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Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.

In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.

On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.

This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?

inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems

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You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.

As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.

I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.

Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.

If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.

Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly.

I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.

If I follow your comment, then a politician who is elected based on how they look while eating a bacon sandwich[1] is better at synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal because they are a politician?

(i.e. Politicians are selected from average people, often on things like appearance, charm, charisma, voice, snappiness, being less-bad than the other candidates, standing for the voter's preferred party, etc. not based on intelligence or systems thinking; so why would they be better reasoning about 3rd order effects than average people? And they are elected on short terms, so why would they be more interested in spending time trying than others?).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...

Why would you think I'm making that completely different argument?

If the current scenario is bad, and someone says "we should do this other thing that would be even worse," pointing out that the other thing is worse isn't an endorsement of the current (bad) scenario.

The point (that you have annoyingly just brushed past) is that there's no evidence the current system selects for rational, systemic thinking either. Maybe exactly the opposite.

Your point was that people are , on average, not smart enough to make these decisions. Parent post points out that it's unclear that such a situation would be a downgrade from current.

A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote.

However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.

So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.

This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.

"I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University." (William F. Buckley)

> However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.

It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching that of an urban hub, there are high chances that the benefits afforded and costs born by the seat of power bubble versus an average person barely overlap.

> however one of the failings currently is the party system <...> where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.

I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.

> I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.

If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the electorate or raising money to persuade the electorate?

Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.

It's 100% the money. Tests "would you vote the same as you favorite politician/party" routinely show parties to be way less aligned than the electorate tends to believe. The several few "high steaks" issues get amplified to exhaustion on captured media while the rest of politics go undisturbed.

News channels are generally more subtle about it, but are still quite egregious. Look at e.g. debates. The questions are carefully framed to make certain positions appear positive or for the debater to go into tangents with context and get shut down for supposed demagogy. Look at some high profile TV hosts. They may appear somewhat reasonable-ish on camera, but then their facebook feed mirrors the topic discussed and takes an extremely biased route. They argue it's private vs official comms, but in reality the line is blurry on purpose and this confusion is used to persuade.

If you go into any country, state and ususally city subreddits (fb groups, discord channels), they are controlled by some PR agency. Discussion is carefully curated to fit the narrative. Bot nets are useful, but zealots are crucial. If previously the young recruits were important to distribute flyers around, these days they are crucial in shaping the public opinion on social media.

> Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.

I have no idea how.

> I have no idea how.

It's not hard, or a new problem. For example in the UK paid for political campaigning on radio and TV has been banned pretty much since the dawn of those mediums. In terms of print, you can have media pluracy rules, to stop the concentration of power.

Any kind of election spending, at the local and national level, is regulated and capped.

Now people have been using less visible targetted online ads using dark money to try and get around this - in my view this is an extremely serious offence and people should go to prison.

You could go further and make it illegal to spend money on online ads for any kind of political campaign whether it's aligned to a party or not ( ie single issue ) - with penalities for the companies hosting those ad campaigns as well as the people running them.

You could include astroturf botnets as part of this definition.

Sure these things can be worked around - but the point is the risk of being caught breaking the rules, and the political damage as a result, will make people think twice.

One of the problems at the moment is people are getting away with a slap on the wrist - in my view undermining democracy is a serious offence - and it's about creating a culture where that's the prevailing view.

It’s been tried in China, in the Zeguo Township, with interesting results.

First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy.

Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material.

> If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.

Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.

> There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal \

Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation.

The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.

ie both come down to - "it's their job"

> The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.

I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representatives is the good one in a representative system? Quite a large portion of this full time job is already not spent nitpicking legislative initiatives

With humans bandwidth is pretty much always limited - however it's clear that a representative has a higher bandwidth for politics than the average person - because it's their job ( and note they normally have a team of researchers around them as well ).

In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their job.

If you have a small group of citizen, selected at random for a particular decision, if they are bribed/lobbied/copted - they aren't at risk from an electorate down the line.

Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.

Right now this is a major threat to democracy - you only need a few people skilled int he dark arts, no morals and a sackful of cash to change the political weather currently.

> Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.

In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of information and the rest relied on hearsay, at best.

The fact that you believe in this "it's different now" (under a thread about speech control on the internet) is a partial proof of how effective the propaganda had been up till now.

I think you underestimate, in the time before the everyday internet, how many people's world views and values were largely set by their direct personal experience, rather than any media they consumed.

Sure, church and state, and to a lesser extent newspapers all were involved in shaping culture - however the values grounded in personal experience drove many societal improvements in the 20th century.

I don't see that so much now, and the power of persuasion has widened from those big institutions to anybody with money - domestic or foreign and at the same time society is atomising.

An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.

I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently.

Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question.

Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another.

Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? The idea I just put forward does not involve questions, it involves replacing one group of people with another doing the same job.

Framing questions is already a problem with legislation. You can frame "do you want to increase online surveillance" as "do you want to protect children" very successfully!

The parent was around direct democracy - where a particular question is posed - and frequent hybrid is randomly selected people to work on a specific question.

If you are saying choose people at random to be an MP for 5 years ( or whatever ), then sure that's different and it would be an interesting experiment - though that would be a pretty stressful job to pitch people into at random.

It would be interesting to see how those random 600 people would organise to get stuff done. In the current government you have specialisation - home secretary, foreign secretary etc - you wouldn't want to keep that structure and randomly allocate roles - but if you have the 600 vote on everything then you still have a bandwidth problem.

Look at how the American hate jury lottery, I doubt this would be welcomed in the state.

It may work in some other country..

> It may work in some other country..

Jury service in the UK is generally seen in a positive light ( despite having far too much hanging around ).

I suspect the US problems could be easily fixed by forcing employers to pay you while you are doing it.

Jury time is paid time off at my US company. And at least at the US Federal level there's a daily stipend for sitting on one. Lower level courts may vary on that.

Many people in the US do not work for your company.

Federal juror pay is $50 daily.[1] This would be 8 hours or less of minimum wage.[2] States pay from $0 to $50 seemingly.[3]

8 states and 1 district had any employer jury pay law. All other than Nebraska excluded small employers, excluded part time employees, allowed to pay under minimum wage, allowed to pay nothing after 5 days or less, or allowed to force employees to use paid time off.[4]

[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/court-programs/jury-service/juror-p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

[3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/jury-duty-p...

[4] https://www.workforce.com/news/jury-duty-laws-by-state

Juries are unpaid and obscure. I think most people in the UK would be delighted to sit in Parliament for the a £100k an year salary + expenses (what MP's currently get) plus a lot of prestige and the experience. It would be a pretty good thing to have on your CV!

Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? The memetic effects of language and communication means propaganda and similar tools of rhetoric and leveraged communication will always work, with or without an internet. There's no "solution", only "good enoughs".

Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?

There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?

> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance.

The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.

You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.

In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.

Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.

A solution is “liquid democracy”, or instantly revocable delegation of your vote. With good UX, you could build a system that allows you to have a nominal representative you trust for different types of votes, with manual override for votes you want to make yourself. It would require some procedural changes to ensure that people have time to read and debate bills.

(This otherwise great in theory idea is mooted by the fact that remote legislative votes are a terrible idea, as security is a shitshow literally everywhere.)

> Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"?

This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you.

In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level.

Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.

I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.

But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See

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

> The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms

only on a federal level. states like california or texas are more direct than a lot of western europe in some ways. like the fact that ballot props are binding law or sheriffs and state attorneys are elected.

>I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.

I'm one of those everyones, and I don't agree.

Except if you mean local initiatives that don't concern 100M people, but e.g. some regional municipality. Of course then just the locals can vote, be they 100K or 1M.

Yes! I meant local issues that don't concern 100M people. Local issues that concern a few thousand people can be (and often are) resolved by direct democracy.

I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.

>Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though?

Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.

In most political systems the two functions of government are rationing and ideological control for the poor and profiteering for the rich. The media provide marketing and propaganda support for both.

It's very hard to have truly independent media.

The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.

Switzerland is a country with a total population approximately the size of the state of New Jersey. This being too centralized for most things, they then further divided that population into 26 cantons ranging in size from approximately the size of New Hampshire at the high end to "that number of people would be classified as a town rather than a city" at the low end.

The median size looks to be around 200,000 people, so maybe start by dividing the US population into cantons of around that size and doing most of the rulemaking at that level.

The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions.

Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.

I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.

But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.

No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.

> The best level of democracy is no democracy.

That's a quite fatal view. I'm not going to defend the shortcomings of democracy as a system or the issues all real implementations have. But democracy has a feature that is unique about it: as long as it actually is a democracy, as soon as things go a way that the people don't like, they can do something about it and change course. For better or worse, but they can. That's the main point of democracy.

Besides, having votes or electionsor is really just a minor detail of the concept of democracy. There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc. The will of the people doesn't fall from the sky or is set in stone. It's a permanent conversation which needs all the other mechanisms. If all that happens is a vote every few years, that's not at all indicative of a democracy. Neither is democracy synonymous with majority rule.

> Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.

What is "cohersion"? There are "cohesion" and "coercion". Assuming the latter, what does this have to do with democracy? An autocracy or dictarship or whatever non-democratic system you can imagine also likely has a government, and their coercion mechanisms tend to be worse than in democracies. In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.

>There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc.

All in theory. Otherwise we wouldn't debate this. Historically none of these traits are unique to democracy, but developed society. US had a civil war over protection of minorities even though it was considered a democracy.

>In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.

Which can only follow laws passed by the government. Separation of powers is not unique to democracy. Again the coercion mechanisms doesn’t matter, but the severity of it.

> No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.

Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope.

Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in all areas.

The BBC is monarchist to the core. A lot of people say the BBC is biased in one political direction or another, but they often forget about monarchism.

One notable example of their privilege was when Andrew George MP dared to ask a question in parliament about the Duchy of Cornwall, only to be told he wasn't allowed to. (The Duchy of Cornwall is a kind of slush fund for the heir to throne. Charles had it before he became king. It has tax breaks, and also the ability to seize property and mine on people's land.)

In theory the King can veto any law he wants. In practice he couldn't without causing a monumental constitutional crisis that would probably end his reign. His unofficial ability to influence government policy is the real issue, but one that is definitely not limited to that one guy with the special blood.

> In theory the King can veto any law he wants. In practice he couldn't without causing a monumental constitutional crisis that would probably end his reign.

His mum Lizzie2 had no problem doing it without causing any problems:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que...?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...

I think it's likely that Chuckie3 is continuing this grand tradition with impunity.

You can benefit much more as a corrupt politician, as the blame is diluted between the whole government. Single king is responsible for it's actions and we even have a word for throwing them out of the window if they misbehave.

It's much rarer for politicians to even get into jail.

Actually quite a few people care about the UK having a king, in the UK. In Northern Ireland, there is a considerable republican (small "r" population) for political reasons.

The BBC promotes the monarchy heavily as it is under royal charter.

There were significant protests at the Queen's funeral cortege and the current king's coronation. The state clamped down hard, in one case arresting someone for holding up a blank bit of paper.

I admit UK wasn't the best example as now it's freedom of speech is maybe worse than in Russia or China. But I feel like public does not trat it as the biggest issue of the UK at the moment.

Let's say Denmark for example.

Thing is that freedom of speech was not good back when I was growing up. There were many groups that were heavily monitored by Special Branch. Some of this has been declassified now. I do not wish to downplay the atrocities of the IRA, but there certainly was another side to the Troubles which the BBC wouldn't report on fairly and tried to claim it was an internal religious conflict.

> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.

I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.

I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.

I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.

If you make it legal to sell your vote, it’d become very obvious very quickly how much money is in politics.

I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting

Representative democracy is rooted in the idea that the average person is kind of a moron. Just look at states where it's incredibly easy to get state-wide referendums on basically anything on the ballot and you'll see the legal landscape there quickly becomes a mess.

REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK?

BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS?

START A WAR WITH IRAN?

VOTE NOW!

Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.

2 ideas about direct democracy.

Selling your vote becomes a nonissue when everybody is doing it.

An LLM informed by a reddit-style discussion tree might be a good way to implement the policy-creating part of a direct democracy.

> idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy

In the US at least, no it is not. The founders were incredibly concerned about the ‘passions of the mob’ and deliberately built a system that they hoped would temper the excesses of the public.

And after seeing the wacko stuff going on in California, I can’t blame them!

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