Ideas from salon
- Delegating your votes to others
- Apply the ‘historical check’ to this system: have any of these ideas been tried and failed?
- Have we made sure that we have not lost any of the benefits of democracy? have we checked that?
- What might Machine Learning do
- Membership of the governance system can be non binary
Problems with our ideas
- Rapid changing system may breed a different kind of Short termism
- People with more time effectively write the
- What is the prioritisation for the decisions
- Which mechanism should be used for which decisions?
- Can one condense the issue down to a wiki page?
Solutions raised:
- evoting… (now possible to tally votes) See Liquid Democracy
- political jury service (educated as part of it)
- long term upper house
- “equationize politics” [save 90 year old for 6 months vs. lots more people for way longer]
- wiki decision preparation
- historical check [unit tests for laws?][multi-generational?]
- learning loop [e.g. forced constitutional rewrite on a regular schedule]
Other points
- Another problem with democracy is minority interests
- Another: geographic representation
- Have we revisited key assumptions e.g. men and women are created equal
- How does the local situation affect political systems and even values: resource constraints or even that one person can kill all others
- who decides what is discussed
- when there is material gain, use jury; otherwise use liquid voting
- anyone in your society can destroy the entire society - so people need to connect better with everyone
- can’t condense info into wiki so everyone can do this - use of reddit (see below)
- macro vs micro - damien’s organic grape experiment
- what should we actually optimize for? social justice, etc… or survival? (think about antartica, mormon desert etc.)
- apportion votes via weird demographics: e.g. economically: top 1% get one vote, 1-2% get one vote, 2-3% get one vote etc.
- use reddit to get better handle on what is representive as is shorter and easier to contibute than a wiki
- what can we learn from other societies in harsh environments (eg antarctica)
- but need efficiency to combat bureaucracy (as we are learning through our experiment)
- Derek raised the point that wikipedia is edited by a very small population of it’s users and that this system would fall prey to the same thing as the do-ocracy, that it would be disproportionately governed by the people who have to the time or inclination to discuss ideas on the wiki.
- blockchain only adds “trustless”
- faster is better? maybe not. masses get excited…
- Need an upper tier for the current system. i.e. let’s not focus only on the failures of democracy, but remember the strengths and figure out how to carry those forwards. We need to keep an eye out for all the things democracy/ the current system does address well that other systems may not - We need to employ the ‘historical checklist idea/ long term, past and future thinking/’ive seen this before’ idea to this system before adopting a new one.
Conclusion: The best system depends on ones goals. Is this to simply survive, to propagate, or do we set the goal of humankind as some kind of ideal? If the latter, or if any, what do we do when what is representative of the populations wishes is not aligned with the goal that has been set?
http://liquidfeedback.org/
https://makeyourlaws.org/
Suggested reading
Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
Congress Reconsidered