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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

So what do we do about the "fencification" of Democracy? The point of public debate is to win elections and affect public policy. Just like talented modern fencers don't make good sword fighters, talented political candidates don't make very good stateswomen and statesmen.

Is there a way to change the rules of public debate to align the game with the interest of the people?

To the author's point, it seems like the problem is fixed for a short time after new rules are introduced. Then, after the Machiavellian players figure out the weak points, the competition becomes a grotesque of what it was intended to be.

This makes me think Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation.

It's much more difficult to game the system when the game's rules keep changing.

[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/63773/what-jefferson-said

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> So what do we do about the "fencification" of Democracy?

Is the problem that politicians are too good at debate or is the problem that voters lack the critical thinking skills to recognize that they're being played? I'd lean much more towards the latter. In watching public policy debates during election cycles, I always notice how little it resembles the debates I did in high school. Politicians, debating the way they do for voters, would lose in high school debate competitions. If anything, debate taught me to recognize nonsensical arguments that were, none the less, somewhat convincing. I wonder what would happen if more voters were acquainted with the experience of having won an argument based solely how you argued rather than the substance of your position.

> Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation

Ah...but now you've just created a meta game that controls the actual game. The Machiavellian players, as you put it, would just figure out how to control the rule rewriting process to achieve their necessary victories once the game starts being played. The only thing that makes the rule changes in debate work for a while is that the rules are written by impartial people who are trying to fix a broken situation and, crucially, are ineligible to play by the rules they create.

I don't see how this relates to democracy. You as the voter are the judge and can use any criteria you want.

Since the US is not an actual democracy, but rather a democratic republic, it's extremely relevant.

Gerrymandering: states are precisely "cracked and packed" to maximize the number of expected majority-red districts in a state and minimize the number of majority-blue.

Partisaned primaries: optimization of campaigning and stumping is done thru visiting specific states that vote early in the primary. Most people don't vote for the best possible candidate, they vote for the candidate they dislike the most that they think can win. The biggest states (CA, TX, NY) are traditionally vote only a few weeks before the end of the primary while NH and IO vote extremely early, and thus, have outsized influence on who most people get to vote for.

Electoral college: Republican candidates don't spend any real effort in deep blue states and Democratic candidates don't spend any real effort in red states.

These are the extreme optimization of quirks in our "democracy" in the same way modern fencing is an extreme optimization of modern fencing rules rather than training for real-world sword fighting battles.

> Gerrymandering: states are precisely "cracked and packed" to maximize the number of expected majority-red districts in a state and minimize the number of majority-blue.

This definition of gerrymandering makes it sound like only Republicans do it, but in fact both major parties do it. For example https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/how-dee...

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