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This reminds of “liquid democracy”: voters can delegate their votes (including fractional votes) to other people (representatives, friends, caregivers, etc), or

This reminds of “liquid democracy”: voters can delegate their votes (including fractional votes) to other people (representatives, friends, caregivers, etc), organizations, or, in this case, an AI. I’d say most voters already do this, referencing voter guides from their preferred political organizations or local newspapers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy Science fiction author Alastair Reynold touches on different types of democracies in a couple of his novels. One example is the demarchists, cyborgs with a direct democracy where everyone votes on even minor issues using brain implants. Another was a proportional democracy where voters who got the “right answers” in previous elections would have their future votes more heavily weighted, effectively becoming indirect representatives of other voters.

alexvoda 4y ago
How is the last example different from an incumbents paradise? To me it looks like a road to autocracy. As for the demarchists, The Orville had an episode about this. There are many reasons it does not work in practice at a medium or large scale.
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly, and they definitely ran into some problems. It was a very interesting rendition of a hivemind.
  - livueta 4y ago
    Trying to provide some context without explicit spoilers: > The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly Demarchist society at/around Yellowstone was supposed to involve many millions of people, but the catch was the Glitter Band of federated space stations allowed a high degree of local control: different stations could vote themselves into being hippie communes or dictatorships or whatever, and one of the main roles of the overarching Demarchist organization (heh) was to make sure these little fiefs didn't violate the fundamental principles of the whole thing by preventing their inhabitants from voting in the broader hivemind or from leaving the station. That broader hivemind held together by largely staying out of hyperlocal concerns, focusing on the advancement of the overall system. > they definitely ran into some problems Yeah, though The Bad Thing that happens roughly halfway through the universe's chronology (some books set before The Event, some after) affects all the different polities and one of the more interesting aspects of the novels, at least personally, is how the different systems deal with this external shock; it's not quite that the Demarchist political system caused the event, although it did get itself into a variety of lesser scrapes. It is a fun concept: representative democracy is indeed kind of a workaround for laggy, low-bandwidth communications. What's possible when that stops being a constraint?
    - visarga 4y ago
      Sometimes you need the constraint. The cells in my brain don't need to be tightly integrated with the cells in my hands, the hands don't neeed to know every little detail that happens in the brain.
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    You are probably thinking of the Conjoiners (an actual hive mind although members did retain some individuality) which at some point were probably no more than a few thousand. The Demarchists were probably the most successful offshoot of Earth and are billions across multiple solar systems. They are not an hive mind and their societies are not exactly an utopia (but not dystopian either).
- berinateni 4y ago
  > How is the last example different from an incumbents paradise? To me it looks like a road to autocracy. That may be true if your vote is also your guess. But if they are two different things (i.e. I vote for candidate A but guess candidate B will win) I don't see an issue. In theory it simply favors a well-informed citizenry. I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > In theory it simply favors a well-informed citizenry. This is a terrible "theory." No voter can be fully informed. I'm not even talking about the asymmetric information that leaders have (information from spy networks, experts, etc). Literally no single person can comprehend all these connections and complexities involved in many things. This is what representatives are supposed to resolve, but they frequently fail us. Your vote always is and always will be a guess. There may be a handful of subjects you're qualified to be an expert on, but the rest are effectively guesses. An "informed" voter is one that knows they are uninformed and doing their best. This isn't a comment encouraging autocracy, but one against this myth of "education is the end all be all solution." We should inform people as much as possible but also be encouraging nuanced discussions. Wisdom of the crowds is powerful, but we also need to recognize the limitations. > I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are. Absolutely not! We want to protect the secrecy of the vote. This can only encourage the degradation of that privacy. There are many ways to extract more information from votes without revealing identity. Cardinal methods, especially Score and STAR, give you a lot more information that you can use infer voter preferences. These methods also allow you to vote honestly, which defeats the entire purpose of your poll question.
  - comex 4y ago
    > But if they are two different things (i.e. I vote for candidate A but guess candidate B will win) I don't see an issue. The problem is that most people are biased towards thinking their favorite candidate will win, so if it's a close election then most people will guess the same as their vote. > I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are. Political betting markets are kind of like that. Though, with money on the line, participants have a stronger incentive to avoid bias than they would in a poll.
tremon 4y ago
voters who got the “right answers” It is a fascist thing to assume that for every political question there is only one "right" answer and all the others must be wrong.
- blueflow 4y ago
  I think it was meant like, which decision had more favorable results. But this might only shift the problem to the entity to decide what is more favorable. Aside from that, i agree with you, the "right or wrong opinion" mindset is dangerous.
  - prox 4y ago
    Wellness and happiness are two markers, if measured correctly/ scientifically that can be of use perhaps.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > I think it was meant like, which decision had more favorable results. How does one even do this? Wait a hundred years? It's still probably impossible to determine the outcome of alternative policies. The right/wrong mindset is not only dangerous, but impossible in principle. But the autocrats won't tell you that.
- NL807 4y ago
  It depends on how you define "right answers". We could be talking about policy making based on objective truth, which is testable and is grounded in reality.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Given an objective scientific fact, what is the appropriate policy that should be enacted concerning that fact? That depends on your values, priorities and ethical framework, none of which have objectively correct answers.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > which is testable and is grounded in reality. How? This is absolutely impossible. You can't run trials. Yes, we can analyze the effects of policies (which we should certainly be doing more of) but these results can also take decades. We can only do a singular experiment and so our sample is biased to all hell. There is no objective truth here, only results of a single experiment.
namlem 4y ago
None of those seem nearly as cool as the real life vTaiwan project. https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blended-volition-3e9b75102b9b https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...
- majou 4y ago
  Absurdly cool.
- prox 4y ago
  Found it difficult to understand, but is this like a way to reach a synthesis through a dialectic system?
  - patcon 4y ago
    While it's only a small part of the larger vTaiwan process, a few fans of Polis made a video to try to share what feels valuable about it: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSL_F7Lwul2dlI9J6-Nzz9_9Pz9AbcG2z https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSL_F7Lwul2dlI9J6-Nzz9_... Also, a paper on the vtaiwan process: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft/ https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft/
    - prox 4y ago
      Thank you, gonna check it out!
fuzzc0re 4y ago
Ok I have been waiting for some time to find the right context on hackernews to shamelessly mention a democratic system that I have been working on for the last year: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01436.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01436.pdf IMO the problem with most {something} democracy systems is that they are voting paradigms that focus either only or mostly on how decisions are made but not how the options to decide upon are formed. This is true for the systems that you mentioned as well. Moreover, the fact that decision-making and policy authoring are operations that take time leads to citizens' beliefs updating during the processes and after the fact, but with "old-school" type representative democracies there is no real-time mechanism to synchronise policy suggestions and voting outcomes with the new states of information accumulation by voters. "High-tech" democracies should take advantage of the technologies that enable fast and cheap communication but they should also have mechanisms that disincentivise the spam that inevitably follows cheap talk. Regarding AI policy making, there are very interesting projects such as https://pol.is https://pol.is which address a lot of the problems that I mentioned above but, in my opinion, their output should be used as advise only. We have not yet exhausted human-centric democratic systems and neural networks are still privately-owned and privately-trained black boxes.
- visarga 4y ago
  On the other hand you can test a neural network a million times, exhaustingly mapping its biases and failures. You can't do that with a human, you got to take a chance.
  - fuzzc0re 4y ago
    Yes you can do a million tests but the biases and failures of the neural net are chosen by human developers, a miniscule subset of citizens who themselves have some form of bias depending on their educational background, places where they grew up, family and friends etc. While you can replace a human in a powerful position with another one, since we do not know how to surgically correct individual weights in order to remove a specific decisional bias from a neural net, we can only retrain it and hope for the best. Because we are humans ourselves, we can understand the incentives of other humans and create adequate mechanisms to correct for their selfishness and their bias but what would be the incentive of an all powerful neural net? Which loss is it minimizing? And how does it know the citizens' preferences in the present and in the future? If the citizens stop feeding it (accurate) information at one point in time, will it still be the benevolent dictator that it was supposed to be? *Edit: Another counterargument that generally applies to neural nets making decisions for human activities is the argument of accountability. While you can put on trial a bad politician for their harmful-to-society decision making, who is to blame when the neural net will inevitably spew the wrong output on an issue that it has not encountered before and a policy decision will be made based on that? Will we put the developers on trial?
andrei_says_ 4y ago
Could you mention the names of the novels?
- komadori 4y ago
  Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds for the main arc.
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    Also "The Prefect", which takes place in the Revelation Space universe but is not connected to the other novels. The main plot in The Prefect is about applying updates to voting software. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prefect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prefect
  - andrei_says_ 4y ago
    Thank you. I discovered AR in the last couple of years and find his world building and imagination incredible. Loved his short stories collections and House of Suns. I started the Revelation Space novels this year.
ksidudwbw 4y ago
Perverse incentives etc.

alexvoda 4y ago

How is the last example different from an incumbents paradise? To me it looks like a road to autocracy. As for the demarchists, The Orville had an episode about this. There are many reasons it does not work in practice at a medium or large scale.

wardedVibe 4y ago
The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly, and they definitely ran into some problems. It was a very interesting rendition of a hivemind.
- livueta 4y ago
  Trying to provide some context without explicit spoilers: > The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly Demarchist society at/around Yellowstone was supposed to involve many millions of people, but the catch was the Glitter Band of federated space stations allowed a high degree of local control: different stations could vote themselves into being hippie communes or dictatorships or whatever, and one of the main roles of the overarching Demarchist organization (heh) was to make sure these little fiefs didn't violate the fundamental principles of the whole thing by preventing their inhabitants from voting in the broader hivemind or from leaving the station. That broader hivemind held together by largely staying out of hyperlocal concerns, focusing on the advancement of the overall system. > they definitely ran into some problems Yeah, though The Bad Thing that happens roughly halfway through the universe's chronology (some books set before The Event, some after) affects all the different polities and one of the more interesting aspects of the novels, at least personally, is how the different systems deal with this external shock; it's not quite that the Demarchist political system caused the event, although it did get itself into a variety of lesser scrapes. It is a fun concept: representative democracy is indeed kind of a workaround for laggy, low-bandwidth communications. What's possible when that stops being a constraint?
  - visarga 4y ago
    Sometimes you need the constraint. The cells in my brain don't need to be tightly integrated with the cells in my hands, the hands don't neeed to know every little detail that happens in the brain.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  You are probably thinking of the Conjoiners (an actual hive mind although members did retain some individuality) which at some point were probably no more than a few thousand. The Demarchists were probably the most successful offshoot of Earth and are billions across multiple solar systems. They are not an hive mind and their societies are not exactly an utopia (but not dystopian either).
berinateni 4y ago
> How is the last example different from an incumbents paradise? To me it looks like a road to autocracy. That may be true if your vote is also your guess. But if they are two different things (i.e. I vote for candidate A but guess candidate B will win) I don't see an issue. In theory it simply favors a well-informed citizenry. I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
- godelski 4y ago
  > In theory it simply favors a well-informed citizenry. This is a terrible "theory." No voter can be fully informed. I'm not even talking about the asymmetric information that leaders have (information from spy networks, experts, etc). Literally no single person can comprehend all these connections and complexities involved in many things. This is what representatives are supposed to resolve, but they frequently fail us. Your vote always is and always will be a guess. There may be a handful of subjects you're qualified to be an expert on, but the rest are effectively guesses. An "informed" voter is one that knows they are uninformed and doing their best. This isn't a comment encouraging autocracy, but one against this myth of "education is the end all be all solution." We should inform people as much as possible but also be encouraging nuanced discussions. Wisdom of the crowds is powerful, but we also need to recognize the limitations. > I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are. Absolutely not! We want to protect the secrecy of the vote. This can only encourage the degradation of that privacy. There are many ways to extract more information from votes without revealing identity. Cardinal methods, especially Score and STAR, give you a lot more information that you can use infer voter preferences. These methods also allow you to vote honestly, which defeats the entire purpose of your poll question.
- comex 4y ago
  > But if they are two different things (i.e. I vote for candidate A but guess candidate B will win) I don't see an issue. The problem is that most people are biased towards thinking their favorite candidate will win, so if it's a close election then most people will guess the same as their vote. > I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are. Political betting markets are kind of like that. Though, with money on the line, participants have a stronger incentive to avoid bias than they would in a poll.

tremon 4y ago

voters who got the “right answers” It is a fascist thing to assume that for every political question there is only one "right" answer and all the others must be wrong.

blueflow 4y ago
I think it was meant like, which decision had more favorable results. But this might only shift the problem to the entity to decide what is more favorable. Aside from that, i agree with you, the "right or wrong opinion" mindset is dangerous.
- prox 4y ago
  Wellness and happiness are two markers, if measured correctly/ scientifically that can be of use perhaps.
- godelski 4y ago
  > I think it was meant like, which decision had more favorable results. How does one even do this? Wait a hundred years? It's still probably impossible to determine the outcome of alternative policies. The right/wrong mindset is not only dangerous, but impossible in principle. But the autocrats won't tell you that.
NL807 4y ago
It depends on how you define "right answers". We could be talking about policy making based on objective truth, which is testable and is grounded in reality.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Given an objective scientific fact, what is the appropriate policy that should be enacted concerning that fact? That depends on your values, priorities and ethical framework, none of which have objectively correct answers.
- godelski 4y ago
  > which is testable and is grounded in reality. How? This is absolutely impossible. You can't run trials. Yes, we can analyze the effects of policies (which we should certainly be doing more of) but these results can also take decades. We can only do a singular experiment and so our sample is biased to all hell. There is no objective truth here, only results of a single experiment.

namlem 4y ago

None of those seem nearly as cool as the real life vTaiwan project. https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blended-volition-3e9b75102b9b https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...

majou 4y ago
Absurdly cool.
prox 4y ago
Found it difficult to understand, but is this like a way to reach a synthesis through a dialectic system?
- patcon 4y ago
  While it's only a small part of the larger vTaiwan process, a few fans of Polis made a video to try to share what feels valuable about it: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSL_F7Lwul2dlI9J6-Nzz9_9Pz9AbcG2z https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSL_F7Lwul2dlI9J6-Nzz9_... Also, a paper on the vtaiwan process: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft/ https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft/
  - prox 4y ago
    Thank you, gonna check it out!

fuzzc0re 4y ago

Ok I have been waiting for some time to find the right context on hackernews to shamelessly mention a democratic system that I have been working on for the last year: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01436.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01436.pdf IMO the problem with most {something} democracy systems is that they are voting paradigms that focus either only or mostly on how decisions are made but not how the options to decide upon are formed. This is true for the systems that you mentioned as well. Moreover, the fact that decision-making and policy authoring are operations that take time leads to citizens' beliefs updating during the processes and after the fact, but with "old-school" type representative democracies there is no real-time mechanism to synchronise policy suggestions and voting outcomes with the new states of information accumulation by voters. "High-tech" democracies should take advantage of the technologies that enable fast and cheap communication but they should also have mechanisms that disincentivise the spam that inevitably follows cheap talk. Regarding AI policy making, there are very interesting projects such as https://pol.is https://pol.is which address a lot of the problems that I mentioned above but, in my opinion, their output should be used as advise only. We have not yet exhausted human-centric democratic systems and neural networks are still privately-owned and privately-trained black boxes.

visarga 4y ago
On the other hand you can test a neural network a million times, exhaustingly mapping its biases and failures. You can't do that with a human, you got to take a chance.
- fuzzc0re 4y ago
  Yes you can do a million tests but the biases and failures of the neural net are chosen by human developers, a miniscule subset of citizens who themselves have some form of bias depending on their educational background, places where they grew up, family and friends etc. While you can replace a human in a powerful position with another one, since we do not know how to surgically correct individual weights in order to remove a specific decisional bias from a neural net, we can only retrain it and hope for the best. Because we are humans ourselves, we can understand the incentives of other humans and create adequate mechanisms to correct for their selfishness and their bias but what would be the incentive of an all powerful neural net? Which loss is it minimizing? And how does it know the citizens' preferences in the present and in the future? If the citizens stop feeding it (accurate) information at one point in time, will it still be the benevolent dictator that it was supposed to be? *Edit: Another counterargument that generally applies to neural nets making decisions for human activities is the argument of accountability. While you can put on trial a bad politician for their harmful-to-society decision making, who is to blame when the neural net will inevitably spew the wrong output on an issue that it has not encountered before and a policy decision will be made based on that? Will we put the developers on trial?

andrei_says_ 4y ago

Could you mention the names of the novels?

komadori 4y ago
Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds for the main arc.
- cpeterso 4y ago
  Also "The Prefect", which takes place in the Revelation Space universe but is not connected to the other novels. The main plot in The Prefect is about applying updates to voting software. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prefect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prefect
- andrei_says_ 4y ago
  Thank you. I discovered AR in the last couple of years and find his world building and imagination incredible. Loved his short stories collections and House of Suns. I started the Revelation Space novels this year.

ksidudwbw 4y ago

Perverse incentives etc.