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> Bottom line up front: I think the solution is to let small groups of people most directly affected by a new development vote on the development. I think this

> Bottom line up front: I think the solution is to let small groups of people most directly affected by a new development vote on the development. I think this would make it possible to buy them off, and win the support or compliance of the most motivated opponents of the things we need to build. This shifts the problem from one place to another. Who do you decide gets to vote? > I realise that this is a very vague categorisation. Who is to decide what “significant” losing out means here? Bear with me, but ultimately that is what I’m going to suggest is the big, interesting research question for anyone who wants to solve vetocracy. Oh. So the solution is: I don't have a solution so I'm going to move the problem from one place to another and state that it is an interesting question for someone else to solve. This goes on and on for a ridiculously long article stating how awesome this would be, if we could only accurately identify those affected by change. Sure. Just given a sufficiently smart compiler. Given an omnipotent genie. We can all solve all of the problems when we bury them in some impossible wish. All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. /sarcasm If your solution to vetocracy is to limit democracy then you aren't using democracy. Democracy becomes subordinate to the mechanism you are using to define the limit. At that point, the mechanism that determines that limit becomes your solution. So hand-waving it away as "an interesting research problem" means that you haven't solved anything at all. You could just as well get rid of democracy and keep only the mechanism of limit and the bribes.

tommy5dollar 3y ago
It seems useful to identify the right problem. It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler. Obviously democracy should be limited to the relevant franchise. We don't let children vote, we don't let people who don't live (and are not from) an area vote. The entire point is to identify the right set of people who should vote, based on those who suffer from the related externalities. It seems unfair to say the article just moves the problem elsewhere, it touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  > It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler. You completely misunderstand the sufficiently smart compiler objection. It is about dodging real problems by proposing magic solutions. You can't make C/C++ a safe language "just" by writing a sufficiently smart compiler. It requires a new approach and perhaps even a new language like Rust. > It touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes. That is not a generic solution to the vetocracy problem. That is a specific identification of a group of people that the author of the article believes should be endowed with making a particular decision. There is no general framework proposed for selecting such a group of people in the general case. Let's consider some possible general mechanisms. The "simple" problem that we "just" have to solve to make the authors otherwise perfect solution work. We could endow that responsibility on a single individual, such as the author himself. He feels he made a good decision in the street-level case, maybe he can do the same for other cases, like mining rights or cross-country oil pipelines. So whenever the question comes up as to who is affected by such a thing we go to the author of the article and ask him to tell us. Kind of like a dictator or even a King. Or we put together a committee and they decide between them who is impacted. Kind of like an oligarchy. Or maybe we all get a vote on who is impacted. A democracy to decide who is impacted and who gets the right to vote. It's recursive! Or divide and conquer! It's starting to sound like picking the mechanism to determine who is impacted by a particular change is a very similar kind of activity to existing political mechanisms. That is suspicious. Maybe it isn't an easy problem to solve after all.
brightball 3y ago
The simplest exercise to follow this to its end: only parents should be allowed to vote on matters that affect children. Education, medical policy, school boards, etc. It’s an easy case to make that always comes with pretty intense debate. Assume that…but with everything. EDIT: To be clear, this is an example to show where this path leads. Not something I'm advocating.
- tikhonj 3y ago
  Maybe it's only the children who should be allowed to vote on matters that affect them.
  - the_third_wave 3y ago
    Definitely not, they are children after all and as such not yet ready to oversee the consequences of their choices - not because they are stupid but because they lack some essential skills which will come along later in their development. That is what it means to be a child, that is why children are not legally responsible for their actions, that is why they require adult supervision.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Parents are the last person to vote on education so. Most are unqualified, all are emotionally involved. Since we cannot exclude people from voting, well, that everybody can vote, directly on indirectly on almost everything is actually a good thing.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Parents are the last person to vote on education so. Most are unqualified, all are emotionally involved. They shouldn't need to be qualified or emotionally not involved to vote on something that affects them, their families, and their children. That's democracy. Anything else is authoritarian dictums, whether they are based on god given or expertise given or gun given power.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
ramblenode 3y ago
> Oh. So the solution is: I don't have a solution so I'm going to move the problem from one place to another and state that it is an interesting question for someone else to solve. This is most of political theory in a nutshell. Whenever you see "The solution is..." just apply this template.
- whitemary 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    The problem is the phrase "the solution is". Most political problems with solutions so simply stated are nothing more than wishful thinking, and fails to fully understand the problems entirely.
  - 13of40 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - whitemary 3y ago
      I'm genuinely curious.
      - 13of40 3y ago
        First of all, what makes you think that person is American? Secondly, "American" means a group of 350 million people who have a broader diversity of race, culture, religion, etc. than any other country on earth or even in history. When you say "American" you're probably skipping all that and just talking about blond Republican males in Utah. Am I right?
amelius 3y ago
> Who do you decide gets to vote? Proof of work, the human version. Like a giant captcha. So, if you spend enough work on a certain task you prove that you care about the issue at hand, and you can vote.
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  So busybody NIMBYs get more influence. Not different from the status quo.
  - amelius 3y ago
    If you don't like the outcome, you can just work for the right to vote against it. Sounds fair to me.
    - wussboy 3y ago
      Then the infinite righteous energy of some cause will win out. Do we always want that? Do we ever want that?
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Do you think the best way to come up with a fair or ethical decisionmaking process should be based on whether it will an outcome favorable to you?
- ausbah 3y ago
  just like proof of work, this favors those who already have power & resources. the wealthy, corporations, etc.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Why? Nobody said that more work == more voting power. It could be just a small threshold of (say) 1 hour of work to gain access to voting.
bandyaboot 3y ago
I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. You’re framing this as just “shifting the problem” without acknowledging that problems have degrees of severity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with saying, “let’s make the problem less severe right now, but continue looking for a better solution”. It seems to me the real front line of the debate is whether the problem is in fact made less severe by what’s being suggested. But apparently engaging in that debate isn’t quite as gratifying as attacking the person’s entire framework for finding solutions.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  > I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm. It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak.
  - elcritch 3y ago
    The current NIMBY-ism status quo is actively harming the weak and poorer folks. Continuing it will continue harming those folks. In many areas it seems to be wealthy people from other locales or powerful city representatives with no actual skin in the game who block many beneficial building projects. I believe the authors intent is to find ways to let people who are influenced the most have the most say. Even then he suggests rolling it out in small experiments which would allow checking the assumptions. If it's harmful, then stop.
  - bandyaboot 3y ago
    > Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm. Oh get over yourself. I used a “trite cliche” as a way to give a general sense of the point I was trying to make before going into it more detail. Had I responded with only that, sure, that would be devolving the argument, but I didn’t. > It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak. That’s a strong argument and one that I’m inclined to agree with.
tomxor 3y ago
> If your solution to vetocracy is to limit democracy then you aren't using democracy. Democracy becomes subordinate to the mechanism you are using to define the limit. At that point, the mechanism that determines that limit becomes your solution. All large democracies use limiting mechanisms, you don't directly vote for most things - which would be a direct democracy, which tends to break down on all but very small scales. All western democracies are a representative democracy, this is already a limiting mechanism, not everything goes everyone's way, we vote for representatives, and hope that they vote for the majority of our interests the majority of the time. The core argument here seems to be that the catchment area of development (an already pre-existing limiting mechanism) is simply defined too broadly. I don't think identifying people who are genuinely affected from those that have nothing better to do between scoffing tea cakes than complain is worth while - So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest. This is not moving goalposts. The further normal people are away from a development the less shits they give because they have their own problems to deal with.. unfortunately that just leaves the people with nothing better to do, who will complain about literally anything because they already have a house and a pension, seem to have lost all empathy of any struggle they had getting there.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  > So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest. There we go again. I get the feeling you don't feel yourself asking for a magic genie here. Clearly you believe that there is an algorithm to determine a "reasonably well defined area" but are unable to provide one. My challenge is: please, provide this algorithm that will work in all of the crazy cases that show up, from the small to the large. From a slight densification of a suburban area, to a commercial development like a shopping center or business park, to industrial use areas, to an infrastructure project like a new bridge or airport, to a massive development like a nuclear power plant. I'm arguing that such an algorithm is beyond the possibility of man. You might as well ask for magic. But as long as you believe such an algorithm is possible, while also refusing to provide it or to sketch it out, you can fall back on: come on bro, it might be better than what we have now, trust me, stop being such a downer. In fact you can turn it around on me - like asking me to prove it couldn't exist! Meanwhile, my intuition is that any limits that are enacted to prevent participation will disproportionately advantage the existing elite and wealthy to the detriment of the middle and lower classes.
coding123 3y ago
As soon as I read "buy them off" I closed the article.
- elcritch 3y ago
  Why shouldn't people affected by a development be able to partake in the benefits? Otherwise they're "paying" for a project by disruptions to their lives and environments without getting anything in exchange.
bruiseralmighty 3y ago
> All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe [20th century respelling of educate] the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. ̶/̶s̶a̶r̶c̶a̶s̶m̶ Rousseau agrees. I'm glad we've finally reached terminal Enlightenment.

tommy5dollar 3y ago

It seems useful to identify the right problem. It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler. Obviously democracy should be limited to the relevant franchise. We don't let children vote, we don't let people who don't live (and are not from) an area vote. The entire point is to identify the right set of people who should vote, based on those who suffer from the related externalities. It seems unfair to say the article just moves the problem elsewhere, it touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.

zoogeny 3y ago
> It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler. You completely misunderstand the sufficiently smart compiler objection. It is about dodging real problems by proposing magic solutions. You can't make C/C++ a safe language "just" by writing a sufficiently smart compiler. It requires a new approach and perhaps even a new language like Rust. > It touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes. That is not a generic solution to the vetocracy problem. That is a specific identification of a group of people that the author of the article believes should be endowed with making a particular decision. There is no general framework proposed for selecting such a group of people in the general case. Let's consider some possible general mechanisms. The "simple" problem that we "just" have to solve to make the authors otherwise perfect solution work. We could endow that responsibility on a single individual, such as the author himself. He feels he made a good decision in the street-level case, maybe he can do the same for other cases, like mining rights or cross-country oil pipelines. So whenever the question comes up as to who is affected by such a thing we go to the author of the article and ask him to tell us. Kind of like a dictator or even a King. Or we put together a committee and they decide between them who is impacted. Kind of like an oligarchy. Or maybe we all get a vote on who is impacted. A democracy to decide who is impacted and who gets the right to vote. It's recursive! Or divide and conquer! It's starting to sound like picking the mechanism to determine who is impacted by a particular change is a very similar kind of activity to existing political mechanisms. That is suspicious. Maybe it isn't an easy problem to solve after all.

brightball 3y ago

The simplest exercise to follow this to its end: only parents should be allowed to vote on matters that affect children. Education, medical policy, school boards, etc. It’s an easy case to make that always comes with pretty intense debate. Assume that…but with everything. EDIT: To be clear, this is an example to show where this path leads. Not something I'm advocating.

tikhonj 3y ago
Maybe it's only the children who should be allowed to vote on matters that affect them.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  Definitely not, they are children after all and as such not yet ready to oversee the consequences of their choices - not because they are stupid but because they lack some essential skills which will come along later in their development. That is what it means to be a child, that is why children are not legally responsible for their actions, that is why they require adult supervision.
hef19898 3y ago
Parents are the last person to vote on education so. Most are unqualified, all are emotionally involved. Since we cannot exclude people from voting, well, that everybody can vote, directly on indirectly on almost everything is actually a good thing.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Parents are the last person to vote on education so. Most are unqualified, all are emotionally involved. They shouldn't need to be qualified or emotionally not involved to vote on something that affects them, their families, and their children. That's democracy. Anything else is authoritarian dictums, whether they are based on god given or expertise given or gun given power.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

ramblenode 3y ago

> Oh. So the solution is: I don't have a solution so I'm going to move the problem from one place to another and state that it is an interesting question for someone else to solve. This is most of political theory in a nutshell. Whenever you see "The solution is..." just apply this template.

whitemary 3y ago
[flagged]
- zdragnar 3y ago
  The problem is the phrase "the solution is". Most political problems with solutions so simply stated are nothing more than wishful thinking, and fails to fully understand the problems entirely.
- 13of40 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - whitemary 3y ago
    I'm genuinely curious.
    - 13of40 3y ago
      First of all, what makes you think that person is American? Secondly, "American" means a group of 350 million people who have a broader diversity of race, culture, religion, etc. than any other country on earth or even in history. When you say "American" you're probably skipping all that and just talking about blond Republican males in Utah. Am I right?

amelius 3y ago

> Who do you decide gets to vote? Proof of work, the human version. Like a giant captcha. So, if you spend enough work on a certain task you prove that you care about the issue at hand, and you can vote.

ZoomerCretin 3y ago
So busybody NIMBYs get more influence. Not different from the status quo.
- amelius 3y ago
  If you don't like the outcome, you can just work for the right to vote against it. Sounds fair to me.
  - wussboy 3y ago
    Then the infinite righteous energy of some cause will win out. Do we always want that? Do we ever want that?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Do you think the best way to come up with a fair or ethical decisionmaking process should be based on whether it will an outcome favorable to you?
ausbah 3y ago
just like proof of work, this favors those who already have power & resources. the wealthy, corporations, etc.
- amelius 3y ago
  Why? Nobody said that more work == more voting power. It could be just a small threshold of (say) 1 hour of work to gain access to voting.

bandyaboot 3y ago

I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. You’re framing this as just “shifting the problem” without acknowledging that problems have degrees of severity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with saying, “let’s make the problem less severe right now, but continue looking for a better solution”. It seems to me the real front line of the debate is whether the problem is in fact made less severe by what’s being suggested. But apparently engaging in that debate isn’t quite as gratifying as attacking the person’s entire framework for finding solutions.

zoogeny 3y ago
> I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm. It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak.
- elcritch 3y ago
  The current NIMBY-ism status quo is actively harming the weak and poorer folks. Continuing it will continue harming those folks. In many areas it seems to be wealthy people from other locales or powerful city representatives with no actual skin in the game who block many beneficial building projects. I believe the authors intent is to find ways to let people who are influenced the most have the most say. Even then he suggests rolling it out in small experiments which would allow checking the assumptions. If it's harmful, then stop.
- bandyaboot 3y ago
  > Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm. Oh get over yourself. I used a “trite cliche” as a way to give a general sense of the point I was trying to make before going into it more detail. Had I responded with only that, sure, that would be devolving the argument, but I didn’t. > It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak. That’s a strong argument and one that I’m inclined to agree with.

tomxor 3y ago

> If your solution to vetocracy is to limit democracy then you aren't using democracy. Democracy becomes subordinate to the mechanism you are using to define the limit. At that point, the mechanism that determines that limit becomes your solution. All large democracies use limiting mechanisms, you don't directly vote for most things - which would be a direct democracy, which tends to break down on all but very small scales. All western democracies are a representative democracy, this is already a limiting mechanism, not everything goes everyone's way, we vote for representatives, and hope that they vote for the majority of our interests the majority of the time. The core argument here seems to be that the catchment area of development (an already pre-existing limiting mechanism) is simply defined too broadly. I don't think identifying people who are genuinely affected from those that have nothing better to do between scoffing tea cakes than complain is worth while - So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest. This is not moving goalposts. The further normal people are away from a development the less shits they give because they have their own problems to deal with.. unfortunately that just leaves the people with nothing better to do, who will complain about literally anything because they already have a house and a pension, seem to have lost all empathy of any struggle they had getting there.

zoogeny 3y ago
> So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest. There we go again. I get the feeling you don't feel yourself asking for a magic genie here. Clearly you believe that there is an algorithm to determine a "reasonably well defined area" but are unable to provide one. My challenge is: please, provide this algorithm that will work in all of the crazy cases that show up, from the small to the large. From a slight densification of a suburban area, to a commercial development like a shopping center or business park, to industrial use areas, to an infrastructure project like a new bridge or airport, to a massive development like a nuclear power plant. I'm arguing that such an algorithm is beyond the possibility of man. You might as well ask for magic. But as long as you believe such an algorithm is possible, while also refusing to provide it or to sketch it out, you can fall back on: come on bro, it might be better than what we have now, trust me, stop being such a downer. In fact you can turn it around on me - like asking me to prove it couldn't exist! Meanwhile, my intuition is that any limits that are enacted to prevent participation will disproportionately advantage the existing elite and wealthy to the detriment of the middle and lower classes.

coding123 3y ago

As soon as I read "buy them off" I closed the article.

elcritch 3y ago
Why shouldn't people affected by a development be able to partake in the benefits? Otherwise they're "paying" for a project by disruptions to their lives and environments without getting anything in exchange.

bruiseralmighty 3y ago

> All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe [20th century respelling of educate] the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. ̶/̶s̶a̶r̶c̶a̶s̶m̶ Rousseau agrees. I'm glad we've finally reached terminal Enlightenment.