Why Github and Stack Overflow are the wrong tools for democracy
reasonwell.com
reasonwell.com
Here is how I see this system playing out in the reality of today. People will go to the main page, and they will see an argument that does not agree with their biases. They will then view the claims for that argument, and they will upvote all claims that agree with their outcome, and downvote all claims that does not. They will not actually verify each claim, they will vote based on the their desired outcome for the argument at large. This effect will completely dwarf the reasoned voting approach for any contentious issue - to believe otherwise has been to never view an argument on the internet.
The premise of this system is invalid: it relies on people being rational and logical when debating issues that they are passionate about - people are neither rational nor logical in these situations.
The core issue - certainly in the United States, perhaps to a lesser degree in some European countries with better education systems - is that our schools are turning out people by the million with severely crippled critical thinking skills. Sure we are in the rarified atmosphere of people who are self selecting for better than average critical thinking skills, here on Hacker News. But out there in the real world, folks struggle to comprehend simple argument structures and logical flows.
It doesn't matter how many smart appealing mechanisms we provide for letting ordinary folks debate complex issues, most are simply not armed with the tools for the job.
Sure, that's an elitist argument and we can all mumble platitudes about how it's unfair to people, and come up with anecdotes about how my great uncle bob didn't graduate high school and is super smart etc. That doesn't make it wrong. Just a highly regrettable situation.
I sort of agree with your overall point but to this point, I do agree, in some sense, but is it really the schools, per se, that are turning out those people. It's not as if there was a point in time that we know where the public had better critical thinking skills.
To a large extent, our education systems are still stuck in that "teach kids to behave, then teach them how to earn money" mentality. We keep kids away from their parents to allow them to earn money, and while we're in control of what the kids do for 5-8 hours a day, anyway, we should turn them into the employees we'll need 10 years from now.
And that is where your statement, though technically correct, is (I imagine unintentionally) little misleading.
Schools have been turning out people like this for the past 2 centuries, because for people who have no influence on the political process, the more fundamental skills of critical thinking, creativity and scepticism are simply not required. If you're a salesman, a nurse or a factory worker without the right to vote, you don't need to be able to form an opinion on the best way to recover from an economic depression. So these are incidental skills: usually not actively discouraged, but by and large not aimed for.
The kicker is, you do need those skills in order to participate effectively in a democracy that's better than "watch a lot of television and vote for the man in the best suit once every four years". Over the past 100 years, we've moved away from excluding people from suffrage (mostly). This means that it's not just the (relatively) well-educated white male bourgeoisie that needs to have critical thinking skills. It's everyone.
Our education system has not yet adapted to this 'new' reality. It still aims for capable workers, not capable citizens. Our education system is vastly better than it was 150 years ago, but our standards have gone up even further.
This is a quote from Paul Krugman:
Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/opinion/krugman-the-ignora...
He is critical of this conservative mode of thought, but these are values that can have merit. Jonathan Haidt discusses that:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.ht...
If critical thought is at odds with irrationality and emotion, then that is a conflict that must be resolved in favour of critical thinking, if democracy is to survive. Carefully considering the arguments for and against political statements is a good thing. I (again) hope no one would argue against that.
However, I reject the notion that critical thought is necessarily liberal. There's nothing in theories of critical thought that's inherently opposed to conservative values. I do not believe critical thinking is a drive towards any particular school of political thought. It is a drive towards knowledge.
Actually, there's another question that should be asked: Is conducting ourselves rationally even possible? If not -- the question whether we should be rational might become moot. There is no doubt that some of our decisions can be, and are, rational. But could all of them be rational? Are humans capable of being 100% rational? I think the answer is a resounding no. In that case the problem shifts from being binary to a question of degree. To what degree are we, or should we be rational?
> If critical thought is at odds with irrationality and emotion, then that is a conflict that must be resolved in favour of critical thinking
I'm not so sure about that either. If every question could have a rational answer, would you like our affairs to be handled by a rational artificial intelligence? Issac Asimov discussed this, and he, too, points in the negative direction.
The question of rationality becomes irrevocably complex when you start asking what is our goal. If our goal is to maximize human happiness and minimize human suffering, then, clearly, we wouldn't even be able to agree on concrete missions as happiness and suffering are both subjective. Some people would place honor ahead of survival. If we can't even place a value on the most basic of ideals -- life -- what hope do we have of assigning value to lesser ones? For example, the protagonist of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground derives joy from being spitefully irrational and from taking actions that cause him harm. Spite is what gives him happiness. How could you reconcile this very human need for spite with rationality?
> I reject the notion that critical thought is necessarily liberal.
You are right, but I think conservative thinking clashes with rationality more often. By its very nature, conservatism places importance on held beliefs and is less open to changing values based on new findings. Liberals tend to think that human existence is a solvable problem given enough information and enough analysis.
I think even this reasonwell stuff shows where programmers can tend to treat problems simplistically and try to use ideas and concepts currently in vogue in programming culture (social networking, upvotes, etc) to solve political debates.
Anyway, as far as people needing to better equipped, intellectually, in a democracy, I agree but I don't know how you get there; I don't think the solution is in slight changes to the curriculum, I certainly don't think the idea that is currently in vogue on HN, to dump college, is going to get you there (where "there" is greater than 95% if the populace discussing issues with philosophical rigor).
A tangential possibility -- most people do have the brain power to think critically; but the education system has trained them to think that being wrong is the end of the world, so if there's any chance that they're right then they'll take it and ignore evidence to the contrary instead of intelligently admitting defeat and changing their opinion.
(See also: politics, where if you do some research and discover that your theoretically good policies are actually shooting your country in the foot, you'd better carry on shooting faster and harder or your career will be crippled by accusations of being a flip-flopper)
You're right that we can't rely on logic in debate. But I would contend that the premise of the system is that structure will be salubrious for debate. There's nothing about the system that would prevent me from developing a totally irrational series of arguments on it and, crucially, the system itself doesn't reason about things. Instead, it keeps track of my reactions to claims and evidence, reactions that will differ from yours. This pluralism is a great strength, and the one he identifies out of Github.
The reddit-style populism you identify is a possible problem with the system.
The question is how _could_ this work in practice? I think there are users who would be motivated to structure arguments this way but I cant think of who they might be.
You _need_ some diagrams on here. I could barely make it through the 3rd paragraph before skipping to the bottom to see if there's any kind of tldr or visual aid so that I wouldn't have to read all that crap.
For a site that wants to boil ideas down to small chunks we can fork and follow this was a really poor introduction.
And the text was borderline unreadable.
However, it looks like the biggest mistake was made by the submitter. Just go to the site root, and it's a pretty good thumbnail, or at least a teaser, of what the thing does. The "about" that was submitted is intended for someone who saw the root, got interested there, and now wants to know more.
The about could definitely have been better written though.
The reason why democracy works is because of the illusion of power - The people at the top give you the illusion of freedom - The freedom of speech, to do what you want, etc. while you have nothing of those in reality.
Ideally, you had all those right from the early man days, then someone at the top curbed you of these and gave it back to you so you would feel 'powerful'. While we all are slaves in one way or the other - We all pay taxes most of which is pocketed by the politicians (in most corrupt countries) and we read the media everyday without knowing that they sell us like a bag of chips to their advertisers and we all think we can say whatever we want on Facebook/Twitter/etc. while all of it is being actually monitored by unknown agencies, etc.
Likewise, Stackoverflow has these so called 'moderators' who somehow magically are considered superior to the average users who go on a rampage to close as many threads as possible as not constructive based on their will. If you noticed carefully, Stackoverflow doesn't have an option for the average user to report moderator abuse. Atleast not easily anyway. If some dude marks a question as not constructive, you have to deal with it. That's a poor example of democracy and unfortunately, it exactly depicts the current model of democracy lives in. If you have some politician who isn't doing his job properly, you are left powerless - You can't throw him out of power easily. The laws are modulated to sustain his power as much as possible - You need many people to support your opinion, get together as a group, pass bills, etc. which needs to be approved by another set of corrupt committees which will most likely rule in favor of the politician himself..etc.
What we need is a more open world - Yes, more open than what we're living in right now. If someone does something wrong, then they must be served justice without any delay. The current scenario involves so much paperwork and hassles that it makes it worthless getting someone to be delivered justice in time. I wish we had a system like Hackernews, but for the real world, except without the mods (who are harmless here anyway) so we can have constructive decisions directly with one another without much effort to set right what's right and to pull off/flag something that's wrong ourselves without having to have someone at the top of us like a 'moderator' so you don't live at the mercy of his bias.
We do. It's call the Congress. It works, like Hackernews, because it's a small, elite group of people chosen to make decisions in a structured, democratic manner.
This country was not founded on the ideal of democracy for the people, nor do I think it should have been. That would be mob rule and you can read all about why that's a bad idea.
What we need to do now is curb corporate influence and corruption in Congress and figure out how to pick better leaders.
Encouraging rational public debate, in a roundabout way, results in better leaders in the long run. The people make more informed votes and future politicians are raised in a more enlightened society.
More important, IMHO, is - how to keep those elected leaders good, honest and in check!
It's far from perfect, but considering that 99% of online communities out there are run in an autocratic way, with a person or clique appointing the "police" which is mostly non-accountable to the users (like HN, for example), having systems of public participation like SO's elections and places for discussion of its governance (Meta) puts it actually quite high in the democratic ranking.
(I explicitly do not mean to raise a discussion of the context. It's just that the article does exactly what you are asking about, saying "It’s yet another way that GitHub is moving beyond software, helping to democratize the development of other stuff, including everything from laws and other legal documents to cartoons and even Wired articles.")
I think the fact that you harshly criticize SO and dismiss HN as harmless is interesting.
¹ Yeah, they might be banned by robots, but I don't think that makes it any better. It's not like the algorithms are independent entities.
* Poor idea -- misses out on issues of motivation, and the soft sides of how people influence each other.
* Isn't great for hard side either. Most good arguments are too nuanced for soundbites.
* Indeed, it would be interesting to see the argument for Reasonwell (over github and similar) presented in Reasonwell's format, and then used as a discussion for how such a system should be designed. This would be a good first use case, and of similar complexity to most political debates. My claim is it would be difficult or impossible to do this in their format.
* The implementation doesn't work (dialog pops up when you try to post a comment, and "okay" doesn't work).
* UX is unclear (I couldn't figure out how to start a debate after minutes of trying, or how to search in useful ways, etc.).
* System isn't open source/free software. This is important for a tool for democracy.
Overall, good ideas were scarce.
Git is perfect for storing and versioning written legislation.
Unfortunately it needs:
* A beginner friendly, focused (leglisation only), interface
* (lets face it) users who are not luddites (Yes, there are some people who cannot understand even simple branchless versioning no matter how many times you explain and demonstra it).
* Legislation to be written differently (Since most leglisation in countries I am familiar with are basically very wordy plain language diff files already).
The last one is probably the biggest hitch legally and because it is probably written by people who fall into the second point.
Models of natural argument are a really fascinating area of AI. Check out the Argumentation lab at University of Dundee for some of this work: http://www.arg.dundee.ac.uk/?page_id=96
The tradeoff in knowledge representation is specificity vs usability. How do you structure a machine-readable argument that represents what you think in an acceptable way but that isn't onerous to create? What is the schema of an argument? Are they all the same?
There's some basic research to be done here that's empirical, not theoretical. I hope that Reasonwell narrows down to facilitating a credible use case rather than presenting yet another grand platform. Here's my line of thought for the guy: Who s currently making structured arguments on the web? The Dundee guys have found plenty of natural language argument (it's everywhere, just like in this post) but haven't been able to get many to actually mark up their thoughts. How could you get people to do this? Perhaps an Intrade like platform for predictions, where people could get extra points for being right for the right reasons. It's a big problem and you'll have to tack into the wind I think.
The reason they work so well is for the above reasons, not because "nerds" are so logic bound. If you don't believe me, imagine what a StackOverflow question of "Is vi or emacs better?" look like". If "nerds" can't decide that question, when either answer will have not affect on them personally - both programs are free and the person is free to use whatever software they want, how will people decide about issues that are at least as complicated but will also affect them personally. They use the example of a carbon tax. If you are for it, then you believe that opposing it will destroy the world. If you are against it, you believe it is government forcibly taking money away from you.
I think that the best way for people to really consider the issue is to have broad friendships in the real world. When debating something over the internet, it frequently devolves into one-upmanship or worse rather than people really learning. If however, you and your buddy and talking about something over a beer while hanging out, even if you have different views, you will likely learn something. More importantly, you will not have fallen into the trap of viewing everyone with a different view as your enemy.
But mostly - you are a site that wants to tell people - quite boldly - that you're the right way to get ideas across and facilitate debate. However this introduction is a terrible way to get an idea across - the idea being: "We have a solution for debating points in a simple fashion. That solution follows XYZ format. Why not try it and let us explain it to you as you go?"
So to the actual approach insofar as I can glean it for as much of your post as I digested - I am not convinced trying to boil everything down to true/false is that useful an approach to debating complex issues. The level of granularity you have to get to in order to break things down to a series of binary choices is just too small, leaving the big picture disconnected from the minutiae.
I was and am optimistic hearing about that European country and Github recently - first thing I thought of was something to make that process go better. I am your target audience for this. I want something like this to succeed. Genuinely. We desperately need to open up new channels for debate in democratic countries where we're currently suffering some kind of fatigue that's making everything seem out of control (and in many ways it is because our ability to debate is broken).
So, good luck with this, but at least take a fresh look at your opening pitch. It's kinda weak.
Ancient greek philosophers already figured out how to approach such matters. The problem is, and I mean this sincerely, that people are either not truly interested in honest intellectual discourse or are intellectually incapable (in a very real sense) of engaging in such discourse.
To paraphrase Popper, there is no point in using logic in arguments with people not interesting in being rational. As well, people that do not understand what a non sequitur is even when it is pointed out are not going to bring much to the discussion.
When you have congressmen that state, in hearings, that they see no problems with CO2 because it is in their coke cans; what on Earth is reasonwell going to do about that?
This being said, i think almost every idea in this area should be given a chance, should be tried out ... we don't have anything to lose but at least a little to win given the current democratic processes and their postdemocratic endemic failures.
We clearly need new/additional democratic tools. This could be such a new one. Not a perfect one but let's see how it works out. HOW it fails.
Finally, any hints towards non-technocratic tools & solutions in the area of new-democracy? (other than liquid feedback)
I've been starting to question this recently for Github. Github does let anyone put up code, but there's little curation (the stars give you a rough idea but don't let you really drill down to what is really useful and what was starred because someone did a show HN), which means there are plenty of not-so-useful projects and projects with questionable licenses (no license specified = trap)
no license specified = trap
Democratic debate seems to nuanced to be classified as For/Against. Dialog takes a back seat here as you have to drill down to another layer of for or against.
Is there some inspiration to be found in http://www.justiceharvard.org/ that might be integrated into the next iteration?
Thanks for the work.
Recently in Bulgaria (EU country) we had a protest against the current political system [1]. One week after the strike, the government resigned. Three weeks within the protest, the non-government leaders of the strike separated ideologically and had different suggestions for fixing the system ( new constitution with more rights for people, participation of non-political organisations in the government, legal right to recall representatives from the Parliament, etc. ) and probably no change will come to the current government system, since we'll elect the same political structures, which existed since forever here.
Conclusion : Democracy will always work through representatives with strong ideas and power to establish media control with money. Nobody will ever listen to "open-sourced" law-suggestions, since they will be poorly funded and perhaps not very well understood by majority of people ( non-technical, retirees, people living in the villages, etc. )
The story :
I'm living in the poorest EU Country. In January, people here had huge electrical bills ( double of what they used to pay ) and for most people this means no money for basic needs ( gas for their vehicles, inability to buy quality food, stalling their mortgage payments, etc. ) [2]. Everyone here was so desperate that the only thing they could do is to get out on the street and protest against their poor income and way of living. On the second week more than 300 000 people participated in the protests ( Bulgaria has 6 million population ), which made the protests the biggest since the collapsing of communism here. Two days later one boy set himself on fire [3], protesting against monopolies, government and organized crime. More people went out on the streets, because of this fact and more of them set their bodies on fire.
What people actually wanted was blurry. The protests began against the electrical bills, went through the governing political party and ended with demands for changing fundamental ways of our democracy ( changing the constitution ). For one week the people of the streets even created non-political organisation with discussions what they should do next. There were many demands and ideas and no single leader ( there were some activists, who were acting like leaders, but too separated to become one ) to take the initiative and do something more about them. We were totally separated as a nation. There was even a pseudo-government from bloggers in Twitter which was between a joke and a real thing.
Later on a lot of disputes around democracy went through the media. And yes, the media is very powerful tool. Every political party here pays a lot for every single minute television time and nobody of the non-political small leaders of groups could actually say anything constructive ( they had poor experience, no PR agency against their back, no specialists to say "This is impossible", etc. ). The parties ( a lot of them corrupt [4] ) took control of the population again. Everything was a storm in a glass of water. No real change in the way our country is ruled.
The world is so digital now. The poorest country in EU has one of the fastest Internet access worldwide [5]. We had good programmers, who work cheap. Darin Dimitrov is on second place in the StackOverflow top users chart [7]. We have it all, as a structure, for more e-oriented government [6]. But in the end nobody out of the political system will ever want to change something so fundamental and loose power and money for letting people say "I disagree" more freely.
From my own experience nobody will ever try to integrate something so radical in the current democratic world ( In US everyone votes for two major parties, here the major political parties for the new elections are more than 6 ). And yes, the people are right, the democracy is illusion almost everywhere!
Here is a demo. What will happen if I as a member of the community want to change the StackOverflow background color, to say ... fuchsia. Will I ever be allowed to do that? Of course, not. What if I convince more people and even 6 / 10 moderators to do that. They won't do it, because nobody up there will ever do what most users want, but simply do what's ( probably ) better for the community. Which is great. But what will happen if I create a lobby and sponsor those moderators, it will be easier then. That's what real democracy is.
Linux is a great open-source model. But we all know who says "Yes" or "No" in many of the final decisions ( for good ).
I'm glad that hackers are very, very loyal and hardly influenced by selling good community-driven ideas for profit. But what will happen when someone else gets on top of such projects. Perhaps the government? I don't want to pay a "tax" for using the kernel, but everything else in my own country I'm using, comes with a tax ( pollution, rainwater, tax for green energy, tax for owning ( not driving ) a car, etc. )
So yes, it is a nice idea, but it will never work outside of small tech-community, since nobody puts irrational people ( thinking for their own profit ) and lobbies in the equation.
[1] : http://www.ibtimes.com/bulgarian-government-announces-resign... [2] : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/desperate-bulgarian... [3] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plamen_Goranov [4] : http://news.yahoo.com/bulgaria-ex-minister-faces-corruption-... [5] : http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2013-01-23/top-10-countri... [6] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government [7] : http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=reputation&filter=all
Loathing politicians, looking for savior, looking for strong political leader, waiting for someone. Protesting against yourself on the street. Putting someone in charge then putting them away with hope that someone else "good enough" will take place.
Age of heroes are gone.
Classic bait and switch. That's how things have played out since Geocities. You young guns sweating over Stack Exchange points don't remember those days. That's why you register a dot-com, to protect your content.
It's just another content farm looking for unpaid labor.
Because it's an excellent resource, it could be monetized with a paywall. We can't predict the future but we can learn from the past.
They're already monetizing it with http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer
They don't really have much competition but I think http://snipt.net/ is a good alternative in certain situations.