I worry that a lot of it comes from scale. It’s expensive/tricky to scale up human flexability; I think I’ve seen well meaning people design systems they intended to be human, and got much worse results than the lawyers and bankers. There’s some skill here.
Just logging that this doesn’t match any data I’ve seen, unless you take Nazi to be an obscenely broad tent. Sources + definitions required.
Oh that’s fun. I like this, but you really need that RCV to avoid vote splitting. I wonder if it’s better off as approval? Strategic voting around a sortician option would be very weird.
Cause RCV for a sotrician option is, statistically, likely to pick a moderate voter who leans towards the thing you dislike. There’s something anti-inductive here.
The upvotes are in! There’s at least dozens. 2 dozens.
Consensus is quite hard to corrupt by design. You trade off some substantial amount of efficiency, and most groups aren’t willing to commit to working towards it.
They believe everyone’s got some good in them, and that good will end up getting the important decisions to happen. I note that they don’t seem to actually control for this belief all that hard. Perhaps anyone who doesn’t believe gets too impatient and moves on.
On the extreme end, Quakers. Consensus is clearly a democratic voting scheme, and they’ve run everything from churches to universities to states to companies with it.
There are indeed ways to design it poorly; I’ll just point again to juries to say that we know how to do it competently. I’ll rephrase the objections in terms of juries (but please note the quotes are from a hyperbolic strawman, and not literally what you said. I hope my replies to the strawman are still useful).
“People who don’t care about the particular law/case will refuse to join a jury and they’ll all get stuck in endless deliberation” - being on the jury is not always optional! While there are strategies to avoid being a juror, the large majority of folks don’t use them. People get real nervous about perjury. Also, we have several levers of control here. Congress salaries+benefits aren’t bad, getting an important position might be akin to winning a lottery. Many folks skip voting day because they feel uninformed or are required to work, but we educate jurists and require companies to give time off for their service. Finally, if a jury is stuck we call a new one; by random draw we’ll eventually get a lot of all people from one side or the other. Gridlock is only ever stochastic.
“People could bribe the juries for the outcomes they want!” - extremely risky, the state knows who is on the jury at the same time as everyone else, predicting it ahead of time is impossible, and we strongly regulate the interactions of juries + invested parties once they’re chosen. Note that we can assign political decision bodies to fairly narrow issues, so managing this at scale isn’t so difficult.
Eh - sounds like arguments against centralization of power to me.
Which, under a sortition vote, would mean we would have a chance!
I think we haven’t tested democracy variations quite far enough. I agree that the first-past-the-post model in capitalism has proven extremely vulnerable to mis/disinformation, and made it possible to benefit from the idiocy of your peers. But I don’t think we’ve seen, say, RCV and proportional representation + robust finance laws prove nearly so bad.
Also, I think this take is disingenuous to the roots of democracy. It is a social technology used for legitimacy in tons of situations by many groups, for a variety of reasons. Often it is neither dumb nor a method of obvious control.
You can do it several ways. Athens had anyone who wanted to from the city meet and interview the randomly chosen folks; if the group disliked them, they were removed from the pot and you drew again. Seems like a good fit when the job is comprehensible, and/or needs community backing. Similar in flavor to senate confirmation of appointees.
In juries, we have professionally licensed advocates and referee’s who interview the randomly chosen, and they can reject folks for almost any reason they want. This seems like a good fit when we already have a big body of bureaucrats and managers who will need to work with these folks. Let them do the filtering.
For perpetually rolling positions, give the outgoing folks a small number of vetos on the next draw. They know what the job requires, and limiting the number of objections ensures against corruption.
There’s also levers you can pull if we don’t have a good way to judge competence. My favorites are to increase the number of people on the panel/jury/group, and provide larger budgets and opportunities for the group to get training. Just as congress (and courts) can pull in industry leaders, expert scientists, and decision makers, these decision making bodies should be able to do the same.
I remain a huge fan of sortition. You randomly pick a bunch of people who are willing (and/or able) to do the job, let guardrails veto some of them, train them and let them cook. An unordered list of things to love:
We already do this for the life-or-death task of juries. We have the technology.
(Second choice is RCV w\ MMP; fairvote does good work.)
ngl, I have no idea. But i’ll search it for you here. Seems to be… what I expected from video editing in the modern day?
(it’s a non linear video editor)
It does seem like the headline + mechanics are entirely uninteresting and unsurprising. I guess the ‘newsworthy’ thing here is that substack platforms the neo-natzis?
It also platforms a bunch of ex-guardian journalists, who will say plenty about the harm being done by corporate buyouts and influence in traditional media. So I have a hard time taking this article, from this venue, very seriously.
For example: fox news, every podcast service, the opinion pages (and some news sections) of most major newspapers, and (I assume) more have all been profiting off of amplifying fringe right-wing folks. Is substack substantially worse? Are they doing anything policy wise that we should advocate for? Regulators who aren’t doing something they should?
… Don’t they take a cut of most subs?
Claiming some old public figure was a newly discovered pedo, and including a quote of them saying terrible things.
Except the quote was 5 years old, not from the Epstein files, the figure had apologized and been publicly forgiven by the victim, and the files revealed nothing new.
The ratio is a vibe, and I kinda regret posting a precise one. The case I checked carefully is this one: everything this guy posts
which I noted in November, and blocked very shortly thereafter. I vaguely recall finding a handful more examples of ‘too good to be true’ headlines, which were in fact not true, but I did not save links.
What made me sad is that even bereft of the algorithm and bad incentives in system, if the headline is ‘directionally correct’ still seems like the most important thing. Very interested in a social media where correct is ranked over good feels.
(and then there’s the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))
I gave Lemmy a dedicated year. A few notes:
Very few people click through.
Lots of rage bait.
Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.
I didn’t miss much “news”; lemmy was functional for reporting what people were talking about.
No notification of moderation actions taken against you is a choice.
Those who post small websites that do cool things: thank you! I did discover several other cool places and tools.
I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.
Cutting it out of my routine, at last for awhile.
One thing I really hoped for from the social Internet was access to people and data that could correct me/fill in gaps. But lemmy doesn’t do this, as people see what is upvoted and upvotes are used for affirmations to the reader.
This is very similar to how we do it with juries; a body of the people to stamp/implement the laws written by congress and rules for reading them from judges. I think it’s an improvement.
But I do want to vouch for how teachable people can be. And I think it really changes how we fund/run/manage education when ‘functioning in the senate’ is a mandatory skill.