up the threshold until you win.

If 51% and 49% cant come to agreement they should live separately. I am not advocating full secession but something like Hong Kong (HK handles everything except Defence and External Affairs).

(I think) In democracy, voters are less likely to compromise. This is result of weak discussion between >1m.

Unfortunately ideology and geography have a correlation that, while positive, is less than one. There will always be a minority that gets overridden. And while it is a good thing for people to have freedom to move to a place that supports their values in extreme cases (some are even talking seriously about it this election), in most situations that isn't practical.

Still that does not stop me from solving 90% of the problem using seperations. For example I would like to have greater say in where my taxes are spent. If we can all agree on this, this would be great.

But likely technology (as always) will come to rescue before democracy. This is in reference to rise of renunciations, AirBnB etc.

> What's the alternative, assuming that you can't reach into peoples' heads and change their positions on an issue?

Supermajority voting on all legislation & referenda? After all, 2/3 of the population forcing 1/3 to obey a law is much more reasonable than 51% forcing 49%.

And making amendments take a 3/4 vote is even better: if 75% of people think something is a good idea, then it probably is.

> a lot of democratic decisions end up with really close counts like 51% against 49%.

America (and the few other remaining non-proportional systems) suffers from this problem much more than the more advanced democratic systems. If America is all you know, you shouldn't generalize too much.

First, I think you might be overestimating the number of decisions that come down to 51% vs 49%.... there are countless actions that the government takes that have a much higher societal-agreement rate than 51%. It only feels like everything is 51v49 because those decisions are the ones people spend their time arguing about; we never talk about the things we all agree on.

Secondly, for spectrum decisions (e.g. what tax rate we should have, how much to spend on defense and education, etc) getting as close to 51v49 for the decision is probably the most equitable outcome.

>Democracy is interesting because it requires you to step outside your own head, understand that there are people who hold different values and different experiences from you, and then mentally engage with them, holding your own doubt and revulsion at bay, until you can come to a consensus that's acceptable to everyone.

Objectively, it can be seen that this is completely untrue. No understanding or empathy is strictly required by democracy. Democracy only requires that you obstinately stick to your preferred viewpoints and shout down those who disagree with you. This can be seen in the legislative chambers of nearly every Western-style democracy on the planet. Specifically:

- in Canada, the hallmark of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's rule was a complete rejection of anything outside his personal ideology, even when his ideology flew directly in the face of fact or public opinion.

- in the US, we are seeing someone who most certainly suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder not only excelling in politics, but may soon come to hold the highest public office and command of the world's most powerful military.

The days of good-old collaboration and working together for the common good back in the 1950s were a short-lived phenomenon created by the shared experience of surviving the deadliest conflict in human history.

Those days are over.

No understanding or empathy is strictly required by democracy.

Yes, it's required. Democracy is compromise. The people need to be highly intellectual to make their roles in the society balance between what they want and what society (other people) want them to be. Without understanding of difference, everything breaks down easily. See what happened when us bomb other countries with simply unbelievable execuses. You can see that people having no understanding of outside world basically do not afraid to use violence to make their thinking a reality...

Uneducated, ignorant people have always existed in democracies. Those democracies still exist.

Being "Highly intellectual" is therefore not a requirement to participate in a democracy.

Just look around you, man. There are stupid people everywhere.

> But I'd much rather have it than any system of forced social roles, where there is one person or small cabal of people who make the decisions and everyone else knows their job is simply to obey.

If Clinton wins the election in a few days, then at the end of her first term, you're looking at 32 years of only three families in the Whitehouse. If she wins a second term, then that's 36 years - almost two whole generations. It's symptomatic of how little things change at the top.

To be a big gun in US politics, you need so many connections and so much money that only a few people can do it. This election has had a two-year electioneering cycle, a ridiculous expense. The notion that 'anyone can become president' just doesn't pan out in reality.

Seems to me that cabals can always form and skew the implementation away from the ideal balance that makes the concept of democracy seem so fair in the first place. I'll recite a personal narrative as my main observation of this potential outcome in the wild.

Several years ago I helped cofound a worker owned for-profit software and design cooperative. Its constitution was formulated around a mix of product incubation and consulting in support of labour solidarity through cultivation of progressively more interesting/motivating/challenging work. It was founded after we had all quit our high-performing and very profitable agency whose non-technical/non-creative ownership cut one too many corners on the sustainable systems that we were working on. Typical anti-flow type management decisions with arbitrary deadlines, death marches, and silly promises to clients despite solid contracts (which I had written and negotiated directly with the clients and our lawyers).

In the new co-op that us engineers and designers from the old company formed, there was growth early on, and a plan to expand to new cities/markets because the cost structure was horizontally scalable by design. This was before boutique remote app studios and incubators became commonplace (at least before all the really big agencies tried to get in on it, e.g. Sid Lee, Ogilvy).

Lo and behold, it turned out there were just barely enough members who wanted to take a more employee/entitlement oriented tack (as opposed to entrepreneurial) vs the other half. These members were of the same local cultural and linguistic background (the socially dominant one), whereas the rest of us were from all over. The locals formed a "cabal" of sorts and pushed for spending lots of money on a swanky office, vetoed horizontal expansion and denied the right to work for one of the members who had just moved to a new city as part of the previous plan (by voting to refuse to allocate some of our mandated work to him).

The original vision fell apart and was replaced by something more parochial. The more "ambitious" cofounders all left and the co-op continues to thrive in its own way today but as a shadow of the dream we had in the beginning.

An autocracy would not have endured these trials so early on. In top-down mode, the boss gets to enforce focus. Certainly not good if the dictator is not benevolent, but the experience provided for a lot of reflection on governance.

Reminds me of this explainer video I saw recently from CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&t=344s

No matter the exact loci of power, there are always gradients between the points, and forces that can bring imbalance are very hard (perhaps undesirable) to control.

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