6 ms·

I'm not sure that the entire premise of "representative democracy" is that you can have highly emotional factions and yet still ahve a productive conversation .

I'm not sure that the entire premise of "representative democracy" is that you can have highly emotional factions and yet still ahve a productive conversation ... I'm not sure where that language derives.I think it's not that complicated: a representative democracy is simply democracy less a people's majority rule. Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not smart enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least non-simplistic terms. As far as teams that have divergent personalities but still manage to perform, it depends on what you mean. There's a lot of factors there. My point was that there is probaby not some technology (at least non-invase/non-mind-altering) that can solve problems of "group-think" or "us vs them" or whatever kinds of problems. Even if you just look at how religion affects politics, with the fairly reasonable assumption that you aren't going to get rid of it, it seems hard to see how you would construct a technology to solve such problems. I don't know what that would mean, really.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Fascinating comment. Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not smart enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least non-simplistic terms. Then why do people have the ability to vote? That's my point: from simple people complex systems form and operate. To say that people are not smart enough to run their own affairs is quite interesting. I'm not sure how to reply to that. But switching to the technology side, with the internet we already have some examples of voting and filtering in action. For instance, there are probably a thousand bad, emotional blog entries for each one that gets upvoted on HN. It's just a matter of appropriate filtering and selection criteria. Let's suppose instead of voting items up or down we categorize them by how they emotionally affect the reader. Over time, the system could provide an appropriate mix of interesting, insightful, and sometimes maddening material for me to consume. My "tolerance level" would be determined by how emotionally I responded to certain stimulus. The system would keep things emotional, but not so much as to not have a cohesive discussion. That's a broad outline of one solution. There are others.
- dinkumthinkum 17y ago
  People have the ability to vote because other people who formed the governments those people live under thought it would it be a good thing to let them vote. I'm not sure what you mean exactly. I don't think you can go from "many people aren't smart but can vote therefore the complexity of government arises from simple constituents (pun intended)." Those people can vote other people into a well established government with machinery of bureacracy dating back hundreds of years. I think that is overstating and reading too much into what is happening. It does sound nice, I agree. However, giving people choices in terms of people who are collectively able to join and continue the machinery, say, the bureacracy of the U.S. government and maintain a semblance of the status quo is not really akin to some phenomena in which simple components combine to form complex systems. In the case of the U.S. government, there is such a long standing set of machinery that is never really seen by the voter in the capacity of voting that the government is really sort of a machine that runs regardless of the officials in office and so forth. Note, this is not the same thing as saying "there is no difference between the two parties." It's just that, for the most part, over the course of time certain things have been established thus the wheels of government continue to run without regard to voters. If the entire state of Maine decided not to go out and vote on Presidential Election day, the mail would still run. Anyway, to you're other point. It seems like you're trying to argue that humans are so malleable that you can change courses of history or foundationally change the way humans deal with eachother by changing how they consume news or other information, presentationally (i.e. not thought-control devices in their brains). I don't think people are necessarily that malleable or that one-side they would, on the whole, choose to be mindless consumers getting information only from your Suggest-a-tron machine. What happens if they decide to actually talk to each other directly without intervention? Wouldn't that interfere with the mind training program? Also, I'm not sure about all this emotional stuff you're talking about.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    People have the ability to vote because other people who formed the governments those people live under thought it would it be a good thing to let them vote. I'm not sure what you mean exactly. That's true, but incomplete. Fact is, over the last two thousand years or so we've tried all combinations of people voting. Sometimes it was smart people, sometimes it was religious people, sometimes it was only special people trained to rule. The best answer so far is so let everybody vote once in a while and to use representatives to make the day-to-day decisions. Perhpas there is another optimum, but I haven't seen anything so far that's better. So even though people have this tendency to view us versus them, somehow we still manage to make tough decisions. Heck, some legislators have been know to get into fist fights, and fights at early elections in the states were common. But it still worked. My wife and my oldest son are completely opposite politically. When he lost his car, she gave him a ride to the polling booth -- human nature holds, but a good system of rules (both personal and structural) allows conflict to be productive and not destructive. Yes -- the system is set up for indirection, and on purpose. Direct democracy has the knack of being "rule of the mob". Over time, a simple 3-branch, 3-level government turned into a complex machine, but that has nothing to do with the two-group thing, at least not directly. That's simply the (recent) institution of the idea that government should be everywhere. Democracies run just fine and make tough emotional decisions without all of that complexity. Note that I'm just using democracy as an example here. You run into the same problem whenever two groups meet, like for instance when you have a programming team half composed of web developers and half die-hard COBOL programmers. Democracy shows us that such divisions can be surmounted. you're trying to argue that humans are so malleable that you can change courses of history or foundationally change the way humans deal with each other by changing how they consume news or other information This already happens. It's called mass media: TV, internet, radio, newspapers, etc. It's been going on forever. The new thing in the mix is the ability to self-discriminate sources of information. It used to be with only one town newspaper and no radio or TV that there was a forced conversation at the town level about important events This type of forced conversation is critical, whether in government or startup teams. We have to learn to have critical conversations. Anymore, however, we've been able to completely filter out anybody who might challenge our worldview. This prevents us from realizing how close the two groups actually are, and it additionally prevents us from developing skills at crossing the barrier to accomplish meaningful things. One group isn't right and the other wrong, rather both groups need each other. Our way of interacting has failed us by allowing us to clan to a degree that is not natural (or productive) And I'm not talking about a Suggest-A-Tron. I'm talking about a discussion board, just like this, only with a more advanced filtering mechanism in place of up-down voting.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Fascinating comment. Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not smart enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least non-simplistic terms. Then why do people have the ability to vote? That's my point: from simple people complex systems form and operate. To say that people are not smart enough to run their own affairs is quite interesting. I'm not sure how to reply to that. But switching to the technology side, with the internet we already have some examples of voting and filtering in action. For instance, there are probably a thousand bad, emotional blog entries for each one that gets upvoted on HN. It's just a matter of appropriate filtering and selection criteria. Let's suppose instead of voting items up or down we categorize them by how they emotionally affect the reader. Over time, the system could provide an appropriate mix of interesting, insightful, and sometimes maddening material for me to consume. My "tolerance level" would be determined by how emotionally I responded to certain stimulus. The system would keep things emotional, but not so much as to not have a cohesive discussion. That's a broad outline of one solution. There are others.

dinkumthinkum 17y ago
People have the ability to vote because other people who formed the governments those people live under thought it would it be a good thing to let them vote. I'm not sure what you mean exactly. I don't think you can go from "many people aren't smart but can vote therefore the complexity of government arises from simple constituents (pun intended)." Those people can vote other people into a well established government with machinery of bureacracy dating back hundreds of years. I think that is overstating and reading too much into what is happening. It does sound nice, I agree. However, giving people choices in terms of people who are collectively able to join and continue the machinery, say, the bureacracy of the U.S. government and maintain a semblance of the status quo is not really akin to some phenomena in which simple components combine to form complex systems. In the case of the U.S. government, there is such a long standing set of machinery that is never really seen by the voter in the capacity of voting that the government is really sort of a machine that runs regardless of the officials in office and so forth. Note, this is not the same thing as saying "there is no difference between the two parties." It's just that, for the most part, over the course of time certain things have been established thus the wheels of government continue to run without regard to voters. If the entire state of Maine decided not to go out and vote on Presidential Election day, the mail would still run. Anyway, to you're other point. It seems like you're trying to argue that humans are so malleable that you can change courses of history or foundationally change the way humans deal with eachother by changing how they consume news or other information, presentationally (i.e. not thought-control devices in their brains). I don't think people are necessarily that malleable or that one-side they would, on the whole, choose to be mindless consumers getting information only from your Suggest-a-tron machine. What happens if they decide to actually talk to each other directly without intervention? Wouldn't that interfere with the mind training program? Also, I'm not sure about all this emotional stuff you're talking about.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  People have the ability to vote because other people who formed the governments those people live under thought it would it be a good thing to let them vote. I'm not sure what you mean exactly. That's true, but incomplete. Fact is, over the last two thousand years or so we've tried all combinations of people voting. Sometimes it was smart people, sometimes it was religious people, sometimes it was only special people trained to rule. The best answer so far is so let everybody vote once in a while and to use representatives to make the day-to-day decisions. Perhpas there is another optimum, but I haven't seen anything so far that's better. So even though people have this tendency to view us versus them, somehow we still manage to make tough decisions. Heck, some legislators have been know to get into fist fights, and fights at early elections in the states were common. But it still worked. My wife and my oldest son are completely opposite politically. When he lost his car, she gave him a ride to the polling booth -- human nature holds, but a good system of rules (both personal and structural) allows conflict to be productive and not destructive. Yes -- the system is set up for indirection, and on purpose. Direct democracy has the knack of being "rule of the mob". Over time, a simple 3-branch, 3-level government turned into a complex machine, but that has nothing to do with the two-group thing, at least not directly. That's simply the (recent) institution of the idea that government should be everywhere. Democracies run just fine and make tough emotional decisions without all of that complexity. Note that I'm just using democracy as an example here. You run into the same problem whenever two groups meet, like for instance when you have a programming team half composed of web developers and half die-hard COBOL programmers. Democracy shows us that such divisions can be surmounted. you're trying to argue that humans are so malleable that you can change courses of history or foundationally change the way humans deal with each other by changing how they consume news or other information This already happens. It's called mass media: TV, internet, radio, newspapers, etc. It's been going on forever. The new thing in the mix is the ability to self-discriminate sources of information. It used to be with only one town newspaper and no radio or TV that there was a forced conversation at the town level about important events This type of forced conversation is critical, whether in government or startup teams. We have to learn to have critical conversations. Anymore, however, we've been able to completely filter out anybody who might challenge our worldview. This prevents us from realizing how close the two groups actually are, and it additionally prevents us from developing skills at crossing the barrier to accomplish meaningful things. One group isn't right and the other wrong, rather both groups need each other. Our way of interacting has failed us by allowing us to clan to a degree that is not natural (or productive) And I'm not talking about a Suggest-A-Tron. I'm talking about a discussion board, just like this, only with a more advanced filtering mechanism in place of up-down voting.