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Republic: a form of government where elected officials exercise power on behalf of the public. I would argue that kind of by definition, a republic is a repres

Republic: a form of government where elected officials exercise power on behalf of the public. I would argue that kind of by definition, a republic is a representative democracy, though it's possible there are representative democratic governments that aren't republics. The US is a republic, which is a form of representative democracy -- much like Im a mammal and a eukaryote. The end of your comment of course is just a non-sense ad hominem. I don't support the Republican party, but your need to other and slander people you don't agree with is troubling. And yes, people are self-entitled idiots. You, me, everyone else. That's why, even with it as our full time job, a support staff, and the genuine motivation to make a difference, we couldn't keep up with the actual complexity of every vote. Expecting the average person to do what a professional with staff can't is ludicrous! Now, there are lots of ways we could use technology to better harness the public for decision making, but having them vote on everything would just be a disaster.

dane-pgp 10y ago
Thank you for your clarification and I apologise if I over-reacted. It felt like you were excluding yourself from the "self-entitled idiots" designation, which would itself be an attempt to "other and slander people". For what it's worth, I think you are under-estimating yourself if you describe yourself as simply a self-entitled idiot, but certainly we all have a bit of that in us.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  My point, though poorly worded, was that very intelligent people with a lot of dedication routinely fail while working as senators and representatives because the job is legitimately complicated and hard. We feel that we'd do good at it because most of us honestly have no idea what's actually required to work in that environment. I don't imagine that I, as an amateur with a job and social life, would really be more informed than the people in Congress. I don't think most of us would be. So the solutions to the problem need to address how to combine our effort and expertise, rather than asking us all to be experts. (If that makes sense....) I think there's a lot of promise in, say, using ML and public repos (eg, github) to let us collectively scan, annotate, and suggest edits for legislation. Why isn't Congress just the maintainers of the authoratative repo that anyone can make a PR to? That seems much more useful than having a vote about everything -- let's argue about it, lay out our best cases as the PRs merge up the hierarchy, and let the Congress people argue out the final merge of a dozen proposal PRs? I mean, that's basically what they do, but it's weirdly pay-to-play, and it seems much more democratic to, ya know, let the public in on it.

dane-pgp 10y ago

Thank you for your clarification and I apologise if I over-reacted. It felt like you were excluding yourself from the "self-entitled idiots" designation, which would itself be an attempt to "other and slander people". For what it's worth, I think you are under-estimating yourself if you describe yourself as simply a self-entitled idiot, but certainly we all have a bit of that in us.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
My point, though poorly worded, was that very intelligent people with a lot of dedication routinely fail while working as senators and representatives because the job is legitimately complicated and hard. We feel that we'd do good at it because most of us honestly have no idea what's actually required to work in that environment. I don't imagine that I, as an amateur with a job and social life, would really be more informed than the people in Congress. I don't think most of us would be. So the solutions to the problem need to address how to combine our effort and expertise, rather than asking us all to be experts. (If that makes sense....) I think there's a lot of promise in, say, using ML and public repos (eg, github) to let us collectively scan, annotate, and suggest edits for legislation. Why isn't Congress just the maintainers of the authoratative repo that anyone can make a PR to? That seems much more useful than having a vote about everything -- let's argue about it, lay out our best cases as the PRs merge up the hierarchy, and let the Congress people argue out the final merge of a dozen proposal PRs? I mean, that's basically what they do, but it's weirdly pay-to-play, and it seems much more democratic to, ya know, let the public in on it.