4 ms·

You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it. As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the rea

You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it. As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details. I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth. Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision. If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.

graemep 4mo ago
An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.
- DrScientist 4mo ago
  I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently. Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question. Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another. Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
  - graemep 4mo ago
    Did you reply to the wrong comment? The idea I just put forward does not involve questions, it involves replacing one group of people with another doing the same job. Framing questions is already a problem with legislation. You can frame "do you want to increase online surveillance" as "do you want to protect children" very successfully!
    - DrScientist 4mo ago
      The parent was around direct democracy - where a particular question is posed - and frequent hybrid is randomly selected people to work on a specific question. If you are saying choose people at random to be an MP for 5 years ( or whatever ), then sure that's different and it would be an interesting experiment - though that would be a pretty stressful job to pitch people into at random. It would be interesting to see how those random 600 people would organise to get stuff done. In the current government you have specialisation - home secretary, foreign secretary etc - you wouldn't want to keep that structure and randomly allocate roles - but if you have the 600 vote on everything then you still have a bandwidth problem.
- j16sdiz 4mo ago
  Look at how the American hate jury lottery, I doubt this would be welcomed in the state. It may work in some other country..
  - DrScientist 4mo ago
    > It may work in some other country.. Jury service in the UK is generally seen in a positive light ( despite having far too much hanging around ). I suspect the US problems could be easily fixed by forcing employers to pay you while you are doing it.
    - mwigdahl 4mo ago
      Jury time is paid time off at my US company. And at least at the US Federal level there's a daily stipend for sitting on one. Lower level courts may vary on that.
      - pseudalopex 4mo ago
        Many people in the US do not work for your company. Federal juror pay is $50 daily.[1] This would be 8 hours or less of minimum wage.[2] States pay from $0 to $50 seemingly.[3] 8 states and 1 district had any employer jury pay law. All other than Nebraska excluded small employers, excluded part time employees, allowed to pay under minimum wage, allowed to pay nothing after 5 days or less, or allowed to force employees to use paid time off.[4] [1] https://www.uscourts.gov/court-programs/jury-service/juror-pay https://www.uscourts.gov/court-programs/jury-service/juror-p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta... [3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/jury-duty-pay-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/jury-duty-p... [4] https://www.workforce.com/news/jury-duty-laws-by-state https://www.workforce.com/news/jury-duty-laws-by-state
  - graemep 4mo ago
    Juries are unpaid and obscure. I think most people in the UK would be delighted to sit in Parliament for the a £100k an year salary + expenses (what MP's currently get) plus a lot of prestige and the experience. It would be a pretty good thing to have on your CV!
pc86 4mo ago
Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly. I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
- DrScientist 4mo ago
  A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote. However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble. So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time. This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
  - friendzis 4mo ago
    > However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble. It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching that of an urban hub, there are high chances that the benefits afforded and costs born by the seat of power bubble versus an average person barely overlap. > however one of the failings currently is the party system <...> where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time. I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.
friendzis 4mo ago
First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy. Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material. > If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers. Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.
- DrScientist 4mo ago
  > There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal \ Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation. The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers. ie both come down to - "it's their job"
  - friendzis 4mo ago
    > The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers. I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representatives is the good one in a representative system? Quite a large portion of this full time job is already not spent nitpicking legislative initiatives
    - 4mo ago

graemep 4mo ago

An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.

DrScientist 4mo ago
I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently. Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question. Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another. Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
- graemep 4mo ago
  Did you reply to the wrong comment? The idea I just put forward does not involve questions, it involves replacing one group of people with another doing the same job. Framing questions is already a problem with legislation. You can frame "do you want to increase online surveillance" as "do you want to protect children" very successfully!
  - DrScientist 4mo ago
    The parent was around direct democracy - where a particular question is posed - and frequent hybrid is randomly selected people to work on a specific question. If you are saying choose people at random to be an MP for 5 years ( or whatever ), then sure that's different and it would be an interesting experiment - though that would be a pretty stressful job to pitch people into at random. It would be interesting to see how those random 600 people would organise to get stuff done. In the current government you have specialisation - home secretary, foreign secretary etc - you wouldn't want to keep that structure and randomly allocate roles - but if you have the 600 vote on everything then you still have a bandwidth problem.
j16sdiz 4mo ago
Look at how the American hate jury lottery, I doubt this would be welcomed in the state. It may work in some other country..
- DrScientist 4mo ago
  > It may work in some other country.. Jury service in the UK is generally seen in a positive light ( despite having far too much hanging around ). I suspect the US problems could be easily fixed by forcing employers to pay you while you are doing it.
  - mwigdahl 4mo ago
    Jury time is paid time off at my US company. And at least at the US Federal level there's a daily stipend for sitting on one. Lower level courts may vary on that.
    - pseudalopex 4mo ago
      Many people in the US do not work for your company. Federal juror pay is $50 daily.[1] This would be 8 hours or less of minimum wage.[2] States pay from $0 to $50 seemingly.[3] 8 states and 1 district had any employer jury pay law. All other than Nebraska excluded small employers, excluded part time employees, allowed to pay under minimum wage, allowed to pay nothing after 5 days or less, or allowed to force employees to use paid time off.[4] [1] https://www.uscourts.gov/court-programs/jury-service/juror-pay https://www.uscourts.gov/court-programs/jury-service/juror-p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta... [3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/jury-duty-pay-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/jury-duty-p... [4] https://www.workforce.com/news/jury-duty-laws-by-state https://www.workforce.com/news/jury-duty-laws-by-state
- graemep 4mo ago
  Juries are unpaid and obscure. I think most people in the UK would be delighted to sit in Parliament for the a £100k an year salary + expenses (what MP's currently get) plus a lot of prestige and the experience. It would be a pretty good thing to have on your CV!

pc86 4mo ago

Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly. I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.

DrScientist 4mo ago
A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote. However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble. So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time. This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
- friendzis 4mo ago
  > However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble. It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching that of an urban hub, there are high chances that the benefits afforded and costs born by the seat of power bubble versus an average person barely overlap. > however one of the failings currently is the party system <...> where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time. I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.

friendzis 4mo ago

First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy. Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material. > If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers. Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.

DrScientist 4mo ago
> There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal \ Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation. The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers. ie both come down to - "it's their job"
- friendzis 4mo ago
  > The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers. I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representatives is the good one in a representative system? Quite a large portion of this full time job is already not spent nitpicking legislative initiatives
  - 4mo ago