6 ms·

How a social network could save democracy from deadlock

95 points by eddyparkinson 7y ago

humanrebar 7y ago
> And rather than showing the messages that divided each of the four groups, Pol.is simply made them invisible. This seems like a good way to find some initiatives through consensus. The main mechanism seems to be giving a "conversational veto" to everyone in the discussion. A "let's move on" button, basically. I find that very interesting. It would certainly help with concerns that "my legislature does nothing". It might actually be an interesting mechanism for legislatures themselves to deploy internally to set agendas, though it would necessarily weaken the power of the factions that actually set legislative agendas (the majority party, the majority leader, etc.). On the other hand, giving a strong and hidden minority veto also doesn't seem to help with the issues that actually divide citizens. - Would not talking about Brexit anymore actually help the U.K.? - Should the U.S. Congress not pass a budget anymore, to avoid balancing it? - Maybe all legislatures agree to broadly humane treatment for refugees, but how would they agree on healthy levels and categories of immigration? - The biggest divisive issue in the U.S might actually be abortion, which generally isn't debated so much as such. It's also clear that not addressing the issue isn't making the underlying problems go away. - More broadly, would the U.S. have ever done anything significant about civil rights if consensus was required first? EDIT: Maybe I'm a bit too pessimistic about civil rights... the constitutional amendment process does require two kinds of consensus for ratification. And many amendments did deal with civil rights.
- calmworm 7y ago
  I interpreted this differently. It’s not about ignoring the polarizing issues or tough topics. These issues would still be presented and discussed. It seemed to me it was all about finding the commonalities between groups then drafting statements that both could agree on.
- Retric 7y ago
  Politics is complex and deadlock preserves the current situation which some group considers preferable to change. Consider, (53+25) = 78% of the US population believes Abortion should be legal in some or all situations. That’s why a total ban is rarely debated it’s a campaign issue, but making it illegal would quickly cost elections. Restrictions on the other hand also have popular support (53 + 21) = 74%. Thus rather than a ban one party pushing for more restrictions. This is not a failure to achieve a ban, but rather a middle ground with significant popular support. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
  - humanrebar 7y ago
    My points were more that: - Sometimes the controversy is about the process, such as historical efforts for suffrage for women. - Sometimes 90% vote benefits for themselves at the expense of 10%. Most unbalanced budgets fall in this category. - Sometimes 10% people preserve benefits for themselves at the expense of everyone else. Especially concerning about automatically hiding debates without consensus is that it hides things that are important or urgent but haven't reached consensus (yet). Maybe there are other mechanisms to provide transparency there, but the article did not seem to describe any.
    - Retric 7y ago
      > Sometimes 90% vote benefits for themselves at the expense of 10%. Most unbalanced budgets fall in this category. In isolation you can find many examples of this. But, political alliances mean that group may be trading financial support for support of another issue. Farm subsidies and net neutrality could be traded with people voting for both even if they only care for one or the other. It smells like corruption, but political horse trading does represent people caring more or less about different issues. Consider three friends going out, one cares a lot about the movie they watch, another cares about what they eat for dinner, and the third really wants to go out to a specific club afterwards. If everyone votes on each activity separately then people may be less happy than a compromise.
      - arethuza 7y ago
        A lot of political compromise always seems to me of the form: we have a cake to share, I want the whole cake and you, being reasonable, want the 'fair' portion of half a cake. So we compromise and I get three quarters of the cake and you get a quarter.
        K0SM0S 7y ago
        This is as painfully true as it is down to earth. Zooming out a bit, a less cynical take (merely observation) is that we seek what we think are the right means for our goals (and these too diverge a lot). Maybe I want money, maybe you'd rather have love of the people; maybe we just both wanna make this world better, maybe we're mostly in it for ourselves. The point is, industrious types seek the means to industry, romantic ones seek an emotional path to/of success, technical minds seek the knowledge or practice of their puzzle, etc.; and in the end everything is just as it should/cloud/would have been. There's a reason you asked 100%, got 75 and I let you walk away with it. However I'd want to spin it, it just had not mattered to me as much as it had to you.
- Johnwbh 7y ago
  It reminds me a bit of the old dinner party rules of not talking politics, sex or religion. You keep things harmonious but at the cost of more interesting conversation. And doesn't help when you're forced to tackle controversial issues
heisenbit 7y ago
I found it quite interesting that they removed the reply button. Afaik HN also has a limited reply button - there is no notification attached to it. This discourages talk/debate like discussion (lack of personal reaction) and encourages more a discourse style interaction around the facts.
- johnday 7y ago
  The opportunity to reply is only invoked after an increasing amount of time, which I think is dependent on the depth of the conversation. In other words, the further into a conversation you are, the more time you are forced to take to think on the other person's response.
  - xorand 7y ago
    Great idea! I was thinking about how to make votes (aka likes) more like real votes. Maybe by updating the number of likes of a post once every 6 hours.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Can you draft a reply before that times has passed? I wonder how that would influence the conversation.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      You can draft whatever you want on your own machine.
      - anoncake 7y ago
        Yes, obviously. That's not what I'm asking.
    - johnday 7y ago
      No, you cannot. I think the intention is to deprive you of the opportunity to start writing at all. There are studies that show the longer you take thinking before acting, the better your outcomes are.
refset 7y ago
For more context on the Polis platform, watch "Clojure on the cyberpunk frontier of democracy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tBVMAm0-00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tBVMAm0-00
lbj 7y ago
Democracy in its current form is bound to fail - The greek inventors specifically warned of exactly our brand of democracy.
- johnisgood 7y ago
  http://www.anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm http://www.anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm might be worth a read.
  - chmod775 7y ago
    The author does a lot of fun thought experiments that don't hold up long under critical scrutiny. Take for example: "On the other hand, if, as it is now fashionable to maintain, the majority of voters in a democracy are prohibited from doing one thing—ending the democratic elective process itself—then this is no longer democracy, because the majority of voters can no longer rule." It is still a democracy, because the majority of voters did not the surrender the power to make that decision to anyone, but in fact nobody is able to make that decision at all. There's no non-democratic entity who could decide so in place of the majority, because it is something that simply can't be changed. Every decision made is still made in a democratic process. Just because you can't decide that the sun should drop out of the sky, does not mean you are not a democracy. It's simply another decision nobody can make. It's completely outside the scope of your democratic decision making. Edit: Another example would be a company in which all decisions are made in a democratic process. Well why can't its workers decide that murder should be legal? The obvious answer is that it is simply not a decision they can make, but is instead at the discretion of the country they operate in.
    - johnisgood 7y ago
      Can the majority of people decide to end democracy if they, the majority, wanted or not? If not, why not, and how is it a democracy then? If yes, then I do not understand the relevance of your comment. > Just because you can't decide that the sun should drop out of the sky, does not mean you are not a democracy. I think this one is pretty obvious and I am not sure of its significance here. You cannot decide to do a lot of things, but that does not mean that you cannot decide to do some other things. Allow me to say this: just because you cannot decide that the sun should drop out of the sky, does not mean that you are a democracy (just as it does not mean you are not a democracy). See the problem here? > Another example would be a company in which all decisions are made in a democratic process. Well why can't its workers decide that murder should be legal? The obvious answer is that it is simply not a decision they can make, but is instead at the discretion of the country they operate in. This makes no sense within the context. You have mixed the scopes yourself. It is at discretion of the country, yes, and the company most likely is not the majority that makes up the country, is it? Otherwise if there was democracy, and whoever was part of the democratic process are indeed the majority of the country they operate in, then they are either allowed to decide that, or they are not allowed to decide that. If the majority of people cannot decide that, then it is simply not democratic. At first I thought you would talk within the scope of the company, then that would have made more sense in the way that workers are not necessarily part of the democratic process, or their votes can be simply ignored, which may happen in the context of a country, too, in which case I would not call that democratic either. For anyone who is reading my comment but have not read the article posted above: please do not dismiss the article because of my comments! There is much more to it than what is mentioned in my comments, and the author has articulated his arguments better than I did! I do not accurately reflect the author's views.
known 7y ago
Unlike social media, traditional media "generates" opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democracy,_media,_and_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democr...
emsign 7y ago
It's funny I just thought about this yesterday. "What if my smartphone loses network connectivity. How many apps on it will stop working? 95%? I miss the old days when storing and processing my personal data was done 100% on my own devices. Sharing that data with others wasn't really a problem and people had websites as always accessible billboards where they presented themselves as well." Sure the social media "network" aspect wasn't there, but it wouldn't be impossible to achieve that today while the bulk of the data resides on people's own devices. Ever since the shift of storing the user's data not on their devices but in the cloud and ever since rendering ad blockers useless by tailoring not just the ads but the actual content towards the user's behavior and biases, the internet has gone down the drain. And more and more people are fed up with it. Societies can be "hacked" via social media, that technology is out there and it is being used not only by superpowers like the US or Russia, but also by political actors in smaller countries like Myanmar or Ethiopia. People die. Mobs incited by fake news campaigns on Facebook kill people. Elections get hacked, not by manipulating voting machines but by manipulating people's minds using the same technology advertisers use. That's some scary stuff. Social Media manipulation is the nuclear bomb of the early 21st century, it's that hot new weapon every sleazy political actor wants to get their hands on. And so we are in a new Cold War, actually it's many cold wars. Unlike the one in the 50s-80s these new ones are invisible and don't feel as scary, which makes them... more scary?! Weapons of mass propaganda... we have to take action to render them useless by abonding social networks and cloud services as we know them today. But that can only happen with a better replacement that's harder to manipulate and that has a higher incentive to be used by the masses. Without an internet connection your smartphones and even your PC becomes either almost completely or at least partially useless. That is not scary because we have to fear network issues or censorship but it's scary because it means so much of the information acquisitioning and processing is out of our control. Modern devices are perfectly capable of handling all the user's data and then some, they have the storage capacity and they have the processing power, the only reason the cloud still exists for end user's is because analyzing everyone's data makes them money. And you can't even blame developers and companies jumping on this bandwaggon. Everyone else does it, the tools are out there, ready to be used, and that sweet ad money pays the bills or the investor's demand it because they think that sweet ad money will reimburse their investment. But is it ethical? Hell no! It seems like nobody is thinking about putting that processing power and that storage capacity that people own in their pockets to use. I welcome the initiatives that do exist, but I feel like that only something massive, something disruptive can change that.
foobar_ 7y ago
https://github.com/g0v/vue.vtaiwan.tw https://github.com/g0v/vue.vtaiwan.tw English translation anyone?
K0SM0S 7y ago
I am very much convinced —have been for about a decade— that this is the general way to go. To fundamentally give democracy to people in a much more direct fashion, a peer-to-peer design true to what democracy actually is. Starting with the local / small issues (if resistance is met at the top, unlike the Taiwainese example it seems).
tus88 7y ago
While a nice idea, the problem is convincing people that compromise is a better alternative to winning.
th-th-throwaway 7y ago
Gamified Nuance. What a brilliant idea. I don't know if this particular design will work but I expect to see a lot more attempts now that the idea has entered the public consciousness. Current social networks are gamified for virality which implicitly rewards the lack of nuance. So statements that are as short, simple, and wrong as possible will spread faster within the supporters while encouraging flaming from the opposition. This is such an inherent property of every social network in existence that I didn't even realize fixing it was an option.

95 points by eddyparkinson 7y ago

> And rather than showing the messages that divided each of the four groups, Pol.is simply made them invisible. This seems like a good way to find some initiatives through consensus. The main mechanism seems to be giving a "conversational veto" to everyone in the discussion. A "let's move on" button, basically. I find that very interesting. It would certainly help with concerns that "my legislature does nothing". It might actually be an interesting mechanism for legislatures themselves to deploy internally to set agendas, though it would necessarily weaken the power of the factions that actually set legislative agendas (the majority party, the majority leader, etc.). On the other hand, giving a strong and hidden minority veto also doesn't seem to help with the issues that actually divide citizens. - Would not talking about Brexit anymore actually help the U.K.? - Should the U.S. Congress not pass a budget anymore, to avoid balancing it? - Maybe all legislatures agree to broadly humane treatment for refugees, but how would they agree on healthy levels and categories of immigration? - The biggest divisive issue in the U.S might actually be abortion, which generally isn't debated so much as such. It's also clear that not addressing the issue isn't making the underlying problems go away. - More broadly, would the U.S. have ever done anything significant about civil rights if consensus was required first? EDIT: Maybe I'm a bit too pessimistic about civil rights... the constitutional amendment process does require two kinds of consensus for ratification. And many amendments did deal with civil rights.

calmworm 7y ago
I interpreted this differently. It’s not about ignoring the polarizing issues or tough topics. These issues would still be presented and discussed. It seemed to me it was all about finding the commonalities between groups then drafting statements that both could agree on.
Retric 7y ago
Politics is complex and deadlock preserves the current situation which some group considers preferable to change. Consider, (53+25) = 78% of the US population believes Abortion should be legal in some or all situations. That’s why a total ban is rarely debated it’s a campaign issue, but making it illegal would quickly cost elections. Restrictions on the other hand also have popular support (53 + 21) = 74%. Thus rather than a ban one party pushing for more restrictions. This is not a failure to achieve a ban, but rather a middle ground with significant popular support. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
- humanrebar 7y ago
  My points were more that: - Sometimes the controversy is about the process, such as historical efforts for suffrage for women. - Sometimes 90% vote benefits for themselves at the expense of 10%. Most unbalanced budgets fall in this category. - Sometimes 10% people preserve benefits for themselves at the expense of everyone else. Especially concerning about automatically hiding debates without consensus is that it hides things that are important or urgent but haven't reached consensus (yet). Maybe there are other mechanisms to provide transparency there, but the article did not seem to describe any.
  - Retric 7y ago
    > Sometimes 90% vote benefits for themselves at the expense of 10%. Most unbalanced budgets fall in this category. In isolation you can find many examples of this. But, political alliances mean that group may be trading financial support for support of another issue. Farm subsidies and net neutrality could be traded with people voting for both even if they only care for one or the other. It smells like corruption, but political horse trading does represent people caring more or less about different issues. Consider three friends going out, one cares a lot about the movie they watch, another cares about what they eat for dinner, and the third really wants to go out to a specific club afterwards. If everyone votes on each activity separately then people may be less happy than a compromise.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      A lot of political compromise always seems to me of the form: we have a cake to share, I want the whole cake and you, being reasonable, want the 'fair' portion of half a cake. So we compromise and I get three quarters of the cake and you get a quarter.
      - K0SM0S 7y ago
        This is as painfully true as it is down to earth. Zooming out a bit, a less cynical take (merely observation) is that we seek what we think are the right means for our goals (and these too diverge a lot). Maybe I want money, maybe you'd rather have love of the people; maybe we just both wanna make this world better, maybe we're mostly in it for ourselves. The point is, industrious types seek the means to industry, romantic ones seek an emotional path to/of success, technical minds seek the knowledge or practice of their puzzle, etc.; and in the end everything is just as it should/cloud/would have been. There's a reason you asked 100%, got 75 and I let you walk away with it. However I'd want to spin it, it just had not mattered to me as much as it had to you.
Johnwbh 7y ago
It reminds me a bit of the old dinner party rules of not talking politics, sex or religion. You keep things harmonious but at the cost of more interesting conversation. And doesn't help when you're forced to tackle controversial issues

heisenbit 7y ago

I found it quite interesting that they removed the reply button. Afaik HN also has a limited reply button - there is no notification attached to it. This discourages talk/debate like discussion (lack of personal reaction) and encourages more a discourse style interaction around the facts.

johnday 7y ago
The opportunity to reply is only invoked after an increasing amount of time, which I think is dependent on the depth of the conversation. In other words, the further into a conversation you are, the more time you are forced to take to think on the other person's response.
- xorand 7y ago
  Great idea! I was thinking about how to make votes (aka likes) more like real votes. Maybe by updating the number of likes of a post once every 6 hours.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Can you draft a reply before that times has passed? I wonder how that would influence the conversation.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    You can draft whatever you want on your own machine.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      Yes, obviously. That's not what I'm asking.
  - johnday 7y ago
    No, you cannot. I think the intention is to deprive you of the opportunity to start writing at all. There are studies that show the longer you take thinking before acting, the better your outcomes are.

refset 7y ago

For more context on the Polis platform, watch "Clojure on the cyberpunk frontier of democracy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tBVMAm0-00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tBVMAm0-00

lbj 7y ago

Democracy in its current form is bound to fail - The greek inventors specifically warned of exactly our brand of democracy.

johnisgood 7y ago
http://www.anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm http://www.anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm might be worth a read.
- chmod775 7y ago
  The author does a lot of fun thought experiments that don't hold up long under critical scrutiny. Take for example: "On the other hand, if, as it is now fashionable to maintain, the majority of voters in a democracy are prohibited from doing one thing—ending the democratic elective process itself—then this is no longer democracy, because the majority of voters can no longer rule." It is still a democracy, because the majority of voters did not the surrender the power to make that decision to anyone, but in fact nobody is able to make that decision at all. There's no non-democratic entity who could decide so in place of the majority, because it is something that simply can't be changed. Every decision made is still made in a democratic process. Just because you can't decide that the sun should drop out of the sky, does not mean you are not a democracy. It's simply another decision nobody can make. It's completely outside the scope of your democratic decision making. Edit: Another example would be a company in which all decisions are made in a democratic process. Well why can't its workers decide that murder should be legal? The obvious answer is that it is simply not a decision they can make, but is instead at the discretion of the country they operate in.
  - johnisgood 7y ago
    Can the majority of people decide to end democracy if they, the majority, wanted or not? If not, why not, and how is it a democracy then? If yes, then I do not understand the relevance of your comment. > Just because you can't decide that the sun should drop out of the sky, does not mean you are not a democracy. I think this one is pretty obvious and I am not sure of its significance here. You cannot decide to do a lot of things, but that does not mean that you cannot decide to do some other things. Allow me to say this: just because you cannot decide that the sun should drop out of the sky, does not mean that you are a democracy (just as it does not mean you are not a democracy). See the problem here? > Another example would be a company in which all decisions are made in a democratic process. Well why can't its workers decide that murder should be legal? The obvious answer is that it is simply not a decision they can make, but is instead at the discretion of the country they operate in. This makes no sense within the context. You have mixed the scopes yourself. It is at discretion of the country, yes, and the company most likely is not the majority that makes up the country, is it? Otherwise if there was democracy, and whoever was part of the democratic process are indeed the majority of the country they operate in, then they are either allowed to decide that, or they are not allowed to decide that. If the majority of people cannot decide that, then it is simply not democratic. At first I thought you would talk within the scope of the company, then that would have made more sense in the way that workers are not necessarily part of the democratic process, or their votes can be simply ignored, which may happen in the context of a country, too, in which case I would not call that democratic either. For anyone who is reading my comment but have not read the article posted above: please do not dismiss the article because of my comments! There is much more to it than what is mentioned in my comments, and the author has articulated his arguments better than I did! I do not accurately reflect the author's views.

known 7y ago

Unlike social media, traditional media "generates" opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democracy,_media,_and_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democr...

emsign 7y ago

It's funny I just thought about this yesterday. "What if my smartphone loses network connectivity. How many apps on it will stop working? 95%? I miss the old days when storing and processing my personal data was done 100% on my own devices. Sharing that data with others wasn't really a problem and people had websites as always accessible billboards where they presented themselves as well." Sure the social media "network" aspect wasn't there, but it wouldn't be impossible to achieve that today while the bulk of the data resides on people's own devices. Ever since the shift of storing the user's data not on their devices but in the cloud and ever since rendering ad blockers useless by tailoring not just the ads but the actual content towards the user's behavior and biases, the internet has gone down the drain. And more and more people are fed up with it. Societies can be "hacked" via social media, that technology is out there and it is being used not only by superpowers like the US or Russia, but also by political actors in smaller countries like Myanmar or Ethiopia. People die. Mobs incited by fake news campaigns on Facebook kill people. Elections get hacked, not by manipulating voting machines but by manipulating people's minds using the same technology advertisers use. That's some scary stuff. Social Media manipulation is the nuclear bomb of the early 21st century, it's that hot new weapon every sleazy political actor wants to get their hands on. And so we are in a new Cold War, actually it's many cold wars. Unlike the one in the 50s-80s these new ones are invisible and don't feel as scary, which makes them... more scary?! Weapons of mass propaganda... we have to take action to render them useless by abonding social networks and cloud services as we know them today. But that can only happen with a better replacement that's harder to manipulate and that has a higher incentive to be used by the masses. Without an internet connection your smartphones and even your PC becomes either almost completely or at least partially useless. That is not scary because we have to fear network issues or censorship but it's scary because it means so much of the information acquisitioning and processing is out of our control. Modern devices are perfectly capable of handling all the user's data and then some, they have the storage capacity and they have the processing power, the only reason the cloud still exists for end user's is because analyzing everyone's data makes them money. And you can't even blame developers and companies jumping on this bandwaggon. Everyone else does it, the tools are out there, ready to be used, and that sweet ad money pays the bills or the investor's demand it because they think that sweet ad money will reimburse their investment. But is it ethical? Hell no! It seems like nobody is thinking about putting that processing power and that storage capacity that people own in their pockets to use. I welcome the initiatives that do exist, but I feel like that only something massive, something disruptive can change that.

foobar_ 7y ago

https://github.com/g0v/vue.vtaiwan.tw https://github.com/g0v/vue.vtaiwan.tw English translation anyone?

K0SM0S 7y ago

I am very much convinced —have been for about a decade— that this is the general way to go. To fundamentally give democracy to people in a much more direct fashion, a peer-to-peer design true to what democracy actually is. Starting with the local / small issues (if resistance is met at the top, unlike the Taiwainese example it seems).

tus88 7y ago

While a nice idea, the problem is convincing people that compromise is a better alternative to winning.

th-th-throwaway 7y ago

Gamified Nuance. What a brilliant idea. I don't know if this particular design will work but I expect to see a lot more attempts now that the idea has entered the public consciousness. Current social networks are gamified for virality which implicitly rewards the lack of nuance. So statements that are as short, simple, and wrong as possible will spread faster within the supporters while encouraging flaming from the opposition. This is such an inherent property of every social network in existence that I didn't even realize fixing it was an option.