Bees are doing democracy right | Hacker News Reader

Bees are doing democracy right

spectator.co.uk

45 pointsforloop18 comments

Ah, Quadratic Voting, very cool stuff. Forget all the stuff about the bees, that's just stuff and nonsense. Democracy, I think, really only matter when each individual is heterogeneous.

Here's some more on QV (ugh, such a horrible name):

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/01/collusion-in-quadratic...

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/my-...

and finally an academic paper:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531

Random thought, what about exponential voting blocks? Everyone gets 100 votes, but you have to spend them in smaller and smaller chunks namely: 50, 25, 12, 6, 3, 2, 1, & 1.

Call me old fashioned, but I'm not persuaded democracy is improved either by requiring that votes are either paid for or so complicated for the voter they require an instruction manual to avoid inadvertently spoiling their ballot paper.

That's okay. I'm old fashioned too. I think all voting should be done with pen and paper. Electronic voting is a straight up scam.

This complicated stuff , I think, is more about the science of voting rather than the real-world engineering of voting.

Of course, every bee wants credit for their own find. So there needs to be a countervailing costly mechanism to prevent bees from simply over-promoting any pollen source they know.

Two problems with this. Most importantly, if bees have the same genetic interests (it's a bit complicated but see The Selfish Gene for Dawkin's explanation of why bees are genetically programmed not to have different interests than their hives) then there is no reason for a bee to want credit. Second, has any reward for the scouts ever been observed?

Right the article is a complete crock of shit. A bee does not benefit in any way from it being her find that the hive exploits. The bee in her dance is just trying to accurately convey the quality of her find, not to try to set policy based on her personal preferences, which scarcely even exist. Drawing an analogy between these bee dances and human voting is just mind boggling stupid.

[I agree with the idea in your comment, but I think it can be written in a more polite language.]

Is also note worthy that the bees in the hive are in effect slaves of the queen, acting in the queen interest and not on their own. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_mandibular_pheromone. As such the bees may evolve behavior that would not appear in a colony of truly independent "voters".

The (female) workers bees are more related to their sisters than to their own daughter and sons ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_ratio... ). So it's better to kidnap^H^H^H help her mother than to have their own children. The ratio of drones vs new queens is difficult to measure, because a new queen means that the colony splits, so the theoretical 3/4 is difficult to be corroborated.

So, in spite of the hormonal details, it's more like the workers enslaved the queen than that the queen enslaved the workers.

[The hormone is probably there only to signal that there is a queen, and it's not necessary to pass to the emergency mode and try to make a new queen.]

Attraction and slavery are very different. If I'm attracted to a human female via pheromones, am I her slave? Hardly.

I would liken bees, ants, et al more to anarcho-communists than monarchists. Queen is a complete misnomer. It's just another job in the collective.

> Of course, every bee wants credit for their own find. So there needs to be a countervailing costly mechanism to prevent bees from simply over-promoting any pollen source they know. Bees must spend a lot of energy to bring their fellows around.

That is wrong. Bee spends lot of energy with promotion, but what really decides is snow-ball effects. When other bees try that source, they will start dancing as well.

This period there was a monumental shift from a moralistic view of human relations as passions which were largely detested to a view that self-interest, read avarice, could be used to tame the other passions, the problem with the bees is the bees are not human with all the vices and wants that go with our being, so attempting to apply simplistic ideas like that to human governance you will undoubtedly lose resolution.

Regarding a complex system of governance that is required for modern society, voting pre-dates the above shift in conception, but it's use was spurred on by the idea that our self-interest can be used to the keep more dangerous vices in check, the problem with this is that avarice is a vice and if you promote it throughout society as being the main force for taming of humanity, you will inevitably fall under it's wheels, this will probably be seen in rising inequality, where virtues, patience, kindness... are marginalised, for the benefit of this one vice.

I'm sorry I don't have an answer, I do think we have gone a long way down a dead end, I can only hope we have not done exactly the same to pride.

On the contrary, the cost of expressing an opinion on social media can be very high. Sometimes rightly of course, but sometimes not.

Doing Democracy right? I recall that worker bees will kill a co-worker if the co-worker doesn't do a good enough dance that tells where pollen can be found.

I'd hate to think what would have happened to some of my co-workers based on the code they checked in. Or maybe the guy has a point...

Who decides what topics the voters get to spend their points on?

How could voters choose between candidates with such a structure?

https://www.uservoice.com

Governance is so much easier if all citizens are insects that happen to be nearly perfect clones of each other.

China is working on that. But I'm not so sure it's democracy that will come out of it.

> clones

I read that as 'drones' and noticed...

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