The perils of extreme democracy – California offers a warning to voters all over the world http://www.economist.com/node/18586520?story_id=18586520
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mazsa
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mazsa
A “perfect” voting system: “[...]
1. MPs run as they currently do – a smallish number of candidates stand for a single constituency
2. People cast a vote as they currently do – each selects a single candidate to cast their vote for
3. Once all of the votes have been cast, you pick one voter at random and use their choice
4. Wait, what? [...]” -
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Taxes & Voting: “[...] Thoreau [...] argues that people should be allowed to decide to not pay their taxes if they decide to withdraw from the political system. He does, however, make a point of saying that people should pay for what they use, such as paying the highway tax if one uses the highway. [...]” http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2695
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“[...] The problem with the U.S. government is that its allocation of resources is highly inefficient. We spend vast amounts of money on subsidies for housing, agriculture and health, many of which distort the economy and do little for long-term growth. We spend too little on science, technology, innovation and infrastructure, which will produce growth and jobs in the future. For the past few decades, we have been able to be wasteful and get by. But we will not be able to do it much longer. The money is running out, and we will have to marshal funds and target spending far more strategically. This is not a question of too much or too little government, too much or too little spending. We need more government and more spending in some places and less in others.
The tragedy is that Washington knows this. For all the partisan polarization there, most Republicans know that we have to invest in some key areas, and most Democrats know that we have to cut entitlement spending. But we have a political system that has become allergic to compromise and practical solutions. This may be our greatest blind spot. [...]” http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2056610,00.html
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The democracy of the state will always be of the state, by the state and for the state.
David D’Amato -
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[Video] Voting is violence, Riley Yieding
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Setting standards without kings or votes: “[...] In the intervening 25 years, it turned into a standards organization that creates standards related to the technical operation of the Internet.
However, the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] is quite a bit different from traditional standards organizations such as ANSI, ISO, or the IEEE Standards Association. Standards organizations typically have high thresholds for membership—in some cases, you can only join the club if you’re a country—and only make their standards available for a (high) fee. Not so with the IETF: “There is no membership in the IETF. Anyone may register for and attend any meeting. The closest thing there is to being an IETF member is being on the IETF or Working Group mailing lists.”
This comes directly from The Tao of IETF, which is the best introduction into this strange and wonderful world—short of attending a meeting in person. If you don’t have that kind of time, two quotes provide a pretty good feel of how the IETF sees itself: “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code” (David Clark). And: “Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept” (Jon Postel). [...]” http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-setting-standards-without-kings-or-votes.ars
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Daniel A. Nagy
”We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”
13 órája · Nem tetszik ·Oleksiy Kononov Makhno rules
13 órája · TetszikDaniel A. Nagy While I’m sure Bat’ka would have endorsed this approach to communication standards, but the quote is actually from David D. Clark, one of the most influential Internet pioneers and is still the guiding principle of IETF, the main standards body of the Internet.
13 órája · TetszikDaniel A. Nagy http://ietf.org/proceedings/prior29/IETF24.pdf (29 Megabytes!)
12 órája · TetszikRoberto Rogel Dani, after reading the English Wikipedia article on ‘rough consensus’, I realised there is contradiction in your idea. ‘We’ reject presidents and voting, but rough consensus uses a president figure (called chairperson in the article) and uses voting (called ‘a show of hands’ there). Would you argue Wikipedia’s article regarding rough consensus is totally flawed?
12 órája · TetszikDaniel A. Nagy It is. I do have some experience in IETF decision making (participation in the OpenPGP WG, specifically the process of drafting RFC4880) and there was no show of hands or presidential decision making. Essentially, we keep arguing until nobody opposes the proposed wording at which point it gets published as a proposed standard. From that point on, it is up to actual implementations to interpret it. If there are at least two independent implementations that interoperate flawlessly on its basis and at least one of them is widely used by the community then it becomes an actual standard.
12 órája · Nem tetszik · 1 személyRoberto Rogel It sounds great as you describe it. Can you edit the Wikipedia’s article?
12 órája · TetszikDaniel A. Nagy I believe that the correct way to go about it using Wikipedia’s somewhat inferior process of cooperation is to write to the discussion page first. I actually might do that, but now I have more urgent (and frankly, more interesting) things to do. It involves running code.
12 órája · TetszikDaniel A. Nagy I do believe that IETF and the Internet in general is the ultimate proof of validity of anarchist legal theory. Based on this “rough consensus and running code”, we have built the largest and most complex machine in human history: the Internet incorporates fiber-optic cables on the ocean floor several kilometers under sea level and stationary satellites 35000 km above it. While not perfect, it works remarkably well.
11 órája · TetszikPeter Földiák http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.10/ietf.html
11 órája · Tetszik · 2 emberRoberto Rogel This topic is precisely what I wanted to ask you about long time ago: about your proposed alternative to democracy and other tyrannies of the majorities. Theoretically, it sounds like the optimum decision process, but… I was wondering about its practicallity of implementation and performance (speed of decision making) when used in very large groups (I have in mind big countries with very diverse and polarised ethnic/social/economic sub-groups.
I have in mind groups where dogma guides their behaviour/decision making. And when/where those dogmas are opposite. The only way to obtain consensus in those scenarios would be for some people to leave their religions/dogmas. And in reality, this is next to impossible. But, as an expert, please let us know whether/how this issue can be solved.
3 órája · Nem tetszik · 1 személyMázsa Péter [i just want to follow this thread]
2 órája · TetszikPeter Földiák On the large scale, you only need the market, not consensus (rough or not).
2 órája · Tetszik
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mazsa
The Myth of the Rational Voter [video]
Audio: https://fee.org/media/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter/
Book: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691138737
Homepage: http://www.bcaplan.com/
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Swiss Voters Reject Proposal to Impose Higher Tax for Top Salary Earners: “Switzerland’s voters rejected a proposal to increase taxes for the nation’s top earners, following the recommendations of most national leaders.
In a referendum today, 59 percent of voters turned down the proposal by the Social Democrats to enact minimum taxes on income and wealth. Residents would have paid taxes of at least 22 percent on annual income above 250,000 francs ($249,000), according to the proposed changes.
Switzerland’s executive and parliamentary branches had rejected the proposal, saying it would interfere with the cantons’ tax-autonomy regulations. [...]” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-28/swiss-voters-reject-proposal-to-impose-higher-tax-for-top-salary-earners.html
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Open Direct Democracy: Open Source project aiming at creating software in support of citizen driven direct democracy for organizations and governments at any level. https://github.com/rbjarnason/open-direct-democracy
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David Bismark: E-voting without fraud [video 4'/7']
[Begin at 3' 20"]
Update: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/03/1419200/An-Anonymous-Verifiable-E-Voting-Tech
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Against Majority Rule: https://fee.org/from-the-archives/against-majority-rule/
Cf. The cliché of socialism number 46 https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/cliches46.pdf
Collected Works of James M. Buchanan online http://www.econlib.org/library/Buchanan/buchCContents.html -
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Der Liquid Democracy e.V. ist ein gemeinnütziger Verein, dessen Mitglieder an Ideen und Projekten arbeiten, die unsere heutige Demokratie flüssiger, transparenter und flexibler gestalten sollen. Dazu gehört die theoretische Konzeption aber auch die praktische, direkt anwendbare Umsetzung in Software-Projekten.
Adhocracy ist die Software, die hinter liqd.net steht. Liquid Democracy ist nicht nur als Staatsform denkbar, sondern auch als eine neue Form des kooperativen Managements. In Adhocracy können Organisationen wie NGOs, Netzinitiativen oder Firmen durch einen demokratischen Prozess ihre Ziele, Strategien, interne Regeln oder Positionen entwickeln. Adhocracy ist die praktische Umsetzung unserer Theorie des Direkten Parlamentarismus. Durch das Betreiben der Plattform liqd.net entwickeln wir beides – Theorie und Praxis – in einem offenen Prozess kontinuierlich weiter.
Votorola ist eine LD-Software zur Realisierung von Abstimmungen/Wahlen sowie zur Strukturierung des politischen Diskurses – in beliebiger Größenordnung (lokal, national, global). [Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/votorola-is-software-for-building-consen ]
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“[...] consider: passion about pacifism. There have been times, when the world was divided into sides fighting vicious and deadly wars, that some folks took the side of stopping the fights. They took the natural passion of fighting an enemy and channeled it into fighting the fighters. I’d like to get folks to similarly see the wasteful pointlessness of today’s political battles. Today we induce millions of people to make up mostly-random political opinions on hundreds of diverse complex policy topics they hardly understand, split into warring factions based on shared opinions, and then fight vicious political battles over which factions get to make the government implement their random opinions. I’d rather folks focused on generating meta-political-opinions, not about particular policies like wars or bank bailouts, but about what political processes best choose effective policies.
[...] nations where citizens can effectively control their government by just specifying a national welfare function, and tweaking it a bit periodically, should be higher status than nations where ordinary citizens must continually form opinions on the effectiveness of hundreds of rapidly changing policies.”
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/fight-the-fighters.html
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Let corporations run for political office: “[...] In a recent quiz, I asked students to give an advantage and a disadvantage of letting corporations run for political office, relative to the status quo. Most gave an advantage I had described in lecture, that firms could develop a consistent brand and reputation on which voters could rely. I hadn’t mentioned any disadvantages in class, but 80+% spontaneously said that a disadvantage is elected firms would support self-serving policies.
Wow. Even GMU econ undergrads, not especially inclined to see the bright side of politicians, see corporations as more intrinsically selfish and corrupt than politicians. The idea of firms as dark untrustworthy aliens is indeed buried deep in our psyche. Xenophobia lives.
Added: I guess I need to spell this out. Humans evolved concern for others because this enabled individual humans to better survive and reproduce, especially by being better respected and liked by others. Similarly, firms who hoped to succeed in the industry of running for office would seek to create and maintain a clear positive long-term brand, one that voters could respect, like, and embrace. It is crazy to assume firms will always hurt their customers for any temporary gain just because some paper somewhere declares firms must seek profits.
Added 1p: Consider an ordinary politician who hopes for 15 more years on the job, versus a firm now holding 100 offices that hopes to continue for another fifty years. Which one is more scared that news of a corrupt act would destroy their future political popularity? Which will try harder to avoid such acts?”
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/unselfish-politicians.html
Cf.:
“[...] it is my high honor to nominate one of our newly enfranchised corporate citizens. A citizen that has shown, in this hour of need, that it is able to create jobs. That understands how to invest and grow and meet a payroll. That has the character to stand up for freedom and justice at home, in China, and around the world. And that has pledged, above all, “don’t be evil.”
It is with great pleasure that I nominate this fine citizen, Google Inc., for the presidency of the United States.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a4mv6q80zqVY
Cf.: http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/420 and http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/partition-is-necessary-and-sufficient-for-equivalence
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Inter-Group Conflict and Intra-Group Punishment: “In many areas of social life different parties interact under conditions of rivalry, striving for something that not all can obtain. Examples of such rivalries in the economic and political realms are R&D competition, promotion tournaments in internal labor markets, lobbying for government favors and electoral competition between political parties. As a result of such rivalries considerable resources are spent on activities that have no direct productive value. For example, […] previous to the adoption of auctions by the FCC, the real resources spent on filing applications for cell phone license lotteries (with an estimated market value of one billion dollars at that time) was about 400 million dollars. Extreme instances of rivalry are military conflicts and socio- political conflicts, like those that arise between parts of a country, when one of them is fighting for a different political status or independence, and those between ethnic groups. Actual conflicts of this type are often very costly, both in human lives and in material losses. […]
“In [many] rent-seeking experiments […] it is individuals who compete for a prize. In many naturally occurring situations, however, players are groups, since political parties, social movements, and associations like trade unions, lobbyists, terrorist groups etc. are invariably composed of more than one individual. Rent-seeking competition between groups rather than single players introduces an additional layer of complexity to the strategic characteristics of the interaction. Although groups clearly have the potential to be more powerful competitors than individual agents, they face internal coordination problems that may severely undermine their efficacy.
“[…] thus far it is poorly understood how human decision makers actually behave in simple collective rent-seeking contests. Consider a setting where all group members reap the benefits of success, while the likelihood of success depends on the efforts of individual group members. If formal enforcement measures are absent, the conflict parties effectively compete on the basis of voluntary contributions although informal sanctions against defectors, like social ostracism or mobbing, may help to overcome the inherent free-riding incentives. To date we have no systematic empirical evidence on how inter-group conflict is likely to evolve in such a setting.
“In the work we present here we use laboratory methods to study how conflict in contest games is influenced by parties being groups instead of individuals and by the existence of the possibility of punishment between members of a party. […] One can see this as a representation of a situation where the prize has a public good flavor for the successful party as is the case in some political confrontations in which all members of the winning party benefit from the outcome.
“Our results for the case without punishment show that expenditure levels in contests between groups are much higher than in contests between individuals, and both exceed equilibrium levels. On average, we observe that teams spend on conflict more than four times as much as predicted and about twice as much as single players. We also find that individual parties fighting against group parties invest similar levels to individual parties fighting against other individual parties. Group parties fighting against individual parties invest like group parties fighting against other groups.
In contests with punishment opportunities expenditure levels are in turn much higher than in any of the treatments without punishment. In the final rounds of the experiment, investments in conflict are more than twice as high with punishment as without. The consequence is a large waste of resources: more than three quarters of the prize parties are fighting over are dissipated by direct conflict expenditures. However, to determine the true efficiency loss the costs imposed by punishment and the costs borne to punish others need to be added. These costs included, material losses are now 869 percent of the equilibrium level and rent dissipation is in excess of 100 percent. These results strongly contrast with those from those public goods experiments where punishment tends to enhance efficiency.”
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Hacking Business Models: “This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.
“Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use. [...]
“Purpose
* Create a sustainable business model that can be adopted and adapted by others.
* Create a fair and democratic company that is owned by the workers.
* Have long-term, trustworthy and meaningful relationships with our staff and customers.“Principles
* Egalitarian: The belief that all people should be treated equally. This includes equality, non-discrimination and inclusivity.
* Sustainable: We have a long-term view on our business. We watch our profits & spend wisely, we take care of each other, we support the things we depend on.
* Transparent: We communicate in an honest and genuine way. Any information or process that can be made open, will be made open.
* Fun: Create a workplace where people can have fun and want to work.
* Agile: Be flexible, receptive & adaptive, especially when dealing with staff and customers.“Methods
“Concrete tools for helping us live according to our principles, including:
* Consensus-based decision making.
* Corporate transparency – any information or process that can be made open, should be made open.
* Licensing that helps benefit our company, our staff, our customers, our partners and society at large.
* Profit-sharing with staff, contributors and worthy causes.
* Don’t try to change people. Focus on getting the best from their strengths. Develop ways to work around their weaknesses.
* Prefer to work with people who share our values.
* Work against patents and other legislation that harms individual rights.“Monty’s amendments
- Subscribe to the Open Source philosophy and support the Open Source community.
- Be a virtual company, networking with others.
- The company or its individual business units should not grow until they are
unmanagable by the chosen methods. If this happens, then the company needs to
be split up or re-organized into largely independent business units.“Default Employee Rules: [...]”
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Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs – “This short “manifesto” describes a new form of government. In “futarchy,” we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. Elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare.” Hanson,2000 http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html Cf.: http://hanson.gmu.edu/ideafutures.html
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Votorola is software for building consensus and reaching decisions in public. Installed in a local town or region, it functions both as a primary electoral system for nominating candidates, and a primary rule-making system for voting up laws, plans and policies. Voting is peer-to-peer. Distributed drafting, recursive delegation and vote shifting guarantee the freedoms of participation and choice to every voter, at all times. The voting engine is designed to interface with standard drafting media and discussion forums. The voter lists are authenticated by a neighbourhood trust network.
Peer-to-Peer Voting
- Voters nominate their own candidates by voting for them. No candidates are pre-declared.
- Votes cascade. When one candidate votes for another, the votes of the first flow to the second.
- Voters are free to shift their votes, at any time.
admin is discussing. 
“[...] Another aspect of Working Groups that confounds many people is the fact that there is no formal voting. The general rule on disputed topics is that the Working Group has to come to “rough consensus”, meaning that a very large majority of those who care must agree. The exact method of determining rough consensus varies from Working Group to Working Group. Sometimes consensus is determined by “humming” — if you agree with a proposal, you hum when prompted by the chair; if you disagree, you keep your silence. Newcomers find it quite peculiar, but it works. It is up to the chair to decide when the Working Group has reached rough consensus.
The lack of formal voting has caused some very long delays for some proposals, but most IETF participants who have witnessed rough consensus after acrimonious debates feel that the delays often result in better protocols. (And, if you think about it, how could you have “voting” in a group that anyone can join, and when it’s impossible to count the participants?) Rough consensus has been defined in many ways; a simple version is that it means that strongly held objections must be debated until most people are satisfied that these objections are wrong. [...]” http://www.ietf.org/tao.html