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Comment by dustractor | Hacker News Reader

In one of the more obscure Ursula K Le Guin books, there was a passage that has always stuck with me. She's describing a hypothetical society where (to paraphase) they had eventually come to the realization that:

"the computer, once invented, could not be un-invented"

They put most of the storage on the moon, most of the processing power in a network of satellites, and in every village there was a hut with a dumb terminal. The vast majority of the population didn't need computer skills, only the handful of people whose lifetime tenured position was to maintain the hut and the terminal. The only 'useful' function provided by the terminal was you could tell it what you had and what you wanted, and if there were people nearby with complementary needs and wants, it would tell you which direction to walk.

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This seems like it would leave the dumb-terminal users at the mercy of whomever controlled the compute and storage infrastructure.

My very first thought. hah

Weird that you automatically assumed it would be private property rather than democratically managed or self-managed.

Weird that you don't consider how democracy doesn't always work out as intended. See: Corruption, Donald Trump. Not that it's bad or isn't the best we have, but there are a lot of superficially democratic states that became de facto property of one or a few. See: Russia.

Superficially democratic states (I like your term) aren't democracies to me. I meant literally democratic, not a theatrical aristocracy. I don't consider the US to be democratic for that reason. Something like liquid democracy or a representative democracy with arbitrary right of recall would work.

Still, even that system could be influenced and converted by someone.

I don't know how to respond to your claim because it's too vague. In any case, perfection is the enemy of good. Actual democracy would be better than this. It seemed like the society they were talking about was utopian anyway, so everyone was being kind and cooperative, not operating adversarially like we do today.

From the synopsis of the book:

> they do nothing on an industrial scale, reject governance, have no non-laboring caste, do not expand their population or territory, consider disbelief in what we consider “supernatural” absurd, and deplore human domination of the natural environment.

Wow, I want to live in this utopia, even compared to other attractive utopias.

Added to the reading list.

>Theatrical aristocracy. I don't consider the US to be democratic for that reason.

This is often repeated, and I don't believe it's true. The US has, without a doubt, the most accessible and open democracy in the world. Take just for example the state legislatures. A state like Indiana has an economy and budget larger than most countries. Yet literally anyone can get elected to the state house of Indiana. Happens all the time. Congress is pretty similar, too (although in full fairness, the senate is indeed a bastion of oligarchy). Anyone who thinks our system isn't democratic isn't really trying.

> The US has, without a doubt, the most accessible and open democracy in the world. Take just for example the state legislatures.

This is a shockingly sheltered view. You must have no exposure to European democracy at all.

> Yet literally anyone can get elected to the state house of Indiana

Nope, this is false. You must have enough money, free time and access to media and advertising in order to that. It's just a positive feedback loop and it doesn't actually matter if legally anyone can run if practically nobody can.

> Anyone who thinks our system isn't democratic isn't really trying.

You haven't thought this through.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/05/politics/ed-durr-steve-sw...

Flukes happen and they don't change the fact that your chances are still close to zero in general. If FOX news (or whatever) didn't like him, he would have certainly lost. Don't forget the selection bias: people will be filtered by whether they are what the people in control want. Similar to the propaganda model: You don't need to tell people what to write at your newspaper if you never hire people that wouldn't just write what you want anyway.

I have told this story many times and I will tell it again:

Since there are so many candidates in the US presidential elections and they nearly all have youtube channels, facebook pages, twitter etc, I was curious how much attention they are getting. The first 2 is easy, they are plastered all over the media and everyone around the world knows them on a first name basis.... but when I looked at random candidates on the long list it was amazing to see the 2 digit numbers. Some didn't get enough attention to account for friends and relatives. Truly shocking was that the green party had youtube videos with 100-250 views. This is such a mind blowingly small number that it doesn't account for any of the media. All those journalists around the world had to write about the top 2 candidates, they wrote tirelessly every day, again and again... Not one of them had the idea to have a looksie what just the number 3 was talking about. That voters collectively didn't give a rats ass about anyones program is one thing but that journalists collectively wrote 1 article on average about half the candidates. Most honestly told the reader they had no idea what their program was about.

So there you have it, the digital age provided us with hard data that demonstrates how no one in the world did their homework. No one bothered to inform themselves before voting. They all looked to others for information but those others didn't have any.

I therefore conclude we need a voting diploma. We bill everyone for 200 bucks and if they fail the exam government keeps the money. Long in advance the voter gets a randomly chosen list of 20 candidate with 500 chars for each of their top 3 agenda points. The test is multiple choice and you have to match the headlines of the agenda points with the candidates.

I'm sure there are people who don't agree but I think it is fair to never listen to them. Don't read what they write. Glaze over when they talk to you and think of puppies.

there is a very good reason that nobody looks at a third party candidate: it would be foolish to vote for them, no matter how closely your views might align to them. Assuming you had any preference at all of which of the major parties get in, by voting for a third party instead of one of them, you in fact increase the chance the other will win. This is a fundamental issue of this kind of voting system, and there are many alternate systems that do not have this crippling, paralysing flaw. For example, look at many northern european democracies, which have ranked choice or proportional votes, and sure enough they often have several-way coalitions of much more reprasentative parties governing them

> Assuming you had any preference at all of which of the major parties get in, by voting for a third party instead of one of them, you in fact increase the chance the other will win

You need to use Esperanto contracts. When Esperanto was new, what they did is had this chain letter (or something?) where they said "If 1000 people agree to learn this language, will you also learn it?" and then they collected signatures and once they had gotten 1000 (or whatever the number was) then many of the people actually learned it...

https://www.starvoting.us/ is much more straightforward to introduce given existing voting infrastructure than RCV.

Coalitions are not needed. Politicians, regardless of their personal agenda, are interested in what the voters want. They might not agree with it, they might not do what the people want, they are always interested. The other candidates, however small, provide valuable insights to them. It shows how far they can push their own agenda.

People can display their self-less submission by voting for the top 2 candidates regardless what they represent. It sends a strong signal that they can do whatever they want.

All countries get a bunch of stuff right and makes a spectacular mess from other things.

Each of those spectacles should have one or more dedicated candidates and people who are sick and tired of it should vote for such candidate. The agenda, most of the time, can be a summary of examples of other [western] countries getting it right.

While original ideas are definitely possible you can have countless [shall we say] boring topics that are absolutely worth representing.

Such party may draw an utopian or extreme picture, it may even be unrealistic. If people vote for it it will eventually send a message to those politicians who always win the election each and every time. In turn they can propose or implement a trimmed down / mild version of it or explain why they are against it.

There might be truly silly ideas worth investigating but the winning candidate cant spend his finite time in office addressing the silly things. Unless there is a significant number of people who don't think it is silly at all.

The only chance for such a party to win is if the issue is ignored or escalated to the point everyone is fed up with it. Long before that one of the bigger candidates will absorb that juicy bag of votes.

Its a slow process but it works.

We bill everyone for 1% of their net worth, and if they fail the exam, government keeps the money. And if you fail you can not contribute money to campaigns etc.

I had so many hilarious conversations with opponents of voting diplomas. If you let people vote who don't know what they are voting for it just adds noise to the formula. What we need is a signal strong enough to drown out the noise.

1% is nothing in contrast with the number of people murdered by democracies. Elections give the impression it is not really important but it might just be the most important thing for most of us to do. It seems reasonable to force people to spend some time learning what it is all about. 1% is nothing compared to getting shot or blown up. Democracy is a well oiled machine that can put all of the jews on the train the next day. It can take us to mars but it cal also kill you with the most sophisticated machinery.

> The US has, without a doubt, the most accessible and open democracy in the world.

Without a doubt, you are both extremely arrogant and ignorant in your US exceptionalism. What you think makes the US system unique (anyone can get elected) is actually standard in democracies. In fact, it's arguably easier for people without significant financial backing to be elected in most Western countries than in the US. And that's not even mentioning countries with far more direct democracy than the US, like Switzerland (the actual contender for the 'most democratic nation on earth' title).

Being literally democratic is not a stable state, and you cannot plan such a system without making sure it fails in safe ways. System that has united, monopolistic control of such a vital resource does not fail in a safe way.

I don't know what you mean. Is it possible you're mixing up direct democracy and liquid democracy?

Great example of a 'no true Scotsman' argument. Such idealizations are of little to no practical relevance, we need solutions that work in the real world, with all its flaws.

Differentiating between "societies which actually adhere to democratic principles and processes" v. "societies which merely pretend to do so" is hardly a "no true Scotsman" argument.

"This person claims to be a Scotsman, but has never set foot in Scotland, nor have any of his ancestors or even acquaintenances (let alone friends or family), nor does he have any other ties whatsoever to Scotland."

"nO tRuE sCoTsMaN fAlLaCy lOl"

Weird that you think saying "democratically managed" somehow fixes the principle-agent problem.

Voters don't write code. There is a process that goes from votes to personnel decisions to design decisions to writing patches. This process involves people who have their own ideas about how to interpret what the voters might theoretically want. There is lots of scope for them to make decisions you wouldn't like.

> Weird that you think saying "democratically managed" somehow fixes the principle-agent problem.

Your moving the goal post, but I'll bite anyway. Liquid democracy does as best as one can in that respect (and perfection is the enemy of good), since anyone that's capable can intervene at any point without hindrance. That's not possible in "representative" "democracies."

> This process involves people who have their own ideas about how to interpret what the voters might theoretically want. There is lots of scope for them to make decisions you wouldn't like.

Sure, and anyone who betrays the people could be removed as soon as they do, unlike today. In liquid democracy, you can just override them and with RIC, you can just recall them at will.

If anyone can intervene to restore the system in a way they truly believe fixes it, could Thomas Hobbes intervene to install a monarch?

No, not remotely. Please read up on liquid democracy. By intervene I meant withdraw their vote from their delegate and cast it themselves, at any time, for any reason.

Wow, no way this would immediately devolve into the worst kind of populism...

I don't see how this can work wth computer system? Let's say evrtyone loves the computers, but there is a single person who hates computers, and they want do irrecoverably delete all data on those satellites. Can you deny them access?

If not, then your system is not going to last long.

If yes, then how do you ensure this mechanism would not be subverted?

Exploits largely go unnoticed until too late. If the majority are technically incompetent good luck detecting the ones who manipulate.

So...not really different than our reality, other than scale.

In our reality, at least for now, there's no single entity that controls it. Instead you have competition between them on most layers of the stack, which means that nobody's at someone's mercy.

As someone who's stage-managed the migration of significant IT assets out of at least the big 3 providers who "controlled the compute and storage infrastructure" (AWS, GCP, Azure), I'm curious if your faith in 'competition' as a control is naïve or deliberate obfuscation (boy have I seen both). There are things you 'can' do, because yes an alternative, in theory exists, and there are things that are practical to do.

Sounds no different than today.

Does the history deal with the obvious risks of such system? This looks like the postapocalyptic equivalent of "Meet hot milfs near <SUBJECT_CITY>".

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

that sounds very interesting; do you have any idea which book this was?

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

Sounds great! Which novel was this?

Sounds like Always Coming Home

But how would they share TicToks?

What's the name of the book?

Look at the niece / nephew comments.

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