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Liquid Democracy

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52 pointsguerrilla24 comments

So much of the frustration in the U.S. is rooted in the mismatch between what civilians want and what elective representatives are doing. Time and time again when civilians express their frustration - like what's going on now in these nationwide protests - our elected representatives tell us to just calm down and "go show your frustration at the next elections if you want to see change".

It strikes me as awfully out of touch because that's exactly what we've been doing all along, yet we don't see the results we want. So either it's our fault because we just suck at this voting thing, or there are systemic inefficiencies in our elective representative democracy.

Liquid democracy seems to be the ideal form of democracy because it gives every citizen the freedom to vote directly on the issues, or to delegate their vote if they wish. Liquid democracy was not technically feasible in 1787 when the U.S. Constitution was written, but technology has come a long way since then.

It's a shame that it's almost considered sacrilege to even suggest that the political system our founding fathers devised over 200 years ago may not actually be perfect in 2020, and could be improved with some modernization.

>"go vote if you want to see change".

>It strikes me as awfully out of touch because that's exactly what we've been doing all along,

Well this is not quite right. Many people (especially young people) actually don't vote, especially in the smaller local elections that elect people like your police chief. The two party system in the US is broken but young people not voting makes it worse.

Politics would looks very different if 90% of millennials started showing up to vote. Dare I suggest they might even start running for office?

Many young people don't vote precisely because they see it as being an ineffective way to enact change, since the politicians they do vote for don't implement the ideas they ran on. They also see the establishment doing everything in their power to hobble candidates (read: sanders) that are actually honest, consistent, and striving for the common man rather than corporations and other powerful entities.

https://i.imgur.com/F9kdJqL.gif

https://img1.quotesuniverse.com/quotes/01/noam-chomsky-quote...

People, including the young, are demotivated by rigged games.

Is it true that politicians don't do what they ran on? I think that may be a myth. My understanding is the opposite: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-ke...

I don't really buy it. Young people overwhelmingly preferred Bernie to Clinton and Bernie to Biden, yet Bernie lost both Democratic primaries. The game is rigged.

Also elections are what, every 2-4 years? That's a very infrequent cycle. Currently there are no elections going on at the moment, so what do you want these protesters to do, wait patiently until November?

I think it's easy to confuse "mismatch between what civilians want and what elective representatives are doing" with "mismatch between what civilians want and other civilians want", particularly as we exist in partisan bubbles.

That's not to say the former doesn't exist, just that we should be careful in how we account. Look, for instance, at the "approval rates" of "congress" versus the approval rates of "my congressperson".

You could also delegate your votes to people without them participating in the platform [1].

For example, you could delegate on Bill Gates because his opinions are already gathered on topics such as a carbon tax and basic income [2]. This data is added by people & bots from Bill Gates' blog, tweets, newspapers, etc.

[1] https://hectorperezarenas.com/2019/08/31/2-step-votings-for-...

[2] https://agreelist.org/a/basic-income https://agreelist.org/a/carbon-tax

This used to be a big thing with the pirate party in Germany before they started to wither away a few years ago.

Personally I think this would pretty quickly converge back to more traditional forms of democracy because I think it's unlikely that people directly participate in a lot of decisions and you get back to something comparable to the status quo in most existing democracies.

I think any system that wants to make accurate decisions based on aggregate preferences probably needs to be able to collect them passively rather than actively.

That's the beauty, they don't have to directly participate if they want to but they can at any time if they need to.

I discovered his idea in the blockchain world and find the concept quite interesting. Essentially you can allocate your vote on different topics to different representatives or vote directly if you wish. It's highly competitive and fluid in terms of representative accuracy to the constitutes opinions, as you can change representatives at will (depending on how you set it up).

I wonder how we could test it out for elections? It likely needs to start small or in the private sector, or post-revolution would give opportunity to rewrite laws in a major way

When I first heard of this, I was also quite intrigued. But I wonder if it might actually be vulnerable to some of the darker patterns of human 'social markets' if implemented in its freest form; we already have something that has the structure, if not the character, of a liquid democracy: Twitter. In such a system, people with a lot of allocated votes would end up with considerable de-facto power that would nonetheless be constantly volatile to emotional outburst no-confidence tectonics if you were allowed to re-allocate your vote at any time/the voting distribution was monitored in real time. You'd also almost certainly end up with Zipfian popularity gravity wells where some representatives were more popular simply because they're more popular, perhaps without genuine merit.

This is important to note, thank you. Our social nature (and dark it can be) must be accounted for in policy decisions... better than it has been recently.

I would like to know of examples in the blockchain world that people would call successful.

The closest one I know is Dash and budget proposals.

I did not say it was successful, quite the opposite, they drove people away with their extremism

https://handshake.org is the only good use case I know of, but their success is still widely unknown. It largely depends on how they play with ICANN

I also understand that Hyperledger is having some success, but the cryptokiddies really don't like that (realistic) implementation.

The biggest issue with blockchain projects is that they want to create some new order rather than participating in the existing society, and by doing so, artificially limit themselves.

One thing I worry about is manipulation of topic assignment. That said, the impact may be limited.

The wonderful thing about this is that it effectively eliminates the legalized bribery that happens with lobbying. There are 15 lobbyists per congressperson just for the finance industry, each sitting on top of who knows how much money.

Also, it allows for "voice on demand." If 95% of legislation is unimportant to the average person, it can safely be entrusted to the representative. The 5% that is important gets a direct voice.

It seems vastly more democratic.

The point of representative democracy is to prevent the tyranny of the majority in mitigation of the deterioration of minority rights.

No, that's the point of Constitutionally limited government, which is an orthogonal feature to representative vs. direct democracy.

A constitutionally limited government can explicitly hurt minority rights, for instance the Confederate States Constitution, or betray intentions of principles through direct democratic procedures by interpretation and enforcement.

With direct democracy you do have tyranny of the majority while this is certainly mitigated in a representative democracy; for instance the 2016 election where the popular vote would have selected a different president.

The US founding fathers were very familiar with Aristotle who stated: "Unlimited democracy is, just like oligarchy, a tyranny spread over a large number of people.”

Indeed the US founding fathers' decisions reflect this, If we're to believe their commentary, they picked a republic with the motivation of liberty for all with emphasis on the elective structure, Constitutional Convention of Hamilton 1787 : "We are now forming a republican government...Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.”

Scalia has a good talk about this, how a merely constitutionally limited government is completely ineffective of guaranteeing its provisions, its interpretation, and its enforcements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0

"Every banana republic has a bill of rights"

That noble purpose is largely stymied, however, in a first-past-the-post voting system where wealthy individuals and corporations have an outsized ability to lobby and influence. Under these constraints, it almost inevitably leads to a two-party political duopoly where voters must vote for the lesser evil -- because the threshold is not to be good or effective but to be slightly less awful than your opponent.

Well, empirically it doesn't do that at all, so that's not really a relevant argument.

I used to be in favor of this but now I think it's in precisely the wrong direction. We need more ways to educate individual voters of the complex tradeoffs and compromises in policies, and teach people to appreciate the complexity of system effects. We don't need more ways for people to capriciously offload their civic duty to whoever seems most willing to responsibly accept their proxy.

People are given the opportunity to vote on issues in liquid democracy. In the U.S. we have a representative democracy where people aren't allowed to vote on issues, they can only vote for reps that they think will have their best interest at heart.

Liquid democracy is the opposite of offloading civic duty. It's an opportunity for citizens to assert their voice directly in the policymaking process.

For instance, if you are a republican living in a blue district, you won't have very good representation under our current system. But with a liquid democracy, you can represent yourself directly whenever you want, effectively bypassing your regional politician.

It's the best of both worlds of representative democracy and direct democracy.

> We need more ways to educate individual voters of the complex tradeoffs and compromises in policies, and teach people to appreciate the complexity of system effects

The effort, to be educated, is not optimal on a capitalist playing field withing a nation as large as the USA. The information is overwhelming and the result (individual voter franchise) is pathetically ineffectual. It's a fool's errand, which is the outlook shared by many americans.

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