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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 expecte

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 4y 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 4y 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.
  - ksaun 4y ago
    (I had inferred that the "quiz" would be objective statements about the candidates' platforms and known past actions as well as facts about the country's current situation. So a gauge of how well the voter understands their choices in the election, not just knowledge of unrelated trivia. There are still issues with this, but it was an interesting idea to ponder.)
  - backpackviolet 4y ago
    > The quiz thing is mostly exhaustion at the idea of people who don't bother to learn anything having a say. I hear you, I feel that frustration as well. Myself, I've come the long way around to deciding that, those people need to be included anyway. And a robust system of democracy should work even with their input. Maybe at the lowest level, all voters get a "I'm happy"/"I'm unhappy" button, and signals of greater interest unlock more options and details. But I think gatekeeping is fundamentally undemocratic, and if you are going to make it harder to vote you need a better reason than "they don't seem to care". We want more hands on the wheel, not fewer. If they don't seem to know or care, that's our problem, not theirs.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      But this isn't gatekeeping. Everyone can vote, nobody is getting turned away at the polling station. We won't know who got marked down for not answering correctly "Who was our first president". It might be busy professionals who don't have time to study (look at the CFA exam). It might be underprivileged minorities, which is a legit concern. It might be that it's evenly spread out who bothers and who doesn't.
- backpackviolet 4y ago
  > 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. I like this idea in theory, and I'd love to find a way to implement it. But I think we'd find ourselves in a situation where we either spend a ton of time rubber-stamping all the "good laws", or we end up not having laws for stuff people all agree on and don't waste time rubber-stamping because why bother with the effort if everyone abides by the law anyway ... until decades later we get another guy doing a bunch of destabilizing horseshit because it's not technically illegal.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    If not an automatic sunset, I would propose a different rule: for every law, we stipulate what statistical measures we thought would be improved by the law over some time period. Like "we think if kids are all fed at school, pass rates will increase 5%". Then check after 5 years to see if that happened, and we can decide what to do. At the moment every law has an imprecise expected outcome and we never go back to think about whether the intervention worked. I'm not saying use the stats mechanically to cancel the law if it fails, just that there ought to be a post-fact consideration of whether something worked.
    - candiddevmike 4y ago
      This is great. Have some kind of "definition of success" with laws that will be used in the future to gauge their effectiveness. If the law isn't having the desired outcome, it gets repealed. Truthfully, outcome based legislature would be quite a bit more readable too, as the outcome bit will spell out exactly the intention of the law.
inglor_cz 4y ago
Even if I agreed with all the points (I don't, because unexperienced people with zero work behind them have the most voting power, while interests of people who spent 40 years building the world will be ignored by every rational politican because old age deprives them of voting power), the first half of the described system is a fragile logistical nightmare.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  No they wouldn't, mid-life parents with multiple kids would have the most voting power. For instance a 50 year old with kids who are 10, 12, and 14 would have 30 + 35 + 34 + 33 = 132 votes, roughly. A 20 year old kid would only have about 60. Not sure what's logistically fragile about it either? There are records of who is the kid of who.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    What about 16 year olds who have children? > There are records of who is the kid of who. Without genetic testing some of these records are going to be wrong. And what of sperm/egg donors? I hope rapists get no votes, but what if the rapist convinces the raped person to not go to the police? I care so much about the quality of life of other people's children that I have decided not to have any of my own (this is not the sole reason, but it is a reason).
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      Those are all minor issues. It's who is taking care of the kids that gets the votes.
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        The fostering system is already known to have abusive foster parents. Now you just encourage them. You encourage extremely large foster households in which children cannot get adequate nurturing. You encourage hostile custody lawsuits in which parents do their best to alienate the child against the other parent. And at the margin you encourage the murder of children. This entire idea of granting votes from minor children to their adult caretakers would be extraordinarily bad for society.
harvey9 4y ago
People who don't test well, maybe have a low IQ or some other measure of intelligence, shouldn't get as much say as clever people (like yourself)?
- lordnacho 4y ago
  It's not an IQ test.
  - harvey9 3y ago
    I didn't say it was
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> - Your vote counts in proportion to your expected remaining years left in society. At what age do you get negative votes? > - 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. Because we all know that parents know what's best for their kids, or even care what's best for their kids? What about foster parents? What about parents who have been deemed unfit by a court? Wouldn't this just encourage unamicable divorces, especially in mixed-party households? And, of course, the Quiverfulls and Octomoms become a disproportionately large voting block. > - 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 The problems with quizzes is that they are 1) going to be forced choice (with only one correct answer, that a biased person decided was correct, or at least only one answer getting the majority of the weight); 2) Salience of the questions; 3) There are too many additional criticisms, just look up "cultural bias in IQ tests" to get an idea of why fact-based quizzes are a bad idea. > - 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. The criticisms with this are 1) Unelected employees of the government gain more power, as they are the people the inexperienced representatives go to for advice; 2) If they aren't making decisions about getting re-elected (which hopefully would be about what the people who voted for them like, and not just gerrymandering or voter suppression), then they are making decisions that will personally benefit them after they are no-longer representatives. Such as the "important thing" of enabling particular industries to thrive at the expense of other considerations; industries which are likely to become their employer when they leave office. > - 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. In David Eddings' Tamuli books there's a republic that elects people to office (often against their will). Upon becoming an officeholder their entire assets (minus, presumably, a house) are liquidated and converted into government bonds. If the government does well, then their net worth increases. If it does poorly, then their net worth decreases. If done in the real world there would definitely be possibilities for manipulation here, but in general it seems an interesting idea. > - Not sure about geographic seats. Multi-representative districts might be a better idea. There are plenty of local matters that have knock-on effects outside of the locality (such as distribution of water rights from a river). Doing it your way we'd have to have elections for "super regions" between the local (or state) and federal level. Geographic representation also allows a rep to really know both the federal regulations, and the local regulations of one place, which allows them to better assist constituents, and to consider the effect of federal law changes on said constituents.
throw0101b 4y ago
> When you vote, it's a quiz. Tests-to-vote have a… checkered history: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
- lordnacho 4y ago
  They have a checkered history in certain contexts. What's wrong with asking people simple stuff that is published beforehand like "Who was our first president?".
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > What’s wrong with asking people simple stuff that is published beforehand like “Who was our first president?”. Its either not relevant (and therefore any coincidental discrimatory effect is far out of proportion to its value) to the voting at hand, or its not uncontroversial (in which case its simply a test for agreement with the viewpoint of the test creator, and a direct tool for excluding other viewpoints).
  - shagie 4y ago
    That information was tested in grade school civics class or as part of the citizenship exam. Let's try some other questions. In what decade did we land on the moon? Who was elected in the previous presidential election? The Earth is thousands? millions? billions of years old? I am fairly sure you could find people who would be more than willing to put those questions on the tests with the goal of disenfranchising people who have belief in the other answer.
    - throw0101b 3y ago
      > The Earth is thousands? millions? billions of years old? Is the Earth round or flat?
dragonwriter 4y ago
> 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. This is both a bad general idea and a ridiculous specific application, as immigrant citizens who arrived as adults do not, in fact, have particularly reduced future in society than any other citizen of the same age. > There will be a table of stats about all sorts of things like this. And…how detailed will those stats be? Will it take into account race, income, place-of-residence, and similar factors that correlate to expected lifespan in society? So that those who are most disadvantaged in the status quo have their voices systemically deweighted to protect the status quo elites? > When you vote, it’s a quiz. Other comments have addressed the problems with poll tests with regard to history, but structurally, this is just another way to deweight the voices of those least well served by the status quo system. > Parliament is chosen by proportional representation. This, OTOH, is a good idea. > Term limits. Maybe just a single term of 10 years. The form of PR suggested above (MMP with some by-district proportional method underneath) renders this mostly superfluous; while there may be a decent argument for term limits to mitigate problems in a system which denies effective choice because of FPTP, or denies effective specific candidate choice because of simple party-list PR, that really applies only to top-up seats in MMP. > Large salary and large pension for the MPs. “Large” is extremely vague this could be good or bad. > 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. You already suggested areas with proportional representation, with top up seats for finer-grained proportionality. Each voter than already has a set of MPs set by the side of the “area”, with a very high probability of having an ideologically largely aligned MP from that area. This also already solves gerrymandering, since once you get away from FPTP winner-take-all districts to multiseat proportional districts, (especially with at-large top-up seats for fine-grained proportionality) the ability to influence partisan balance or other features of the legislature by where you draw district lines is basically eliminated. All the random assignment suggested in this item (whether voters to an MP or addresses to an electoral district) is superfluous.

candiddevmike 4y 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 4y 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.
- ksaun 4y ago
  (I had inferred that the "quiz" would be objective statements about the candidates' platforms and known past actions as well as facts about the country's current situation. So a gauge of how well the voter understands their choices in the election, not just knowledge of unrelated trivia. There are still issues with this, but it was an interesting idea to ponder.)
- backpackviolet 4y ago
  > The quiz thing is mostly exhaustion at the idea of people who don't bother to learn anything having a say. I hear you, I feel that frustration as well. Myself, I've come the long way around to deciding that, those people need to be included anyway. And a robust system of democracy should work even with their input. Maybe at the lowest level, all voters get a "I'm happy"/"I'm unhappy" button, and signals of greater interest unlock more options and details. But I think gatekeeping is fundamentally undemocratic, and if you are going to make it harder to vote you need a better reason than "they don't seem to care". We want more hands on the wheel, not fewer. If they don't seem to know or care, that's our problem, not theirs.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    But this isn't gatekeeping. Everyone can vote, nobody is getting turned away at the polling station. We won't know who got marked down for not answering correctly "Who was our first president". It might be busy professionals who don't have time to study (look at the CFA exam). It might be underprivileged minorities, which is a legit concern. It might be that it's evenly spread out who bothers and who doesn't.
backpackviolet 4y ago
> 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. I like this idea in theory, and I'd love to find a way to implement it. But I think we'd find ourselves in a situation where we either spend a ton of time rubber-stamping all the "good laws", or we end up not having laws for stuff people all agree on and don't waste time rubber-stamping because why bother with the effort if everyone abides by the law anyway ... until decades later we get another guy doing a bunch of destabilizing horseshit because it's not technically illegal.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  If not an automatic sunset, I would propose a different rule: for every law, we stipulate what statistical measures we thought would be improved by the law over some time period. Like "we think if kids are all fed at school, pass rates will increase 5%". Then check after 5 years to see if that happened, and we can decide what to do. At the moment every law has an imprecise expected outcome and we never go back to think about whether the intervention worked. I'm not saying use the stats mechanically to cancel the law if it fails, just that there ought to be a post-fact consideration of whether something worked.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    This is great. Have some kind of "definition of success" with laws that will be used in the future to gauge their effectiveness. If the law isn't having the desired outcome, it gets repealed. Truthfully, outcome based legislature would be quite a bit more readable too, as the outcome bit will spell out exactly the intention of the law.

inglor_cz 4y ago

Even if I agreed with all the points (I don't, because unexperienced people with zero work behind them have the most voting power, while interests of people who spent 40 years building the world will be ignored by every rational politican because old age deprives them of voting power), the first half of the described system is a fragile logistical nightmare.

lordnacho 4y ago
No they wouldn't, mid-life parents with multiple kids would have the most voting power. For instance a 50 year old with kids who are 10, 12, and 14 would have 30 + 35 + 34 + 33 = 132 votes, roughly. A 20 year old kid would only have about 60. Not sure what's logistically fragile about it either? There are records of who is the kid of who.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  What about 16 year olds who have children? > There are records of who is the kid of who. Without genetic testing some of these records are going to be wrong. And what of sperm/egg donors? I hope rapists get no votes, but what if the rapist convinces the raped person to not go to the police? I care so much about the quality of life of other people's children that I have decided not to have any of my own (this is not the sole reason, but it is a reason).
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Those are all minor issues. It's who is taking care of the kids that gets the votes.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      The fostering system is already known to have abusive foster parents. Now you just encourage them. You encourage extremely large foster households in which children cannot get adequate nurturing. You encourage hostile custody lawsuits in which parents do their best to alienate the child against the other parent. And at the margin you encourage the murder of children. This entire idea of granting votes from minor children to their adult caretakers would be extraordinarily bad for society.

harvey9 4y ago

People who don't test well, maybe have a low IQ or some other measure of intelligence, shouldn't get as much say as clever people (like yourself)?

lordnacho 4y ago
It's not an IQ test.
- harvey9 3y ago
  I didn't say it was

anonymouskimmer 4y ago

> - Your vote counts in proportion to your expected remaining years left in society. At what age do you get negative votes? > - 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. Because we all know that parents know what's best for their kids, or even care what's best for their kids? What about foster parents? What about parents who have been deemed unfit by a court? Wouldn't this just encourage unamicable divorces, especially in mixed-party households? And, of course, the Quiverfulls and Octomoms become a disproportionately large voting block. > - 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 The problems with quizzes is that they are 1) going to be forced choice (with only one correct answer, that a biased person decided was correct, or at least only one answer getting the majority of the weight); 2) Salience of the questions; 3) There are too many additional criticisms, just look up "cultural bias in IQ tests" to get an idea of why fact-based quizzes are a bad idea. > - 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. The criticisms with this are 1) Unelected employees of the government gain more power, as they are the people the inexperienced representatives go to for advice; 2) If they aren't making decisions about getting re-elected (which hopefully would be about what the people who voted for them like, and not just gerrymandering or voter suppression), then they are making decisions that will personally benefit them after they are no-longer representatives. Such as the "important thing" of enabling particular industries to thrive at the expense of other considerations; industries which are likely to become their employer when they leave office. > - 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. In David Eddings' Tamuli books there's a republic that elects people to office (often against their will). Upon becoming an officeholder their entire assets (minus, presumably, a house) are liquidated and converted into government bonds. If the government does well, then their net worth increases. If it does poorly, then their net worth decreases. If done in the real world there would definitely be possibilities for manipulation here, but in general it seems an interesting idea. > - Not sure about geographic seats. Multi-representative districts might be a better idea. There are plenty of local matters that have knock-on effects outside of the locality (such as distribution of water rights from a river). Doing it your way we'd have to have elections for "super regions" between the local (or state) and federal level. Geographic representation also allows a rep to really know both the federal regulations, and the local regulations of one place, which allows them to better assist constituents, and to consider the effect of federal law changes on said constituents.

throw0101b 4y ago

> When you vote, it's a quiz. Tests-to-vote have a… checkered history: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

lordnacho 4y ago
They have a checkered history in certain contexts. What's wrong with asking people simple stuff that is published beforehand like "Who was our first president?".
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > What’s wrong with asking people simple stuff that is published beforehand like “Who was our first president?”. Its either not relevant (and therefore any coincidental discrimatory effect is far out of proportion to its value) to the voting at hand, or its not uncontroversial (in which case its simply a test for agreement with the viewpoint of the test creator, and a direct tool for excluding other viewpoints).
- shagie 4y ago
  That information was tested in grade school civics class or as part of the citizenship exam. Let's try some other questions. In what decade did we land on the moon? Who was elected in the previous presidential election? The Earth is thousands? millions? billions of years old? I am fairly sure you could find people who would be more than willing to put those questions on the tests with the goal of disenfranchising people who have belief in the other answer.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    > The Earth is thousands? millions? billions of years old? Is the Earth round or flat?

dragonwriter 4y ago

> 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. This is both a bad general idea and a ridiculous specific application, as immigrant citizens who arrived as adults do not, in fact, have particularly reduced future in society than any other citizen of the same age. > There will be a table of stats about all sorts of things like this. And…how detailed will those stats be? Will it take into account race, income, place-of-residence, and similar factors that correlate to expected lifespan in society? So that those who are most disadvantaged in the status quo have their voices systemically deweighted to protect the status quo elites? > When you vote, it’s a quiz. Other comments have addressed the problems with poll tests with regard to history, but structurally, this is just another way to deweight the voices of those least well served by the status quo system. > Parliament is chosen by proportional representation. This, OTOH, is a good idea. > Term limits. Maybe just a single term of 10 years. The form of PR suggested above (MMP with some by-district proportional method underneath) renders this mostly superfluous; while there may be a decent argument for term limits to mitigate problems in a system which denies effective choice because of FPTP, or denies effective specific candidate choice because of simple party-list PR, that really applies only to top-up seats in MMP. > Large salary and large pension for the MPs. “Large” is extremely vague this could be good or bad. > 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. You already suggested areas with proportional representation, with top up seats for finer-grained proportionality. Each voter than already has a set of MPs set by the side of the “area”, with a very high probability of having an ideologically largely aligned MP from that area. This also already solves gerrymandering, since once you get away from FPTP winner-take-all districts to multiseat proportional districts, (especially with at-large top-up seats for fine-grained proportionality) the ability to influence partisan balance or other features of the legislature by where you draw district lines is basically eliminated. All the random assignment suggested in this item (whether voters to an MP or addresses to an electoral district) is superfluous.