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Direct democracy is a terrible idea. Voters have shown again and again they that they don't understand what they are voting for. Most voters only understand "pr

Direct democracy is a terrible idea. Voters have shown again and again they that they don't understand what they are voting for. Most voters only understand "pretty words" and have no intention or will to understand issues at a deeper level.

argvargc 5y ago
Politicians have also shown again and again they don't understand what they are voting for, and/or don't care. Caring about the outcome is at least an improvement.
thcwhuzzle 5y ago
Politicians don’t even read the laws they vote on. In many circumstances they literally aren’t even given the time to read the text.
- netrus 5y ago
  I have strong opinions on a lot of laws I have not actually read. I will rely on experts, and so do politicians (that might be experts within their party, staff, lobbyists ...). The main skill is to decide whom to trust. I do not really see any alternative - I do not think a parliament with hundreds of delegates spending most of their day reading complex legal texts would be any better than what we see today. Still, I am sure most politicians spend much more time and resources to inform their vote than the average citizen.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    What happens when those expert staff are deliberately pushing an agenda? Perfect example of politicians not knowing anything about what they're voting for is the absurd Article 13 in EU. Something that was impossible for anyone not called Alphabet or Facebook. If they did know what they were voting for, that is far worse...
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    If professional full-time legislators cannot understand the legislation they’re voting on, they should not write it to be that unwieldy.
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    An alternative is having bills that are for a single issue that a layperson can understand. It is not just the politicians that need to understand what they are voting on. The people need to understand them too so they are aware when their representation is voting against their interests.
- maccard 5y ago
  That seems reasonable to me. I'm in the UK, and I don't expect all 650 MPs to have a detailed understanding of 4 different pieces of legislation per day [0]. I _do_ expect them to have a brief pack from their staffers explaining what they're voting for though. [0] https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons there was 12 votes in 3 days last week in the House of Commons
  - 45ure 5y ago
    >I'm in the UK, and I don't expect all 650 MPs to have a detailed understanding of 4 different pieces of legislation per day I respectfully disagree. The MPs (Members of Parliament) receive substantial remuneration to represent their constituents ─ including business expenses related to equipment, premises, staff, maintaining a second home etc. The main remit of their job is to be knowledgeable and informed of the bills they are voting upon. Most of these bills go through a lengthy process of debates, stages, readings and 'ping-pong' between HoC and HoL, before gaining the Royal Assent. There are absolutely no excuses for having a 'brief pack' and then vote based on a toss of a coin. Your reasonable expectation breeds complacency and apathy, absolving public servants of responsibility. As a taxpayer and a citizen, it is especially important to demand more at this crucial juncture, where they are stripping away any laws, which can be used to hold themselves accountable, whilst introducing Draconian measures. https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/ https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/ https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ https://www.theyworkforyou.com/
- gregoriol 5y ago
  The major problem with politics nowadays is that it has become a "job", so people need to be re-elected to keep their life running; if they don't, they don't have anything else to do. It shouldn't be like that: people should be elected for a duty, and after their duty is done, they should go back to their normal job, not seek infinite re-election.
  - moshmosh 5y ago
    The counter-argument to these sorts of notions (including things like legislative term limits) is that, in a sufficiently advanced political environment, this will make your representatives even more dependent on entrenched power-brokers to be effective—chiefly, bureaucrats and lobbyists.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Why should society be based around people having a ‘normal job’?
    - Swenrekcah 5y ago
      It shouldn’t necessarily but it is, so until that changes the political system has to account for it.
      - zepto 5y ago
        If you build a political system around that assumption, it’s not going to chance.
        Swenrekcah 5y ago
        True, but what I meant was, in the context of the conversation, that the system must not be ignorant of the fact that regular people need to earn a living, and provide opportunities for regular people to participate without sacrificing a significant amount of time to fundraising. I don’t know what the best solution is but if the system is only practically open to those that don’t need to work for a living then things surely will stay the same.
FractalHQ 5y ago
And they are too easy to easy brainwash. i.e. Fox News. But it isn’t hard to beat our current system of selling votes to the highest bidding lobbyist.
- ajuc 5y ago
  > But it isn’t hard to beat our current system of selling votes to the highest bidding lobbyist. There's 20 different ways to fix it already implemented in the rest of the world. Starting with a sane vote-counting system and low threshold on financing political parties from anywhere except the state budget.
wavesounds 5y ago
What if the app made you take a test to understand what you're voting for? (Yes I'm aware poll tests have been abused in the past to disenfranchise people, let's assume we can create an app with fair tests)
inawarminister 5y ago
Eh ballot-based democracy like the Swiss has seems to work quite well for centuries now.
- weswpg 5y ago
  > Eh ballot-based democracy like the Swiss has seems to work quite well for centuries now. OP was proposing replacing the current system with direct democracy whereas the swiss simply hold referenda on specific issues while they still have representatives to govern them. Meanwhile, on the issues that they do vote on through referenda, it can result in popular support for discriminatory laws like the ban on ....Muslim temples with pointy roofs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendu... > The Swiss government recommended that the proposed amendment be rejected as inconsistent with the basic principles of the constitution.[3] However, after the results were tabulated, the government immediately announced that the ban was in effect.[4] The problem is that people tend to believe that the outcome of an election or a referendum should be allowed to overrule basic human rights and national constitutions.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    The OP was proposing ensuring that politicians answer to their electors. The jump from there to direct democracy was already an straw-man. The jump from that to "no representatives on the middle" is completely baseless.
    - weswpg 5y ago
      The suggestion being replied to here was: "I would vote for any candidate that committed to letting its registered users decide every vote he or she made." I fail to see how that is substantially different from direct democracy. What good would representative democracy be if each representative was just an empty vessel carrying out the collective wishes of a mass of Internet commenters?
- vinay427 5y ago
  This is widely-cited and has become a bit of a trope among many people here in Switzerland, but one famous example that isn't usually looked upon with pride today is the extremely delayed granting of suffrage to women in Switzerland (1971 nationally, 1991 in the last canton), or the current same-sex marriage referendum considered long-overdue by some. There are a few other human/civil rights along this vein that, at least to me, point to the possibility of a better system that can balance direct democracy (at least in the sense of modern Switzerland, California on a state level, etc.) with some longstanding sense of inherent rights.
mikem170 5y ago
I think that direct democracy can work for local issues. People need to be engaged with what they are voting on, things that effect their lives, things they have a real stake in. An example might be a few hundred people in a room seeking consensus on local government taxes and services. This has been successfully implemented in places.
- gregoriol 5y ago
  Local issues are simple compared to national or international issues: they affect less people, mostly a community that may already form a group of likewise thinking people or similar categories of people. Larger issues affect much different people, with impacts that may be harder to understand.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  That is some of the reasoning behind the US Constitution. Federalist 9 and 10 address the effectiveness of direct democracy at a small scale and the utter failure that direct democracy is at a large scale. Once you get past a tribe size, opposing factions come into play. Factions are not bad but direct democracy at scale leads to the largest faction ruling over all. Ideally, all factions come to a consensus on what is best for all instead of fighting for total control.
- chr1 5y ago
  People can also decide for themselves if something is an issue important to them enough to vote personally, or not important enough that can be delegated to someone they trust. This is usually called liquid democracy, as it allows to change the amount of directness vs delegation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
  - throwanident 5y ago
    To deter intimidation, ordinary voters should have secret ballots. But to provide accountability, powerful voters should not have secret ballots. Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to draw a dividing line between ordinary voters and powerful ones in a liquid democracy method to satisfy both of these criteria.
bluefirebrand 5y ago
The other side of that is that Hacker News and Reddit and other upvote/downvote cultured sites often have shown that the first upvotes and downvotes on a topic often are the ones that win out because people just bandwagon them
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  The year is 2040: The USA now has exactly 69 states and the official currency is doge coin. Elon Musk is the Supreme Overlord for life and was the first leader of the United States to have a Department of Memes.
  - ww520 5y ago
    Shouldn’t it be AI Arnold 2.0 or Skynet something?
    - jvalencia 5y ago
      The AI through a convoluted deep net, decided that maximizing the AI efficiency was best setup based on this reality.
- throwanident 5y ago
  I think I saw someone suggest using a multi-armed bandit algorithm with upvotes as the objective. I'd like to see that! An algorithm like that would balance the exploitation of showing current highly upvoted posts first with the exploration of showing posts with few votes first, so that every post gets its chance while still penalizing spam posts once they're conclusively known to be bad.
eat_veggies 5y ago
“we must above all rid ourselves of the very Western, very bourgeois and therefore contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves. In fact, experience proves that the masses understand perfectly the most complicated problems. [...] the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning and to learn all the tricks of the trade. If recourse is had to technical language, this signifies that it has been decided to consider the masses as uninitiated. [...] Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, pp. 188–189
- andreilys 5y ago
  Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.” Counterpoint quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
  - staticautomatic 5y ago
    Really the counterpoint is Walter Lippmann’s book The Phantom Public.
- triceratops 5y ago
  > Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand. Who's doing the explaining? What viewpoints do they offer? How much time and mental energy do the people have to educate themselves on the issues?
- staticman2 5y ago
  "It's been 60 years since I died and given 60 years of new data I was wrong about everything." Frantz Fanon, from heaven, hypothetically.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- 5y ago
goodpoint 5y ago
That's a big generalization. Ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy show a lot of promise.
vageli 5y ago
So people are unable to vote on issues but somehow intelligent enough to identify the candidate who best represents their interests? If most voters only understand pretty words, what difference does it make if those words are in a campaign for a piece of legislation put to direct vote or in the mouth of a political candidate?
- Aunche 5y ago
  >So people are unable to vote on issues but somehow intelligent enough to identify the candidate who best represents their interests? No, but those politicians are at least able appoint reasonably competent unelected government officials.
- jonshariat 5y ago
  I think the idea is that you can spend the time once every few years to research a candidate, review key policy positions, etc. Not saying its the best system but just want to point out that there is a time element. People can't spend time understanding each piece of legislation in general.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    How do you evaluate a community organizer/constitutional law professor as a candidate for the US Senate? Or a real estate billionaire for President? What about the foreign policy positions of someone who's never run anything larger than a city? What more is there than pretty words in these cases?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- phaemon 5y ago
  So management are unable to code but somehow intelligent enough to identify the developers who can best create their product? (I'm actually not sure if this argues for or against the point. I guess it depends on your management!)
- weswpg 5y ago
aqme28 5y ago
> Voters have shown again and again When, exactly? There are also plenty of cases where voters have chosen admirably, but lobbying and politics have chosen otherwise.
clarge1120 5y ago
This app would make sense as an instant polling tool to give politicians instant, and evolving, feedback. So, this isn't direct democracy. In the current system, the representative is expected to vote on behalf of their constituents, using some level of personal judgment. This app would allow decisions to be made more quickly and better represent the view of the constituency. Imagine being able to go back and see what the constituents demanded, and what the representative decided. One could then look at outcomes and determine how reliable a politician's judgment is.
mistermann 5y ago
The general public is surely flawed in a variety of ways (as are politicians, in the same ways and others), but a well written system could highlight these shortcomings, and we could work on addressing them over time. It wasn't all that long ago that basic reading and arithmetic were beyond the majority of people, but we recognized that and took steps to remedy it, with some decent success. Deploying such a system into production would be a long, careful process, running it in parallel (with no power) to simply measure public sentiment would be extremely informative, and it would also get the public thinking seriously about things...simply using a well designed system would make them smarter.
lucideer 5y ago
> Voters have shown again and again [citation needed] Seriously. I would love to see these so-called "again and again" examples. Anecdote: I'm involved in local politics and one of the biggest problems I see resulting from "direct" citizen/constituent involvement initiatives is that they are fundamentally predicated on attracting people who want to oppose & object to things (sometimes to bad things, but very often to positive, progressive initiatives). Because of the effort barrier to involvement, those who are actively engaged tend to be people who have a problem with something, which means the "I agree with this ongoing initiative" voice is lost.
- rrdharan 5y ago
  Prop 13 in California?
  - lucideer 5y ago
    Which one?
- sideshowb 5y ago
  I don't think you need examples of poor decisions to see the problems with direct democracy. Take Brexit, and let's lay aside the question of whether or not it was a good idea, for the sake of argument let's just acknowledge there were strong feelings on both sides. The fact that it was a referendum meant that for the sake of a very small margin, an enormous number of people are very unhappy with the result. And if the government had backtracked on the referendum result, the same issue would apply - in terms of being a united nation we were screwed either way. In representative democracy, by way of comparison, such a small margin would mean the winner had to tread a very careful line with any legislation they tried to pass, thus in general leading to more reasonable compromise solutions.
  - lucideer 5y ago
    I mentioned I was talking about local politics. Issues are complex at every level, but I do think people are better equipped to make informed decisions the "closer" they are to an issue. The EU is an unbelievably abstracted entity, and with trans-national issues in general, I think it would be difficult to find any example of a resolution that makes everyone happy. Here's a few observations though: - I'm guessing from your comment you would rather Brexit hadn't passed. Do you think it wouldn't have happened if it had been up to govt. (without referendum)? - one should also look at things holistically: do you think Brexit would have ever been proposed (in the form that it was) if people were more directly involved in the decision-making that led to its formation as an idea? - a vote for Brexit was ultimately a vote of dissatisfaction with a large range of other political issues people felt they didn't have enough of a direct say in. If those various areas were more open to public involvement, would we have had the level of discontent that drove the Brexit vote? > In representative democracy, by way of comparison, such a small margin would [...] (lead) to more reasonable compromise solutions. Ultimately, I don't buy this. It's not necessarily true at all. But even if it were, the same would be true of a direct-democracy approach because what you're comparing is representative democracy with 1 big binary vote at the end, where in reality greater engagement in the process as a whole would lead to a very different referendum proposal document (if any).
drummer 5y ago
>Voters have shown again and again they that they don't understand what they are voting for. This includes politicians, senators and every other kind of 'representative'. Often they don't even read what they vote on, and you can duckduckgo that.
rapind 5y ago
Totally. We’re so much better off with an elite, preferably rich, class that constantly tweaks policy for their own profit. Shit show either way IMO until (if) we get our heads out of our collective ass.
throwanident 5y ago
You don't need people to understand perfectly. You just need them to be right more often than they are wrong, and have enough of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet%27s_jury_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet%27s_jury_theorem
snarf21 5y ago
While I agree, do you think US senators understand the nuances of tech? What about the senator who was complaining about a fake report about Biden and "no meat" and people would have to start drinking plant based beer. Also, one of the bills in January was 290 pages and delivered hours before a vote was to happen. Even if people could understand the issue there isn't time. Most bills are just a compromise packed with garbage. I don't think direct democracy but I would like a second level that is local. The number of people represented by each politician is 10x higher than it was 200 years ago. I would like there to be 10 elected officials instead and have a delegate in DC that votes as the 10 dictate. It would be easy to do with today's technology. It greatly helps with disenfranchisement. It also gives people someone they can go to with issues that need solved.

argvargc 5y ago

Politicians have also shown again and again they don't understand what they are voting for, and/or don't care. Caring about the outcome is at least an improvement.

thcwhuzzle 5y ago

Politicians don’t even read the laws they vote on. In many circumstances they literally aren’t even given the time to read the text.

netrus 5y ago
I have strong opinions on a lot of laws I have not actually read. I will rely on experts, and so do politicians (that might be experts within their party, staff, lobbyists ...). The main skill is to decide whom to trust. I do not really see any alternative - I do not think a parliament with hundreds of delegates spending most of their day reading complex legal texts would be any better than what we see today. Still, I am sure most politicians spend much more time and resources to inform their vote than the average citizen.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  What happens when those expert staff are deliberately pushing an agenda? Perfect example of politicians not knowing anything about what they're voting for is the absurd Article 13 in EU. Something that was impossible for anyone not called Alphabet or Facebook. If they did know what they were voting for, that is far worse...
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  If professional full-time legislators cannot understand the legislation they’re voting on, they should not write it to be that unwieldy.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  An alternative is having bills that are for a single issue that a layperson can understand. It is not just the politicians that need to understand what they are voting on. The people need to understand them too so they are aware when their representation is voting against their interests.
maccard 5y ago
That seems reasonable to me. I'm in the UK, and I don't expect all 650 MPs to have a detailed understanding of 4 different pieces of legislation per day [0]. I _do_ expect them to have a brief pack from their staffers explaining what they're voting for though. [0] https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons there was 12 votes in 3 days last week in the House of Commons
- 45ure 5y ago
  >I'm in the UK, and I don't expect all 650 MPs to have a detailed understanding of 4 different pieces of legislation per day I respectfully disagree. The MPs (Members of Parliament) receive substantial remuneration to represent their constituents ─ including business expenses related to equipment, premises, staff, maintaining a second home etc. The main remit of their job is to be knowledgeable and informed of the bills they are voting upon. Most of these bills go through a lengthy process of debates, stages, readings and 'ping-pong' between HoC and HoL, before gaining the Royal Assent. There are absolutely no excuses for having a 'brief pack' and then vote based on a toss of a coin. Your reasonable expectation breeds complacency and apathy, absolving public servants of responsibility. As a taxpayer and a citizen, it is especially important to demand more at this crucial juncture, where they are stripping away any laws, which can be used to hold themselves accountable, whilst introducing Draconian measures. https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/ https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/ https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ https://www.theyworkforyou.com/
gregoriol 5y ago
The major problem with politics nowadays is that it has become a "job", so people need to be re-elected to keep their life running; if they don't, they don't have anything else to do. It shouldn't be like that: people should be elected for a duty, and after their duty is done, they should go back to their normal job, not seek infinite re-election.
- moshmosh 5y ago
  The counter-argument to these sorts of notions (including things like legislative term limits) is that, in a sufficiently advanced political environment, this will make your representatives even more dependent on entrenched power-brokers to be effective—chiefly, bureaucrats and lobbyists.
- zepto 5y ago
  Why should society be based around people having a ‘normal job’?
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    It shouldn’t necessarily but it is, so until that changes the political system has to account for it.
    - zepto 5y ago
      If you build a political system around that assumption, it’s not going to chance.
      - Swenrekcah 5y ago
        True, but what I meant was, in the context of the conversation, that the system must not be ignorant of the fact that regular people need to earn a living, and provide opportunities for regular people to participate without sacrificing a significant amount of time to fundraising. I don’t know what the best solution is but if the system is only practically open to those that don’t need to work for a living then things surely will stay the same.

FractalHQ 5y ago

And they are too easy to easy brainwash. i.e. Fox News. But it isn’t hard to beat our current system of selling votes to the highest bidding lobbyist.

ajuc 5y ago
> But it isn’t hard to beat our current system of selling votes to the highest bidding lobbyist. There's 20 different ways to fix it already implemented in the rest of the world. Starting with a sane vote-counting system and low threshold on financing political parties from anywhere except the state budget.

wavesounds 5y ago

What if the app made you take a test to understand what you're voting for? (Yes I'm aware poll tests have been abused in the past to disenfranchise people, let's assume we can create an app with fair tests)

inawarminister 5y ago

Eh ballot-based democracy like the Swiss has seems to work quite well for centuries now.

weswpg 5y ago
> Eh ballot-based democracy like the Swiss has seems to work quite well for centuries now. OP was proposing replacing the current system with direct democracy whereas the swiss simply hold referenda on specific issues while they still have representatives to govern them. Meanwhile, on the issues that they do vote on through referenda, it can result in popular support for discriminatory laws like the ban on ....Muslim temples with pointy roofs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendu... > The Swiss government recommended that the proposed amendment be rejected as inconsistent with the basic principles of the constitution.[3] However, after the results were tabulated, the government immediately announced that the ban was in effect.[4] The problem is that people tend to believe that the outcome of an election or a referendum should be allowed to overrule basic human rights and national constitutions.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  The OP was proposing ensuring that politicians answer to their electors. The jump from there to direct democracy was already an straw-man. The jump from that to "no representatives on the middle" is completely baseless.
  - weswpg 5y ago
    The suggestion being replied to here was: "I would vote for any candidate that committed to letting its registered users decide every vote he or she made." I fail to see how that is substantially different from direct democracy. What good would representative democracy be if each representative was just an empty vessel carrying out the collective wishes of a mass of Internet commenters?
vinay427 5y ago
This is widely-cited and has become a bit of a trope among many people here in Switzerland, but one famous example that isn't usually looked upon with pride today is the extremely delayed granting of suffrage to women in Switzerland (1971 nationally, 1991 in the last canton), or the current same-sex marriage referendum considered long-overdue by some. There are a few other human/civil rights along this vein that, at least to me, point to the possibility of a better system that can balance direct democracy (at least in the sense of modern Switzerland, California on a state level, etc.) with some longstanding sense of inherent rights.

mikem170 5y ago

I think that direct democracy can work for local issues. People need to be engaged with what they are voting on, things that effect their lives, things they have a real stake in. An example might be a few hundred people in a room seeking consensus on local government taxes and services. This has been successfully implemented in places.

gregoriol 5y ago
Local issues are simple compared to national or international issues: they affect less people, mostly a community that may already form a group of likewise thinking people or similar categories of people. Larger issues affect much different people, with impacts that may be harder to understand.
tastyfreeze 5y ago
That is some of the reasoning behind the US Constitution. Federalist 9 and 10 address the effectiveness of direct democracy at a small scale and the utter failure that direct democracy is at a large scale. Once you get past a tribe size, opposing factions come into play. Factions are not bad but direct democracy at scale leads to the largest faction ruling over all. Ideally, all factions come to a consensus on what is best for all instead of fighting for total control.
chr1 5y ago
People can also decide for themselves if something is an issue important to them enough to vote personally, or not important enough that can be delegated to someone they trust. This is usually called liquid democracy, as it allows to change the amount of directness vs delegation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
- throwanident 5y ago
  To deter intimidation, ordinary voters should have secret ballots. But to provide accountability, powerful voters should not have secret ballots. Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to draw a dividing line between ordinary voters and powerful ones in a liquid democracy method to satisfy both of these criteria.

bluefirebrand 5y ago

The other side of that is that Hacker News and Reddit and other upvote/downvote cultured sites often have shown that the first upvotes and downvotes on a topic often are the ones that win out because people just bandwagon them

rPlayer6554 5y ago
The year is 2040: The USA now has exactly 69 states and the official currency is doge coin. Elon Musk is the Supreme Overlord for life and was the first leader of the United States to have a Department of Memes.
- ww520 5y ago
  Shouldn’t it be AI Arnold 2.0 or Skynet something?
  - jvalencia 5y ago
    The AI through a convoluted deep net, decided that maximizing the AI efficiency was best setup based on this reality.
throwanident 5y ago
I think I saw someone suggest using a multi-armed bandit algorithm with upvotes as the objective. I'd like to see that! An algorithm like that would balance the exploitation of showing current highly upvoted posts first with the exploration of showing posts with few votes first, so that every post gets its chance while still penalizing spam posts once they're conclusively known to be bad.

eat_veggies 5y ago

“we must above all rid ourselves of the very Western, very bourgeois and therefore contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves. In fact, experience proves that the masses understand perfectly the most complicated problems. [...] the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning and to learn all the tricks of the trade. If recourse is had to technical language, this signifies that it has been decided to consider the masses as uninitiated. [...] Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, pp. 188–189

andreilys 5y ago
Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.” Counterpoint quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- staticautomatic 5y ago
  Really the counterpoint is Walter Lippmann’s book The Phantom Public.
triceratops 5y ago
> Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand. Who's doing the explaining? What viewpoints do they offer? How much time and mental energy do the people have to educate themselves on the issues?
staticman2 5y ago
"It's been 60 years since I died and given 60 years of new data I was wrong about everything." Frantz Fanon, from heaven, hypothetically.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
5y ago

goodpoint 5y ago

That's a big generalization. Ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy show a lot of promise.

vageli 5y ago

So people are unable to vote on issues but somehow intelligent enough to identify the candidate who best represents their interests? If most voters only understand pretty words, what difference does it make if those words are in a campaign for a piece of legislation put to direct vote or in the mouth of a political candidate?

Aunche 5y ago
>So people are unable to vote on issues but somehow intelligent enough to identify the candidate who best represents their interests? No, but those politicians are at least able appoint reasonably competent unelected government officials.
jonshariat 5y ago
I think the idea is that you can spend the time once every few years to research a candidate, review key policy positions, etc. Not saying its the best system but just want to point out that there is a time element. People can't spend time understanding each piece of legislation in general.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  How do you evaluate a community organizer/constitutional law professor as a candidate for the US Senate? Or a real estate billionaire for President? What about the foreign policy positions of someone who's never run anything larger than a city? What more is there than pretty words in these cases?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
phaemon 5y ago
So management are unable to code but somehow intelligent enough to identify the developers who can best create their product? (I'm actually not sure if this argues for or against the point. I guess it depends on your management!)
weswpg 5y ago

aqme28 5y ago

> Voters have shown again and again When, exactly? There are also plenty of cases where voters have chosen admirably, but lobbying and politics have chosen otherwise.

clarge1120 5y ago

This app would make sense as an instant polling tool to give politicians instant, and evolving, feedback. So, this isn't direct democracy. In the current system, the representative is expected to vote on behalf of their constituents, using some level of personal judgment. This app would allow decisions to be made more quickly and better represent the view of the constituency. Imagine being able to go back and see what the constituents demanded, and what the representative decided. One could then look at outcomes and determine how reliable a politician's judgment is.

mistermann 5y ago

The general public is surely flawed in a variety of ways (as are politicians, in the same ways and others), but a well written system could highlight these shortcomings, and we could work on addressing them over time. It wasn't all that long ago that basic reading and arithmetic were beyond the majority of people, but we recognized that and took steps to remedy it, with some decent success. Deploying such a system into production would be a long, careful process, running it in parallel (with no power) to simply measure public sentiment would be extremely informative, and it would also get the public thinking seriously about things...simply using a well designed system would make them smarter.

lucideer 5y ago

> Voters have shown again and again [citation needed] Seriously. I would love to see these so-called "again and again" examples. Anecdote: I'm involved in local politics and one of the biggest problems I see resulting from "direct" citizen/constituent involvement initiatives is that they are fundamentally predicated on attracting people who want to oppose & object to things (sometimes to bad things, but very often to positive, progressive initiatives). Because of the effort barrier to involvement, those who are actively engaged tend to be people who have a problem with something, which means the "I agree with this ongoing initiative" voice is lost.

rrdharan 5y ago
Prop 13 in California?
- lucideer 5y ago
  Which one?
sideshowb 5y ago
I don't think you need examples of poor decisions to see the problems with direct democracy. Take Brexit, and let's lay aside the question of whether or not it was a good idea, for the sake of argument let's just acknowledge there were strong feelings on both sides. The fact that it was a referendum meant that for the sake of a very small margin, an enormous number of people are very unhappy with the result. And if the government had backtracked on the referendum result, the same issue would apply - in terms of being a united nation we were screwed either way. In representative democracy, by way of comparison, such a small margin would mean the winner had to tread a very careful line with any legislation they tried to pass, thus in general leading to more reasonable compromise solutions.
- lucideer 5y ago
  I mentioned I was talking about local politics. Issues are complex at every level, but I do think people are better equipped to make informed decisions the "closer" they are to an issue. The EU is an unbelievably abstracted entity, and with trans-national issues in general, I think it would be difficult to find any example of a resolution that makes everyone happy. Here's a few observations though: - I'm guessing from your comment you would rather Brexit hadn't passed. Do you think it wouldn't have happened if it had been up to govt. (without referendum)? - one should also look at things holistically: do you think Brexit would have ever been proposed (in the form that it was) if people were more directly involved in the decision-making that led to its formation as an idea? - a vote for Brexit was ultimately a vote of dissatisfaction with a large range of other political issues people felt they didn't have enough of a direct say in. If those various areas were more open to public involvement, would we have had the level of discontent that drove the Brexit vote? > In representative democracy, by way of comparison, such a small margin would [...] (lead) to more reasonable compromise solutions. Ultimately, I don't buy this. It's not necessarily true at all. But even if it were, the same would be true of a direct-democracy approach because what you're comparing is representative democracy with 1 big binary vote at the end, where in reality greater engagement in the process as a whole would lead to a very different referendum proposal document (if any).

drummer 5y ago

>Voters have shown again and again they that they don't understand what they are voting for. This includes politicians, senators and every other kind of 'representative'. Often they don't even read what they vote on, and you can duckduckgo that.

rapind 5y ago

Totally. We’re so much better off with an elite, preferably rich, class that constantly tweaks policy for their own profit. Shit show either way IMO until (if) we get our heads out of our collective ass.

throwanident 5y ago

You don't need people to understand perfectly. You just need them to be right more often than they are wrong, and have enough of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet%27s_jury_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet%27s_jury_theorem

snarf21 5y ago

While I agree, do you think US senators understand the nuances of tech? What about the senator who was complaining about a fake report about Biden and "no meat" and people would have to start drinking plant based beer. Also, one of the bills in January was 290 pages and delivered hours before a vote was to happen. Even if people could understand the issue there isn't time. Most bills are just a compromise packed with garbage. I don't think direct democracy but I would like a second level that is local. The number of people represented by each politician is 10x higher than it was 200 years ago. I would like there to be 10 elected officials instead and have a delegate in DC that votes as the 10 dictate. It would be easy to do with today's technology. It greatly helps with disenfranchisement. It also gives people someone they can go to with issues that need solved.