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Comment by maxwell | Hacker News Reader

> You cannot have both, unless you're willing to have a legislature that has something like 5,000 people in it, which is not practical. (For instance, the USA has 50 states, so if we wanted 100 representatives from each state, the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.)

Madison said the same thing, but we didn't have contemporary communication tools. My company's Slack has over 5,000 people and works just fine. Why is it unrealistic to repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and increase membership in the House by an order of magnitude?

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Because it might be possible to stand out in a crowd of 500 but not 5,000. And it certainly is not possible to do deals other than "this is good for everyone".

It would almost certainly end political parties. Lead to good ideas being debated openly by people who have no chance of hanging together long enough to force a direction.

My god man what are you thinking !

(/s)

> (/s)

IMO we should just drop this notation altogether and just let angry people get angry, and ignore 'em. Sarcasm is better when it doesn't have to be labeled.

> Sarcasm is better when it doesn't have to be labeled.

Which is why nobody ever uses a different tone of voice when speaking sarcastically.

This does not match my experience. One of the reasons /s exists is because it’s much harder to read the intent of a written paragraph than the intent of someone speaking directly to us.

The hallmarks of sarcasm are subtle, and come in a few forms - sometimes it’s intentional emphasis on a particular word, sometimes it’s a quizzical look or raised eyebrow, etc.

But at least in my experience, I can usually tell when someone is being sarcastic in person, but it gets harder and harder to tell on the Internet.

I read GP's reply as a sarcastic one, and that they intentionally omitted the /s just to prove how hard sarcasm actually is to detect through text.

Hah, I think you are right. I bit hard, and maybe helped them prove their point.

Exactly. Also it's different when you are talking to one person vs 1000s of people. Even when it is obvious, 0.1% of readers will read it just a little to quickly and get confused. Given that "/s" makes it more obvious, the intentional omission of it is intentionally requiring more effort of the readers.

There are times and places when one might want to make the readers work harder, but HN comments doesn't seem to qualify.

Why stop at 5000 make it 50 000 to make it even harder. It would mess with everything from party discipline to lobbying.

> Lead to good ideas being debated openly by people

Do you have examples of any ideas at all being debated openly by 5000 people?

In UK we have a ratio of about 1 MP to 100k people (600 MPs 60M citizens). In US it's 1:1M (300:300M) (all calculations to order of magnitude and from memory)

If you are literally one in a million, certain perks come with the trrritory.

I think we might get better results if we see our elective representatives as "cattle not pets"

> Madison said the same thing

Interesting, I didn't know that. I looked it up, and I really liked this Madison quote:

> In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

(from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._55)

Increasing membership of the House has the effect of reducing the advantage less-populous states have (both in the house and in the electoral college). That might make it politically infeasible to pass.

> politically infeasible to pass.

Probably true. But I would hope that argument could be deflated easily, since it was the senate that was supposed to give smaller states a disproportionate amount of influence.

Which is why people who don't want to pass it for this reason will state some other reason, like "5000 representatives is obviously silly and way too many"

Exactly. Why do people need representatives in the age when everyone has a voice? Education is still crucial, and not everyone can have an opinion on all matters, but the current first-past-the-post and representative system is blatantly corrupt. It's unlikely those in power would give it up easily, but we need a new system that's truly of the people, by the people, for the people.

Flux[1] was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately seems to be recently disbanded. The idea of everyone voting for issues they care about, where leaders are subject matter experts, is a sound one. It's ludicrous to think that a single person can politically represent thousands or millions of people on all matters. Modern politics is a reality show where charismatic and unscrupulous power-hungry egomaniacs compete for the top celebrity spot.

[1]: https://voteflux.org/

>Why do people need representatives in the age when everyone has a voice?

Because people are capricious, easily manipulated by emotion and generally refuse to acknowledge their ignorance on matters in which they insist on having opinions about.

Using the Twitter/Reddit voting model to run the world is absurd.

> Because people are capricious, easily manipulated by emotion and generally refuse to acknowledge their ignorance on matters in which they insist on having opinions about.

So are a huge number of politicians.

It's also a slippery slope- where is the line drawn? We allow everyone to elect the government, but you don't trust them to vote on a referendum?

> Because people are capricious ...

Right. So you'd rather have them vote for a single candidate who sells them hopes and dreams that they'll make the right decisions to solve all their problems 4 years at a time, instead of voting for solutions to specific issues they're interested in where subject matter experts can actually improve things?

Corruption and greed are inescapable. At least by not giving a single person and party absolute power over everything, the damage can be contained to specific areas of government.

> Using the Twitter/Reddit voting model to run the world is absurd.

What's absurd is the current absolutist model that is easily corrupted via social media (Cambridge Analytica, etc.).

"where subject matter experts can actually improve things"

How to correctly mobilized the talents of subject matter experts is a complex issue, and no one is certain of the correct answer:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...

How many people in your company with 5000 slack users are the real decision makers ? I highly doubt it’s more than a few. If you had 5000 people in the legislature they would most likely still vote party line based on the decision of a few.

> the legislature would have 5,000 people in it — clearly not realistic.

Perhaps one solution would be for those 5,000 people to be entrusted with the job of picking (for each bill being considered) 100 "second-level representatives" to go forward and do the hard work of debating and evaluating proposals and reaching consensus.

These SLRs could be a mixture of subject matter experts and people good at political logrolling, so that the legislation which passed would reflect the priorities of the 5,000 representatives (and their voters) while still allowing a meaningful discussion to take place and shape the result.

Are the 5,000 people on Slack in leadership positions? I'd bet that when a decision needs to be made, it is made by smaller groups.

National referendums on major political issues where the vote goes direct to the public would be a welcome addition, too.

Direct democracy is an awful idea. Picture Twitter deciding policy. No thanks.

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