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Governments take thousands of decisions. Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions? We risk ending up with a "d

Governments take thousands of decisions. Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions? We risk ending up with a "democracy" where the power is really in the end of people having enough time and / or skin in the game to actually vote. Voter fatigue is already a known effect where places that vote the most are also the ones with the lowest turnout. California and Switzerland vote twice a year, they barely ever go above 50% turnout. That kind of system would be interesting for signature collection, however. It would then be easier, more fair and more secure to collect signatures to put something on the ballot. Today you really need money to do that.

nickpsecurity 9y ago
On that last point, remember we have things like Civitas we can use: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/
harel 9y ago
You can let gov deal with minor national wide issues, and delegate the important stuff to the people (thresholds to be agreed upon in advance and when in doubt defer to the people). Anything local should be handled in the same way by local authorities.
tom_mellior 9y ago
That's why systems like Liquid Democracy have delegation features. You don't elect representatives, but you can delegate ("lend", if you will) your vote on certain issues to them. And revoke the delegation at any time. Maybe Cicada could be equipped with something like this, but sentences like "The concept is so new that the word representativeless does not even exist. We had to invent it." don't look like the authors have done a lot of research on the topic.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  This is a github post that tries to pass itself off as a "paper" (because it sounds official, right), and ends with "And that can change the world". Wow that's academic and objective. Why are we upvoting delusional content that lacks a real understanding of behavior, politics, and law? Because if you want to change the world, a basic understanding of that might help. He could start with Plato and Xenophon and the Trial of the Generals and then progress to Reddit if he thinks crowds are wise and democracy without flaw. The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code. Is this serious? It's every bad Silicon Valley joke wrapped up in a document. In the real world, politicians, and armies, and people with power that you don't even know of have been ruling the world for a long time. If you want to break that you gotta be more realistic than quoting a science fiction book and a Github paper. To create something scalable enough to run an entire nation with no representatives, we created two cutting edge technologies to serve as the foundation of the platform Is it reasonable to make this statement without showing any code? They seem to have not scaled beyond writing thought on paper. How do you go from that to "leaders being replaced with code"? Is there not a massive gap to be bridged before such audacious claims are made? Why isn't there more skepticism of something like this?
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Primarily because HN is very libertarian-leaning, and has a lot of people who do not understand people or societies as a result.
    - zo1 9y ago
      You must think us Libertarians get insanely promoted and upvoted on HN or something. The truth is no where near that.
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        I see a lot more libertarian ideology appear on the front page than anything else, politics-wise, even if there's reasonable arguments in the comments. From blockchains to direct democracy to universal income, and a while back, an incredible amount of writings on property rights for some reason.
        hueving 9y ago
        Universal income is not a libertarian idea, it's socialist. Block chains are a technology, nothing more, nothing less. Big banks are using them and they have nothing to do with libertarianism. Direct democracy is orthogonal to libertarianism. Structure of government is independent of desired role of government. Calls for direct democracy have surged from liberals in the US after the second wrath of the electoral college. The only thing that is libertarian is writing on property rights.
        vertex-four 9y ago
        Universal income as a replacement for all current Government social support functions is an idea that came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role in social support, and forcing people to take control of their own lives. Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently performs - i.e. they don't really support it, since that's untenable. PoW and PoS blockchains follow libertarian ideology and fundamentally libertarian ideas of how the world should work - "no ability for the Government to see what you're doing and tax it" is pretty much the rallying cry of its proponents, or it was about three years ago when I was into it. (Oh, along with a healthy dose of "companies can do no wrong, and if they do, it's your fault".) The political goal is to remove the Government's (and therefore the banks') role in trade. Centralised "blockchains" as used by banks are irrelevant there, and shouldn't even use the same word. Direct democracy is, unfortunately, something that heavily overlaps with libertarian ideology - again, it severely shrinks or removes the role of Government in political decision-making processes.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Delegation doesn't mitigate large groups' tendencies to, in moments of emotional fervor, make incredibly stupid decisions that they wouldn't if forced to the a few weeks to think about it. This is the difference between e.g. the Californian and Swiss referendum systems [1]. California directly enacts popular thought into law. That makes lawmaking a game of finding moments when you can make the majority disinterested while sending an active minority ballistic, and then freezing that moment into law. Switzerland, on the other hand, lets leaders counter-propose and negotiate with the population. It also has mandatory waiting periods. Broad direct democracy has a poor history because it tends to empower mobs. This is a bigger problem than the expertise issue that delegation addresses.
  - joshuaheard 9y ago
    That's true, but you would still have a balance of power so that a court could overturn a law created by direct democracy.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > you would still have a balance of power so that a court could overturn a law created by direct democracy Presumably based on the laws this direct democracy enacts? Observe California and imagine if every single law had to be passed through referendum. The system fails because people don't compromise across large, unaccountable groups. Direct democracy is better used as a check on a small group of leaders, e.g. a right to popularly veto legislation (or Constitutional amendments) and a right to select the leaders.
      - thriftwy 9y ago
        > imagine if every single law had to be passed through referendum And what do you think will happen then? I hope you respect the readers by not assuming that it will be paper ballot referendums.
        xg15 9y ago
marcosdumay 9y ago
You can always give veto power to direct vote, and keep the government organized as usual.
anoplus 9y ago
I agree; in practice, people can't deal with gov all day. But there are hybrid gov models to address it, such as delegate democracy, which I foresee as next stage in the evolution. Also, I think it's kind of viscous cycle situation. Bad gov reflects in personal-live problems causing the individual to have even less time to deal with the gov. One day robots will work for us. We will receive UBI. We will have plenty of free time, so we can all be full-time governors.
SkyMarshal 9y ago
To prevent voter fatigue, you have to make it difficult to get referendums/propositions on the ballot, and you have to make voting on the ones that do get on infrequent (like yearly). But if the alternative is legislative bodies inundated with lobbyists and corporate money making big decisions for us, I'd be willing to experiment with any solution, even direct democracy like this.
ciocan42 9y ago
In this real time everything, voting for matters every few years does not make any sense. The issues are hanging for decades and the progress is slow. 50%+1 voting process it is not optimal. A statistically significant number could be way down than half of population. If voting process is convenient (meaning a tap away), secure, cheap and real time all the issues could be resolved much faster. Instead of decades could be months. We are still in the stone age when it comes to policy and democracy.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
I used to think I'd like direct democracy, but after living in California for a few years I realized it wasn't at all what I'd expected. Intelligently voting on an issue requires you to invest a lot of time in understanding the topic, its pros and cons, and any far-reaching effects. It's almost like a full-time job, which is why we elect representatives!
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  The problem is that governance is complex that representatives are in many respects just incompetent voters. We elect a lot of lawyers because they're skilled in both assimilation and evaluation, but the upshot is legalism, procedural paralysis, exponential growth of the legal corpus, inaccessibility to the citizenry, and factionalism.
  - TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
    I'd actually consider "procedural paralysis" a feature. Writing laws and making changes in such a complex system must be done with extreme care and deliberation. The government is like a huge monolithic repo!
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >It's almost like a full-time job, which is why we elect representatives! We elect representatives because our history is dictatorial, and each step taken toward a more democratic system has been a compromise after a revolt between the ruler(s) and the ruled. That usually means leaving them with some power. Direct democracy doesn't mean that you have to make an intelligent decision on every single topic, ever. It means you can choose which topics to make decisions on and which topics you want to delegate to somebody else and whom to delegate it to. It would still mean that you could delegate your vote on decisions about regulating the Internet to notorious full time job holder Ted Stevens if you really wanted.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Nobody should vote on all decisions because nobody is expert in everything. Rather than voting, people should make proposals (of lesser or greater scope) which are edits to the legal corpus can then be supported or opposed is a manner somewhat similar to Wikipedia editing, a methods of governance I call Participativism.
imron 9y ago
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael_Rimmer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael...
visarga 9y ago
> Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions? I think the solution to voter fatigue is sortition - you select a random group of, say, 1000 people, they come together, hear the issue, vote on it, and disband. For every issue you repeat the random selection. It is a statistical law that a randomly selected group is representative of the whole. When you have a few thousand people, they are within a couple of percent precise compared to an actual election. So a random selection (just like jury duty) could be the cheapest way to go about solving the voter fatigue problem. An advantage of sortition is that it does away with the need for elections and political campaigning, cutting off lobbying at both ends - can't lobby a random group that always changes, and the system doesn't need political campaigns or even parties in order to function, unlike representative democracy. And it's not a new invention - sortition was the original form of democracy in Athens.

nickpsecurity 9y ago

On that last point, remember we have things like Civitas we can use: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/

harel 9y ago

You can let gov deal with minor national wide issues, and delegate the important stuff to the people (thresholds to be agreed upon in advance and when in doubt defer to the people). Anything local should be handled in the same way by local authorities.

tom_mellior 9y ago

That's why systems like Liquid Democracy have delegation features. You don't elect representatives, but you can delegate ("lend", if you will) your vote on certain issues to them. And revoke the delegation at any time. Maybe Cicada could be equipped with something like this, but sentences like "The concept is so new that the word representativeless does not even exist. We had to invent it." don't look like the authors have done a lot of research on the topic.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
This is a github post that tries to pass itself off as a "paper" (because it sounds official, right), and ends with "And that can change the world". Wow that's academic and objective. Why are we upvoting delusional content that lacks a real understanding of behavior, politics, and law? Because if you want to change the world, a basic understanding of that might help. He could start with Plato and Xenophon and the Trial of the Generals and then progress to Reddit if he thinks crowds are wise and democracy without flaw. The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code. Is this serious? It's every bad Silicon Valley joke wrapped up in a document. In the real world, politicians, and armies, and people with power that you don't even know of have been ruling the world for a long time. If you want to break that you gotta be more realistic than quoting a science fiction book and a Github paper. To create something scalable enough to run an entire nation with no representatives, we created two cutting edge technologies to serve as the foundation of the platform Is it reasonable to make this statement without showing any code? They seem to have not scaled beyond writing thought on paper. How do you go from that to "leaders being replaced with code"? Is there not a massive gap to be bridged before such audacious claims are made? Why isn't there more skepticism of something like this?
- vertex-four 9y ago
  Primarily because HN is very libertarian-leaning, and has a lot of people who do not understand people or societies as a result.
  - zo1 9y ago
    You must think us Libertarians get insanely promoted and upvoted on HN or something. The truth is no where near that.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      I see a lot more libertarian ideology appear on the front page than anything else, politics-wise, even if there's reasonable arguments in the comments. From blockchains to direct democracy to universal income, and a while back, an incredible amount of writings on property rights for some reason.
      - hueving 9y ago
        Universal income is not a libertarian idea, it's socialist. Block chains are a technology, nothing more, nothing less. Big banks are using them and they have nothing to do with libertarianism. Direct democracy is orthogonal to libertarianism. Structure of government is independent of desired role of government. Calls for direct democracy have surged from liberals in the US after the second wrath of the electoral college. The only thing that is libertarian is writing on property rights.
        vertex-four 9y ago
        Universal income as a replacement for all current Government social support functions is an idea that came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role in social support, and forcing people to take control of their own lives. Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently performs - i.e. they don't really support it, since that's untenable. PoW and PoS blockchains follow libertarian ideology and fundamentally libertarian ideas of how the world should work - "no ability for the Government to see what you're doing and tax it" is pretty much the rallying cry of its proponents, or it was about three years ago when I was into it. (Oh, along with a healthy dose of "companies can do no wrong, and if they do, it's your fault".) The political goal is to remove the Government's (and therefore the banks') role in trade. Centralised "blockchains" as used by banks are irrelevant there, and shouldn't even use the same word. Direct democracy is, unfortunately, something that heavily overlaps with libertarian ideology - again, it severely shrinks or removes the role of Government in political decision-making processes.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Delegation doesn't mitigate large groups' tendencies to, in moments of emotional fervor, make incredibly stupid decisions that they wouldn't if forced to the a few weeks to think about it. This is the difference between e.g. the Californian and Swiss referendum systems [1]. California directly enacts popular thought into law. That makes lawmaking a game of finding moments when you can make the majority disinterested while sending an active minority ballistic, and then freezing that moment into law. Switzerland, on the other hand, lets leaders counter-propose and negotiate with the population. It also has mandatory waiting periods. Broad direct democracy has a poor history because it tends to empower mobs. This is a bigger problem than the expertise issue that delegation addresses.
- joshuaheard 9y ago
  That's true, but you would still have a balance of power so that a court could overturn a law created by direct democracy.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > you would still have a balance of power so that a court could overturn a law created by direct democracy Presumably based on the laws this direct democracy enacts? Observe California and imagine if every single law had to be passed through referendum. The system fails because people don't compromise across large, unaccountable groups. Direct democracy is better used as a check on a small group of leaders, e.g. a right to popularly veto legislation (or Constitutional amendments) and a right to select the leaders.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      > imagine if every single law had to be passed through referendum And what do you think will happen then? I hope you respect the readers by not assuming that it will be paper ballot referendums.
      - xg15 9y ago

marcosdumay 9y ago

You can always give veto power to direct vote, and keep the government organized as usual.

anoplus 9y ago

I agree; in practice, people can't deal with gov all day. But there are hybrid gov models to address it, such as delegate democracy, which I foresee as next stage in the evolution. Also, I think it's kind of viscous cycle situation. Bad gov reflects in personal-live problems causing the individual to have even less time to deal with the gov. One day robots will work for us. We will receive UBI. We will have plenty of free time, so we can all be full-time governors.

SkyMarshal 9y ago

To prevent voter fatigue, you have to make it difficult to get referendums/propositions on the ballot, and you have to make voting on the ones that do get on infrequent (like yearly). But if the alternative is legislative bodies inundated with lobbyists and corporate money making big decisions for us, I'd be willing to experiment with any solution, even direct democracy like this.

ciocan42 9y ago

In this real time everything, voting for matters every few years does not make any sense. The issues are hanging for decades and the progress is slow. 50%+1 voting process it is not optimal. A statistically significant number could be way down than half of population. If voting process is convenient (meaning a tap away), secure, cheap and real time all the issues could be resolved much faster. Instead of decades could be months. We are still in the stone age when it comes to policy and democracy.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

I used to think I'd like direct democracy, but after living in California for a few years I realized it wasn't at all what I'd expected. Intelligently voting on an issue requires you to invest a lot of time in understanding the topic, its pros and cons, and any far-reaching effects. It's almost like a full-time job, which is why we elect representatives!

anigbrowl 9y ago
The problem is that governance is complex that representatives are in many respects just incompetent voters. We elect a lot of lawyers because they're skilled in both assimilation and evaluation, but the upshot is legalism, procedural paralysis, exponential growth of the legal corpus, inaccessibility to the citizenry, and factionalism.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  I'd actually consider "procedural paralysis" a feature. Writing laws and making changes in such a complex system must be done with extreme care and deliberation. The government is like a huge monolithic repo!
crdoconnor 9y ago
>It's almost like a full-time job, which is why we elect representatives! We elect representatives because our history is dictatorial, and each step taken toward a more democratic system has been a compromise after a revolt between the ruler(s) and the ruled. That usually means leaving them with some power. Direct democracy doesn't mean that you have to make an intelligent decision on every single topic, ever. It means you can choose which topics to make decisions on and which topics you want to delegate to somebody else and whom to delegate it to. It would still mean that you could delegate your vote on decisions about regulating the Internet to notorious full time job holder Ted Stevens if you really wanted.

anigbrowl 9y ago

Nobody should vote on all decisions because nobody is expert in everything. Rather than voting, people should make proposals (of lesser or greater scope) which are edits to the legal corpus can then be supported or opposed is a manner somewhat similar to Wikipedia editing, a methods of governance I call Participativism.

imron 9y ago

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael_Rimmer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael...

visarga 9y ago

> Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions? I think the solution to voter fatigue is sortition - you select a random group of, say, 1000 people, they come together, hear the issue, vote on it, and disband. For every issue you repeat the random selection. It is a statistical law that a randomly selected group is representative of the whole. When you have a few thousand people, they are within a couple of percent precise compared to an actual election. So a random selection (just like jury duty) could be the cheapest way to go about solving the voter fatigue problem. An advantage of sortition is that it does away with the need for elections and political campaigning, cutting off lobbying at both ends - can't lobby a random group that always changes, and the system doesn't need political campaigns or even parties in order to function, unlike representative democracy. And it's not a new invention - sortition was the original form of democracy in Athens.