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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.

The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.

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One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.

Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?

Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.

> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.

I'm not certain.

Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.

I'm less familiar with other examples.

> Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book.

Link?

> We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.

Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.

And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone.

Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences.

The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs.

Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries.

I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess.

And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.

Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.

> Banning campaigning would go a long way.

With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.

And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?

If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.

Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.

Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.

That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.

I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.

I mean, that is exactly why people even know their names. You think people actually read schumers policy positions on his website? Maybe a single digit percentage do. Most everyone just blindly picks the party line option even on primaries usually the party endorsed candidate wins.

Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.

Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.

I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.

Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist (2004) https://vimeo.com/90583017

Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.

File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.

If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.

Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.

What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?

Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.

Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.

Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.

Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.

Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.

It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol

But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.

> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money

How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.

In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.

e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?

By allowing uncapped funding, you’re just giving a lot of power to big money. Which is not exactly democratical either.

I guess having parties funded entirely by small private donations or maybe a way to optionally allocate some share of the taxes you pay yourself and banning all direct funding from government and corporations could be the least bad option.

That’s what is going on here

- parties repeatedly getting 2% over 4 years get gov donations

- parties can take capped membership fees

- private citizen can forward a minuscule part of incomes tax towards a specific party, fully anonymously

- during campaigning, private people can donate to parties, capped to a small percentage of donator official incomes.

Fun thing is, this was put in place after an attempt to install a local equivalent of Orban. Bankrolled by a businessman with close ties to Russia.

My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.

Well that isn’t a very compelling argument unless you get a lot more specific.

Start with the fact that it's impossible and will only benefit the candidate that best bends the rule or is able to blatantly break it without repercussions.

Here’s a narrow critique, you don’t understand that limiting campaigning privileges name recognition which is something only existing officials or celebrities will have.

In a representative system where you vote directly for candidates and not parties like in the US you need to know who is who and what they support.

Banning campaigning hurts challengers to the status quo.

I could keep picking your naive suggestion apart but this is I believe sufficient evidence that you haven’t done your homework.

And most party funding comes from the government which favours party which are already in power? Not that this is a horrible system but it does have rather obvious downsides.

e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.

You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.

Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.

So far government does u-turn after each election so it looks like there’s enough safeguards to make sure formula stays sane. Maybe it would be a problem if private citizen funding was fully banned. But now that’s allowed with a cap to avoid fraud.

And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.

I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.

I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.

But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.

What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…

I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.

Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.

That's why term limits exist.

Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.

IMO:

1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.

2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.

3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.

Its tricky, though. There might be people who are doing a perfectly good job and kicking them arbitrarily might be suboptimal.

Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing.

But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well..

> The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town)

Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.

The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s

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