Hyperarchy: Democracy for the Digital Era | Hacker News Reader

Hyperarchy: Democracy for the Digital Era

blog.hyperarchy.com

60 pointsnathansobo49 comments

I like some of these ideas, particularly the flexible system of delegation. But right now the issue-ranking system seems like a weak link. It's too simplistic and could easily devolve into an exercise in voting on bumper-sticker slogans. There should be tools for more reasoned exploration of the issues, like an argument mapping tool for instance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map). Don't just let me vote on a tweet-sized solution, let me see the arguments made for and against it in a structured way that I can also vote on.

The concept of Hyperarchy was already explored by demexp.org. Look for instance at the aspect of vote delegation: http://www.demexp.org/dokuwiki/description_of_the_political_...

It's an interesting idea, but I see some major problems.

1) It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity. There's quite a lot of inertia/sentiment preventing this sort of situation. If you can't insure that each person only gets one voice, then the system breaks.

2) What happens when the Goon Swarm arrives? No, I'm serious. It's hard to troll the government as it stands today. The internet sees a lot of groups out there whose only goals are to inconvenience others. This system could actually give Anonymous etc. real world power.

> It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity

Actually, it's quite possible nowadays in many countries, with the introduction of smart ID cards.

That is... relatively scary. I feel that one of the essential features of the internet is its anonymity. Take that away and it loses some of its value.

This isn't the Internet. It may run over the Internet, but it isn't the Internet. It's a government. A more delicate balance of accountability and anonymity is called for.

I'd also observe that nobody is really claiming that we must run out and immediately implement this to replace the US Federal government. Start a house-level government, or a frat-level government, or I suppose more relevantly for this crowd, use it for your open source project's governance. Work your way up, learning from the experience. Anonymity and coercion and a lot of other problems that absolutely must be solved for this to work at large scales need not necessarily be solved at smaller ones. Scale up the security later when we need to, and when we understand the space better. In the future we need better cryptography and P2P and etc etc etc, but let's learn about the space now.

(There's something about the word "government" that just makes engineer's engineering sense go flying out the window and turns them right back into Waterfall designers. It's OK to iterate!)

Alex Howard suggested this link to me about how one country is using Bank Accounts for authentication. what do you think of THAT idea??

http://egovau.blogspot.com/2011/06/turning-open-government-p...

The concept of flexible delegation is really interesting, but what about secrecy of the ballot? Is there any way that can be ensured? The article does not touch on the subject, unfortunately.

From the article: > You can also drill into each person’s individual ranking to learn their personal opinion.

I hope you can turn that off!

Secret ballots are only useful to prevent coercion. Why else would you want your ballot secret?

Because I might be turned down for a job or apartment or loan because of my political views ?

And because it's frankly nobody else's business how I vote ?

Voting is an inherently public, civic act. It's not a personal matter. Your vote has a direct effect on lots of other people. Why shouldn't you be accountable for that?

You should review the history behind secret voting for a list of reasons why secret votes are considered a good thing.

I've looked around Wikipedia, but the only reason I can find is voter intimidation. Every presidential election in the US until Grover Cleveland in 1884 was by open ballot, so it's not like an open-ballot system is untenable.

I'd consider voter intimidation a sufficient reason. Why is it so easily dismissed, in your opinion?

Voting for a representative and voting directly on an issue are two very different things. Sure, the idea behind them is the same, but the level of transparency of your stance is drastically higher in the latter case. In other words, you can always say "Well, yeah, I know John Doe is 'pro-choice', but I didn't vote for him because of that. I voted for him because of his ideas for lowering the unemployment."

On the other hand, if you publicly voted "pro-choice" instead of "pro-life", there's no way you can deny it. So it comes down to plausible deniability. As to why you would want to deny your own choice in the first place, several other commenters have already explained that.

Buying and selling votes is common practice in many parts of the globe. The less secret a vote is the easier it is to trade.

The problem is that, as others have mentioned, from openness results social pressure, and social pressure can severely affect your decisions.

On the other hand, openness of course leads to transparency, and transparency prevents corruption and lobbying (to a considerable degree, at least). Interestingly though, this is also due to social pressure.

My vision would be a system that combines techniques such as the ones deployed in BitCoin and NameCoin (Public Keys) to ensure unique identities but still preserve anonymity. In a such a system, everyone could freely speak their mind anonymously, yet still be accountable (in this case meaning he or she can be identified as some individual, but not as a specific person). This would also lead to reducing debates to facts and arguments, by effectively completely depersonalizing it. It would no longer be about people, it would be about problems, ideas and solutions.

I don't really know if this technically feasible (I'm not even sure if it makes sense to anyone but me), but I think it would solve many of the problems with real democracy.

>transparency prevents corruption and lobbying

This isn't really true. I'm interning at the Sunlight Foundation this Summer, and some of our free tools are used by lobbyists with less money to spend than some larger interests here in D.C.

Transparency can actually lead to more, but more varied, lobbying.

The really remarkable thing about transparency is just how much corruption is completely knowable and out in the open, yet totally ignored.

OK. So suppose your voting preferences are available online.

Your boss happens to be a friend of the candidate, or a member of a political party. You are told to vote a certain way or lose your job.

You are turned down for a bank loan because your bank manager doesn't like liberals.

You are refused an apartment because the people on your street don't like conservatives.

You fail at an interview because the interviewer only likes people who vote the way she does.

This is so bloody obvious it shouldn't need to be spelled out. Secret ballots are secret so that people can exercise their democratic rights without fear of discrimination, recrimination or intimidation.

WTF? Maybe the interviewer only hires tall people, or the people on your street don't like your race, or you are turned down for a bank loan because you're a woman. There are lots of stupid prejudices in the world, but people don't go around hiding who they are all the time. It's just not worth it.

You really don't want to let go of this idiocy, do you ?

The examples I gave are ways in which the democratic process can be subverted. It's more than just whether you are black or gay. It's the very basis by which a citizen can freely exercise their choice.

If that choice can be interfered with then the whole principle of one person - one vote goes out the window.

If I know my vote will impact my personal future - that I, or my family could be attacked or threatened, or my career ruined, because of the way I vote - even if that is just a potential threat then I will not vote at all, or if forced to will vote safely with the herd.

The examples I gave are ways in which the democratic process can be subverted.

OK, I finally see what your point is. I just disagree with it.

>people don't go around hiding who they are all the time

What a strange and naive life you must lead if you truly believe this.

The identities people have difficulty obscuring (gender, skin color, weight, etc) just so happen to be the aspects that have the most enduring prejudice against them.

Because simply having certain beliefs and opinions and making them public can have social and economic consequences.

Only? Isn't that enough of a reason?

I am always reminded of the Athenian state, and how the vagaries of public opinion swung its direction wildly and rapidly.

A stable -archy needs to have an inherent conservatism to prevent public hysteria (cough MSM cough) yanking the direction around.

TLDR: Vote delegation. Not quite implemented yet, but in progress.

TSDG (Too Short, Don't Grok): "Even as simple as Hyperarchy makes voting, no one has time to share their opinion on every question. So Hyperarchy recasts representative democracy as networked democracy. Instead of electing a Senator you've never met to represent you on everything, you elect individuals you trust personally to represent you on specific issues. I can give my girlfriend power to vote on my behalf for questions about health and nutrition, while delegating to my coworker for questions concerning programming languages or digital privacy. So when my girlfriend votes about health or my coworker votes on technology, they vote for me as well.

But the real power is when influence flows through multiple connections in the social network. Suppose I delegate to my girlfriend on questions about nutrition, but she in turn delegates her vote to an expert like Michael Pollan. Then he inherits not only her vote, but mine as well. This transitive nature of delegation allows power to flow to individuals with expertise. By gaining the trust of a few influential people, Michael Pollan can emerge as a super-representative, voting on behalf of a huge number of followers. But you can change your delegation at any time, so Pollan would keep that power only as long as he deserved it."

The founders didn't design things they way they did because they traveled by horse (and I highly doubt it took a week from Monticello to Philadelphia), they designed things so that only the most capable citizens would be elected to leadership. They say this explicitly in the Federalist Papers (ok, maybe that bit was Hamilton, but still). They rejected direct democracy: by framing the nation as a "republic", with the assumption that only landowners would vote, through the electoral college, through the creation of the Senate, and by vesting remaining powers to the States. The term "democracy" is hard to find in American political discourse prior to the McKinley administration (the start of American imperialism) and didn't really get going until Wilson (entry into WWI). The most populist Presidents (Jackson and Bush II) have notably been among the worst.

Then again, if this tool really scales to 300M people, what's to stop the delegation of votes from leading to the same representative power structures and coalitions (which have more to do with game theory and human psychology than the prevailing mode of transport)?

Why not take a hybrid approach: leave the current power structure but replace the House of Representatives with this? That way you still have a check on the masses vis-a-vis the Senate (and the President).

"It was a long journey in those days from Monticello to Philadelphia, where the Congress was held. Part of the road ran through the wilderness, and it took more than a week to get there."

http://all-biographies.com/presidents/thomas_jefferson.htm

Footnote at the bottom of the page: Source: "The Lives of the Presidents and How They Reached the White House" by Charles Morris, LL.D., 1903. (We didn't check the book though)

I had the same exact idea regarding delegation years ago, but I no longer have the requisite faith in humanity to agree with it.

How many of us are actually wise enough to delegate a vote, when we think ourselves wise and others foolish?

And how many of us are actually qualified to decide public policy, when we can barely manage our own affairs?

Just imagine what sort of absurd tyranny a vast mob of common humans could accomplish if the power were truly given to them.

It would be surreal.

( A minimal republic, and a system of full-on social darwinism, to me, appears to be ideal. )

I have recently created something related, targeted to the Swedish political scene. The basic idea is similar but the concepts I use are quite different. If I may say so myself, my take on it is less sophisticated but more elegant.

Google Translate does an OK job with the site (although the Swedish word "Kontakt" should not be translated as "Plug"):

http://digitaldemokrati.se

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=...

(The site currently runs on a minimal Heroku setup, so it will go down quickly if this catches some attention here on HN. Nevertheless, enjoy it while it lasts.)

Also, the project is open source, although the main public repo is currently in bad shape and not quite up to date:

https://github.com/digitaldemokrati

If there is some interest in this, I could do a write-up in English and post it here as a separate submission. Anyone interested?

PS. After lurking and posting from throwaway accounts since 2007, this is my first HN post in my own name!

I can't seem to find the option that allows me to delegate. If that's implemented, I haven't been able to test it.

With that in mind, I wonder about how the delegation would work in practice. It sounds like a good idea, but the devil's in the details. For example, if I delegate my vote to someone else on a whole class of issues, but I want to cast my vote on a specific issue in that class, would that work?

Also, it would have to have some good controls for notifications. On the one hand, if I delegate my vote, I would like to stay informed about how that vote is being used. On the other hand, if there's a lot of voting going on and I get a notification every time my vote is used, it might just turn into noise for me. And the quantity might increase drastically if I have a long chain of delegation and people in that chain keep "overriding" the links that are further away.

All in all, it sounds like a great idea, but there's a whole lot of details that remain to be solved. I'm really interested in seeing whether and how they'll address those details.

According to the last paragraph on the linked page, vote delegation isn't implemented yet, but that seems to be top of their to-do list now.

Or we could use the freedom of information, power distribution, disintermediation and distribution efficiency made possible by the internet to obviate the need for centralized government.

I'd vastly prefer that to yet another version of allowing other people to determine my life for me.

It seems to me that that is exactly what this has the potential to do. It's only being framed in the language of centralized government because people might not be ready to deal with the truly revolutionary implications of such a system.

Not if anyone is still bound by the decisions of the majority.

Just because people are bound by the decisions of the majority doesn't mean it's centralized. They may decide that the cost of sometimes having to abide by group decisions that conflict with their individual preferences is outweighed by the benefit of being part of a group with an optimal decision-making process that (presumably) provides benefits to its members that they would not get if they chose to remain unaffiliated. All the while remaining decentralized.

Reading http://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html totally altered the way I look at this.

>Just because people are bound by the decisions of the majority doesn't mean it's centralized.

That wasn't the point my grandparent was making. The first and foremost critical flaw of democracy is (and always will be) that the majority can dictate over the minority. That has nothing to do with centralization.

Also, it's not about "personal preferences". It's about minorities effectively being dominated by the majority, without them having any way to fight back. While there might be some basic rights to protect minorities, they are essentially always stripped of the most important and fundamental right in such a society: influence on decisions that concern themselves. That is - factually - a tyranny for everyone who is not part of the majority.

This is a pretty useful tool for doing retros at Pivotal Labs. Makes figuring out what to talk about super easy and eliminates the whole dot voting awkwardness.

Good ideas in principle but I'm reminded of my experience tuning PID controllers for servo motors: too much P and you have wild, out-of-control oscillations, too much D and you never get to your target. The I value has to be carefully chosen to make sure misrepresentations are gradually amplified to break through the collective perception threshold.

As stated I think there's not enough damping in hyperarchy.

Where is the contact info for the people behind Hyperarchy? This is similar in concept to something I published a few years ago called "The Electors" (http://theelectors.org/), and it would be cool to chat with the Hyperarchy crew.

nathan@hyperarchy.com, maxbrunsfeld@gmail.com they would love to talk to you. i am alissa@hperarchy.com, their sister/gf respectively, so i help them in my free time get in touch with interested people and whatnot!

It's about time. That do remind me of Philip K. Dick's novel where the President is replaced by a computer program, tho!

kind of reminds me of the daemon/freedom™ novels by daniel suarez, in a good way.

This is a terrific concept, but it's also too important to be relegated to a private web site. Until the software can be run as a local application (perhaps as part of a mutually-corroborated P2P network) and its internal workings made fully verifiable, this is merely another fancy web-based-UX demonstration.

Elected representatives have set terms. We trust them with our vote for a specific period, and they can even make decisions that hurt some of our interests. Has this been taken into consideration? If we can switch votes at will, then it's not much different than crowdvoting. What about abuse of power? Is there a third leg (justice) to punish abusers?

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