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Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol [pdf] (2007)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 2y ago[flagged]
- dudefeliciano 2y agoThe republic of Venice used Lira as a coin. Doge just means chief magistrate of Venice, and the root of the word (Dux) is the same as for "Duce", the title Mussolini gave himself.
- addled 2y agoBut did it have someone's face on it? Was it ever a Doge's?
- boomboomsubban 2y agoYes. Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_lira https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_lira
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- philwelch 2y agoThe more famous Venetian coin was probably the gold ducat, the name of which is also derived from the Latin “dux” (whence also the title “Duke”).
- brudgers 2y agosome comments a few months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598171
- simonebrunozzi 2y agoI was the poster of the thread from a few months ago. I am wondering how HN allowed a repost just a few months after that. Typically you have to wait a year or more before being able to post the same link again.
- boomboomsubban 2y agoDifferent sites hosting a PDF.
- brudgers 2y agoI don’t think the algorithm is terribly well implemented anymore. For example, your example. But I could be wrong.
- boomboomsubban 2y ago*2007 Previous discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25039470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25039470
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- roenxi 2y agoThe important part of understanding the Doge Election Protocol is understanding that the goal is different from a modern election. Somewhere like India or the US uses elections to work out which major faction has the most power. This is a big improvement on the factions actually fighting, the process actually simulates a battle in a loose sense and something like first past the post voting (while ugly) is good enough. A protocol like the Venetian use is obviously satisfying very different goals. As the article points out, there are interesting properties of the system that influence negotiations and consensus building. And I assume the oligarchs already know roughly how the power breaks down if there is a big fight, there would be less factions to keep track of. I really liked the article because it explores all this. I'd also observe that (in politics, anyway) a system where nobody quite knows how it works encourages a certain level of moderation. If people can figure out how to optimise a social technology to their political benefit they will (gerrymandering, strategic lawsuits and judge selection, regulatory capture, purposefully choosing policies to get just enough votes and no more, etc, etc). If the actors have no idea how in practice they can't do tight optimisations.
- ykonstant 2y agoI'd love it if a talented artist / meme-maker took the title and assembled the obvious joke :)
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- johngossman 2y agoDubrovnik also had a complicated and obscure election system. Rebecca West describes it a little in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon." Robin Harris gives more details in "Dubrovnik." Both systems were designed to control populism and election corruption. Of course, in both places only a small minority had any power at all. Notably both places were highly stable for centuries (millenia) when countries and empires all around them rose and fell.
- shadowgovt 2y agoI see someone's been keeping up on Overly Sarcastic videos on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzVolAKS_DQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzVolAKS_DQ
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- talkingtab 2y agoDoes anyone know of any JavaScript implementations of the protocol? And there was some discussion someplace some where 5 groups of 5 people iteratively made better decisions than one group of 25. We have these words, like "elections" and "democracy" and have no idea what they are. imho.