5 ms·

Decentralized decision making is usually better because of the local knowledge problem. But not always. It's the wisdom of crowds vs madness of crowds dichotomy

Decentralized decision making is usually better because of the local knowledge problem. But not always. It's the wisdom of crowds vs madness of crowds dichotomy. That's why it's good to have constraints on democracy in the form of Constitution-type documents, and why representative democracy can sometimes be better than direct democracy. There's also the inescapable incentive conflict of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. It's not really a just or perfect system, it's just the best one we have, to recycle that old cliche.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Though a more common failure state is 2 wolves telling 98 sheep that "democracy sucks, don't listen to these experts/socialists/Jews, we need a strong wolf in charge" and getting 1/3 of the sheep to vote for them, in a near literal "When I voted for the Leopards eating people's faces party, I didn't expect the leopards to eat my face!" situation.
- EGreg 4y ago
  The most common failure mode is when governments don’t listen to the legitimate concerns of other groups, cherrypick the attacks made by a small minority, carry out reprisals to “deter aggression” and start to dehumanize the other population by claiming they are inherently fascist or dumb or bloodthirsty. Then their mass media selects only the things that reinforce “other group does bad things, our group simply makes some mistakes but has great intentions” and “other side must be defeated 100% or it will come back and can’t be trusted to uphold a deal”. Example: When both Ukraine and Russia were in one federation called USSR (similar to USA, Yugoslavia or EU) then Crimea or some cities moving from Russia to Ukraine would have been regarded as an administrative change, requiring various adjustments to signs and flags. No one would even think of killing each other over which republic’s flag would fly over what territory, let alone escalating to a nuclear war that threatens to destroy human life on the planet. Think about how insane that is. In a libertarian world, cities would simply vote for a free market of competing agencies providing police, road maintenance, etc. And the whole package of “services” from a state would be unbundled and not worth fighting over. The concept of “territorial integrity of a country” or “national armies” would not be something that would even matter. The people of Hong Kong or Catalonia or Kurdistan or Bangladesh would be pretty happy and not have to fight for their “independence”. Countries shouldn’t own people. People should self-organize to get their needs met in peaceful arrangements and that’s all.
  - bulatb 4y ago
    That world exists in the imaginary term: the land of wonderful things we could have in the long term, if everyone would just not do the thing they absolutely will do in the short term. All solutions that need everyone to "just" unfortunately have one thing in common: they fail. It doesn't matter what could happen if everyone "just"—they won't. It doesn't matter that "but if they did"—they won't. It doesn't matter that "Ok, but if"—they won't. "But if" is not a possibility, and operating like it is will only keep us from whatever progress toward that wonderful thing we could actually make, incomplete as it might be.
  - Edman274 4y ago
    What would prevent a city from raising an army to go capture another city's natural resources by force?
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  This is the biggest risk right now. Not that democracies will make short-run bad decisions (they will, but that's probably survivable) but that democracies will vote away democracy.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    It occurred to me that voting away democracy is an absorbing state. You get stuck there once you reach that state. So the law of large numbers is working against you. It just has to happen once.
c7b 4y ago
> There's also the inescapable incentive conflict of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. That problem isn't entirely inescapable, though. There's a whole mathematical discipline on voting systems (social choice theory) - unfortunately the important results are mostly negative (google eg Arrow's impossibility theorem, Condorcet paradox,...), but the specific problem of the "dictatorship of the majority" has a solution in principle, namely quadratic voting. But yeah, we won't really ever get a perfect voting system.
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  >efficiently selects the outcome for which the population has the highest willingness to pay Majority rule does the same, no?
  - c7b 4y ago
    only if there are only two options, for more options any rank-ordering system will be plagued by Arrow's and other impossibility theorems. quadratic voting uses cardinal preferences, which avoids some of those issues, and QV specifically has linear marginal cost of votes, which can be shown to be optimal in a very simplified mathematical model of voter preferences. but I don't want to evangelize QV too much here, it has enough proponents already and I'm not fully convinced that's is resilient to problems like collusion
    - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
      You don't need collusion when quadratic voting works only in hypothetical cases.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  It's something I haven't studied before. Why does quadratic voting solve the dictatorship of the majority problem? Do you mean to say that it attenuates the worst effects even if it doesn't solve it completely?
  - 4y ago
darkwater 4y ago
> There's also the inescapable incentive conflict of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. I don't think that situation is THAT common, given that usually the majority of people has the same problems, usually economic. Biggest exception would be immigration, since immigrants are generally in lower numbers, especially the ones that can actually vote.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  The problem is that voters outside of that issue will be mostly apathetic due to information asymmetries + finite bandwidth to care about issues + active disinformation and propaganda by lobby groups. So much the case that you don't even need a majority to get negative sum policies passed. The same dynamic happens with sufficiently determined minorities. Here's a few examples. Agricultural subsidies, carried interest loophole, local planning laws, lack of action on global warming. The cases of majority rule leading to negative sum policies are probably more rare than the impact of determined minorities. Although I can think of Black voter disenfranchisement and immigration laws off the top of my head. It's partly a money in politics issue, but it's also deeper than that. Farmers will actively vote out anyone who wants to take away their subsidies. Non-farmers don't care enough one way or the other, because the cost is dilute. You don't need direct money in politics for that mechanism to play out.
sure_about_that 4y ago

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Though a more common failure state is 2 wolves telling 98 sheep that "democracy sucks, don't listen to these experts/socialists/Jews, we need a strong wolf in charge" and getting 1/3 of the sheep to vote for them, in a near literal "When I voted for the Leopards eating people's faces party, I didn't expect the leopards to eat my face!" situation.

EGreg 4y ago
The most common failure mode is when governments don’t listen to the legitimate concerns of other groups, cherrypick the attacks made by a small minority, carry out reprisals to “deter aggression” and start to dehumanize the other population by claiming they are inherently fascist or dumb or bloodthirsty. Then their mass media selects only the things that reinforce “other group does bad things, our group simply makes some mistakes but has great intentions” and “other side must be defeated 100% or it will come back and can’t be trusted to uphold a deal”. Example: When both Ukraine and Russia were in one federation called USSR (similar to USA, Yugoslavia or EU) then Crimea or some cities moving from Russia to Ukraine would have been regarded as an administrative change, requiring various adjustments to signs and flags. No one would even think of killing each other over which republic’s flag would fly over what territory, let alone escalating to a nuclear war that threatens to destroy human life on the planet. Think about how insane that is. In a libertarian world, cities would simply vote for a free market of competing agencies providing police, road maintenance, etc. And the whole package of “services” from a state would be unbundled and not worth fighting over. The concept of “territorial integrity of a country” or “national armies” would not be something that would even matter. The people of Hong Kong or Catalonia or Kurdistan or Bangladesh would be pretty happy and not have to fight for their “independence”. Countries shouldn’t own people. People should self-organize to get their needs met in peaceful arrangements and that’s all.
- bulatb 4y ago
  That world exists in the imaginary term: the land of wonderful things we could have in the long term, if everyone would just not do the thing they absolutely will do in the short term. All solutions that need everyone to "just" unfortunately have one thing in common: they fail. It doesn't matter what could happen if everyone "just"—they won't. It doesn't matter that "but if they did"—they won't. It doesn't matter that "Ok, but if"—they won't. "But if" is not a possibility, and operating like it is will only keep us from whatever progress toward that wonderful thing we could actually make, incomplete as it might be.
- Edman274 4y ago
  What would prevent a city from raising an army to go capture another city's natural resources by force?
matthewdgreen 4y ago
This is the biggest risk right now. Not that democracies will make short-run bad decisions (they will, but that's probably survivable) but that democracies will vote away democracy.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  It occurred to me that voting away democracy is an absorbing state. You get stuck there once you reach that state. So the law of large numbers is working against you. It just has to happen once.

c7b 4y ago

> There's also the inescapable incentive conflict of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. That problem isn't entirely inescapable, though. There's a whole mathematical discipline on voting systems (social choice theory) - unfortunately the important results are mostly negative (google eg Arrow's impossibility theorem, Condorcet paradox,...), but the specific problem of the "dictatorship of the majority" has a solution in principle, namely quadratic voting. But yeah, we won't really ever get a perfect voting system.

GoblinSlayer 4y ago
>efficiently selects the outcome for which the population has the highest willingness to pay Majority rule does the same, no?
- c7b 4y ago
  only if there are only two options, for more options any rank-ordering system will be plagued by Arrow's and other impossibility theorems. quadratic voting uses cardinal preferences, which avoids some of those issues, and QV specifically has linear marginal cost of votes, which can be shown to be optimal in a very simplified mathematical model of voter preferences. but I don't want to evangelize QV too much here, it has enough proponents already and I'm not fully convinced that's is resilient to problems like collusion
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    You don't need collusion when quadratic voting works only in hypothetical cases.
hackerlight 4y ago
It's something I haven't studied before. Why does quadratic voting solve the dictatorship of the majority problem? Do you mean to say that it attenuates the worst effects even if it doesn't solve it completely?
- 4y ago

darkwater 4y ago

> There's also the inescapable incentive conflict of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. I don't think that situation is THAT common, given that usually the majority of people has the same problems, usually economic. Biggest exception would be immigration, since immigrants are generally in lower numbers, especially the ones that can actually vote.

hackerlight 4y ago
The problem is that voters outside of that issue will be mostly apathetic due to information asymmetries + finite bandwidth to care about issues + active disinformation and propaganda by lobby groups. So much the case that you don't even need a majority to get negative sum policies passed. The same dynamic happens with sufficiently determined minorities. Here's a few examples. Agricultural subsidies, carried interest loophole, local planning laws, lack of action on global warming. The cases of majority rule leading to negative sum policies are probably more rare than the impact of determined minorities. Although I can think of Black voter disenfranchisement and immigration laws off the top of my head. It's partly a money in politics issue, but it's also deeper than that. Farmers will actively vote out anyone who wants to take away their subsidies. Non-farmers don't care enough one way or the other, because the cost is dilute. You don't need direct money in politics for that mechanism to play out.

sure_about_that 4y ago