11 ms·

When can liquid democracy unveil the truth? (2021)

53 points by jka 4y ago

SemanticStrengh 4y ago
Liquid democracy is not a power structure that maximize truth seeking.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mhitza 4y ago
  What do you mean, in comparative terms, with your assertion?
- mistermann 4y ago
  Not in the current spec perhaps, but there's nothing stopping an implementation of a spec from including such functionality.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    when the spec is inherently broken an impl can't do shit. Don't you realize the absurdity of deffering the decisions of multi-domain highly technical topics to laymans that have an attention span of 3 milliseconds and a remarkable lack of erudition and critical thinking? Epistemology isn't even taught in schools, the joke is at its peak
    - hkt 4y ago
      The same might be said of electorates in representative democracies. How do you distinguish?
      - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
        the representative voters in a representative democracy are equally deficient and in opposition to a direct democracy, are additionally gamed by PR campaigns that create an artificial partitioning of mental share (mindshare) of brands (political parties). However the persons voting the actual laws, while demagogous and victim of monetary conflict of interests, are humans that are paid to study proposed laws or to propose laws and then to deliberate together. While those people are extremelly deficient, the mere quality of being full time paid is still transcendant over the layman mental abilities in government optimization, while however extremely insufficient in comparison to the utopia a science/evidence based government would create.
        mistermann 4y ago
        Do you consider the above to be beliefs or knowledge? Do you think being paid causes people to automatically make such important distinctions, consistently and without error?
    - mistermann 4y ago
      > when the spec is inherently broken an impl can't do shit. Is your premise correct? Is the conclusion even correct? I feel like you're speaking colloquially. > Don't you realize the absurdity of deffering the decisions of multi-domain highly technical topics to laymans that have an attention span of 3 milliseconds and a remarkable lack of erudition and critical thinking? I believe I do, to a substantial degree. And yourself? Do you realize the absurdity (and the consequences) of assigning this responsibility to who we currently assign it to? > Epistemology isn't even taught in schools, the joke is at its peak Here I partially agree, but I think you lack imagination - I think the joke is just getting warmed up (pun intentional).
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  It probably isn’t in the way you mean “truth”. A good democracy is one where the interests of most people are exercised. And in that world there might be a different “truth” than what we see today in the New York Times and in the Washington Post. Of course you don’t want regular people to rule on behalf of the ruling class: the ruling class does that best. They know their own truth best.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    > A good democracy is one where the interests of most people are exercised. By that criterion, a good democracy can vote to enslave or exterminate a minority.
    - avgcorrection 4y ago
      You want to play the mince-words game? That’s fine. “Most people” would include the minority as well. I say “most” rather than “all” since not everone’s interests will be perfectly represented: compromises will always have to be made. And some things will be decided by way of a majority vote while other things will require a unanimous vote like... exterminating people. I don’t think voting to exterminate a group of people would be more straightforward in a perfect democracy compared to our status quo system. Still though you will always be able to, no matter how I (pithily) define the term, find some absurd, abstract scenario where you can make democracy out to be some devil incarnate political philosophy, in the same way that one can “debunk” utilitarianism by invoking the Utility Monster.
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        > You want to play the mince-words game? Calm down now... The way to solve the problem you want to solve is with rights, constitutions, charters and such things, not definitions. Voting alone isn't sufficient for a good democracy. That's all I was pointing out. > in the same way that one can “debunk” utilitarianism by invoking the Utility Monster. I mean we literally have multiple living utility monsters, so that's not a very wise comment to make.
banach 4y ago
Fascinating! Something to pull out next time someone quotes Chruchill on (representative) democracy.
avgcorrection 4y ago
What truth? I haven’t read this kind of research so the following is speculation. (And if I am way off about this kind of research then at least I can talk about epistemology as it applies to politics.) Politics happens when different interests clash. Each agent have their own truth.[1] Let’s model one-person rule: the Truth is whatever that person says is the truth. Thus the Truth is “unveiled” as long as the person who rules is rational with regards to their own interests. Now we haven’t modeled any other agent’s interests, i.e. their truths, so they might not like this Truth. Rule by the elite: the Truth becomes whatever the group is fine with agreeing on after deliberating and competing amongst themselves. Rule by the people: same as the previous but every person gets a say. Now think about the likely course of this apparent research on “truth”: the academics decide what the truth is. What opinions on the economy, the environment, social issues, are within the bounds of the truth. An Overton Window. Then they gauge the population based on that. But the people might have completely different concerns than the academics. The book Seeing Like a State discusses things like the monocrop forest industry in Germany in 19th century Germany. The Truth of the German state was that it wanted to maximize efficiency, i.e. output of timber. What would a test on “unveiling the truth” reveal? How competent one is at maximizing yield. But what about ecology? What about the fact (as would later be learned) that chopping down organic forests and then planting the same kind of “crop” for miles ruins the ecosystem and is a bad long-term plan both for the local environment and for harvesting timber? That wasn’t even part of the “domain of discourse” to the German state. What if you polled someone in a warehouse on the “truth” of running a warehouse? Would the truth be dictated by the management and only be about how to maximize profits? Or would it also include things like how to make a workplace that prevents injury, both of the repetitive and immediate kind? You see, maybe safety beyond things like avoiding employees getting stabbed by forklifts isn’t even part of the domain of discourse since the injured and chronically worn-out workers can easily be replaced. But once the workers become part of the decision-making apparatus then it becomes part of the domain of discourse, because the people on the floor have an interest in their own health and being able to keep their jobs. But this is where (based on my limited understanding) the research on deliberative democracy (which might be unrelated to this research; idk) goes wrong. It seems to want to see if the general population is worthy of getting more democracy, i.e. getting more power. So then it tests them. But based on what? Based on the status quo domain of discourse, i.e. our liberal democracies where the average citizen does not really have much power (just ask some democratic theorists about it). So what are they really measuring? Whether the participants can have rational discourse based on the truth of upper-middle class academics. So the population has to prove that they are worthy of political power by reasoning within the status quo domain of discourse where they don’t have much power at all and are for the most part are spectators. This can in effect just be a sort of perpetual democratic gatekeeping with an academic veneer. [1] This might be called relativism or post-modernism. But set aside whether there is an absolute truth or not for a minute: the truth in in this context, for all intents and purposes, is political. That’s after all the topic under discussion. (Not whether God exists and whether he has the ultimate Truth or something like that.) For example, a lot of Eurasia had to respect the truth of Genghis Khan that he had a right to rule over them.
photochemsyn 4y ago
> "Liquid democracy is a voting paradigm that allows voters that are part of a social network to either vote directly or delegate their voting rights to one of their neighbors. The delegations are transitive in the sense, that a voter who decides to delegate, delegates both her own vote and the ones she has received through delegations. The additional flexibility of the paradigm allows to transfer voting power towards a subset of voters ideally containing the most expert voters on the question at hand. It is thus tempting to assume that liquid democracy can lead to more accurate decisions." Well, first of all you have to ask if the 'decision to delegate' can be monetized or not. If American citizens could sell their vote directly to the highest bidder, then many likely would (most elections have relatively low turnout). How much would the average US citizen want in return? $100? $1000? $10? Would votes be purchasable only by other US citizens, or by corporate bodies, or by citizens of foreign nations? Beyond that, this is already supposedly how representative democracy works. People ideally elect representatives, who go to Congress and sit on committees, where they make 'expert-assisted decisions' about budgets and projects. If the state wants to hire an expert to design a bridge, hopefully it's not the committee chair's lazy incompetent relative who gets the job, rather there's some kind of competitive merit-based assessment. However, given the kind of people we have running Congress... this system doesn't seem to work that well. Geriatic insider traders who owe their positions to various corporate conglomerates (finance, energy, defense, pharmaceuticals, etc.) have ended up running all the committees, and the evidence that this is a failure can be easily seen by looking at America's crumbling domestic infrastructure. P.S. 'Liquid democracy' is a rather meaningless choice of words. Should we be comparing it to 'gaseous democracy' or 'solid-state democracy'?
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > Well, first of all you have to ask if the 'decision to delegate' can be monetized or not. If American citizens could sell their vote directly to the highest bidder, then many likely would (most elections have relatively low turnout). How much would the average US citizen want in return? $100? $1000? $10? Would votes be purchasable only by other US citizens, or by corporate bodies, or by citizens of foreign nations? You're making up problems. The same exact problem, vote buying, exists in every form of democracy. Secret ballot is supposed to solve that. And has nothing to do with direct, liquid or representative democracy. > Beyond that, this is already supposedly how representative democracy works. No, you misunderstood liquid democracy if that's what you think. The difference is that anyone can withdraw their vote at any time for any reason and cast it on their own. It has nothing to do with committees. You can read more about liquid democracy in Wikipedia if the article wasn't enough for you [1]. > However, given the kind of people we have running Congress... this system doesn't seem to work that well. Geriatic insider traders who owe their positions to various corporate conglomerates (finance, energy, defense, pharmaceuticals, etc.) have ended up running all the committees, and the evidence that this is a failure can be easily seen by looking at America's crumbling domestic infrastructure. Yeah, this is what liquid democracy solves. Please make sure you understand the concept before arguing against it. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
gbolcer 4y ago
Isn't that really just the same thing as Arrow-Debreau's competitive markets? You can't find an equilibrium w/o concave functions?
- guerrilla 4y ago
  There's a difference. In markets, all agents do not likely have the same resources (i.e. same number of votes), so it's not a democracy since some people have (sometimes many) more votes than others.
lawrenceyan 4y ago
This is pretty much how Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus cryptocurrencies function.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  No. Both proof-of-stake and proof-of-work are lotteries, not a voting system. In proof-of stake, you get a number of tickets based on how much you own, in proof-of-work, it is based on how much computing resources you spent, and there is only one winner per round. In both cases, you can pool with other players and share the gains, so you trade a very low probability of winning big to a more reasonable and steady income.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    Mathematically, lotteries are forms of voting, although by most measures not very effective. (Though they have one advantage over more common forms: At least one person's preference is guaranteed to be reflected exactly.) I don't think there's much in common with PoS though.
  - lawrenceyan 4y ago
    I should clarify. It's voting in the style of a representative democracy.

53 points by jka 4y ago

SemanticStrengh 4y ago

Liquid democracy is not a power structure that maximize truth seeking.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mhitza 4y ago
What do you mean, in comparative terms, with your assertion?
mistermann 4y ago
Not in the current spec perhaps, but there's nothing stopping an implementation of a spec from including such functionality.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  when the spec is inherently broken an impl can't do shit. Don't you realize the absurdity of deffering the decisions of multi-domain highly technical topics to laymans that have an attention span of 3 milliseconds and a remarkable lack of erudition and critical thinking? Epistemology isn't even taught in schools, the joke is at its peak
  - hkt 4y ago
    The same might be said of electorates in representative democracies. How do you distinguish?
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      the representative voters in a representative democracy are equally deficient and in opposition to a direct democracy, are additionally gamed by PR campaigns that create an artificial partitioning of mental share (mindshare) of brands (political parties). However the persons voting the actual laws, while demagogous and victim of monetary conflict of interests, are humans that are paid to study proposed laws or to propose laws and then to deliberate together. While those people are extremelly deficient, the mere quality of being full time paid is still transcendant over the layman mental abilities in government optimization, while however extremely insufficient in comparison to the utopia a science/evidence based government would create.
      - mistermann 4y ago
        Do you consider the above to be beliefs or knowledge? Do you think being paid causes people to automatically make such important distinctions, consistently and without error?
  - mistermann 4y ago
    > when the spec is inherently broken an impl can't do shit. Is your premise correct? Is the conclusion even correct? I feel like you're speaking colloquially. > Don't you realize the absurdity of deffering the decisions of multi-domain highly technical topics to laymans that have an attention span of 3 milliseconds and a remarkable lack of erudition and critical thinking? I believe I do, to a substantial degree. And yourself? Do you realize the absurdity (and the consequences) of assigning this responsibility to who we currently assign it to? > Epistemology isn't even taught in schools, the joke is at its peak Here I partially agree, but I think you lack imagination - I think the joke is just getting warmed up (pun intentional).
avgcorrection 4y ago
It probably isn’t in the way you mean “truth”. A good democracy is one where the interests of most people are exercised. And in that world there might be a different “truth” than what we see today in the New York Times and in the Washington Post. Of course you don’t want regular people to rule on behalf of the ruling class: the ruling class does that best. They know their own truth best.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > A good democracy is one where the interests of most people are exercised. By that criterion, a good democracy can vote to enslave or exterminate a minority.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    You want to play the mince-words game? That’s fine. “Most people” would include the minority as well. I say “most” rather than “all” since not everone’s interests will be perfectly represented: compromises will always have to be made. And some things will be decided by way of a majority vote while other things will require a unanimous vote like... exterminating people. I don’t think voting to exterminate a group of people would be more straightforward in a perfect democracy compared to our status quo system. Still though you will always be able to, no matter how I (pithily) define the term, find some absurd, abstract scenario where you can make democracy out to be some devil incarnate political philosophy, in the same way that one can “debunk” utilitarianism by invoking the Utility Monster.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      > You want to play the mince-words game? Calm down now... The way to solve the problem you want to solve is with rights, constitutions, charters and such things, not definitions. Voting alone isn't sufficient for a good democracy. That's all I was pointing out. > in the same way that one can “debunk” utilitarianism by invoking the Utility Monster. I mean we literally have multiple living utility monsters, so that's not a very wise comment to make.

banach 4y ago

Fascinating! Something to pull out next time someone quotes Chruchill on (representative) democracy.

avgcorrection 4y ago

What truth? I haven’t read this kind of research so the following is speculation. (And if I am way off about this kind of research then at least I can talk about epistemology as it applies to politics.) Politics happens when different interests clash. Each agent have their own truth.[1] Let’s model one-person rule: the Truth is whatever that person says is the truth. Thus the Truth is “unveiled” as long as the person who rules is rational with regards to their own interests. Now we haven’t modeled any other agent’s interests, i.e. their truths, so they might not like this Truth. Rule by the elite: the Truth becomes whatever the group is fine with agreeing on after deliberating and competing amongst themselves. Rule by the people: same as the previous but every person gets a say. Now think about the likely course of this apparent research on “truth”: the academics decide what the truth is. What opinions on the economy, the environment, social issues, are within the bounds of the truth. An Overton Window. Then they gauge the population based on that. But the people might have completely different concerns than the academics. The book Seeing Like a State discusses things like the monocrop forest industry in Germany in 19th century Germany. The Truth of the German state was that it wanted to maximize efficiency, i.e. output of timber. What would a test on “unveiling the truth” reveal? How competent one is at maximizing yield. But what about ecology? What about the fact (as would later be learned) that chopping down organic forests and then planting the same kind of “crop” for miles ruins the ecosystem and is a bad long-term plan both for the local environment and for harvesting timber? That wasn’t even part of the “domain of discourse” to the German state. What if you polled someone in a warehouse on the “truth” of running a warehouse? Would the truth be dictated by the management and only be about how to maximize profits? Or would it also include things like how to make a workplace that prevents injury, both of the repetitive and immediate kind? You see, maybe safety beyond things like avoiding employees getting stabbed by forklifts isn’t even part of the domain of discourse since the injured and chronically worn-out workers can easily be replaced. But once the workers become part of the decision-making apparatus then it becomes part of the domain of discourse, because the people on the floor have an interest in their own health and being able to keep their jobs. But this is where (based on my limited understanding) the research on deliberative democracy (which might be unrelated to this research; idk) goes wrong. It seems to want to see if the general population is worthy of getting more democracy, i.e. getting more power. So then it tests them. But based on what? Based on the status quo domain of discourse, i.e. our liberal democracies where the average citizen does not really have much power (just ask some democratic theorists about it). So what are they really measuring? Whether the participants can have rational discourse based on the truth of upper-middle class academics. So the population has to prove that they are worthy of political power by reasoning within the status quo domain of discourse where they don’t have much power at all and are for the most part are spectators. This can in effect just be a sort of perpetual democratic gatekeeping with an academic veneer. [1] This might be called relativism or post-modernism. But set aside whether there is an absolute truth or not for a minute: the truth in in this context, for all intents and purposes, is political. That’s after all the topic under discussion. (Not whether God exists and whether he has the ultimate Truth or something like that.) For example, a lot of Eurasia had to respect the truth of Genghis Khan that he had a right to rule over them.

photochemsyn 4y ago

> "Liquid democracy is a voting paradigm that allows voters that are part of a social network to either vote directly or delegate their voting rights to one of their neighbors. The delegations are transitive in the sense, that a voter who decides to delegate, delegates both her own vote and the ones she has received through delegations. The additional flexibility of the paradigm allows to transfer voting power towards a subset of voters ideally containing the most expert voters on the question at hand. It is thus tempting to assume that liquid democracy can lead to more accurate decisions." Well, first of all you have to ask if the 'decision to delegate' can be monetized or not. If American citizens could sell their vote directly to the highest bidder, then many likely would (most elections have relatively low turnout). How much would the average US citizen want in return? $100? $1000? $10? Would votes be purchasable only by other US citizens, or by corporate bodies, or by citizens of foreign nations? Beyond that, this is already supposedly how representative democracy works. People ideally elect representatives, who go to Congress and sit on committees, where they make 'expert-assisted decisions' about budgets and projects. If the state wants to hire an expert to design a bridge, hopefully it's not the committee chair's lazy incompetent relative who gets the job, rather there's some kind of competitive merit-based assessment. However, given the kind of people we have running Congress... this system doesn't seem to work that well. Geriatic insider traders who owe their positions to various corporate conglomerates (finance, energy, defense, pharmaceuticals, etc.) have ended up running all the committees, and the evidence that this is a failure can be easily seen by looking at America's crumbling domestic infrastructure. P.S. 'Liquid democracy' is a rather meaningless choice of words. Should we be comparing it to 'gaseous democracy' or 'solid-state democracy'?

guerrilla 4y ago
> Well, first of all you have to ask if the 'decision to delegate' can be monetized or not. If American citizens could sell their vote directly to the highest bidder, then many likely would (most elections have relatively low turnout). How much would the average US citizen want in return? $100? $1000? $10? Would votes be purchasable only by other US citizens, or by corporate bodies, or by citizens of foreign nations? You're making up problems. The same exact problem, vote buying, exists in every form of democracy. Secret ballot is supposed to solve that. And has nothing to do with direct, liquid or representative democracy. > Beyond that, this is already supposedly how representative democracy works. No, you misunderstood liquid democracy if that's what you think. The difference is that anyone can withdraw their vote at any time for any reason and cast it on their own. It has nothing to do with committees. You can read more about liquid democracy in Wikipedia if the article wasn't enough for you [1]. > However, given the kind of people we have running Congress... this system doesn't seem to work that well. Geriatic insider traders who owe their positions to various corporate conglomerates (finance, energy, defense, pharmaceuticals, etc.) have ended up running all the committees, and the evidence that this is a failure can be easily seen by looking at America's crumbling domestic infrastructure. Yeah, this is what liquid democracy solves. Please make sure you understand the concept before arguing against it. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

gbolcer 4y ago

Isn't that really just the same thing as Arrow-Debreau's competitive markets? You can't find an equilibrium w/o concave functions?

guerrilla 4y ago
There's a difference. In markets, all agents do not likely have the same resources (i.e. same number of votes), so it's not a democracy since some people have (sometimes many) more votes than others.

lawrenceyan 4y ago

This is pretty much how Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus cryptocurrencies function.

GuB-42 4y ago
No. Both proof-of-stake and proof-of-work are lotteries, not a voting system. In proof-of stake, you get a number of tickets based on how much you own, in proof-of-work, it is based on how much computing resources you spent, and there is only one winner per round. In both cases, you can pool with other players and share the gains, so you trade a very low probability of winning big to a more reasonable and steady income.
- morelisp 4y ago
  Mathematically, lotteries are forms of voting, although by most measures not very effective. (Though they have one advantage over more common forms: At least one person's preference is guaranteed to be reflected exactly.) I don't think there's much in common with PoS though.
- lawrenceyan 4y ago
  I should clarify. It's voting in the style of a representative democracy.