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>> If you think just allowing people to vote directly will somehow circumvent the natural tendency of people for herd mentality, confirmation bias, and valuing

• kbenson 10y ago
  > Abuse detection is a solved problem, correcting for bias is well understood too. What about the bias introduced from the initiative name and/or description?[1] Who decides this? Who writes the laws that are proposed by initiatives? What if there's no counter side to a law proposed, or it's very complex, and hard to understand? Right now we have people whose job it is to keep track of these laws, make sure small provisions don't overstep, and come to an agreement on what should be acceptable to vote one. We elect those people (or we elect the people that employ and control those people). Who does this in a direct democracy? Do we still elect officials, and they do everything except they don't vote? > Giving people access to information, while at the poll, will increase the number of truly informed constituents when voting. If we have a direct democracy, there will be a lot more initiatives. 15 things every day, if we are keeping up with congress, according to to the flashforward link you supplied (thanks, I'm listening to it in the background right now). Looking up all the relevant information for each initiative to make an informed decision will take quite a while. Assuming a minimum of 15 minutes per item to research and consider each item, that's close to four hours, each day. Even halving that is a significant time investment. I think people will naturally defer to authorities they suggest. There's even less incentive for the random authorities people might choose to be accountable for their speech, and I'm also quite worried that people would choose non-qualified people for their queues on what to vote for very poor reasons (pick your Kardashian or their relation). If we want to defer to someone for our vote, why not our elected official? What I think would be interesting, was a way to wrest my vote from my representative on a by-vote basis. That is, we all get a chance to have a direct vote, but if we don't, our share goes to our representative. For example, if I'm in CA, and my senators are voting on a bill, and I vote specifically a certain way, then their votes count for (CA vote eligible population -1)(CA vote eligible population) each, and my vote counts for 2/(CA vote eligible population), one for each senator, and assuming nobody else votes directly. For important issues, we can wrest control from our legislators, but otherwise the system will perform as it has. I'm still not entirely sure it would be a good idea given our predisposition as a species for poor judgement in certain situations, but I think it's a lot more feasible than a direct democracy on everything (and it keeps people around to design and present bills, and still incentivizes them to do so). 1: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/dec/10/states-ballot-language-rules-worth-imitating/ http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/dec/10/states-ballot-l...
  • rwhitman 10y ago
    To your first block of questions - the crowdsourced moderation methods employed in public forums (like for example HN, Reddit, Wikipedia) have evolved to a point where they work very well. It's possible that a government-grade moderation system could be developed by augmenting with machine learning. There could be a grading system employed for the quality, fairness of any legislation submitted that uses both machine-based checks and human moderation to balance the quality grade of the legislation up for vote. "Hard to understand" is something we can detect with software even today. A check by both a human panel and a machine that's parsing language should be enough to ensure that a law is being fairly presented. (Which is a hell of a lot better than the system we have today, where politicians create bills even the people who wrote them don't understand.) > What I think would be interesting, was a way to wrest my vote from my representative on a by-vote basis. That is, we all get a chance to have a direct vote, but if we don't, our share goes to our representative. That's a very clever idea. I like that a lot. To this second block, here's my brainstorm on how it could work - it's possible to counter the potential fatigue by clustering the vote in tiered node cluster groups. Let's say we made the smallest vote cluster maybe 150 people at any given point, and we'll distribute these groups evenly by geography and population density (adjusted in realtime as demographics shift). The group is politically neutral - assigned based on political sentiment (not party affiliation) using a set of simple surveys and voting behavior so there is an even representation of the political voices in each sample. This is collected with voter registration, or after non-participation for X time period. Anyone can log in and vote on any legislation they chose each day but the cluster always stays neutral. We apply abuse detection to detect if the cluster is being stuffed or gerrymandered in some way, and the software rejects and reorgs a cluster when abuse is detected. If someone suffers voter intimidation or outside influence they simply report abuse and the system identifies their cluster for review. Take that model and scale it up, each cluster node is part of a larger node. The vote from each node counts as a whole for that node. If the system needs an extra human layer in a node to recount a vote, it can get swapped with no consequences to other nodes. One node fails, the vote is rerouted elsewhere. The question really comes down to the participation rate. In social network systems this is best solved with physical rewards at first and later with social rewards. Same can be applied. If nodes get low voter participation, they trigger an automatic vote reward system. Some will try to game the system to get the rewards, pick random answers. This will trigger fraud detection by inserting control questions, honeypots. Anyhow it's all doable just a matter of prototyping and iterating in a test environment. And the political willpower to implement it. Probably wouldn't become reality in our lifetimes, at least at the national level, but a fun thought exercise nonetheless