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Comment by comte7092 | Hacker News Reader

The Princeton study actually showed that when it comes to advancing policies, it was pretty much a wash.

Their difference came in when looking at getting policies blocked. If a policy was unpopular with economic elites, they were effective at getting it shut down.

It’s an important distinction, because there’s a clear way to see what causes this behavior. There are a myriad of ways that our systems make it easy to block things rather than get things done. And if people realized that, there’s a pretty clear path for reform.

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If you click through to the (much better) article on The Markup, you can see that the lobbying group strongly advocating killing the bill entirely and apparently thought they had succeeded until was voted through and signed. Their request for revisions to be based on some genuine concerns that being obligated to sell every component off-the-shelf means they are telling competitors (and counterfeiters) exactly how to build their devices. It seems like it was just laziness on Hochul's part to just accept their terms verbatim instead of meeting in the middle. But the bill is still a first of it's kind and huge win for Right to Repair.

Meeting in the middle is an illusion when the window keeps shifting

Idk what this means in this context. There are basically zero right to repair laws in America except this one. Prior to December, no company had any obligation at all. NY just created the window. Once this goes into effect, tech companies are going to essentially forced to comply in order to operate in NY. The other 49 states or the federal government can basically only make the rule broader.

Nope, thats what they want you to believe. It was always only about making the dame parts and schematics available that their own repair people habe access to

I was totally with you until the last sentence. please go on.

I mean it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian.

On the federal level, the filibuster is an obvious example of a an anti majoritarian rule that creates perverse incentives.

Going deeper, the way that the individual houses are structured gives significant power to committee chairs who gain power through seniority and fundraising for their parties, which creates centralized points of leverage for lobbyists.

What we’ve seen over time is that fewer and fewer bills get passed, and individual bills themselves get larger. This is a result of rules and customs changing within the house and senate themselves that have made it harder and harder to pass small bills, so everything gets rolled into monster packages and the process get more obscured to people who are on the outside.

The thing is that all of these rules get set by majority vote. Leadership elections happen by majority vote. Changing rules can happen without consent of the other house. The issue is that there’s very little understanding or focus on why they are important.

The structure of the U.S. government was explicitly designed to be anti majoritarian. For many people, in fact probably the majority of the population this is a feature.

^ this. It turns out a government will more effectively avoid flagrant injustice if its structure makes it difficult to accomplish anything quickly without supermajoritarian agreement.

Example?

War on drugs.

I’m not sure how higher supermajority requirement would have prevented the war on drugs from happening.

There was alignment both at the elite level and the popular level in support of those policies for a long time. It functioned because the minorities it target were politically weak.

That's not a positive example of what I was referring to.

A positive example would be something that would have passed if the majority party wanted it when the minority party was against it.

The pieces I talk about having nothing to do with the constitution, and they aren’t really a part of any explicitly planned design.

Now, do people claim that anti majoritarianism is good? Sure. Clearly there are people who benefit from this system. In addition, a lot of people do justify it who seemly don’t directly benefit economically, simply due to an ideological affinity.

> The pieces I talk about having nothing to do with the constitution, and they aren’t really a part of any explicitly planned design.

Huh?

Congress derives its authority from the constitution, at least in the U.S.

Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with what congress is authorized to do. It was about the internal rules of the house and senate, and the process by which they are made.

None of that is prescribed by the constitution.

> Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with what congress is authorized to do. It was about the internal rules of the house and senate, and the process by which they are made.

If you genuinely don't understand how congress came about and why their actions are accepted by the other branches of government, I would recommend doing some reading of history.

Ah yes, the classic condescending response.

It must be the case that I simply haven’t read enough, simply because my understanding differs from yours. It can’t be possible that my points are a result of careful study over several years.

Speaking of careful study. I suggest that you go back and actually read what I wrote and address what I said. Please inform me where in the constitution there is a prescription for what the house and senate rules must be.

You keep talking about congressional authority. I will reiterate, that is completely tangential to my points.

If you think my response was condescending, why did you provide a substantive reply?

Since it's quite rare, other readers will have the suspicion that something's up, either that the substantive part is not really so or that the alleged condescension is only imagined.

> None of that is prescribed by the constitution.

It would help to be a bit clearer.

The Constitution specifies that the House and Senate make their own rules via a simple majority vote.

The Senate set a rule that they would require a vote to end (previously unlimited) debate and hold a vote on an issue. Originally, this required a two thirds majority, which was lowered to 60 votes later.

More recently, the Senate changed the rules again to only require a simple majority vote on some matters.

Nothing about the Filibuster rule was ever specified in the Constitution.

Thank you for writing that out, having a tangible example definitely provides more clarity to other readers.

I do want to push back though a bit. The filibuster isn’t the only rule I was referring to, and the entirety of the constitutions specification of the rule making process is literally “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings”. So when I say rule making broadly has nothing to do with the constitution, it’s because it quite literally doesn’t.

It sounds like you are trying to justify an anti-majoritarian stance with majoritarian consensus. If you are against majoritarianism, you should probably find another way to make your case. Here, let me help you out:

It's better for a small minority of people to make the rules. A small minority of people agree with this, thus it is correct.

No?

Clearly there are things desired by the majority of the population that are not desirable because of downstream effects.

There are thousands of comments and posts on HN every year describing examples.

The ability for a small number of extremely wealthy people to dictate what laws should not be passed is not protection of the minority, and if it was intended by the founders (which in some ways it was, though not in the form it takes today) then it should be opposed.

The founders never even intended that the majority be able to vote.

Really, their core quibble with the Crown, and the sticking point that prevented any peaceful solution (because compromise would have seriously threatened the political power of the nobility in Great Britain), was that they wanted rich people to have the franchise and to be able to hold high-level offices, not just aristocrats.

The problem is, when the majority rules, the result is inevitably a shitshow.

The founders understood that, which is why they set things up the way they did. Nothing has changed since then. If anything it's even more true, given the new and extensive ways the elites have to manipulate majority opinion.

There are numerous countries in the world that are literally democracies, not republics, where the majority does in fact rule.

Quite a few of them are not shitshows.

So I consider your first sentence to be proven false.

I think where the founders got it wrong is not expecting the population to be so ignorant and easily swayable. For instance, school voucher measures, which would benefit so many people, tend to get shut down due to lobbying efforts from rich and powerful teacher's unions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/11/13/teach...

If people were wiser and did their research better, these kinds of campaigns would be ineffective and the rich would lose their sway.

The founders also probably didn't expect our government to grow so large and so corrupt. The richest and most corrupt entity in the United States is the government itself. The vast majority of the government is not even beholden to people at all in any way, shape, or form. This includes the tens of thousands of employees in the federal bureaucracies, as well as organizations like teacher's unions who are funded indirectly by tax dollars. Many, if not all, monopolies today are also artificially created by government policy, allowing for an unholy union of corporations and the government.

> it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian.

You say this as if anti majoritarian is a bug. It's not. It's a feature. The US system is supposed to prevent tyranny of the majority. That's why there are checks and balances in it. That's why the Constitution limits the powers of the branches of government, and why further limits were put in place in the Bill of Rights. The US system is not supposed to be a tool for the majority to enforce its will on everyone. It's supposed to be a tool for protecting everyone's basic rights and limiting government to certain particular functions, not to allow it to do whatever a 51% majority wants. That was the original idea of the founders of the US system.

I would say that, if anything, we have too much majoritarian thinking in the US today, and I would support amending the Constitution to put more roadblocks in the way of a 51% majority being able to simply run roughshod over everybody else.

> all of these rules get set by majority vote

Yes, and this is an example of too much majoritarian thinking; whoever has the majority in either house of Congress takes that as permission to gerrymander the rules however they like to favor their preferences.

The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority, specifically the minority with the most power/voice/money. I think what you're arguing for isn't against tyranny of the majority, but a limit to the power of the federal government/more local government.

For instance, the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis, yet the tyranny of the minority keeps blocking these efforts for their benefit. Without majority rule, we have a ridiculously dysfunctional government that doesn't represent the people.

> The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority

That's one alternative, but not the only one. Another alternative is for the government to not have the power to tyrannize in the first place. As the saying goes, the problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell.

> the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis

I don't think this is true. I think vocal minorities want these things.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-...

Trusting what you read in a poll is how you wake up the next morning and Trump has won the election.

The election of Trump is a great example of the tyranny of the minority.

Name a state that trump won where the polls showed him down over 36 points on the eve on the election.

If the government followed the constituion this wouldn't be problems: 1. Marijuana would never have been illegal at the federal level because an amendment wasn't passed. 2. Healthcare and any other federal welfare policies could be ennacted by passing an amendment.

If there isn't broad consensus across the country to pass an amendment then states can do it independently. There is no reason a state can't have single payer healthcare, except that they don't want to pay for it and want to just add the cost to the national debt.

You are ignoring the constitutional article granting congress the ability to make laws. Congress passed laws making weed illegal and hasn’t passed a law granting (or prohibiting) universal healthcare.

States can, indeed do it independently. There’s at least 3 states with a public option

> Healthcare and any other federal welfare policies could be enacted by passing an amendment.

All federal welfare policies can be enacted under the commerce clause and/or the general welfare clause.

Yeah, exactly - what can't be enacted under the commerce clause. Everything impacts commerce, growing wheat on your own land for your own use impacts commerce. It's not legitimate. Once that door was opened, it went from enumerated power to anything not prohibited.

> The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority

Being anti-majority doesn't mean pro-minority.

It is about decreasing the weight of merely being in the majority as an input feature to optimal decision making. It is protecting against pseudo-relevance majority can pose as an overemphasized decision making strategy. This doesn't mean all ideas that manifest as majority is irrelevant, not at all, it is protecting against the false positives.

Mind you a lack of steamrolling with majority alone forces a downstream integration of opponent thoughts.

Think it like a collective intelligence architecture that is trying to make sure we don't get stuck in local optima.

That’s all well and good, but when these issues come up, people seemingly turn their brains off and repeat “tyranny of the majority” without evaluating the empirical reality of how these systems function in practice.

I’m amenable tot he notion that there should be some guardrails on simple majoritarianism, but it shouldn’t follow that all anti majoritarian rules are good.

We do have guardrails. The constitution puts various things off-limits to any sort of majoritarian process of regular governing.

Should there be more things off-limits? Should there be less? Intelligent people could disagree, but the off-limits category already exists and there is a process to change what is in it.

The original founders didn’t design the current iteration of senate and house rules. You didn’t need 60 votes in the senate to pass anything in 1795.

But in a way you’re right. “The founders” created a government that protected aristocratic interests explicitly. Most states had property requirements to vote when the constitution was ratified, and even higher property requirements to hold office. So you can definitely say that they would have been fine with a system that allowed moneyed interests to block legislation they didn’t like.

Yeah one of the ways 17th amendment really broke things was the Senate went from an elitist organization representing the intrests of states and statesman like the UN in order to balance the ills of populist House but now it's got all the populist ills of the House but non of the bennifits of geographic or population representation.

> It's supposed to be a tool for protecting everyone's basic rights and limiting government to certain particular functions, not to allow it to do whatever a 51% majority wants. That was the original idea of the founders of the US system.

The US Senate process to force an end to (previously unlimited) debate on an issue and hold a vote on the matter is not a feature put in place by the Constitution.

It's a rule put in place by the Senate in the 1900's.

> this is an example of too much majoritarian thinking; whoever has the majority in either house of Congress takes that as permission to gerrymander the rules however they like to favor their preferences.

This is literally how the Constitution specifies that the legislature will operate. The Senate sets it's own rules, by majority vote. This is how the "nuclear option" to change the Filibuster rule was recently implemented.

>Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used the nuclear option Thursday morning, meaning he called for a vote to change the Senate rules by a simple majority vote. It passed, 52 to 48.

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/harry-reid-nuclear-op...

> This is literally how the Constitution specifies that the legislature will operate.

Yes, it is: each house of Congress is explicitly permitted to set its own rules of procedure. That is obviously not an anti-majoritarian feature of the Constitution. I didn't say every single provision in the Constitution was anti-majoritarian, or that the founders did a perfect job of implementing their ideas.

> The Senate sets it's own rules, by majority vote. This is how the "nuclear option" to change the Filibuster rule was recently implemented.

And also, of course, how the filibuster rule was put in place in the first place.

There were a whole lot of things in the US system of government that were put there on purpose but have turned out to definitely be bad. The fact that an element is a "feature" doesn't mean it didn't turn out to be a bad idea, in practice. If a tiny minority of rich people & companies can leverage our "anti-tyranny-of-the-majority" features so well that their use of it is practically the only use... that's broken. "It's that way on purpose" isn't a rebuttal to "it's broken".

There's a reason we don't push our system on other countries even when we're the ones setting up a new government—it's basically a ho-hum fact among people who are into that kind of thing (so, the ones who tend to end up in charge of directing the creation new governments—at least in charge of the boring details) that the US system blows goats, but some of the ways that it's broken also mean that it's nearly impossible to fix without a revolution. This has been essentially regarded as a fact in poli-sci circles since... I dunno, probably the early 20th century I'd say (Germany and Japan didn't get our system after WWII, notably, and that wasn't by accident)

> There were a whole lot of things in the US system of government that were put there on purpose but have turned out to definitely be bad.

I don't agree that there were "a whole lot", but yes, some of the original features were bad. The founders knew they couldn't avoid that, which is why they included an amendment process. Which has been used to fix a number of the original features that turned out to be bad.

I also don't agree that the brokenness in the current US system is due to too much use of anti-majoritarian features. I think it's due to too little use of such features. (Well, that and simply ignoring the Constitution altogether when it is politically expedient.)

> The founders knew they couldn't avoid that, which is why they included an amendment process.

Our bad election rules make coalition-building to accomplish even very popular things really difficult if powerful interests oppose them, and it's getting worse the more sophisticated the game-playing within our set of rules gets. Moreover, a bunch of the reforms we need would threaten the power of those who could, realistically, work to effectively change the system (see again: broken election process) so they simply will not happen.

We have trouble accomplishing things with overwhelming popularity in the general population that don't need an amendment—amendments are all but dead under modern electoral and political game conditions, and fixing that would require... an amendment. Key reforms that would fix the very deepest problems are about as likely as a literal miracle happening.

But these rules are only 10-20 years old. They're not part of the original intent you talk about.

Appeals to authority of dead people’s political documents is propaganda.

Just because we can invoke historical story does not mean we abide it today.

The majority inherently rules whether it’s US Constitution or the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Not really sure how you get to a system of material comfort and logistics we have without majority buy in to not fight and kill.

I wish people would realize how silly they sound reciting the dead peoples chants when the literal world clearly shows majority rule is not so bad literally. For whatever reason quite a few folks prefer to fight over which vain elders hallucinations and diatribes are the one true social system when the reality is providing real stuff to survive is all society really is about.

> dead people’s political documents is propaganda.

Yours is no less propaganda.

People do cultural learning, pretty much everything you use from technology to medicine and yes politics is overwhelmingly based on dead people's ideas. That is the basis of us as cultural beings.

You're right with cultural learning we might inherit noise too, but you'll have to fight against the content of those ideas, not dismiss from mere historicity. If an idea has merit, it will be timeless.

Disagree I have to fight them. Every political system is eventually jettisoned by generational churn.

Medicines we keep using keep proving their value to the present through experiment. We have binned plenty discovered in the past but later revealed to be snake oil.

As ephemeral gibberish does not exist it is naturally lost to time as those who memorized it die off. What’s literally true remains always verifiable by experiment.

I can find academic papers, political arguments we are in violation of the old ideas today anyway. How do we know we even abide them as intended and aren’t just abiding arbitrary math for staffing institutions described by the Constitution? They are not like organic chemistry where cause-effect is obvious. Does “America” give rise to society or people engineering together casually referring to some old gibberish when pressed? How do you test for existence of political ideology except by populist poll? Democratic majority rule. But that’s anti-America which is to prevent majority rule!

What I advocate is more like forgetting they exist by not teaching them. We can teach how to create together versus destroy each other, without the history lesson, and measure for impact literally to avoid carrying forward snake oil.

> The US system is supposed to prevent tyranny of the majority.

So instead, we get old-fashioned tyranny of the of the rich and powerful minority.

There should be incentives to keep bills simple.

Perhaps the threshold for passing a bill should increase with the bill's length.

I think they are getting at "vetocracy". I like Vitalik on this subject: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/19/bullveto.html

The people doing the blocking have names and addresses.

Right. It's like the argument that the 2 party system is an intentional brake on democracy, so we have to legislate reforms into being... with the permission of the 2 party system that determines whether legislation gets passed? The clear logical extension of the argument is that reform on the terms in which we have these problems is ultimately not very workable.

If a policy was unpopular with economic elites, they were effective at getting it shut down.

The push for Federalism is a good example of this. If you hear a politician claiming "states' rights", this might just be why. One material example of this is the NRA funding lawsuits against the Brady Bill, despite the gun control measures being popular with non elites.

Won’t these economic elite just catch wind of and block said reforms?

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