4 ms·

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 dem

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
  - DrScientist 4mo ago
    With humans bandwidth is pretty much always limited - however it's clear that a representative has a higher bandwidth for politics than the average person - because it's their job ( and note they normally have a team of researchers around them as well ). In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their job. If you have a small group of citizen, selected at random for a particular decision, if they are bribed/lobbied/copted - they aren't at risk from an electorate down the line. Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate. Right now this is a major threat to democracy - you only need a few people skilled int he dark arts, no morals and a sackful of cash to change the political weather currently.
    - friendzis 4mo ago
      > Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate. In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of information and the rest relied on hearsay, at best. The fact that you believe in this "it's different now" (under a thread about speech control on the internet) is a partial proof of how effective the propaganda had been up till now.
      - DrScientist 4mo ago
        I think you underestimate, in the time before the everyday internet, how many people's world views and values were largely set by their direct personal experience, rather than any media they consumed. Sure, church and state, and to a lesser extent newspapers all were involved in shaping culture - however the values grounded in personal experience drove many societal improvements in the 20th century. I don't see that so much now, and the power of persuasion has widened from those big institutions to anybody with money - domestic or foreign and at the same time society is atomising.

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
- DrScientist 4mo ago
  With humans bandwidth is pretty much always limited - however it's clear that a representative has a higher bandwidth for politics than the average person - because it's their job ( and note they normally have a team of researchers around them as well ). In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their job. If you have a small group of citizen, selected at random for a particular decision, if they are bribed/lobbied/copted - they aren't at risk from an electorate down the line. Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate. Right now this is a major threat to democracy - you only need a few people skilled int he dark arts, no morals and a sackful of cash to change the political weather currently.
  - friendzis 4mo ago
    > Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate. In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of information and the rest relied on hearsay, at best. The fact that you believe in this "it's different now" (under a thread about speech control on the internet) is a partial proof of how effective the propaganda had been up till now.
    - DrScientist 4mo ago
      I think you underestimate, in the time before the everyday internet, how many people's world views and values were largely set by their direct personal experience, rather than any media they consumed. Sure, church and state, and to a lesser extent newspapers all were involved in shaping culture - however the values grounded in personal experience drove many societal improvements in the 20th century. I don't see that so much now, and the power of persuasion has widened from those big institutions to anybody with money - domestic or foreign and at the same time society is atomising.