First of all, regardless of all the claims made in the document, I find it awesome to see such a gigantic writeup that tries to be at least a bit internally consistent. It reminds me of Bit451 [1][2], although that one was simply insane.
So about Cicada: the document quickly notes that the 'human unique identifier' is at the core of the proposal. It is claimed that it "allows us to prevent Sybil attacks and ensure everyone has a voice in the system". It promises to do this with cryptography and 'biocryptics', a word which isn't really that widely used in the research community. It seems to mostly refer to anonymous biometrics authentication systems [3][4]. In that field I can find nothing about preventing Sybil attacks.
Additionally, preventing Sybil attacks in a decentralized system, by relying on a biometric measurement that is fully under the control of an attacker seems doomed to fail. No matter how much cryptography you throw at it.
There must either be some central party designating trust in a certain (anonymous) biometric, or there needs to be a web of trust that is sufficiently connected and resistant to manipulation. A combination, with good checks and balances and distribution of power, seems to be the way to go most of the time.
Personal identity seems like a generally intractable problem, despite the lofty goals stated in the introduction. And without it, the document is built on a foundation of sand.
An argument that I find myself having quite frequently about Bitcoin and pseudonymity is that pseudonymity and concealing identity is not a feature of the system, but rather that defining two-way identity in any sort of useful way is such a difficult problem that solving it would be a bigger achievement than Bitcoin itself.
Seeking a biological equivalent to a non-portable key in a TPM is pretty hopeless, and that's what you'd need to get a HUID -- not just a hash fingerprint that anyone can appropriate, but an internal signing mechanism to allow zero-knowledge verification of identity. And the inverse problem, the Sybil problem, is just as intractable, and as far as I know has never really been solved without a centralized issuing authority or reliance on a scarce resource (like proof-of-work, which even there solves only a weak variant of the Sybil problem by conflating the unit of "identity" with a unit of "work").
We know multiple ways to reliably identify someone using biological markers with near-perfect accuracy. Yes, that lack of perfection leaves open the possibility of subversion, but so what? You'll grow old and die waiting for the perfect solution.
Human biometrics are subject to spoofing, replay, and birthday attacks. You can't extract enough entropy from any extant biometrics to be useful, secure, and free of collisions (without having an intolerably high false negative rate).
This seems to me like the whole misadventure of putting finger print readers in door locks and phones: Someone noticed that fingerprints work quite well for identifying people in customs and law enforcement and simplified that thought to "fingerprints can identify people" - ignoring the circumstances of how fingerprints are taken when they work.
Governments take thousands of decisions. Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions? We risk ending up with a "democracy" where the power is really in the end of people having enough time and / or skin in the game to actually vote.
Voter fatigue is already a known effect where places that vote the most are also the ones with the lowest turnout. California and Switzerland vote twice a year, they barely ever go above 50% turnout.
That kind of system would be interesting for signature collection, however. It would then be easier, more fair and more secure to collect signatures to put something on the ballot. Today you really need money to do that.
That's why systems like Liquid Democracy have delegation features. You don't elect representatives, but you can delegate ("lend", if you will) your vote on certain issues to them. And revoke the delegation at any time.
Maybe Cicada could be equipped with something like this, but sentences like "The concept is so new that the word representativeless does not even exist. We had to invent it." don't look like the authors have done a lot of research on the topic.
This is a github post that tries to pass itself off as a "paper" (because it sounds official, right), and ends with "And that can change the world". Wow that's academic and objective.
Why are we upvoting delusional content that lacks a real understanding of behavior, politics, and law? Because if you want to change the world, a basic understanding of that might help. He could start with Plato and Xenophon and the Trial of the Generals and then progress to Reddit if he thinks crowds are wise and democracy without flaw.
The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code.
Is this serious? It's every bad Silicon Valley joke wrapped up in a document. In the real world, politicians, and armies, and people with power that you don't even know of have been ruling the world for a long time. If you want to break that you gotta be more realistic than quoting a science fiction book and a Github paper.
To create something scalable enough to run an entire nation with no representatives, we created two cutting edge technologies to serve as the foundation of the platform
Is it reasonable to make this statement without showing any code? They seem to have not scaled beyond writing thought on paper. How do you go from that to "leaders being replaced with code"? Is there not a massive gap to be bridged before such audacious claims are made?
Why isn't there more skepticism of something like this?
HN has political clusters which are mappable (and if someone would like to help me in that venture I'd appreciate it, I can be contacted via gmail).
There is a very strong libertarian contingent, a moderately strong centrist contingent, a moderately strong socialist contingent (ie the Scandinavian social democracy model you point to) and small extremist contingents consisting of a few fascists and a few communists. Some of the libertarians are anarchists/voluntaryists but being anarchists they reject labels :)
I see a lot more libertarian ideology appear on the front page than anything else, politics-wise, even if there's reasonable arguments in the comments. From blockchains to direct democracy to universal income, and a while back, an incredible amount of writings on property rights for some reason.
As much as I can see those topics as being enablers of Libertarian ideals or as being "libertarian"-themed, I don't think the majority of their proponents on HN promote them for those reasons.
I must say, I did miss the discussions/writings on property rights. Would have been interesting, as it's one of the two fundamental tenets of Libertarianism.
Universal income is not a libertarian idea, it's socialist.
Block chains are a technology, nothing more, nothing less. Big banks are using them and they have nothing to do with libertarianism.
Direct democracy is orthogonal to libertarianism. Structure of government is independent of desired role of government. Calls for direct democracy have surged from liberals in the US after the second wrath of the electoral college.
The only thing that is libertarian is writing on property rights.
Universal income as a replacement for all current Government social support functions is an idea that came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role in social support, and forcing people to take control of their own lives. Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently performs - i.e. they don't really support it, since that's untenable.
PoW and PoS blockchains follow libertarian ideology and fundamentally libertarian ideas of how the world should work - "no ability for the Government to see what you're doing and tax it" is pretty much the rallying cry of its proponents, or it was about three years ago when I was into it. (Oh, along with a healthy dose of "companies can do no wrong, and if they do, it's your fault".) The political goal is to remove the Government's (and therefore the banks') role in trade. Centralised "blockchains" as used by banks are irrelevant there, and shouldn't even use the same word.
Direct democracy is, unfortunately, something that heavily overlaps with libertarian ideology - again, it severely shrinks or removes the role of Government in political decision-making processes.
> Universal income [...] came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role
I don't think it's meaningful to credit the idea to a single ideology. It's an idea that has popped up many times, in many forms, over time. I first came across it as a tool to ensure basic human dignity for all, which is more important to me than silly discussions about "big" or "small" government.
> Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently performs
That, too, is an overly broad statement. The Socialists I know who oppose universal income all do it (a) because they think that labor is a value in itself, and that everybody should work, or (b) because they somehow think that a basic income profits Big Capital. I haven't heard any say that they think five government support programs are better than one government support program.
Making everything about government size seems to be a US thing. These are not discussions we usually have in Europe. (Except, sometimes, about the EU itself.)
Nearly all of the articles supporting basic income have nothing about repealing other social programs. If it did start as libertarian it has definitely been hijacked by socialists to increase government entitlements rather than optimize them.
"blockchain" is not the same thing as decentralized currency. Don't conflate the two. The block chain just enables decentralized currency.
Also, block chains don't prevent a government from seeing what you are doing or levying taxes against you. Pseudononymous currency is only one of the interesting things you can do with block chains.
Delegation doesn't mitigate large groups' tendencies to, in moments of emotional fervor, make incredibly stupid decisions that they wouldn't if forced to the a few weeks to think about it.
This is the difference between e.g. the Californian and Swiss referendum systems [1]. California directly enacts popular thought into law. That makes lawmaking a game of finding moments when you can make the majority disinterested while sending an active minority ballistic, and then freezing that moment into law. Switzerland, on the other hand, lets leaders counter-propose and negotiate with the population. It also has mandatory waiting periods.
Broad direct democracy has a poor history because it tends to empower mobs. This is a bigger problem than the expertise issue that delegation addresses.
> you would still have a balance of power so that a court could overturn a law created by direct democracy
Presumably based on the laws this direct democracy enacts? Observe California and imagine if every single law had to be passed through referendum. The system fails because people don't compromise across large, unaccountable groups.
Direct democracy is better used as a check on a small group of leaders, e.g. a right to popularly veto legislation (or Constitutional amendments) and a right to select the leaders.
> The system fails because people don't compromise across large, unaccountable groups.
The solution: don't group people who are uncompromisingly different from each-other into the same democracy. Group them into separate democracies, and then have them interact with one-another through their state (by treaty, trade, war, etc.) rather than by trying to all be part of one giant family.
Given globalism, many cultures with clashing political beliefs tend to end up as residents of the same countries, states, counties, cities, even individual ridings. Representative democracy was never designed for this use-case. Countries—or at least city-states—used to have pretty uniform cultures overall.
So, a much bigger bullet to bite: if we want representative democracy to continue to function under global-freedom-of-movement conditions, we might have to legislate some form of incentivization toward "intentional communities" that have more self-coherent political zeitgeists, such that the representatives of those communities can actually faithfully represent some clear set of beliefs, rather than just pandering vaguely to mutually-conflicting beliefs.
In short: it's culture ghettos or disenfranchisement.
(My evidence for this stance is that existing self-selected culture ghettos—the Chinatowns and Little Indias of the world, when they're large enough to "run themselves" as cities/townships in a regional district—actually tend to have local laws and policies that a supermajority of their residents prefer, and very little in the way of complaints. When most everyone in a place is from one culture, it's much simpler for everyone in that place to agree on what they want; and then it's much more evident when local politicians are doing a bad job of giving them what they want, so they tend to oust those until they end up with effective politicians.)
>When most everyone in a place is from one culture, it's much simpler for everyone in that place to agree on what they want;
What happens when those communities want oppressive/discriminatory regulations (e.g. those who want sharia law or only white people)? Are you okay with them doing that?
I'm not going full-blown Archipelago (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...) here. I'm not suggesting that these communities should be like the city-states of old, fully empowered to make local law that "works for them" (however awful) without national law prevailing over it. You can't make a municipal bylaw banning white people from your city; municipal bylaws do not work that way.
More generally, things like human rights are still properly built up and decided by the metaethical process of culture clash, rather than something subjective to any individual culture. Humans are humans before they're members of any individual culture, after all, and there is definitely a core set of things all humans need, whether a given culture believes they do or not. It's in our best interests to keep cultures with different ethics interacting, such that the conversation on such subjects doesn't miss out on anyone's viewpoint.
And I'm also not suggesting that people who are persecuted by the social mores of their culture shouldn't be able to leave their culture—renounce it—and join some other culture. Other countries might not feel strongly on this point, but America was, in fact, founded on immigration of what Sharia law would call "apostates": people fleeing and renouncing cultures that they had irreconcilable differences with. In fact, I'm surprised that America has no specific enshrined protection for apostates, such that violence committed in the name of cultural apostasy would be considered a hate-crime. (I guess it's harder to recognize cultural violence than racial violence, because both the attacker and the victim are of the same race, and the victim hasn't always made any formal renunciation of their origin culture. But that doesn't mean it isn't just as frequent.)
Instead, what I'm specifically talking about here is using intentional communities/culture ghettos to make (proportional, but maybe also FttP?) representative democracy work better. Basically, to eliminate gerrymandering by making ridings into "natural kinds", where it's clear where the boundaries of a riding are. One culture-ghetto = one riding.
If a culture-ghetto has a large enough population, you wouldn't split it to give it multiple representatives, because that would reintroduce the potential for gerrymandering; instead, you'd just either have a riding elect multiple representatives proportional to its size (presumably using positional-choice voting or somesuch); or you'd give have it elect a single representative, but give that representative votes in the House proportional to the size of their constituency.
Consider that, right now, we have the "seeds of" policies like Sharia or white-separatism within every community, because every community has some people who would prefer those things. Every representative has to consider how much their community cares about these issues—and they might even play one side against the other, favoring a minority position if they'll gain more votes from that minority than they'll lose in the rest of their riding. And, besides that, a representative can just end up mistaken about how much their constituency cares about an issue. Or paid off by lobbyists to care about the issue, and then justify caring by pointing to the minority who does. All of these effects mean that we can actually end up with quite a few representatives who are in favor of these minority viewpoints.
Culture-ghettos change this. Everyone from a given culture Foo, within a regional catchment area, will end up living in the same place—and so the same riding. If the Foos (and only the Foos) are in favor of some weird policy Bar, then it'll be very clear to anyone with eyes that the representative of the Foo riding should be supporting Bar (and there's probably political corruption involved if they aren't), and that the representatives of the non-Foo ridings shouldn't be supporting Bar (and there's probably political corruption involved if they are.) You can quickly do a 100-person sample of beliefs of a riding, compare it to the platform of the representative, and use the correlation as a measure of how well they're serving their constituency. Obviously, this makes corruption way, way harder. But it also makes minority positions obviously so. If only the Foo riding like Bar, then only one representative in the House will be voting for Bar.
---
Note how this seems actually kind of scary: what if the riding's minority is something like "LGBT people"—probably what you'd see from the core of San Francisco after ghetto-annealing took place. How do ideas like equal rights for gay or trans people bubble up into federal law if minority viewpoints are suppressed? But, note, this is what a House of Commons is supposed to look like; suppressing minorities is what it does by design, by having its members vote blindly for their constituents' beliefs (coherently extrapolated using statesmanship), rather than voting their own conscience.
Thankfully, the complete system is not just the House. The Senate is supposed to be where the people voting their conscience reside, and that's where things like amendments grant new rights come from: Senators recognizing and empathizing with the plight of minorities that have nothing to do with them other than sharing their society.
Right now, the House is just a Senate with very short terms. It's so vague what Congressmen are representing that they're allowed to "play Senator", expressing opinions nearly nobody in their constituency actually has, with little repercussion. With the House this way, the Senate just seems redundant. But, given a properly-functioning House, the Senate is a very important counterbalance: it applies a more technocratic eye to the House's inherently short-term populist moods.
Half the problem of American politics comes down to a system originally designed to play these two forces (short-term populism and long-term political-science debate) against one another, tilting over because one of the two forces is not in play. If the House is busy pretending to be a Senate, the force of populism has no say in legislature. This frustrates the people, and so you get reactive populism inserted wherever it will fit, like the Executive or the Judiciary.
If every Congressman thinks themselves a statesman rather than a proxy for the beliefs of you-and-yours, no Congressman will make law that serves your needs. So, a President ends up elected based on their seeming sameness to their electorate, in the hopes that maybe they can represent their needs when Congress can't; and everyone from local judges to supreme-court justices attempt to rework the law set by Congress in their own hands by pursuing trials only for precedents they want set to create overriding case law they can believe in. The horse is lamed and limping, and a functioning Congress making functional law is the broken leg.
I used to think I'd like direct democracy, but after living in California for a few years I realized it wasn't at all what I'd expected. Intelligently voting on an issue requires you to invest a lot of time in understanding the topic, its pros and cons, and any far-reaching effects. It's almost like a full-time job, which is why we elect representatives!
The problem is that governance is complex that representatives are in many respects just incompetent voters. We elect a lot of lawyers because they're skilled in both assimilation and evaluation, but the upshot is legalism, procedural paralysis, exponential growth of the legal corpus, inaccessibility to the citizenry, and factionalism.
I'd actually consider "procedural paralysis" a feature. Writing laws and making changes in such a complex system must be done with extreme care and deliberation.
>It's almost like a full-time job, which is why we elect representatives!
We elect representatives because our history is dictatorial, and each step taken toward a more democratic system has been a compromise after a revolt between the ruler(s) and the ruled.
That usually means leaving them with some power.
Direct democracy doesn't mean that you have to make an intelligent decision on every single topic, ever. It means you can choose which topics to make decisions on and which topics you want to delegate to somebody else and whom to delegate it to.
It would still mean that you could delegate your vote on decisions about regulating the Internet to notorious full time job holder Ted Stevens if you really wanted.
> Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions?
I think the solution to voter fatigue is sortition - you select a random group of, say, 1000 people, they come together, hear the issue, vote on it, and disband. For every issue you repeat the random selection.
It is a statistical law that a randomly selected group is representative of the whole. When you have a few thousand people, they are within a couple of percent precise compared to an actual election. So a random selection (just like jury duty) could be the cheapest way to go about solving the voter fatigue problem.
An advantage of sortition is that it does away with the need for elections and political campaigning, cutting off lobbying at both ends - can't lobby a random group that always changes, and the system doesn't need political campaigns or even parties in order to function, unlike representative democracy. And it's not a new invention - sortition was the original form of democracy in Athens.
In this real time everything, voting for matters every few years does not make any sense. The issues are hanging for decades and the progress is slow.
50%+1 voting process it is not optimal. A statistically significant number could be way down than half of population.
If voting process is convenient (meaning a tap away), secure, cheap and real time all the issues could be resolved much faster. Instead of decades could be months.
We are still in the stone age when it comes to policy and democracy.
I agree; in practice, people can't deal with gov all day. But there are hybrid gov models to address it, such as delegate democracy, which I foresee as next stage in the evolution.
Also, I think it's kind of viscous cycle situation. Bad gov reflects in personal-live problems causing the individual to have even less time to deal with the gov.
One day robots will work for us. We will receive UBI. We will have plenty of free time, so we can all be full-time governors.
To prevent voter fatigue, you have to make it difficult to get referendums/propositions on the ballot, and you have to make voting on the ones that do get on infrequent (like yearly).
But if the alternative is legislative bodies inundated with lobbyists and corporate money making big decisions for us, I'd be willing to experiment with any solution, even direct democracy like this.
Nobody should vote on all decisions because nobody is expert in everything. Rather than voting, people should make proposals (of lesser or greater scope) which are edits to the legal corpus can then be supported or opposed is a manner somewhat similar to Wikipedia editing, a methods of governance I call Participativism.
You can let gov deal with minor national wide issues, and delegate the important stuff to the people (thresholds to be agreed upon in advance and when in doubt defer to the people). Anything local should be handled in the same way by local authorities.
Do people really think pure direct democracy is a good idea? Why?
We already have a problem with legislators not understanding anything about many areas they are expected to create policy on. Why would Average Joe do any better?
Much easier to bribe 500 people in a 300 million people. Actually, you may just have to bribe 100 or so, enough to tilt partisan things in your favor.
2. Direct democracy would not follow party lines, there is no need to.
You can have gun rights and abortion rights.
You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration.
You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue.
You can have higher taxes but lower regulations.
You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending.
You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code.
3. Because any other forms of rulers get disconnected form people as soon as they start ruling
4. No "too-big-to-fail" ruler (dictator, king, plutocrat, oligarch, meritocratic, strongman). Entire country doesn't depend on single charismatic person.
5. It might have been difficult in the past, but in the internet age in USA, direct democracy has less things that would work against it. More information available, more means to communicate available, decent education available.
6. Find best people for the job. Ideas can come from anywhere. Implementer can come from anywhere. You won't get "I implement my idea, not you". "You stole my idea". etc.
It's easy to influence all Joes on the social media platforms virtually all of them use.
> 2. Direct democracy would not follow party lines, there is no need to.
Party line is less of a problem in countries with sensible representative democracies, i.e not FPTP.
> You can have gun rights and abortion rights. You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration. You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue. You can have higher taxes but lower regulations. You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending. You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code.
I completely agree with you here, but like others you only talk about the big issues. Not the small day-to-day operation that must also be handled as well as all the small "boring" issues that face any real government.
> 3. Because any other forms of rulers get disconnected form people as soon as they start ruling.
Representatives are not rulers.
> 4. No "too-big-to-fail" ruler (dictator, king, plutocrat, oligarch, meritocratic, strongman). Entire country doesn't depend on single charismatic person.
I guarantee that if direct democracy was implemented you would have charismatic personalities telling people how to vote on day one. And they would be much better than influencers trying to use reason too.
> 5. It might have been difficult in the past, but in the internet age in USA, direct democracy has less things that would work against it. More information available, more means to communicate available, decent education available.
More information overload. More false information supporting your preexisting views.
> 6. Find best people for the job. Ideas can come from anywhere. Implementer can come from anywhere. You won't get "I implement my idea, not you". "You stole my idea". etc.
Just like today it would be the most charismatic that flow to the top. Perhaps it would be even worse since today only the representatives have to be charismatic. At least their aides and bureaucrats can be ugly and socially inept as long as they are good at what they do.
>It's easy to influence all Joes on the social media platforms virtually all of them use.
And that is a good thing. If they can be influenced in a bad way quickly, then they can be influenced in a good way, or away from bad way, quickly as well.
Representative democracy was a compromise of the days where direct democracy was not possible due to limits of communication. Not so in this day and age, you can have answer from people over the internet in few hours. Thought leaders would still continue to exist and influence people. But, representatives with limited attention span, limited brain power, limited time of the day, demands from multiple concerns, personal influences of experience and needs, won't wield so much power.
>I completely agree with you here, but like others you only talk about the big issues. Not the small day-to-day operation that must also be handled as well as all the small "boring" issues that face any real government.
Bureaucracy exists in representatives democracy as well. It will continue to exist in direct democracy. Hire the best that people want, not political appointments.
>Representatives are not rulers.
I don't know. We, in USA, has developed a class of people, who "represent" people for ages and generations. They do polling of people to find issues that would result into they winning the race to be representative and then do what they want to do once they win. Electing a representative has a huge disconnect with what people want done.
>I guarantee that if direct democracy was implemented you would have charismatic personalities telling people how to vote on day one. And they would be much better than influencers trying to use reason too.
Absolutely. No different than a representative trying to secure vote. But, with representative democracy people cede control for two years, four years, six years at a time. With direct democracy you get a chance every day to influence decision making.
>More information overload. More false information supporting your preexisting views.
really? Who is this external arbitrator of what is false and what is true? Can that arbitrator make mistakes? I believe there are more good people than bad, and many eyes examining what is true vs few arbitrators of truth, is better.
>At least their aides and bureaucrats can be ugly and socially inept as long as they are good at what they do.
A case for entertaining plumber or soldier, ha? I wouldn't mind knowing if the plumber can sing. lol. People would vote on a policy, a plan and a cost and an executive (Roman Consul) to carry it out. Hiring decisions would be left to the Consul. There would be a sense of Civic Duty and people would pay more attention, in a generation or two, education in schools would emphasize Civic Duties. Representative democracy, almost half the people don't even vote, knowing it doesn't matter much what the representative claimed in the election and what transpired.
"...And that is a good thing. If they can be influenced in a bad way quickly, then they can be influenced in a good way..."
Are you just interested in making arguments for arguments' sake?
Besides that, all of your comments are good examples about why direct democracy is not a always a good idea - because most people don't have enough time/desire to think issues through, and yet they are willing to be adamant about their opinions on them.
So, let's trust a few who are even more distracted because of demands on their time and brain power.
Arguing for 500 congressman with all the power is arguing for all the "Research Institutes" which write the laws for them.
How many years would it have taken if we had forced those 500 to write just 2300 page ACA/Obamacare?
> why direct democracy is not a always a good idea
Always? When did I say always? I specifically said it had least things working against it compared to other methods. You could have second coming of Christ and these lands will be blessed again in his kingdom, but we are discussing state of affairs till that happens, aren't we?
> "And that is a good thing. If they can be influenced in a bad way quickly, then they can be influenced in a good way, or away from bad way, quickly as well."
People are massively influenced by the information they consume. We tend to live in filter bubbles (we're discussing within one right now). Breaking people out of those filter bubbles is not straightforward, as you're asking them to trade the certainty of the world they know with the uncertainty of the world they don't. It takes a certain amount of curiosity to want to do that, and that's something that has to come from within, you can't bring it about directly.
Are you waiting to bet that current President can be "educated" to change his views because he has intellectual curiosity? He is representative democracy in action, isn't he?
Are you willing to say that you support the President, because he is result of representative democracy?
>It takes a certain amount of curiosity to want to do that, and that's something that has to come from within, you can't bring it about directly.
Is that "something within" a requirement for our elected representatives? If not, aren't they just as equally susceptible to the same bubble think?
What I'm suggesting is that if big business and mass media can can effectively control the population, it doesn't matter if they have to control 500 or 500,000,000.
I'm not suggesting we wait for elected representatives to get better, a more direct form of democracy would be preferable, but there needs to be a shift in the way we engage with information and debate before that will make a positive difference. In other words, the priority should be sorting out the news media first.
>there needs to be a shift in the way we engage with information and debate before that will make a positive difference.
What do you think is going on while, as you suggest, entire population of the country updates its capability to deal with information presented? Are we not being influenced?
Is that an achievable goal? Why in a highly educated, highly liberal, highly resourceful society like USA we still lack this capability? Is it because at the end of the day we are emotional beings, not rational?
>What I'm suggesting is that if big business and mass media can can effectively control the population, it doesn't matter if they have to control 500 or 500,000,000.
They would try to control as many as they could for their benefit. Do you think we should make it easy for them by asking them to influence 500 or should we band together and use our numbers as a deterrent to mass influence?
"If they can effectively control...", but you are assuming it to be foregone conclusion. I think the battle is still raging on and more people we have on our side that they must influence the better, instead of just 500.
>In other words, the priority should be sorting out the news media first.
Will it ever be completed sorted out to be fair all the time, to all the parties?
I believe we have created this current phenomenal prosperity, not by assuming people doing right thing all the time, but despite there being bad elements. Hence, I appreciate what we have much more.
Anytime I hear, "and, over here all of us do the right thing.", I bet against that solution being successful.
If there is one thing that I agree with bible is that humanity is fallen. We must work with that assumption as we design or evaluate solutions.
> "Is that an achievable goal? Why in a highly educated, highly liberal, highly resourceful society like USA we still lack this capability? Is it because at the end of the day we are emotional beings, not rational?"
Let me put it another way. If we started using direct democracy tomorrow, which areas of policy do you feel informed enough to make policy decisions on? The economy? Foreign policy? Education? Healthcare? The military? Any others?
> You can have gun rights and abortion rights. You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration. You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue. You can have higher taxes but lower regulations. You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending. You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code.
Well, you can. But will that really happen? Especially in the area of civil rights, it is difficult to defend a right of interest to a minority group from ill-informed or simply emtionaly-driven majority opinion.
I didn't say it was full proof. It was the best compromise given how the world works.
Supreme Court can still function to validate laws against founding constitutional rights.
But, I do agree, majority will have its way most of the time. If minority has a grievance, it has to address the same way people holding any other minority of opinion would deal with it... make majority see things your way.
Gay partners should be able to adopt. Make majority see it your way.
We should have not criminalize marijuana use. Make majority see it your way.
In fact Civil rights have more advantages than people with majority race, ethnicity, religion but holding a minority opinion e.g. euthanasia. At least for Civil Rights there are courts to go to, majority has agreed to have that as a recourse just for Civil Rights opinions.
I honestly think minority Civil Rights are only possible when majority is doing good, economically and emotionally. Because, Civil Rights need to be enforced through education, and might of the state, which is the majority at the end of the day.
Sure, Gay rights and no slavery exists in USA, mostly because majority sees it that way. In Saudi Arabia or in ISIS territories those rights don't exist.
Civil Rights only exists where majority agrees that Civil Rights deserve to be honored. If they didn't, it wouldn't. We can feel as uncomfortable as we want about it, but that's just how the world operates. Unless there are technological advantages where one assumes god position enforcing Civil Rights of each individual without any external dependency, I don't see if that way of how the world operates could ever be changed.
That's explicitly not how our system works. If you have a claim to a right rooted in the Constitution, you do not need to convince the majority to see things your way. Your rights emanating from the Constitution (and further from the Constitution of your state) trump the majority.
You could have Supreme Courts without representative Democracy.
You could have direct democracy on issues (Brexit e.g.) within representative democracy.
Majority agrees with this form of government including Supreme Court and Constitutional Rights. If 99% of USA agreed to not follow constitution, would Supreme Courts be able to enforce their opinions? Majority agrees to give that power to Supreme Court and is upholding it everyday.
If you think we gave our constitution to ISIS today, they would function the same way, without buying into it?
> Much easier to bribe 500 people in a 300 million people
It's also much easier to force individual accountability on 500 people than 300 million. That sense of accountability is what drives compromise. Consider how often the electoral base drives compromise versus it occurring as a top-down necessity.
It depends on ow you organize it, but ideally most decisions would be taken on the level of the people who are affected by it. If Joe doesn't understand before the election, he will understand after, and if he doesn't like the result, he can call for a new election.
However, modern DD systems should support delegator/liquid democracy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy) which subsumes the benefits of representative democracy, while letting voters take back their vote from their delegate at any time.
Maybe it doesn't make much difference? Maybe fine-tuning salami tarriffs is something that should not be done, and relevant legislators should be freed to perhaps produce salami themself?
I don't have any confirmations that these small decisions actually matter much.
You can have salami makers lobby for 6,5% import tax then salami sellers lobby for 4% import tax for years before the same parliament, this consuming resources of society but bringing zero value to society at large.
On other hand, we can still leave such decisions to relevant professionals and pass laws to gauge their work.
> On other hand, we can still leave such decisions to relevant professionals and pass laws to gauge their work.
Why not do this for everything? In fact, politicians already have armies of expert advisors that they just choose not to listen to when their analysis does not conform to party lines or personal agenda. This is what should be fixed instead of trying to pass such a huge reform.
I don't have faith in expert advisors. They often live in their own bubble and resist reality with impunity.
Society should be able to command them on issues that raise enough attention. "So what if you think that you should scan everybody at airports, admit 2M immigrants annually and log all phone calls? You're not doing that, effective immediately."
Direct democracy works IF we have an educated electorate. Which America does not have, and will not have for at least a generation... all the same, it can work.
An educated electorate does not imply subject matter expertise, it means ubiquitous critical thinking abilities... the ability to debate, ask good questions, analyze the credibility and argument of a subject matter expert, and having the humbleness to be persuaded.
Who says they would have to? Direct democracy = direct voting, not intimate involvement with every stage of policy.
Representatives would still exist as subject matter experts that develop policy within their ___domain and act to convince the public. Ubiquitous critical thinking is sufficient to protect the public from demagogues and conmen - and that is an achievable goal (albeit politically challenging today)
That said I personally think this is an extreme case.
I'll also admit that people - including me - are scaringly easy to manipulate in cases that are more complicated than this.
Generally I'm more in favour of the Swiss system where you meet in town and vote by raising your sword. (disclaimer: I think this might have changed now - I heard this was how it used to be done by someone I know who grew up there a decade or two (I guess) before I was born.
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The Swiss have expert legislators that actually make the laws the way they want.
Grossly simplified, the populace can force a decision, but the specific implementation of the decision is created by lawmakers and later accepted by the population. If it is rejected the lawmakers get to have another go.
It is of course more direct than in America, though it is more a case of voters saying "We want this" and legislators saying "Ok, we tried to implement it in the best way we could. Do you accept?".
What's the correct decision? All the people voting completely against their interests now think they're making the correct decision. Not all decisions or votes are equal and the outcome of an election can change what can even be voted on and by whom for the next round.
I'm responding to the point that voters need to be rational and educated for a direct democracy to function. It only requires that voters have a bias, however slight, to making the 'right' decision.
Don't think too much about how to define 'right' because you'll drive yourself mad. All that matters is the belief that in the long run people tend to make 'right' choices slightly more often than wrong ones.
> "All that matters is the belief that in the long run people tend to make 'right' choices slightly more often than wrong ones."
Do they though? I see people making the "wrong" choices very often when the "right" choice is inconvenient for them. I would include myself in that description too.
That wasn't the point. The question is whether it's a good idea - and it's not when people don't know or don't care about what they're voting on, both of which requires education and rational (long-term) thinking.
These days I think that direct democracy is better than bureaucracy.
Why won't it? Provided that it's deployed slowly and tenderly.
Maybe Average Joe doesn't understand your area. Then you have two options:
- Educate Average Joe about the issue.
- Make sure that Average Joe doesn't vote on the issue and only concerned citizens do. This usually requires that issue poses no nuisances for Average Joe.
But right now, when legislators don't understand anything and create bad policy, we have ZERO options. Zero is less than two.
Joe does not have the time to be informed about the pros and cons of every decision that the government needs to ask him about. It's simply not practical.
Direct democracy would be handing over the machinery of government to marketing companies fed by lobbies.
If you give out voting credits, influencers will call for votes on many small, but hot, topics to expend all votes and then ram through what they want. It's too easy to hack.
In most western democracies, not necessarily America. Representatives can be held accountable and any corruption is usually exposed with dire consequences for their party.
It's also easy to counter. I can think how and so can you.
What's the point of "ramming through" if it gets repealed in terror at the start of next cycle? Very potent point is that laws should be tried and then most of them should be repealed. Only a minority of laws should survive to permanence.
Right now we pretend that we're capable of writing good laws from the first attempt.
> What's the point of "ramming through" if it gets repealed in terror at the start of next cycle?
You just characterized the see-saw retributionary populist democracies that trashed Latin America's economies over the 20th century. Policy instability is anathema for lower-level civic and economic self-organization.
I'm not sure you are right. Many Latin American countries fair just fine when you adjust for their inherent handicap.
Maybe they had bad policies, maybe whey didn't, I'm not sure they'll be massively better off under any other system. If we're not talking about Cuba and Venezuela which have exactly opposite problem of failing to turn evidently unsuccessful decisions.
> Many Latin American countries fair just fine when you adjust for their inherent handicap
Policy volatility is about as significant a driver of Latin American per-capita economic growth as income inequality. Capital inflows and debt are insignificant; only U.S. interest rate volatility is comparable to domestic factors.
"Regarding macroeconomic policies, the higher the volatility of discretionary fiscal policy, the lower the growth.
...
Despite several episodes of reform reversals, most countries made progress in market-oriented structural reforms during 1970–2004, except Venezuela. The intensity of reversals was highest in Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Venezuela. Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Uruguay made the most progress during the 35 years. Greater market-oriented reforms and fewer reform reversals were associated with higher growth."
I don't necessarily ascribe to direct democracy ideas, but if you want to learn about why some people think it's a good idea, check out "The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement" by David Graeber.
It chronicles his experiences in the Occupy Wall Street movement and expounds upon the value of direct democracy.
Legislators aren't ignorant, they just vote according to their corporate sponsors.
Direct democracy incentivizes the citizen to learn the issues.
My opinions aside, TFA details a system to relieve "voter fatigue" and knowledge ___domain issues (delegating a committee of experts to craft votable resolutions)
I like the idea of visualising the decisions. Break down an issue into its constituent parts, then show all the graphs and see-saws - if you vote x, then it a, b, c will change like this, and l,m,n will change like this.
Arguing the converse would be arguing that one representatives soul has more inherent decisive import than those represented and that's difficult to qualify or quantify unless the representative entity's God himself.
I suggest the people who want to "fix politics" get involved and start very small: look at a single ward within a city. Don't try to replace representative democracy -- enhance it, automate it. If you've got a theory, start small, and run on it. Go out and get votes. Then, once you've been elected actually see the real world problems that exist. Or, even simpler, volunteer in a local state representative's office for a good few years till you understand the actual challenges. Make their job and their constituents involvement better. Radical change starts with modest beginnings.
The scale of government which interests people is a direct product of the issues that interest them. Want to influence school policies? Almost 100% a local ward/district issue. Want to have a meaningful impact on almost anything else? It all happens at the state & federal level. In some states (CA being a prime example), a huge amount of even normally local education policy issues have been taken over by the state because of the way schools are funded.
I have known plenty of people who went into local government and left after 3-5 years, because the fights are just as hard as at the higher levels, but the chance to engage in meaningful policy creation is almost nil. The professionals use it as a training/credentialing circuit, and the regular citizens generally seem to leave permanently.
> A new Distributed Proof of Work (DPoW) backed blockchain that is immune to centralization because of a unified client/miner with only one miner allowed per person, linked anonymously to a HUID.
The whole blockchain thing is built on the assumption that we don't have this HUID thing which solves Sybil attacks. Now that Sybil attacks are no longer a concern, surely there must be a more efficient algorithm than PoW to secure the chain.
> This ID is not centrally controlled, which will virtually eliminate all Sybil attacks, along with the vast majority of problems in peer to peer networks.
It's trivial to stop Sybil attacks in a centralized system... Making the ID decentralized certainly does not help in that department.
> A HUID generated through the intersection of revocable biometrics and cryptography.
Aren't biometrics (and by extension, identities) trivial to generate?
As banach mentioned the key to making direct democracy work is making it liquid as well.
If you can delegate your voting power totally or granularly on a per issue basis to other individuals--while maintaining the ability to revoke your voting power from said individuals you can get the benefits of representative democracy and direct democracy at once.
Would love someone more informed to discuss the cons of liquid or delegative democracy.
>A true Direct Democracy (DD) requires representativeless government. The concept is so new that the word representativeless does not even exist. We had to invent it
I think non-representative would suffice and it would sound better. Anyway, the project looks cool but I have a strong aversion towards direct democracy, referendums, etc. when millions/billions are involved
Of all places to be cynical, a den of code-oriented and clever people with the ability to propagate major social change shouldn't be one of them.
A commendable and inspiring effort. Cicada is bafflingly ambitious; any system that proposes a 7billion person user base is hopefully geared to fight a very, very long and arduous battle.
Good luck! I will happily root for anyone brave enough to tackle the inevitable problems of the future with an open and articulate vision. Shoot, maybe I'll even throw in a PR or two.
If we were to talk about human organizational models the way we talk about network topologies the conversation would be so much more productive. We could talk about uptime, failover, backups, consensus and other objective qualities.
No matter what form of government you support, I think the organizational model can be represented as some form of game (in the game-theory sense) that can be replicated and compared to other organizational models. For example, imagine a wide scale battle simulation where players join a team based on how the chain of command is organized. This would allow you to test centralized/decentralized/hybrid models or organization in a way that gets better over time.
My prediction is that a hybrid model would win. Instead of a pure top-down, or bottom-up model - you'd have something like a RAFT protocol organizing the squads. This way there's no general you can take out, and there's consensus among what the battle plan is.
“The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code.“
Aside from security, Luddites, equal access, hardware failures, trust issues, power shortages, and many other issues with depending on technology for gov to function...
How does anything beat guns? In theory, the U.S. armed forces could depose the government, but culture and tradition ensure that it defers to democratic institutions. In a country with a history of coups, especially coups that have deposed harmful regimes, coups are regarded in a more positive light. They are thinkable and therefore possible. In the United States, given our history, things would have to change a lot (even much more than electing an incompetent, incontinent buffoon as president) before a coup would become possible. Direct democracy would be tenuous at first, perhaps assuming more and more responsibility over time under the watch of a representative government that gradually became a caretaker bureaucracy, with the trust and respect held by representative democracy institutions gradually transferring to the direct democracy institutions.
I thank my lucky stars that this will never get off the ground. The last thing we need is another naive idealist defining the structure of our government.
Well, decision makers in current governments can't personally enforce anything either. You need a hierarchy that respects their authority. It'd also work with this system.
>Cicada is a revolutionary distributed direct democracy (DDD) platform that will unleash the true power of the people, allowing tomorrow's Founding Fathers to run an entire nation from the palm of their hand. It's powered by a radical new blockchain that's completely immune to centralization and pays you to secure it with a practical Universal Basic Income.
If the past years have shown anything then that blockchain software - like any software - needs continous development, maintaining, bug fixing, clarification of edge cases, etc. In a world where "leaders are replaced with code", where does that place the Cicada developers?
A hybrid direct-represenative sort of organization could be formed using votebots to make decisions for people who don't have time to participate, but who could review the decisions later and change represenative bots if they don't like it based on their historical performance.
I imagine this thing doesn't have a way to determine if the State is itself legitimate, or a way to achieve consensus on which State (of multiple ones that may exist in each geographic area) is the master-legislator.
It probably assumes and hardcodes the current State.
This is too complicated. If a simple thing like Bitcoin fails to be mainstream because most people don't even want to start thinking through it, imagine THIS.
Also, there will be so many room for bugs that the number of issues will make GitHub servers explode.
The underlying decision mechanism of distributed democracy is Wisdom of the crowd which means that together as a group we are much smarter than a single individual.
"The classic wisdom-of-the-crowds finding involves point estimation of a continuous quantity. At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, 800 people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight of 1198 pounds.[8] This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd's individual judgments can be modeled as a probability distribution of responses with the median centered near the true value of the quantity to be estimated."
Gee whiz... everybody's really down on democracy in this thread. Ok, so when is someone going to write a distributed app for running a one party state?
I've been advocating blockchaining democracy for a while now. At the time I even bought a ___domain for this (continuousreferendum.com, which lapsed by now). Never had the time to learn enough to do this. I'm really really glad someone did. The future is right there. Now the real hard stuff is to get governments to transition to being 'pilots' and not 'navigators'.
So about Cicada: the document quickly notes that the 'human unique identifier' is at the core of the proposal. It is claimed that it "allows us to prevent Sybil attacks and ensure everyone has a voice in the system". It promises to do this with cryptography and 'biocryptics', a word which isn't really that widely used in the research community. It seems to mostly refer to anonymous biometrics authentication systems [3][4]. In that field I can find nothing about preventing Sybil attacks.
Additionally, preventing Sybil attacks in a decentralized system, by relying on a biometric measurement that is fully under the control of an attacker seems doomed to fail. No matter how much cryptography you throw at it.
There must either be some central party designating trust in a certain (anonymous) biometric, or there needs to be a web of trust that is sufficiently connected and resistant to manipulation. A combination, with good checks and balances and distribution of power, seems to be the way to go most of the time.
[1] http://bit451.org/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728231
[3] https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-1462...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_biometrics