Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Even if Congress were paying any attention to what constituents want (and they rarely seem to), it’s laughable that such a small number of people are expected to faithfully understand the wishes of so many people. Right now it’s on the order of one million regular people per representative!

Moreover, with such a small number of people, buying them becomes “easy”; it just doesn’t take that much money to corrupt a few hundred people. If most people need to work their entire lives to reach a million dollars, does it really take much for billionaires to steer the ship?

Now, if you were to vastly increase the number of representatives, you’d solve both problems. Suppose there were 5,000 members of Congress; then it would take a lot more money to corrupt enough people to change outcomes, and each of them would have to represent a much smaller fraction of the population.

A huge number of representatives would’ve been impractical before the age of the Internet (as you’d need a stadium just to hold a session) but with secure remote access it’s quite feasible to have tons of people logged in at once. And heck, why not designate a Congress-stadium anyway, for rare in-person sessions? If it works for mega-churches, it can work for politicians.

Go down the path even more and you land at direct democracy, where every citizen can vote on any legislative decision. Corporations can not buy half the people.

Because it can be a lot of work to dive into the details of a decision every citizen could delegate his vote to someone he trusts - delegate his vote in general, per topic (economical decisions to Betty, foreign affairs to Tom) or just for a single decision. You can change your vote delegation any time. This is Liquid Democracy.

Our current parliaments are just a special case of Liquid Democracy: You delegate your vote on all decisions to a single person but you can choose only between a handful of people and are not allowed to change your choice of delegation for the next 4 years.

Different Pirate Parties all over Europe tried to establish this new concept of democracy but I am afraid it was not well understood/they did not explain it well enough.

The Athenians had real problems with direct democracy. Plato is still relevant:

Plato rejected Athenian democracy on the basis that such democracies were anarchic societies without internal unity, that they followed citizens' impulses rather than pursuing the common good, that democracies are unable to allow a sufficient number of their citizens to have their voices heard, and that such democracies were typically run by fools. Plato attacked Athenian democracies for mistaking anarchy for freedom. The lack of coherent unity in Athenian democracy made Plato conclude that such democracies were a mere collection of individuals occupying a common space rather than a form of political organization.

Corporations don't need to buy off half the people, they just need to convince a winning minority to go along, which you've made easy because you've divided all of your political issues into things people pick and chose not out of expertise but out of ignorance. There are other issues like control of the agenda which aren't obvious but hugely relevant to controlling democracies.

Was Prop 8 in Cali, with lots of outsiders weighing in on limiting other people's rights a good thing?

This is my macabre favorite story about Athenian democracy:

The news of the victory itself was met with jubilation at Athens. Their joy was tempered, however, by the aftermath of the battle, in which a storm prevented the ships assigned to rescue the survivors of the 25 disabled or sunken Athenian triremes from performing their duties, and a great number of sailors drowned. A fury erupted at Athens when the public learned of this, and after a bitter struggle in the assembly six of the eight generals who had commanded the fleet were tried as a group and executed.

Sucked for those generals. Win the battle, lost men due to storms, then you get executed because the mob is angry and some orators know how to harness that. Modern direct democracy wouldn't be voting on executing people, but you can see where things can get just as twisted.

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

spoiler: the Athenians lost the war. Turns out getting rid of winning generals cause you're mad is dumb.

Plato preferred aristocracy; how many people do you think would like to live under a government that abandoned any pretense and outright called itself an aristocracy?

Does that make his criticisms of democracy any less valid?

Well, yes, for two reasons:

1. If democracy is bad, we should have some other system. Surely we should take into account the proposed alternative when we consider any criticism of democracy itself.

2. Implicitly any reference to the writings of Plato is burnished by the image of "wisdom of the ancients," so it is worth considering the flaws of these philosophers' work.

Direct democracy has flaws, we do have another system: representative democracy.

The Greeks were certainly wise, but my main point is this is not untrod ground, we've got at least 2000 years of experience to draw from.

Athenian democracy also frankly looks pretty different from direct democracy as is being proposed in this thread since it was made possible by the existence of slaves who did not participate. The Greeks were wise (or I guess we should say the ones whose writings we still read) but they were humans and products of their time.

Democracy is still better than any alternative

> Corporations can not buy half the people.

They can get them for free. See Fox News and Facebook.

Corporations can not buy half the people.

You don't have to buy anyone just influence.

You can buy influence by: building a media platform that everyone uses, buying a media platform that everyone uses, building a media source, or buying a bunch of media sources. Or most economically buying a handful of the most valuable Influencers, because most people love to love someone, and the platforms for Influencers are infinite now.

Most of the representation drawbacks to current systems you mentioned are intended to be safe guards against human whim, and to mitigate the power of super Influencers, originally the church. A substantial portion of the bureaucracy, forced slowness, involved in current systems are also deliberately placed for the same reasons.

When I look for causes for the current issues regarding ineffectiveness of parliaments, beyond their structure, I think that the huge change in the PERCEIVED ease of communication is having huge impacts on the actions of delegates. While all of us communicate a huge amount more than 30 years ago, I believe that generally we convey less. What is actually being conveyed by the current communication tools is relegated to the most compelling. The most effective communications are usually the topics with the most emotion charging them, because emotion conveys the most information in the current deluge of communication.

All of that hyper emotional and constant communication nearly paralyzes delegates, and also pushes all of us towards divisiveness because "for and against" become almost completely dogmatic as a result of level of emotion embedded.

> Moreover, with such a small number of people, buying them becomes “easy”;

Not to ignore your point, but there's actually substantial contention in the Political Science field about the impact of money. Does money flow to views, or do views flow to money? It's a difficult topic to study and is certainly not settled. Fun to delve into.

...or because the positions are smaller (and even less salient), it becomes easier to buy off a bunch of smaller reps. If the rep for Chattanooga is corrupt, would you know? Do you even know who they are, right now?

I'm not aware of any academic research on this off the top of my head, but it must exist, that's probably a better reference than a belief that everything changes if we adjust some numbers. That's a very engineer-oriented approach, but it misses that the current crisis (can we call it that) is social. People have to decide they will not support and/or elect unethical morons who say what they want to hear. Until then, it doesn't matter, and you aren't going to be able to reform the system without getting reformers into it, anyway. If you can do that, why is a massive change needed?

Don't mean to be a complete dick about this, but any supporting evidence would be appreciated. You made a logical leap (more reps = less corruption) which is not at all obvious.

It's not academic, but perhaps the founding fathers were onto something. The original constitution set the number of House Representatives to 1 for every 30,000 citizens. It was not until 1911 that the House capped the number at its present 435. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_H...

Yeah, well those guys thought only land-holding males should vote, so maybe they didn't. Did the men designing a system of government for a nation limited to the eastern coast have special insight in what governing 300 million people would look like?

Okay yeah fuck the patriarchy too but they weren't idiots. What they did was no small task and it's.. disrespectful.. to ignore that because they weren't progressive enough for your taste. We could appreciate the fact that they created a system that lets us change the rules as it evolves because they themselves admitted it would be impossible to forsee all the future context needed to make a perfect government. IIRC we've abolished slavery and granted women the right to vote and redefined marriage--we've corrected the issues you mentioned and more. What really kills the whole thing is when we feel the need to circumvent the rules in order to push an agenda down other people's throats. The system was designed to balance a plurality of of factions by preventing abuse of localized powers while at the same time reaching concensus for majority rule.

You mistake criticism for disrespect. I've read Federalist 10, as well. Yes, it's a marvel.

That we've corrected issues over time is evidence that they didn't have all the answers, as wise as they were.

≥That's a very engineer-oriented approach, but it misses that the current crisis (can we call it that) is social.

I've been trying to harp on this point for a while. Any proposed changes to how our government functions and how representatives gets elected isnt going to work because it's addressing something that isn't causing the problems we're seeing. The problem IS the electorate and the choices the electorate is making under its own will.

We are here, because the electorate chose to be. And the portion of the electorate that seems perfectly willing to make uninformed or irrational choices isn't exactly small, and often only counts as a technical "minority" when compared to the over all population.

You might alleviate the problem at best, and most likely only temporarily with any proposed changes. Every change that's been proposed in these discussions always assumes that the presence and amount of rational actors is sufficient, if not the norm. That's not what we currently see.

> buying them becomes “easy”

Are the People paying them enough though?

A talented trader, entertainer, or athlete can easily make ten times what we pay our President or the average Congressperson, yet the latter have vastly greater levels of responsibility.

If you want to know what a society values, then look at what they are willing to pay for. It looks like the public is not willing to pay for effective leadership.

Unfortunately a lot of people are angry at politicians and will be dead-set against paying them any more than current levels. But are we not putting ourselves in a vicious cycle of:

relatively bad pay for politicians -> incompetent leaders -> angry people -> bad pay for politicians?

Btw, a lot of countries have had issues with petty bribery of the police. How do you think they solved it? By doubling the pay of cops, not demonizing them for taking bribes.

I'm not saying I disagree in general but, in this case, I don't think the megacongress would help. The issue here is that the vast majority of citizens do not know or care about net neutrality.

In fact a lot of the older people I've talked to think "net neutrality" means the government can censor partisan comments on the internet.

True, time to call it internet freedom instead.

> buying them becomes “easy”;

That's precisely why systems where powers are concentrated among the hands of the few are bound to fail.

Unfortunately, adding a bunch of people probably can't get the result you want.

Imagine adding nodes to a fully connected graph (complete graph). The number of edges grows exponentially. That's sort of how congress, or any meeting, is. Each additional person adds a burden to the communication and negotiation costs.

As a result of that, and the fact that a party is most powerful if they always vote as a block, you see a tendency to vest power in party leadership (majority/minority leaders), or committee leaders. Adding a bunch of extra people would presumably amplify that.

>Even if Congress were paying any attention to what constituents want (and they rarely seem to),

They are listening to their electorate.

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