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Bruce Schneier’s Plan to Reinvent Democracy

102 points by grammers 3y ago

nverno 3y ago
“We have this fiction in our minds that voting is perfectly accurate: that even a differential of a few votes is meaningful. In reality, elections have error rates every step of the way, and a very close election is a statistical tie." I'm curious about the error rates he mentions. What causes them in practice? This reminded me of another article on hacking voting machines - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-electio...
- bombcar 3y ago
  I would guess things like - theoretically perfect election where every eligible voter votes instantly and magically in an instant, and then determine all the things that detract from that: late registration, sickness, distraction, and then add up all the tallying errors and such (none of which even considers if people are making the “true” decision they’d make if they had perfect knowledge and foreknowledge of the outcomes). Elections are basically an emergency valve and a way to get people to not complain too much.
  - nverno 3y ago
    > all the tallying errors and such These are the types of errors I assumed he was considering there- I guess calling a close election a statistical tie makes even more sense if you're accounting for people not voting/having voted without 'perfect knowledge' as well.
    - harvey9 3y ago
      Even with perfect knowledge and mandatory voting, if you are trying to determine the will of the people then giving a choice of (usually) two quite similar parties doesn't really capture that.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        I suspect you end up with two or three or ten similar parties because of the vast majority of the people don’t basically agree on most things, you can’t have a democracy and instead have a civil war instead.
  - creato 3y ago
    > Elections are basically an emergency valve and a way to get people to not complain too much. No, they're a collective agreement that we compete with votes instead of on a battlefield. Instead of getting recruited to be in some politician's army, you get recruited to be their voter.
- hedora 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - joekrill 3y ago
    > The above two paragraphs are stating easily verifiable facts. I won’t bother editorializing. If they are so easily verifiable can you provide some citations?
  - rhn_mk1 3y ago
    Those facts are not as easily verifiable as you might think. "Some academic articles about exit polls and vote tallies in swing districts" does not bring any relevant on the search engine I tried. Your claims are extraordinary, so could you duly provide the extraordinary evidence?
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      Are they really such extraordinary claims? Witness: the 2000 election. The voting machines that were hackable with a screwdriver and USB. The fact that even now, many states lack any paper trail. The termination of exit polls after double digit discrepancies in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_the_Unite... has many sources and stories for you to have a look at. It's ... Extraordinary. While election shenanigans may not be as clearly, obviously bad as the flagged (!) GP claims, they are far from what I would call a basic minimum standard.
    - hedora 3y ago
      Huh, Google Scholar is significantly crappier than I remember (at least for this topic) Here’s one from 2004: https://ia903008.us.archive.org/9/items/files-all/rnc-election-plans/exit-polls-2004-edison-mitofsky.pdf https://ia903008.us.archive.org/9/items/files-all/rnc-electi... Search terms (ddg): academic study of exit poll discrepancies 2004
- flangola7 3y ago
  People underestimate how accurate voting is. We can know how millions of people voted with an error rate in the hundreds or even dozens. That's almost six nines accuracy.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    A bold statement, when we're discussing a country where many states have no paper trail whatsoever. Where exit polls can be off by over 12% in those states. And where the result of those discrepancies was to stop doing exit polls.
  - LgWoodenBadger 3y ago
    How does one even begin to approximate the accuracy of a process like anonymous voting, let alone claim 6 nines of accuracy?
- gadders 3y ago
  I'll bite. Vote harvesting and being able to vote without ID.
- dao- 3y ago
  It's a fallacy to think (or deflection to claim) that errors could corrupt the system when even without errors, the system is inherently corrupt and riddled with antidemocratic rules. Think gerrymandering, the fact that election day in the US isn't a national holiday, Citizens United, the joke that has become the Supreme Court, the list goes on and on. US democracy is a farce.
  - nverno 3y ago
    I don't think any of those things you mentioned, aside from the Supreme Court, are inherently part of the 'system', and I don't think the design of the US democratic system is inherently corrupt - in fact, most of the rules in place were designed with the intent of discouraging the inevitable corruption. Individual problems can be attacked without dismantling the whole thing. Gerrymandering, especially, seems like it could have an outsized effect on the error rates of some elections.
    - dao- 3y ago
      I guess my point is, I don't think it's helpful to frame antidemocratic practices as errors when they are kept in place very deliberately by the powers that be.
      - nverno 3y ago
        I agree, I was thinking the error rates he alluded to were probably logistical or sources of human error.
  - neuralRiot 3y ago
    To me democracy is like asking a bunch of 6 year olds what they want for dinner. It’s based in the assumption that people know the candidates and vote for the policies they agree with, a bit of contemporary history can tell us how well that works.
AlbertCory 3y ago
> the example of the king who builds a secret escape tunnel: What happens to the engineers who know about the tunnel? he asks, making the point that there will always be someone who knows your secrets. Not always. When Genghis Khan died, Marco Polo's legend (not universally believed) says they got a bunch of slaves to bury him somewhere, then killed them all, and then the people who killed them were themselves killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_place_of_Genghis_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_place_of_Genghis_Khan
- dogma1138 3y ago
  Who killed those who killed the ones who killed those who killed the ones who killed the slaves?
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    As long as they aren't yapping the location to their killers, you really only need to kill one round of people. The second round of killings was already overkill.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      props for using "overkill"
      - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        Thanks.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      The first round of killings were probably done by people who had a general idea of where the burial took place, since the slaves probably couldn’t be unsupervised long. The next round could take place further away, since the soldier could probably be more relied on to follow orders and return to a known location when they had completed their task.
  - 3y ago
iamnotsure 3y ago
GitHub would help lawmakers a lot.
- caseysoftware 3y ago
  There was a huge "citability" effort ~10-15 years ago focused around tracking bill revisions over time and understanding who did what and when. iirc, it used public sources to track things on a near-daily basis. It fell flat. It turns out lawmakers don't want accountability in any way, shape, or form. If we want that level of transparency, we can't count on the government to do it or even accept it willingly.
  - iamnotsure 3y ago
    "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Couldn't that be built in spite of lawmakers wishes? Legislation and voting records are all public, are they not? And looking to the future, how long until we have an LLM monitoring C-SPAN that can start keeping very specific logs?
lordnacho 3y ago
Might as well write out my democracy fantasy: - Everyone gets to vote if they're over the voting age (eg 18). - Your vote counts in proportion to your expected remaining years left in society. So if you're 95, you get 1 vote. If you're 20 you get around 60 more, depending on the tables. If you're an immigrant who arrived as an adult, eg a corporate expat, you get maybe 5 votes. There will be a table of stats about all sorts of things like this. Skin in the game. - If you have kids, you get their votes, split with the other parent. So a 10 year old would give each parent roughly 35 extra votes. - When you vote, it's a quiz. The questions will be known questions out of a bank of maybe 10k questions, and the quiz is 100 random questions. If you get 75 correct, your candidate gets 75 x your weight. We want voters who cared to learn the facts to have more say. - Parliament is chosen by proportional representation. Have a few areas represented in proportion, then add overall balancing seats. There's several ways to do this. - Term limits. Maybe just a single term of 10 years. Takes time to learn politics, like anything else. But also we want people to make decisions that aren't just about getting re-elected. If you know you're leaving eventually you can just focus on getting the things done that are important. - Large salary and large pension for the MPs. Independent commission that looks at all your finances in private, during and after tenure. Flags things that it finds flagworthy. - Not sure about geographic seats. Maybe just assign each voter to a virtual MP, at random. Local geographies should have local government to deal with local matters. This also does away with gerrymandering. But if we're going to have geographic seats, get a computer to assign random blobs.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Some of these are very good, but quizzes are very undemocratic. I get why they may seem like a good idea, but they end up being a great tool for disenfranchisement. For me, I would add that any law passed must have a relatively short sunset clause. This forces us to reconsider laws periodically to make sure they're still relevant.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    They're all undemocratic, it's not how it's done anywhere! Except maybe PR. The quiz thing is mostly exhaustion at the idea of people who don't bother to learn anything having a say. It's no different from having kids deciding what we should have for dinner. We can come up with a bunch of facts beforehand that everyone can read the answers to, and then it's up to people themselves to decide how much they really care.
hedora 3y ago
Also relevant: “The World Set Free” by H.G. Wells (1913). It continues to stand the test of time, and addresses exactly the same issues as Schneier is discussing, but without the information systems approach (and proposes a different solution). One thing the Schneier seems to be missing vs. Wells is that we’re entering an age of unlimited energy production, and therefore unlimited natural resources. Wells has a blind spot around environmental issues, but I think he’s closer to the mark on resource scarcity than current thinking. Anyway, Schneier actually has some interesting insights not covered by The World Set Free, which is refreshing. https://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/537 https://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/537
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > we’re entering an age of unlimited energy production We've been entering this age for almost 80 years. When are we finally going to reach it? > therefore unlimited natural resources Natural resources bred inside of a nuclear reactor tend to be radioactive. I also think you underestimate the extent to which populations of all organisms, including humans, will expand until natural resources again become the limiting factor.
  - hedora 3y ago
    > We've been entering this age for almost 80 years. When are we finally going to reach it? Wells’ answer was “once the politicians get out of the way”. I think that’s still true today.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      So basically once the voters, who vote those politicians in knowing in advance that they'll stop this energy progress, get out of the way.
deleted 3y ago
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klyrs 3y ago
Schneier has earned much of my respect over the years, but he lost a little by hosting this. It's written by a star-struck fan who is so impressed by Schneier's life work that the article is almost entirely focused on how impressed the author is with Schneier, and I was entirely turned off by the time "the Plan" is mentioned. There was a keynote speech, which I'd be interested in reading a transcript of. Instead, the author swerves to talk about a sci-fi reinvention of democracy which is not "the Plan". Is there a plan? I don't know, the only thing I learned is that Schneier is willing to post lickspittle under a bait headline.
- SllX 3y ago
  Not sure who Schneier is but I tried to heed your comment here and skim for what could plausibly be a plan and it wasn’t there. It really is just hype. LPT to the author of the article: If ideas matter, they can stand alone to the person who you conceive of having originated them and be defended separately.
  - auggierose 3y ago
    Unfortunately, this is not how people work. Ideas DO matter, but most people cannot be convinced by a sound argument only. Which in a way makes sense, because logic alone will get you only so far.
- barathr 3y ago
  This is from the news section of his site, not his main blog. It is just a recitation of interviews he does, of which there are many. Someone posted it here.
- jjulius 3y ago
  >lickspittle This word is new to me and I love it, thank you.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  They can't charge for RSA if they release transcripts immediately.
tremon 3y ago
So, what actually is Schneier's plan to "Reinvent Democracy"? Does the article mention or evaluate any of Schneier's suggestions, or is the article thinly-veiled clickbait to get us to watch the keynote (registration required) ?
- MollyRealized 3y ago
  No, the only informative part of it is: ... the current trend toward zero-sum politics—where one party wins while the other loses—and how that situation isn’t optimal. “We have an economy where my success depends on your failures,” he said. “We need to have a game where everyone wins, and it would be unlike anything we have ever seen. We have to harness plurality and embrace conflict and disagreement.” To fix this, we have to rethink the nature of growth, which as he says is the fuel that powers the zero-sum world and is relevant only in that world where resources are plentiful. He ended his talk with suggestions on how to change democracy with built-in security, recognizing other tech innovations to make it more efficient.
machina_ex_deus 3y ago
There are two interpretations of democracy. In one interpretation, the purpose of democracy is accountability of the leaders and the government. Representative democracy is a means to an end from that interpretation: you don't vote so that the leaders represent you, you vote to keep them in check. The other interpretation, is an intentional misunderstanding that is promoted, which says that the purpose of democracy is to "represent" the people. What does representation means? Whatever the leading polarization line the media is pushing. Most likely, polarization across left/right, race, sex, ethnicity, religion. Exactly the non constructive sort of representation, the one that requires minimum accountability. The U.S. media and elite have perfected the art of brainwashing towards the representation interpretation, and against the accountability interpretation (also branded "populism"). The polarization is no accident. It is the strategy producing minimum accountability, which produces maximum power.
- jmole 3y ago
  Maybe we should stop voting for people and start voting directly for policy.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    On a small scale this is initiative and referendum. On the large scale this results in a small proportion of unelected people who have a lot of time on their hands controlling things. A large chunk would probably be relatively well-to-do retirees.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    Speaking as a California resident, who has to deal with the remainders of the fashion for direct democracy a hundred years ago, I think this is mostly a bad idea. One, people enact policies, so we still have to choose leaders. Two, rule-by-ballot-prop is a messy business, with many dubious propositions making it to the ballot not because they're particularly good, but because people with money can pay to make it happen. And three, it depends upon people putting a lot of time into understanding complicated issues. I'm a smart, dutiful person who tries to keep up and who spends many hours every election trying to understand. For me it still often comes down to deciding who to trust. The only advantage I see to it is when it gives politicians cover to do things that they agree with the populace on but don't want to get yelled at about. E.g., legalizing marijuana. Unfortunately, there are also bad examples, like CA Prop 8, which was just trying to put bigotry in the state constitution.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> I got pushback from several folks at the show, who all agree that we need a common fact base for any successful democratic system, and misinformation throws that off. No, we don't. We just need to each have a decent true understanding of how policy directly impacts us and those we care about. Then we apply our individual ethical weights and decide how to vote based on that. > Maybe his suggestions won’t come to pass Is it just me or are his suggestions never mentioned in this post? I think I read it all (though did not click on any of the links). Personally I'd like to see the voting power in the house of representatives made proportionate to the number of people who affirmatively voted for each representative. I'd also like to see multi-representative districts so that everyone who got, say, 5% of the vote, is elected, with their voting power in the House proportionate to the number of people who voted for them. Do that and gerrymandering doesn't matter except at the absolute margin. Maybe do the same with the Senate, except possibly keep it single-senator per state to make the minority party happy. I don't know. I'd also like to see three senators per state, one elected every two years. I'd be in favor of abolishing the Senate entirely, but I know that won't fly.
- shagie 3y ago
  > I'd also like to see multi-representative districts so that everyone who got, say, 5% of the vote, is elected, with their voting power in the House proportionate to the number of people who voted for them. Do that and gerrymandering doesn't matter except at the absolute margin. An example of this proposal and what it would do can be seen at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/10/opinion/house-representatives-size-multi-member.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/10/opinion/house... (though note it comes with "need more seats too" aspect). https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=616 https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    It's fundamentally different in that each elected representative still has exactly the same single vote in congress. It is still somewhat prone to gerrymandering, and most importantly requires minor candidate voters to effectively vote along party lines (to the extent of including the most popular party member in their ranking list, to be ensured of at least one of their choices getting elected) instead of voting only for those they think represent their concerns the best. It also continues the effect of granting proportionately more voting power in Congress to districts with a small population. E.g. https://ballotpedia.org/Demographics_of_congressional_districts_as_of_2015 https://ballotpedia.org/Demographics_of_congressional_distri... - In 2015 just over 1 million people represented by the single Montana at-large district to just over half a million represented by the two Rhode Island districts.
photochemsyn 3y ago
This article could benefit from an explicit definition of "democracy" from the author's perspective. It's one of those concepts that people don't really agree on the meaning of, even though it's bandied about a lot (rather like 'freedom'). Are we talking about strictly representative democracy, i.e. the selection of individuals by the voting public to act on their behalf within executive, legislative and judicial branches of government? And if so, how is that pool of candidates itself selected, and by what interests? Or are we talking about direct democracy, perhaps a mixed system in which proposed laws are written by the elected representatives but then voted on by the general public, e.g. state and national referendums? Or are we talking about oligarchy masquerading as democracy, with puppets put up in show elections and with their actions controlled by the hidden hands of billionaires?
barathr 3y ago
For those who are looking for more in-depth material, I'd recommend looking at Bruce Schneier's post about a workshop he organized on this topic a few months ago. The comments include notes on the presentations: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-democracy.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...
- Animats 3y ago
  Yes. The linked article is a bad book report. The "reimagining" link is useful, but it's a bunch of people with their own agendas. That shows a fundamental problem. Given a large number of people with different agendas, how does an action plan emerge? This is a problem with meetings in general. We all know what meetings that accomplish nothing are like. Democracies needs something to vote on. There's a stage before voting which involves focusing and drafting. This tends to be dominated by lobbyists and others backed to promote narrow, self-serving agendas. That part of the system sucks.
  - barathr 3y ago
    My sense is that this is in its early stages as this was the first gathering of that group of folks. I imagine some good dialogue and collaborations are coming out of it, and we might see the results of that in a year or two.
  - tremon 3y ago
    In my mind, voting is an implementation detail of democracy. The drafting process is much more important, as that is where all the different voices are supposed to be heard. > This tends to be dominated by lobbyists and others backed to promote narrow, self-serving agendas In a real representative democracy, this shouldn't matter (yes, I know, this veers eerily close to a no-true-scotsman argument). If all the participants promote their own self-serving agendas, the end result will be a mix of those agendas, weighted by how widely particular viewpoints are represented. The problem of course is firstly that systems like winner-takes-all and first-past-the-post violate democracy by silencing other voices, and secondly that lobbying is done by interests who represent nobody but themselves yet it has a hugely outsized influence on the outcome.
yarg 3y ago
Also from his blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_sto.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_s... He beat Snowden to the punch, but no-one was listening.
- tptacek 3y ago
  That's a blog post about work other cryptographers did a year or more beforehand.
  - yarg 3y ago
    > Problems with Dual_EC_DRBG were first described in early 2006. The math is complicated, but the general point is that the random numbers it produces have a small bias. The problem isn’t large enough to make the algorithm unusable. > But today there’s an even bigger stink brewing around Dual_EC_DRBG. In an informal presentation (http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf) at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor. > What Shumow and Ferguson showed is that these numbers have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can predict the output of the random-number generator after collecting just 32 bytes of its output. To put that in real terms, you only need to monitor one TLS internet encryption connection in order to crack the security of that protocol. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG. You're right that it's a blog post regarding the work of others, but even Dan and Niels' simplified presentation is well beyond what a layman can grasp. Not knowing security, Schneier's post brought it down to a level where it didn't go over my head completely.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      None of what Schneier reported put any of this in a layperson's grasp! The issue with Dual EC is that it's a public key RNG: it produces RNGs by encrypting state to a private key. Somebody potentially holds the private key, and can "decrypt" random numbers back to the internal state of the RNG. There, see, I explained it. There's not much to it! As evidence for Schneier not really moving the needle on this: Dual EC remained a component of important industry products --- Juniper/Netscreen VPNs, in particular --- for years after this blog post. For what it's worth: that's what the major revelation after BULLRUN was. Not that Dual EC was bad --- literally every competent practitioner knew Dual EC was bad --- but that serious products were actually using it. Seeing Dual EC turn up in a VPN server was the smoking gun, not any particular slide from a Snowden tranche. That's when there's no denying it's a backdoor. (Mark me down as someone who was a Dual EC backdoor skeptic prior to the Snowden fallout, for whatever that's worth to you.)
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
I agree so much with the observation that we are still using, basically, archaic systems. We have so much more knowledge now, so many more capabilities, but people still argue over socialism or capitalism, for example. There are numerous better possible systems, but instead of people putting their heads together and really coming up with a better system, at least for our modern day needs, people just stick to arguing what they learned, what gets inherited. I think we definitely need something new. Capitalism unchecked and without heavy regulation is unsustainable, if nothing else it will lead to revolts and uprising. Socialism has a naive view of human nature IMO. Hybrid systems like the Nordic countries use are pretty great, but still much room for improvement. On top of all of that, democracy can't work when, like in the US, almost half the population is severely uneducated and ends up voting out of spite and/or based on belief.
amelius 3y ago
Can we simulate that democracy using LLM-based agents to see if it could work?
shagie 3y ago
Of note is that United States has severely fallen off the cube root law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law ) which is more an observation than a law... but tells of how big the house of representatives should be. > The cube root law is an observation in political science that the number of members of a unicameral legislature, or the lower house of a bicameral legislature, is about the cube root of the population being represented. The US population is about 336M which would put the size at 696. This would change it from an average of 754k people / representative to 483k people. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/09/opinion/expanded-house-representatives-size.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/09/opinion/expan...
maxboone 3y ago
One of the things about tech bros I really don't like is that we generally think we are good in each field. Systems like proposed have been widely discussed & widely debated in the field Political Science (wherein my SO does research). This sounds to me like a simplified or applied version of Brennan's "epistocracy". There's a nice podcast about this: https://hiphination.org/season-3-episodes/s3-episode-5-demons-of-democracy/ https://hiphination.org/season-3-episodes/s3-episode-5-demon... Or, in text, a summary of the book "Against Democracy": https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-book-epistocracy-jason-brennan https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-boo... OT: Must-read on this subject and good reference material is Ruling the Void from Peter Mair.
- stubybubs 3y ago
  > One of the things about tech bros I really don't like is that we generally think we are good in each field. This is, in fact, the worst thing about tech bros and other highly paid experts in specific fields. I've grown up enough to learn that my earlier ideas have been terribly wrong because they've lacked perspective. Doesn't matter how good I am at X, there's just no substitute for experience with Z. The top-tier tech bros have been proving this in the last few years. Many of them have enjoyed the kind of success that they have simply by living in a particular period in history that was very friendly to massive IPOs making them fabulously wealthy. Their more recent decisions have been in many cases absolutely disastrous, and anything dealing with real people is generally laughably bad. See the metaverse gamble, recent Twitter, or poisonous permethrin-treated mosquito nets for examples. They often times have no idea what they're doing. Edit: another non-tech example is how biomedical researchers want to make people with paraplegia walk. Ask people with paraplegia what they want and they'll tell you bladder control and the ability to have sex. Just listen to people.
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    The typical high achiever in technical fields is the beneficiary of a better than average capacity for working memory, which is the critical bottleneck for learning complex rule-driven material in a short period of time, such as in school. But this capacity has little if any bearing on one's ability to reflect on a diffuse and unstructured corpus of information accumulated over extended periods of time, nor in cultivating the habit of remaining in suspended judgment necessary for fair, unmotivated and context-sensitive appraisal.
deleted 3y ago
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simne 3y ago
I think, nearly all people who tried to Reinvent Democracy, waste time, because underestimate ONLY TWO things - Dunbar's number, and have not tried make really democratic organization (or just lie). What differ really democratic organization - democratic order, mean way of making decisions. To make democratic order really effective (not just imitation), need to follow few simple rules, for simplicity, I could reduce there to only one - rules should work. So, what says us Dunbars number and democratic organization practice? First, real people are not subjects, only organized Group is subject. Second, how large should be Group? - From Dunbar, about 150 people, but exists tricky thing - not all people are subjective, exists 1-10% human-hubs, who affect all others. So if your Dunbar group all human-hubs, you could have community of about 1500-3000 people (really up to approx 5000), behavior of which you could estimate with high precision. And that's how Switzerland live just now - more than 80% of their communities have 1000-5000 members. 90% of real-life questions answered inside community, on local level, and their federal system is tiny and make very few decisions, most of them with plebiscite. Third, to let rules work, must be enforcement (fines, power to enforce punishment) and must be fine tuned system of punishment grades, from just blame, to fines, up to most for me powerful - exclusion from community. In online communities, enforcement is near impossible, so online Democracy is just hallucination.

102 points by grammers 3y ago

“We have this fiction in our minds that voting is perfectly accurate: that even a differential of a few votes is meaningful. In reality, elections have error rates every step of the way, and a very close election is a statistical tie." I'm curious about the error rates he mentions. What causes them in practice? This reminded me of another article on hacking voting machines - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-electio...

bombcar 3y ago
I would guess things like - theoretically perfect election where every eligible voter votes instantly and magically in an instant, and then determine all the things that detract from that: late registration, sickness, distraction, and then add up all the tallying errors and such (none of which even considers if people are making the “true” decision they’d make if they had perfect knowledge and foreknowledge of the outcomes). Elections are basically an emergency valve and a way to get people to not complain too much.
- nverno 3y ago
  > all the tallying errors and such These are the types of errors I assumed he was considering there- I guess calling a close election a statistical tie makes even more sense if you're accounting for people not voting/having voted without 'perfect knowledge' as well.
  - harvey9 3y ago
    Even with perfect knowledge and mandatory voting, if you are trying to determine the will of the people then giving a choice of (usually) two quite similar parties doesn't really capture that.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I suspect you end up with two or three or ten similar parties because of the vast majority of the people don’t basically agree on most things, you can’t have a democracy and instead have a civil war instead.
- creato 3y ago
  > Elections are basically an emergency valve and a way to get people to not complain too much. No, they're a collective agreement that we compete with votes instead of on a battlefield. Instead of getting recruited to be in some politician's army, you get recruited to be their voter.
hedora 3y ago
[flagged]
- joekrill 3y ago
  > The above two paragraphs are stating easily verifiable facts. I won’t bother editorializing. If they are so easily verifiable can you provide some citations?
- rhn_mk1 3y ago
  Those facts are not as easily verifiable as you might think. "Some academic articles about exit polls and vote tallies in swing districts" does not bring any relevant on the search engine I tried. Your claims are extraordinary, so could you duly provide the extraordinary evidence?
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    Are they really such extraordinary claims? Witness: the 2000 election. The voting machines that were hackable with a screwdriver and USB. The fact that even now, many states lack any paper trail. The termination of exit polls after double digit discrepancies in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_the_Unite... has many sources and stories for you to have a look at. It's ... Extraordinary. While election shenanigans may not be as clearly, obviously bad as the flagged (!) GP claims, they are far from what I would call a basic minimum standard.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Huh, Google Scholar is significantly crappier than I remember (at least for this topic) Here’s one from 2004: https://ia903008.us.archive.org/9/items/files-all/rnc-election-plans/exit-polls-2004-edison-mitofsky.pdf https://ia903008.us.archive.org/9/items/files-all/rnc-electi... Search terms (ddg): academic study of exit poll discrepancies 2004
flangola7 3y ago
People underestimate how accurate voting is. We can know how millions of people voted with an error rate in the hundreds or even dozens. That's almost six nines accuracy.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  A bold statement, when we're discussing a country where many states have no paper trail whatsoever. Where exit polls can be off by over 12% in those states. And where the result of those discrepancies was to stop doing exit polls.
- LgWoodenBadger 3y ago
  How does one even begin to approximate the accuracy of a process like anonymous voting, let alone claim 6 nines of accuracy?
gadders 3y ago
I'll bite. Vote harvesting and being able to vote without ID.
dao- 3y ago
It's a fallacy to think (or deflection to claim) that errors could corrupt the system when even without errors, the system is inherently corrupt and riddled with antidemocratic rules. Think gerrymandering, the fact that election day in the US isn't a national holiday, Citizens United, the joke that has become the Supreme Court, the list goes on and on. US democracy is a farce.
- nverno 3y ago
  I don't think any of those things you mentioned, aside from the Supreme Court, are inherently part of the 'system', and I don't think the design of the US democratic system is inherently corrupt - in fact, most of the rules in place were designed with the intent of discouraging the inevitable corruption. Individual problems can be attacked without dismantling the whole thing. Gerrymandering, especially, seems like it could have an outsized effect on the error rates of some elections.
  - dao- 3y ago
    I guess my point is, I don't think it's helpful to frame antidemocratic practices as errors when they are kept in place very deliberately by the powers that be.
    - nverno 3y ago
      I agree, I was thinking the error rates he alluded to were probably logistical or sources of human error.
- neuralRiot 3y ago
  To me democracy is like asking a bunch of 6 year olds what they want for dinner. It’s based in the assumption that people know the candidates and vote for the policies they agree with, a bit of contemporary history can tell us how well that works.

AlbertCory 3y ago

> the example of the king who builds a secret escape tunnel: What happens to the engineers who know about the tunnel? he asks, making the point that there will always be someone who knows your secrets. Not always. When Genghis Khan died, Marco Polo's legend (not universally believed) says they got a bunch of slaves to bury him somewhere, then killed them all, and then the people who killed them were themselves killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_place_of_Genghis_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_place_of_Genghis_Khan

dogma1138 3y ago
Who killed those who killed the ones who killed those who killed the ones who killed the slaves?
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  As long as they aren't yapping the location to their killers, you really only need to kill one round of people. The second round of killings was already overkill.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    props for using "overkill"
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      Thanks.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    The first round of killings were probably done by people who had a general idea of where the burial took place, since the slaves probably couldn’t be unsupervised long. The next round could take place further away, since the soldier could probably be more relied on to follow orders and return to a known location when they had completed their task.
- 3y ago

iamnotsure 3y ago

GitHub would help lawmakers a lot.

caseysoftware 3y ago
There was a huge "citability" effort ~10-15 years ago focused around tracking bill revisions over time and understanding who did what and when. iirc, it used public sources to track things on a near-daily basis. It fell flat. It turns out lawmakers don't want accountability in any way, shape, or form. If we want that level of transparency, we can't count on the government to do it or even accept it willingly.
- iamnotsure 3y ago
  "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  Couldn't that be built in spite of lawmakers wishes? Legislation and voting records are all public, are they not? And looking to the future, how long until we have an LLM monitoring C-SPAN that can start keeping very specific logs?

lordnacho 3y ago

Might as well write out my democracy fantasy: - Everyone gets to vote if they're over the voting age (eg 18). - Your vote counts in proportion to your expected remaining years left in society. So if you're 95, you get 1 vote. If you're 20 you get around 60 more, depending on the tables. If you're an immigrant who arrived as an adult, eg a corporate expat, you get maybe 5 votes. There will be a table of stats about all sorts of things like this. Skin in the game. - If you have kids, you get their votes, split with the other parent. So a 10 year old would give each parent roughly 35 extra votes. - When you vote, it's a quiz. The questions will be known questions out of a bank of maybe 10k questions, and the quiz is 100 random questions. If you get 75 correct, your candidate gets 75 x your weight. We want voters who cared to learn the facts to have more say. - Parliament is chosen by proportional representation. Have a few areas represented in proportion, then add overall balancing seats. There's several ways to do this. - Term limits. Maybe just a single term of 10 years. Takes time to learn politics, like anything else. But also we want people to make decisions that aren't just about getting re-elected. If you know you're leaving eventually you can just focus on getting the things done that are important. - Large salary and large pension for the MPs. Independent commission that looks at all your finances in private, during and after tenure. Flags things that it finds flagworthy. - Not sure about geographic seats. Maybe just assign each voter to a virtual MP, at random. Local geographies should have local government to deal with local matters. This also does away with gerrymandering. But if we're going to have geographic seats, get a computer to assign random blobs.

candiddevmike 3y ago
Some of these are very good, but quizzes are very undemocratic. I get why they may seem like a good idea, but they end up being a great tool for disenfranchisement. For me, I would add that any law passed must have a relatively short sunset clause. This forces us to reconsider laws periodically to make sure they're still relevant.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  They're all undemocratic, it's not how it's done anywhere! Except maybe PR. The quiz thing is mostly exhaustion at the idea of people who don't bother to learn anything having a say. It's no different from having kids deciding what we should have for dinner. We can come up with a bunch of facts beforehand that everyone can read the answers to, and then it's up to people themselves to decide how much they really care.

hedora 3y ago

Also relevant: “The World Set Free” by H.G. Wells (1913). It continues to stand the test of time, and addresses exactly the same issues as Schneier is discussing, but without the information systems approach (and proposes a different solution). One thing the Schneier seems to be missing vs. Wells is that we’re entering an age of unlimited energy production, and therefore unlimited natural resources. Wells has a blind spot around environmental issues, but I think he’s closer to the mark on resource scarcity than current thinking. Anyway, Schneier actually has some interesting insights not covered by The World Set Free, which is refreshing. https://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/537 https://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/537

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> we’re entering an age of unlimited energy production We've been entering this age for almost 80 years. When are we finally going to reach it? > therefore unlimited natural resources Natural resources bred inside of a nuclear reactor tend to be radioactive. I also think you underestimate the extent to which populations of all organisms, including humans, will expand until natural resources again become the limiting factor.
- hedora 3y ago
  > We've been entering this age for almost 80 years. When are we finally going to reach it? Wells’ answer was “once the politicians get out of the way”. I think that’s still true today.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    So basically once the voters, who vote those politicians in knowing in advance that they'll stop this energy progress, get out of the way.

deleted 3y ago

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klyrs 3y ago

Schneier has earned much of my respect over the years, but he lost a little by hosting this. It's written by a star-struck fan who is so impressed by Schneier's life work that the article is almost entirely focused on how impressed the author is with Schneier, and I was entirely turned off by the time "the Plan" is mentioned. There was a keynote speech, which I'd be interested in reading a transcript of. Instead, the author swerves to talk about a sci-fi reinvention of democracy which is not "the Plan". Is there a plan? I don't know, the only thing I learned is that Schneier is willing to post lickspittle under a bait headline.

SllX 3y ago
Not sure who Schneier is but I tried to heed your comment here and skim for what could plausibly be a plan and it wasn’t there. It really is just hype. LPT to the author of the article: If ideas matter, they can stand alone to the person who you conceive of having originated them and be defended separately.
- auggierose 3y ago
  Unfortunately, this is not how people work. Ideas DO matter, but most people cannot be convinced by a sound argument only. Which in a way makes sense, because logic alone will get you only so far.
barathr 3y ago
This is from the news section of his site, not his main blog. It is just a recitation of interviews he does, of which there are many. Someone posted it here.
jjulius 3y ago
>lickspittle This word is new to me and I love it, thank you.
unethical_ban 3y ago
They can't charge for RSA if they release transcripts immediately.

tremon 3y ago

So, what actually is Schneier's plan to "Reinvent Democracy"? Does the article mention or evaluate any of Schneier's suggestions, or is the article thinly-veiled clickbait to get us to watch the keynote (registration required) ?

MollyRealized 3y ago
No, the only informative part of it is: ... the current trend toward zero-sum politics—where one party wins while the other loses—and how that situation isn’t optimal. “We have an economy where my success depends on your failures,” he said. “We need to have a game where everyone wins, and it would be unlike anything we have ever seen. We have to harness plurality and embrace conflict and disagreement.” To fix this, we have to rethink the nature of growth, which as he says is the fuel that powers the zero-sum world and is relevant only in that world where resources are plentiful. He ended his talk with suggestions on how to change democracy with built-in security, recognizing other tech innovations to make it more efficient.

machina_ex_deus 3y ago

There are two interpretations of democracy. In one interpretation, the purpose of democracy is accountability of the leaders and the government. Representative democracy is a means to an end from that interpretation: you don't vote so that the leaders represent you, you vote to keep them in check. The other interpretation, is an intentional misunderstanding that is promoted, which says that the purpose of democracy is to "represent" the people. What does representation means? Whatever the leading polarization line the media is pushing. Most likely, polarization across left/right, race, sex, ethnicity, religion. Exactly the non constructive sort of representation, the one that requires minimum accountability. The U.S. media and elite have perfected the art of brainwashing towards the representation interpretation, and against the accountability interpretation (also branded "populism"). The polarization is no accident. It is the strategy producing minimum accountability, which produces maximum power.

jmole 3y ago
Maybe we should stop voting for people and start voting directly for policy.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  On a small scale this is initiative and referendum. On the large scale this results in a small proportion of unelected people who have a lot of time on their hands controlling things. A large chunk would probably be relatively well-to-do retirees.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Speaking as a California resident, who has to deal with the remainders of the fashion for direct democracy a hundred years ago, I think this is mostly a bad idea. One, people enact policies, so we still have to choose leaders. Two, rule-by-ballot-prop is a messy business, with many dubious propositions making it to the ballot not because they're particularly good, but because people with money can pay to make it happen. And three, it depends upon people putting a lot of time into understanding complicated issues. I'm a smart, dutiful person who tries to keep up and who spends many hours every election trying to understand. For me it still often comes down to deciding who to trust. The only advantage I see to it is when it gives politicians cover to do things that they agree with the populace on but don't want to get yelled at about. E.g., legalizing marijuana. Unfortunately, there are also bad examples, like CA Prop 8, which was just trying to put bigotry in the state constitution.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

> I got pushback from several folks at the show, who all agree that we need a common fact base for any successful democratic system, and misinformation throws that off. No, we don't. We just need to each have a decent true understanding of how policy directly impacts us and those we care about. Then we apply our individual ethical weights and decide how to vote based on that. > Maybe his suggestions won’t come to pass Is it just me or are his suggestions never mentioned in this post? I think I read it all (though did not click on any of the links). Personally I'd like to see the voting power in the house of representatives made proportionate to the number of people who affirmatively voted for each representative. I'd also like to see multi-representative districts so that everyone who got, say, 5% of the vote, is elected, with their voting power in the House proportionate to the number of people who voted for them. Do that and gerrymandering doesn't matter except at the absolute margin. Maybe do the same with the Senate, except possibly keep it single-senator per state to make the minority party happy. I don't know. I'd also like to see three senators per state, one elected every two years. I'd be in favor of abolishing the Senate entirely, but I know that won't fly.

shagie 3y ago
> I'd also like to see multi-representative districts so that everyone who got, say, 5% of the vote, is elected, with their voting power in the House proportionate to the number of people who voted for them. Do that and gerrymandering doesn't matter except at the absolute margin. An example of this proposal and what it would do can be seen at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/10/opinion/house-representatives-size-multi-member.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/10/opinion/house... (though note it comes with "need more seats too" aspect). https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=616 https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  It's fundamentally different in that each elected representative still has exactly the same single vote in congress. It is still somewhat prone to gerrymandering, and most importantly requires minor candidate voters to effectively vote along party lines (to the extent of including the most popular party member in their ranking list, to be ensured of at least one of their choices getting elected) instead of voting only for those they think represent their concerns the best. It also continues the effect of granting proportionately more voting power in Congress to districts with a small population. E.g. https://ballotpedia.org/Demographics_of_congressional_districts_as_of_2015 https://ballotpedia.org/Demographics_of_congressional_distri... - In 2015 just over 1 million people represented by the single Montana at-large district to just over half a million represented by the two Rhode Island districts.

photochemsyn 3y ago

This article could benefit from an explicit definition of "democracy" from the author's perspective. It's one of those concepts that people don't really agree on the meaning of, even though it's bandied about a lot (rather like 'freedom'). Are we talking about strictly representative democracy, i.e. the selection of individuals by the voting public to act on their behalf within executive, legislative and judicial branches of government? And if so, how is that pool of candidates itself selected, and by what interests? Or are we talking about direct democracy, perhaps a mixed system in which proposed laws are written by the elected representatives but then voted on by the general public, e.g. state and national referendums? Or are we talking about oligarchy masquerading as democracy, with puppets put up in show elections and with their actions controlled by the hidden hands of billionaires?

barathr 3y ago

For those who are looking for more in-depth material, I'd recommend looking at Bruce Schneier's post about a workshop he organized on this topic a few months ago. The comments include notes on the presentations: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-democracy.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...

Animats 3y ago
Yes. The linked article is a bad book report. The "reimagining" link is useful, but it's a bunch of people with their own agendas. That shows a fundamental problem. Given a large number of people with different agendas, how does an action plan emerge? This is a problem with meetings in general. We all know what meetings that accomplish nothing are like. Democracies needs something to vote on. There's a stage before voting which involves focusing and drafting. This tends to be dominated by lobbyists and others backed to promote narrow, self-serving agendas. That part of the system sucks.
- barathr 3y ago
  My sense is that this is in its early stages as this was the first gathering of that group of folks. I imagine some good dialogue and collaborations are coming out of it, and we might see the results of that in a year or two.
- tremon 3y ago
  In my mind, voting is an implementation detail of democracy. The drafting process is much more important, as that is where all the different voices are supposed to be heard. > This tends to be dominated by lobbyists and others backed to promote narrow, self-serving agendas In a real representative democracy, this shouldn't matter (yes, I know, this veers eerily close to a no-true-scotsman argument). If all the participants promote their own self-serving agendas, the end result will be a mix of those agendas, weighted by how widely particular viewpoints are represented. The problem of course is firstly that systems like winner-takes-all and first-past-the-post violate democracy by silencing other voices, and secondly that lobbying is done by interests who represent nobody but themselves yet it has a hugely outsized influence on the outcome.

yarg 3y ago

Also from his blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_sto.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_s... He beat Snowden to the punch, but no-one was listening.

tptacek 3y ago
That's a blog post about work other cryptographers did a year or more beforehand.
- yarg 3y ago
  > Problems with Dual_EC_DRBG were first described in early 2006. The math is complicated, but the general point is that the random numbers it produces have a small bias. The problem isn’t large enough to make the algorithm unusable. > But today there’s an even bigger stink brewing around Dual_EC_DRBG. In an informal presentation (http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf) at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor. > What Shumow and Ferguson showed is that these numbers have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can predict the output of the random-number generator after collecting just 32 bytes of its output. To put that in real terms, you only need to monitor one TLS internet encryption connection in order to crack the security of that protocol. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG. You're right that it's a blog post regarding the work of others, but even Dan and Niels' simplified presentation is well beyond what a layman can grasp. Not knowing security, Schneier's post brought it down to a level where it didn't go over my head completely.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    None of what Schneier reported put any of this in a layperson's grasp! The issue with Dual EC is that it's a public key RNG: it produces RNGs by encrypting state to a private key. Somebody potentially holds the private key, and can "decrypt" random numbers back to the internal state of the RNG. There, see, I explained it. There's not much to it! As evidence for Schneier not really moving the needle on this: Dual EC remained a component of important industry products --- Juniper/Netscreen VPNs, in particular --- for years after this blog post. For what it's worth: that's what the major revelation after BULLRUN was. Not that Dual EC was bad --- literally every competent practitioner knew Dual EC was bad --- but that serious products were actually using it. Seeing Dual EC turn up in a VPN server was the smoking gun, not any particular slide from a Snowden tranche. That's when there's no denying it's a backdoor. (Mark me down as someone who was a Dual EC backdoor skeptic prior to the Snowden fallout, for whatever that's worth to you.)

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

I agree so much with the observation that we are still using, basically, archaic systems. We have so much more knowledge now, so many more capabilities, but people still argue over socialism or capitalism, for example. There are numerous better possible systems, but instead of people putting their heads together and really coming up with a better system, at least for our modern day needs, people just stick to arguing what they learned, what gets inherited. I think we definitely need something new. Capitalism unchecked and without heavy regulation is unsustainable, if nothing else it will lead to revolts and uprising. Socialism has a naive view of human nature IMO. Hybrid systems like the Nordic countries use are pretty great, but still much room for improvement. On top of all of that, democracy can't work when, like in the US, almost half the population is severely uneducated and ends up voting out of spite and/or based on belief.

amelius 3y ago

Can we simulate that democracy using LLM-based agents to see if it could work?

shagie 3y ago

Of note is that United States has severely fallen off the cube root law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law ) which is more an observation than a law... but tells of how big the house of representatives should be. > The cube root law is an observation in political science that the number of members of a unicameral legislature, or the lower house of a bicameral legislature, is about the cube root of the population being represented. The US population is about 336M which would put the size at 696. This would change it from an average of 754k people / representative to 483k people. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/09/opinion/expanded-house-representatives-size.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/09/opinion/expan...

maxboone 3y ago

One of the things about tech bros I really don't like is that we generally think we are good in each field. Systems like proposed have been widely discussed & widely debated in the field Political Science (wherein my SO does research). This sounds to me like a simplified or applied version of Brennan's "epistocracy". There's a nice podcast about this: https://hiphination.org/season-3-episodes/s3-episode-5-demons-of-democracy/ https://hiphination.org/season-3-episodes/s3-episode-5-demon... Or, in text, a summary of the book "Against Democracy": https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-book-epistocracy-jason-brennan https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-boo... OT: Must-read on this subject and good reference material is Ruling the Void from Peter Mair.

stubybubs 3y ago
> One of the things about tech bros I really don't like is that we generally think we are good in each field. This is, in fact, the worst thing about tech bros and other highly paid experts in specific fields. I've grown up enough to learn that my earlier ideas have been terribly wrong because they've lacked perspective. Doesn't matter how good I am at X, there's just no substitute for experience with Z. The top-tier tech bros have been proving this in the last few years. Many of them have enjoyed the kind of success that they have simply by living in a particular period in history that was very friendly to massive IPOs making them fabulously wealthy. Their more recent decisions have been in many cases absolutely disastrous, and anything dealing with real people is generally laughably bad. See the metaverse gamble, recent Twitter, or poisonous permethrin-treated mosquito nets for examples. They often times have no idea what they're doing. Edit: another non-tech example is how biomedical researchers want to make people with paraplegia walk. Ask people with paraplegia what they want and they'll tell you bladder control and the ability to have sex. Just listen to people.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  The typical high achiever in technical fields is the beneficiary of a better than average capacity for working memory, which is the critical bottleneck for learning complex rule-driven material in a short period of time, such as in school. But this capacity has little if any bearing on one's ability to reflect on a diffuse and unstructured corpus of information accumulated over extended periods of time, nor in cultivating the habit of remaining in suspended judgment necessary for fair, unmotivated and context-sensitive appraisal.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

simne 3y ago

I think, nearly all people who tried to Reinvent Democracy, waste time, because underestimate ONLY TWO things - Dunbar's number, and have not tried make really democratic organization (or just lie). What differ really democratic organization - democratic order, mean way of making decisions. To make democratic order really effective (not just imitation), need to follow few simple rules, for simplicity, I could reduce there to only one - rules should work. So, what says us Dunbars number and democratic organization practice? First, real people are not subjects, only organized Group is subject. Second, how large should be Group? - From Dunbar, about 150 people, but exists tricky thing - not all people are subjective, exists 1-10% human-hubs, who affect all others. So if your Dunbar group all human-hubs, you could have community of about 1500-3000 people (really up to approx 5000), behavior of which you could estimate with high precision. And that's how Switzerland live just now - more than 80% of their communities have 1000-5000 members. 90% of real-life questions answered inside community, on local level, and their federal system is tiny and make very few decisions, most of them with plebiscite. Third, to let rules work, must be enforcement (fines, power to enforce punishment) and must be fine tuned system of punishment grades, from just blame, to fines, up to most for me powerful - exclusion from community. In online communities, enforcement is near impossible, so online Democracy is just hallucination.