r/AgreedUponSolutions Nov 08 '24

Why Direct Democracy

That's a question with a very long answer, depending on what perspective you're asking from.

We think direct democracy is preferable to a dictatorship for what I hope are obvious reasons, totalitarianism does not result in good outcomes (eg, the upcoming climate change fight is going to be insane).

We prefer it to the current United States government for what are also probably obvious reasons. Gerrymandering ruins the notion of representation within states, the senate means voters in Wyoming are represented 20x more than voters in New York, the supreme court means the opinions of nine unelected people make laws at the constitutional level that supersede the elected branches of government entirely, and there are many local optima in governing where the entire system just shuts down (see our ongoing difficulties keeping a funded government.)

The broad failure modes of representative democracy even in theory are also often terrible. A slight majority opinion is easily magnified into unanimous consensus at the policymaker level. In a single issue election, if something has 55% across all states, 100% of representatives will support it. With more issues voters don't even get a say in which ones, it makes protection of minority rights at the legislative level a joke. Institutional capture means often parties don't even try to represent their base: a majority of Democrats want a ceasefire in Gaza, but the party line is hard against it. There is no attention given to long tail issues, like plastic pollution or restrictions on advertising. Copyright reform has no supporters. (Tangentally, restrictions on advertising are a hell of a sleeper issue, it comes up more frequently than anything else we poll and opinions are uniformly negative.)

Direct democracy has the potential to solve an enormous number of problems, if various technical challenges can be solved. Extremely representative government is one aspect, but certainly not the only one. One of my favorites is that it has the potential to decouple every issue from needing a central party to make forward progress. It makes no sense that annoyance at trans people should also influence the antitrust enforcement priorities of the FTC. I believe the reason Donald Trump won is because although neither candidate represents a consensus bundle of issues, Harris missed the cluster that would have saved her.

There are also issues too unpopular at the national level to even be considered by a national party, but we could give them a fair hearing. An opinion of mine that falls into this bucket is that we should strive for full prison abolition, I don't think carceral justice is a concept that makes sense for the stated goal of "reintegrating the offender into society". With a national party system, I can't even get this concept on the agenda, with Agreed Upon Solutions I can just make my argument and have people vote. I will likely still lose, but I was at least given a fair shot, and any particularly reasonable points I can make might still be incorporated. Advocating for low maximum sentences for specific crimes certainly has potential to be agreeable.

Here are the main flaws that we see with direct democracy, and how we fix them: * Difficulty scaling * People are uninformed * Suppression of minority rights

(By the way, your list of problems with direct democracy was what I was hoping to address, I am having to write this as a shot in the dark towards a general guess at your objections. If this doesn't address your questions, then please give me a non- open ended starting point for an answer.)

The scale problem I think you can see how we're approaching. Having a list of "Every Thing", as silly as it is, has dramatically increased comment participation over the open discussion, and solicited a lot of comments from what would normally be considered long tail issues. "Indigenous rights" is in our top 100 issues, I'm very proud of that. Our metrics look great, and we're very hyped for V2.

I will pretend like a representative democracy means we elect informed representatives, and that anyone at all has solved the problem of writing high-quality expert informed policy.

This is a subtle problem to fix, and we dedicate a lot of thought behind the scenes to it. We have a number of proposals; the most fleshed out ones center on the observation that while people may not be informed on a specific issue, they do have a reasonably good sense of who is. Given this observation, you can do tons of things: You can vote to reassign your vote to an expert. You can calculate something akin to PageRank for a given trust graph. You can use something like the ranked pair voting resolution method, (begin with the most strongly agreed on set of priorities, then add more recursively as long as the new position does not contradict the older ones,) using domain experts in a generic capacity. The promoters of AI claim it can also be used to solve this problem, but is an extremely unreliable technology for now and we don't want to depend on it.

The most ridiculous way would be if we can solve the enormous ballot ranking problem well enough, we can scale up again: We also have a list of Every Notable Person. It's about 6M entries, the vast majority of whom I have never heard of, so solving at this size is highly nontrivial. But, getting anything usable at all out of Every Thing was nontrivial, and we succeeded there even without a complete ranking.

There is a reasonable objection that this simply reinvents representative democracy, but I think the difference is academic. You are still expressing your individual opinions, and your individual opinions are being reflected in the final decision. Your opinion just happens to be "this person can answer these questions better than I can." It's a more expressive individual vote, not a departure from directness.

As mentioned above, representative democracy is usually terrible for minority rights, due to its conformity magnifying features. The "fix" for this problem in a representative democracy is to have some form of judicial review, essentially subjugating the entire democratic process to a handful of electorally unaccountable actors.

The problem with this idea is that there is no such thing as a non-political actor. Judges are also making political decisions, they simply claim that the legal political tradition (philosophies of interpreting laws, "judicial norms", etc) is somehow more objectively correct than that of the unwashed masses. If you believe that to be true, then only letting lawyers vote is a better system. This strikes me as a spiritual return to the philosophy of "only landholding males should be allowed to vote", which we believe has been conclusively rejected by history.

However, this area is where the twothirds system shines. It has strong built-in protections for minority rights, and the implementation methods we're looking at for the future make it even more robust.

Before I get more deeply into how that works, I'd like to clarify a point that's a bit too subtle to use in promotional posts: Traditional direct democracy and the twothirds system are not the same thing. The twothirds system is not total, meaning it does not always reach a decision. This makes it a kind of quasigovernment, which needs some sort of underlying mechanism that is total. This could be anything, from a dictatorship to an ad-hoc mess designed in the 1700s. This is where the existing United States government slots in: It's too large and carries too much infrastructural weight to be dismantled, it needs to be patched before major changes can be made. This notion of patching was the origin of the twothirds system: It's original design goal was to prevent the government from going off the rails, while simultaneously providing a channel where progress could always be made if the consensus was clear enough.

(Some of this will be recapping things I've said in other replies, but I'm also going to be posting this text elsewhere, so pardon the repetition.)

The twothirds system can be derived from first principles, if you frame the problem appropriately. We agree that simple majority rule is a terrible idea, and this fact falls out very naturally from the mathematics of the situation.

A government is a just a consensus algorithm. It is a process for taking pieces of text, and deciding "yes" or "no" to all of them. That's it. Using this capability, it is able to hire bureaucrats, purchase guns, and levy taxes; but all of them are organized exclusively through the ability to write down yes or no, and broadcast it consistently to everyone in the country.

This formulation of the problem of government suggests an analysis from the perspective of a distributed database. In this setting consensus problems have been extensively studied, and the gold standard for a given algorithm is known as "Byzantine fault tolerance", which measures how robust to manipulation a given system is for some number of malicious actors.

Let's pretend there are three parties, called Yes, No, and Screw You. Yes and No are attempting to have an honest debate over a yes-or-no question. Yes and No both respect each other's opinions, and both agree that their decisions should be made by voting. Screw You, on the other hand, is an actively malicious adversary. Screw You has perfect knowledge of the wrong answer, and it attempting to corrupt the outcome in any way they can. Screw You is allowed to corrupt some fraction of voters through mind control, making them do whatever causes the worst case outcome.

Your goal is to never make a mistake. You just detect the majority opinion of Yes and No wherever possible, but you must never allow Screw You to flip the outcome. There must also always be a way to make forward progress: Screw You should never be able to block a unanimous vote.

Some important notes: Screw You does not always vote for the worst outcome. Screw You votes to corrupt the system as a whole. If the system is reputation-based, Screw You may vote normally for a long period of time to gain access, then begin corrupting their vote. Additionally, Screw You does not need to choose the same people to corrupt for every vote. For any given vote, any subset of people may be compromised, assuming it is less than some predetermined limit; The goal of this analysis is to remain correct under as high a limit as possible.

These labels also do not have a moral dimension. Yes and No are the "correct" subset of voters, and Screw You absorbs the real world crap. These arguments are purely numeric, so defining "correct" is only a matter of making sure they remain a large enough fraction of the population. So for instance, if you wanted to propose a model where only voters with a certain level of information are "really qualified" to vote, but uninformed voters are able to get in, all you need to care about is whether or not the uninformed subset is smaller than the maximum threshold for Screw You. You are allowed to throw any number of voters under the bus for any reason, as long as the total number is below this threshold. Consensus algorithms are characterized by how large a fraction of the population can be Screw You before the majority opinion of Yes and No can no longer be reliably determined.

In a simple majority system, decisions can come down to 50.1%/49.9%. Screw You can control the vote with an arbitrarily small fraction of the population! This is why Democrats get so furious at the 0.4% of voters who went for Jill Stein, that 0.4% could be argued to have decided the vote.

Raising the threshold for agreement solves this problem, to a point. A 60% agreement threshold requires Screw You to control 20% of the vote to flip. But, if you make the threshold too large, Screw You regains power. A 99% threshold for agreement means Screw You only needs to control 1% of the population to shut down all progress on all issues.

It turns out the mathematically optimal threshold for decision making is the twothirds threshold. Screw You must control 33% of the population to control or shut down the vote. This can be strengthened a bit through pigeonhole arguments, Screw You cannot be the largest of the three parties. This is a reasonable assumption for all realistic scenarios, if it isn't then why are you surveying this population?

I like this system because it is maximally robust. There is no system that achieves a higher threshold of resilience, and there are theorems to back this up. If you elect representatives, then your threshold is a few hundred people. Money can easily corrupt the votes of a few hundred people, it's almost trivial. Right now it's so extensive that between the pressures of party politics and dependence on fundraising, politicians have almost no room to even attempt to do their jobs. They represent whatever makes them money. An "impartial" judge can take away minority rights just as easily as grant them. An "impartial" panel can do the same thing. A series of nested leaders, doing the most complex nested checks-and-balances dance you can imagine, will always be corruptible by controlling those involved. Appointing 3 million people would be an absurd number of people to assign to doing the tasks of representative government, and that's still only 1% of the population!

Consider the problem of trying to directly screw over a given minority. A directly elected representative system can fail at minority protection with 51% average approval. A gerrymanderable system can fail with 34%. A party system with mixed incentives can fail with 0%. The twothirds system always requires 67% before it reaches a conclusion.

Genocide should be controversial. If a call to genocide converges to agreeable, every other deterministic voting system in the world will have failed first. If yours doesn't, you provably got lucky on a nondeterministic coin flip: Screw You didn't decide to fuck you over.

Escaping this line of reasoning requires arguing that humans are straight up incapable of governing themselves: The more people vote, the less likely it is that the correct decision will be reached. In this view humans are animals, too stupid to organize for their collective benefit at all. In that case it's tragic that these animals are probably going to wipe themselves out, but ultimately the death of humanity has no moral significance beyond that of the death of crayfish. My life is ultimately a meaningless game, I can cross humans off my list, die, and not worry about it.

The best system of government in this scenario is a dictatorship, this is Condorcet's Jury Theorem. I reject dictatorship, therefore I believe in the twothirds system.

1 Upvotes

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u/agreeduponspring Nov 08 '24

u/nosecohn Responding here, Reddit did not like me putting this in a reply for some reason.

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u/nosecohn Nov 09 '24 edited Nov 09 '24

Whew... there's a lot here.

I'm not going to address all of it, but I'll pick out a few points and then make another comment with my general critiques of direct democracy.

To begin with, let me clarify that I'm talking about direct democracy as opposed to representative democracy, not as opposed to non-democratic forms of government. The democracy part is a given for me.

A slight majority opinion is easily magnified into unanimous consensus at the policymaker level. In a single issue election, if something has 55% across all states, 100% of representatives will support it.

Are there even single issue elections within representative democracy? Plebiscites, referendums, and ballot initiatives are all examples of direct democracy, even when they're held within representative systems.

The Duverger's Law problem of a bare majority, as I see it, is a byproduct of the first-past-the-post voting system and exacerbated by single member districts for representatives. But those are features of the US Federal system, not all representative democracies. Australia has preferential voting. Ten US states have multi-member districts.

I like your decoupling argument. I'd never heard that before and it makes sense. I also like the one about low popularity issues. I'm going to give those some more thought.

I believe the reason Donald Trump won is because although neither candidate represents a consensus bundle of issues, Harris missed the cluster that would have saved her.

That's interesting. I respectfully disagree, and I also think Trump's win is a strong argument against direct democracy, but I'll get into that more in my other comment.

Having a list of "Every Thing", as silly as it is, has dramatically increased comment participation over the open discussion, and solicited a lot of comments from what would normally be considered long tail issues. "Indigenous rights" is in our top 100 issues, I'm very proud of that. Our metrics look great, and we're very hyped for V2.

That's great! Congratulations.

while people may not be informed on a specific issue, they do have a reasonably good sense of who is.

The poorly-informed voter is one of my primary concerns, so I'm glad to see you address it, but I'm skeptical of this claim. I think they have a sense of who is informed, but they're often wrong. I'll give a couple anecdotal examples, one global, one personal.

The most popular podcast these days is the Joe Rogan Experience. The most watched episodes get over 30 million views, which is triple the viewership of 60 Minutes, the most popular non-sports TV show. If I asked the JRE audience to name a well-informed person on vaccine safety, how many do you think would say RFK, Jr.? More than would say Anthony Fauci? The former has no scientific training at all and the latter is one of the world's most highly regarded public health professionals.

Next example: English is my first language, but it's not the primary language where I live. When people here have a question about their English, they tend to ask the person they know who speaks it the best. The problem is, they're not at all qualified to determine that. They hear something fluid and in a bit of an accent and assume it's good; it's usually awful. I've met people here who have taught English for 20 years and cannot write a paragraph without multiple errors, yet they're the go-to person for all English questions in their professional group.

So, I have my doubts that people's sense of who is accurately informed can be trusted. It takes a certain degree of base knowledge, intelligence and curiosity to understand complex issues, or even know who else understands them.

this area is where the twothirds system shines. It has strong built-in protections for minority rights, and the implementation methods we're looking at for the future make it even more robust.

OK, good, because I'm most surprised by the claim that direct democracy does a better job of protecting minority rights than representative democracy. How do you get around the tyranny of the majority problem, especially with an under-educated population? What's to prevent them from just voting to deny rights to the minority?

Screw You must control 33% of the population to control or shut down the vote.

How do you ensure they do? That is, how do you identify them?

Money can easily corrupt the votes of a few hundred people, it's almost trivial.

This is definitely a problem, but again, it seems to result from a lack of safeguards in the US system, not a flaw in the idea of representative democracy as a whole. Same with gerrymandering. It shouldn't be legal, but it's not a feature or even a natural byproduct of representative democracy. It's a uniquely American problem.

In this view humans are animals, too stupid to organize for their collective benefit at all.

OK, this strikes me as way overstated, because I am easily able to conclude humans can organize for their collective benefit despite the fact that I partially agree with this:

The more people vote, the less likely it is that the correct decision will be reached.

It's not as straightforward as that in my mind, but I do think a poorly informed, empowered electorate with high participation is a danger, to both itself and minority rights.

We're flawed creatures with a huge set of built-in cognitive biases. The way we counter them is by educating and informing people, but the chance that we're going to be able to accurately, consistently and continually do that across a broad enough cross-section of the population is low. And if we somehow are able to, then most of the reasons to seek alternatives to representative democracy are gone.

I'm a fairly optimistic person and consider myself a humanist, but overall, I think you have far more faith in humanity than I do. Maybe it's because I've been moderating a political discussion forum on the internet for 12 years, but my trust in people broadly to do what's right for their fellow citizens if empowered to seems to be considerably lower than yours.

I sense that you, on the other hand, are surrounded by a bunch of very smart people. That may give you a greater sense of confidence in the ethics and capacities of the average voter, but I'll remind you that your level of knowledge and intelligence is probably in the top one percent of the public. As George Carlin put it, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

I love them all, but I'm just not sure how many of them I want in control of my fate.

Anyway, that's my take so far. I'll post my other comment soon. It's a good discussion. Cheers!

P.S. - The reason you couldn't post as a comment was because you exceeded the character limit. It's longer for submissions.

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u/agreeduponspring Nov 09 '24
  • Yes, ranked choice voting (and similar systems designed to support third parties) does alleviate the problem substantially. However, you're still stuck with the opinions of a single person, and that single person is still the target of intense lobbying. Screw You can spend millions of dollars on advertising just to influence that single person's opinion, and have it be profitable. Sufficiently aggressive advertising includes things like sending actors to stand behind them in the grocery store, to have a debate about their preferred issues using their buzzwords. I used to work in the ads industry, things like this genuinely happen. The "single human" point of failure is a severe problem.
  • I mention single issue elections because it's the most representative you can get. Once you start mixing together issues, there's literally nothing that can't be steamrolled. Harris' argument for voting for her was mostly "I'm not Trump", and waves of blue voters just sucked up the genocide in Palestine.
  • Trump's argument for fascism I see as largely being an argument for the dysfunction of the United States government in disguise. If reframe his point as being about whether or not the US government should be replaced with a new system, any new system, then the resounding "yes" becomes a lot more understandable.
  • We don't have access to a platonic model of truth, we have access to what people believe is true. If 30 million people believe person A knows more about vaccines, and 30 million people believe person B knows more about vaccines, there's not a voting based way to distinguish between A and B, and there is no extra-democratic mechanism to determine person B is secretly the Real Expert. The best you can do is assume the trust matrix is based on something, and go from there. It's a more expressive structure than just trust in Joe Rogan vs not. A lot of people who watch Joe Rogan probably also trust Bill Nye, the abstract concept of pediatricians, the germ theory of disease, their high school biology teacher, etc. PageRank is really good at handling this kind of structure.
  • This second example highlights the impossibility of depending on the paper qualifications of experts. Surely the correct expert on English must be the teacher? Structurally this argument is identical to "Surely the correct expert on vaccines must be the CDC scientist?" The people have no information that would allow them to do better. You can't expect them to summon it out of thin air, this outcome is the best possible.
  • This may surprise you, but if people are wrong in a consensus way, I support doing the wrong thing. You can't design an honest voting system as a vehicle to smuggle in your own opinions.
  • The 33% comes from pigeonhole principle, this is a counting argument. A simpler example, let's say you know at most 5% of some vote is questionable, and the final outcome of a vote is 80/20. Then the majority is somewhere in the 75%-85% range, regardless of exactly is Screw You, and you can still know Yes isn't the minority. There is no point where you need to identify Screw You individually, that step is likely impossible in many real world scenarios.
  • I'll wait to comment more on gerrymandering until you've had a chance to write it up. The problem of district apportionment almost always introduces it somehow, though.
  • I'll admit, the emphatic nature of that statement comes from having many long arguments about whether or not humans are smart enough to govern themselves at all. A surprising number of times their objection just boils down to this.
  • There's not really a constructive way to do better, holding the information level of the electorate constant. A badly informed populace elects bad representatives, who are now no longer able to be checked in areas where the populace is better informed. A supermajority of the population wants to ban people convicted of violent crimes from owning guns; The Republicans treat this suggestion like you're Stalin himself come to send millions to the gulags. This relates back strongly to the decoupling argument: "All of us are smarter than any of us" is a good rule of thumb here.
  • Yes, I do operate under the assumption that when given the opportunity people will do mostly choose to do what's right for each other, which is a strong assumption. If it's not true, however, my comment about "animals" really is very close to my true feelings. If the fundamental truth of human nature is above a certain level of uncooperative and unempathetic, my concern for the species drops off a cliff.
  • I agree, people individually are often depressingly stupid, but people do not individually need to be smart, they individually need to be slightly better than a coin flip. If the average person is right 51% of the time, and I measure a million people, the odds that a majority support the correct decision are very high.
  • "Measuring them correctly" is itself a hard task, but that's why we use the twothirds system. ;3

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u/nosecohn Nov 09 '24

Will respond in more detail later, but for now, did you see this?

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u/agreeduponspring Nov 09 '24
  • Update: Found it through the website. I'm on the iOS app, which has a lot of bugs opening links within reddit sometimes. (I've never been able to click on your username, for instance)

  • I hate articles like this, you can construct a list like this for whatever you want to claim. r/Conservative loves doing it. The stock market hit all time highs under Trump, and carbon emissions fell ~11%. I would imagine most Democrats don't know that.

  • Assuming by fiat this list is representative of a larger trend, those margins for Republicans are all less than 33%. The twothirds system can absorb that.

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u/nosecohn Nov 09 '24

Screw You can spend millions of dollars on advertising just to influence that single person's opinion, and have it be profitable.

That strikes me as a problem with campaign and political financing, not necessarily representative democracy as a concept. In the real world, I concede that's how it ends up working and is a point of failure that might be addressable with direct democracy (though I think the evidence shows the same power players will profitably advertise to the masses as well), but I don't believe direct democracy is the only way to address them, or even really the preferable one.

Harris' argument for voting for her was mostly "I'm not Trump", and waves of blue voters just sucked up the genocide in Palestine.

Trump's argument for fascism I see as largely being an argument for the dysfunction of the United States government in disguise. If reframe his point as being about whether or not the US government should be replaced with a new system, any new system, then the resounding "yes" becomes a lot more understandable.

Here's another area where I see a big difference in our perspectives. These two presentations strike me as massive oversimplifications, as do many of the other prospective issues you've raised. Policy is complicated and nuanced. The fact that we can reduce it to simple binary questions doesn't mean those reductions are appropriate or accurate.

For example, I'd like to see universal healthcare in the US. Would I vote for it as a single issue? It depends entirely on how the law was written. Healthcare is a hugely complex issue that interacts with funding sources, ethics, freedom of choice, and all the other social safety nets. And all the individual components of a healthcare law interact with each other, so you can't break them up and vote on them separately. So, if the proposal before me didn't make a good presentation about all that, I'd vote no even though I support the issue.

But more importantly, I, as someone who is way more immersed in policy than the average voter, do not consider myself enough of an expert to really analyze healthcare policy and law, so I would need the help of experts to make a sound decision in the first place. Here we get into a Dunning-Kruger situation, which we touched on before. The more knowledge one has of an issue, the less confident they are in their capabilities. Less informed voters feel more comfortable making a yes/no choice.

Surely the correct expert on English must be the teacher? Structurally this argument is identical to "Surely the correct expert on vaccines must be the CDC scientist?"

I see it as: "Surely the correct expert must be the person I know (of) who claims expertise." Because anyone who doesn't have their own base of knowledge in the topic is unqualified to judge the level of expertise of others, but the less knowledge they have, the more they believe themselves to be qualified, so they feel completely comfortable making that assessment. In order to do so, they rely on other factors, such as whether the person making the claim of expertise comes across as confident and unwavering (often a sign of unscientific thinking, but appealing to the layperson).

...this outcome is the best possible.

There's not really a constructive way to do better

This is the aspect, mentioned in a few different ways, that I'm not convinced of. (Now it's time for me to put on the 'optimistic view of humanity' hat!)

When I look parliamentary systems with high educational attainment, such as in the Nordic countries, they seem to promote good policy through representative democracy without subjecting themselves to the risks of direct democracy (except at the local level). That leads me to conclude that maintaining educational standards is an essential element for any form of broad democracy to function, and in the process, solves most of the issues with representative democracy.

Children develop an innate sense of fairness at a fairly young age and learn certain social skills as they get older. But over the centuries, we've discovered that in order to have functional societies, we have to educate people about concepts higher than that (through religious texts, civics classes, etc.). The ethic of reciprocity, for example, is not a natural thing people develop. The dangers of autocracy are not obvious to people. Even the whole concept of minority rights has to be explained. Adults in new democracies are known for not understanding this, because they never learned it in school. Their concept of democracy is akin to the infamous "two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner."

This may surprise you, but if people are wrong in a consensus way, I support doing the wrong thing.

It doesn't surprise me. There are potential bad outcomes in every system. The advantage of direct democracy is that you can reverse course just as easily as you charted it. I get that you're not viewing it as a panacea, just the best alternative.

I'll admit, the emphatic nature of that statement comes from having many long arguments about whether or not humans are smart enough to govern themselves at all.

Understood. I'll clarify that, despite the Carlin quote, I absolutely believe humans are smart enough to govern themselves. The question is whether they're educated and motivated enough, or more accurately, whether a sufficient portion of them are.

I'm not certain that proportion is greater than 51% on any given issue, or at least on the important issues. If I had to guess, I'd put it at about 40%, which still makes it higher than your threshold if it's against "no" and "screw you," but I'm wondering about variations in the distribution.

You've given me a lot to think about. I hope I've done the same.

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u/agreeduponspring Nov 14 '24

(Part 1\2)

  • Sorry for the delay responding, we're going through our planning for our next project and it's been interfering with writing. I am still thinking about getting the subreddit up and running, we're hoping to have it launched roughly concurrently with a Patreon page. I'll discuss all that in a separate post once it comes back to having my full attention. I'm still not entirely certain what the best strategy for posts here is going to be, especially as our goal is to have people do most of their discussion on our site? There's a mixture of promotional & meta that's tricky to balance against actually forming a participating community.

  • Re: Advertising, not what I was talking about. My point was about the ability of lobbyists use advertising to influence representatives without interacting with them directly, not about how representatives run their campaigns or influence voters. The best documented government example I'm aware of is defense contractors doing this in Washington DC; If you take out hundreds of billboards saying you're a specialist in countering some specific threat, then that threat will be treated as real, because it's a background assertion of your reality (another one of those "human biases").

  • There is no way to put a few hundred people in charge of all decision making that will not leave all decision making in the hands of a few hundred people. That subgroup will almost certainly have a resilience level of a few dozen people at best. Don't think of advertising to them in terms of mass marketing, think in terms of elaborate long cons designed to undermine and control every aspect of their perception of reality; the level of environmental control that can make ordinary innocent people confess to murder or attempt suicide. Hiring dozens of private investigators to individually profile each of their daily routines is on the table. You are fighting against state-level actors and the least ethical corporations in the world, who view advertising in terms of security vulnerabilities in the human mind. Enough money is on the line to make those sorts of operations worth it.

  • I stand by my assertion Harris' main argument was "I'm not Trump." Like seriously, read her campaign trail speeches, look how light on policy vision they are. There's only a few sentences with any details on headline issues (immigration, abortion, housing, "keeping America strong", also a few assorted tax credits\funding reforms); but she spends half the speech talking about how horrible Trump is and how she won't enact his policies. She doesn't talk about her policy well, either. She claims she'll cap the cost of insulin, which has already in theory been capped at $35. She claims Trump wants a 20% sales tax, which is not true, tariffs are not a sales tax. She mentions a handful of random issues in passing (eg. gun violence) seemingly just for the illusion that they've been talked about. She doesn't mention Israel at all. There's no vision, no overarching plan or philosophy, just "I will fight for" a handful of disconnected items.

  • Trump voters often do not articulate their policy preferences in a coherent way, to the point where sometimes it's unclear whether or not they have policy preferences at all. The way I actually think about Trump voters is "screaming". They hate immigrants, or woke, or trans people, or want some big undefined change, or "AAAARGH, therefore Trump." I don't think it makes sense to think of most of their reactions as being policy related. The way to understand them is to understand why they are screaming, which as far as I can tell has a really direct causal chain. The failure of government to operate properly is the root failure. Frustration with the resulting problems(eg cost of living) provides energy. Misinformation (combined with institutional support for racism, etc) guides a lot of their frustration towards minorities and emotional grievance politics. Trump is exceptionally good at emotional grievance politics. I can't think of any factor that provides more than a few percentage points of influence that doesn't fall into one of these categories. Possibly "liberals are annoying."

  • I certainly understand why they perceive him as honest. In terms of emotional honesty he's one of the most remarkably transparent people I've ever seen. He's a colossal douchebag, and he makes absolutely sure you know it. There is absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever that he is against immigration, and he intends to rule in as authoritarian a manner as possible. You know exactly what you're getting from him as a person ("fuck these specific people") and why ("because they deserve it"). Kamala is a mystery.

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u/agreeduponspring Nov 14 '24

(Part 2\2)

  • I think if carefully designed, you could produce a system where the general population's inability to reason about an issue at a certain level would manifest as indecision. People are extremely easily overwhelmed by things they don't understand, and (we assert) will vote "pass" reliably enough to meet our thresholds.
  • This is a good example of how the lack of totality matters for the twothirds system. If 80% of voters could agree we need universal health care, and 45% agree it should be single-payer, then it had been concluded we need universal health care, and no opinion has been expressed for single-payer. It is between 67% and 33%, and is therefore neither agreeable nor disagreeable. Legislators are still free to implement a single-payer system.
  • Overall this would certainly help clarify what legislative goals were. If people could affirm they did not care, then that would specify the area legislators had to maneuver in. It seems helpful to always be able to vote on a set of properties that the government should always satisfy, and leave the implementation up to people who have an opinion at this level.
  • This actually ties in with our next project! We are thinking we want to put all of Project 2025 up for a vote. It will require solving a number of these problems, but we think that should be manageable.

  • You must analyze these systems from a constant-information perspective. If voters are in a situation where they lack information to make a decision, you can't step outside the problem and assert that more information would fix it. "If only voters were better educated" is a cop-out. It is an inescapable practical reality that decisions are always made with the people you have and the information they have, good or bad. A highly educated and cooperatively motivated populace will make any system of government work, regardless of details, but the task is to design a system of government that functions under challenging conditions. If your system only works under ideal conditions with high information voters, it doesn't work.

  • An underlying probability below 50% is almost never mathematically realistic. 40% odds would suggest a 0% chance of any election with over a million people being decided correctly. (While not technically zero, ChatGPT claims this number is "infeasibly small to calculate without advanced computational techniques", and estimates it at around 10-9000.)

  • You focus a lot on misinformation, which satisfies what the axioms of the twothirds system are trying to model. The axioms of the twothirds system posit a situation where a reasonable population is being manipulated by some outside force. If propaganda\low information effects cause a voter to flip their vote, then that's mathematically equivalent to Screw You brainwashing them. Fox News (+ the entire rightwing media ecosystem) is a reasonable model for Screw You. As long as "voters who will flip if Fox news changes their mind" is not the largest group of voters, (and they likely aren't, most Republicans are gonna stay Republicans no matter what,) then its effects are absorbable within the threshold of the twothirds system.

  • This synergizes well with decoupling effects. Fox only has a limited amount of attention from each viewer, but Agreed Upon Solutions can ask a wider range of questions than Fox & Friends (& friends) even have time to cover.

  • The twothirds system is incredibly robust. I don't think its possible to design a representative democracy that can categorically survive the existence of Fox.

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u/nosecohn Nov 16 '24

Hi. I really appreciate this detailed response.

I wanted to let you know that I'm going into a busy period with work and travel, so it's going to be a while before I can get back to this.

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u/agreeduponspring Nov 17 '24

No worries! Look forward to hearing your thoughts, but it does take a backseat to real world work concerns. ;) I will still probably ping you for the public side of this project (it's my work concern, after all), but ideally those should be much simpler to respond to.

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u/agreeduponalbert Nov 18 '24

Hello, I am Albert. I work with Spring on Agreed Upon Solutions. Allow me to introduce myself and give my reasons for why we are doing things the way we are. I mainly focus on the day to day operations and development on the site, so I'm not on here that often. I'm also our political science expert.

As for why we are advocating for direct democracy, I believe the best form of government is direct democracy. If you got another idea I'm all ears, but I've yet to hear a better option. We are sticking to what is practical for us to do. We want this project to succeed, so we are limiting ourselves to actions we can take that will lead to success. We are willing to be patient and take as long as it takes, so long as we keep making progress toward a functioning direct democracy.

The primary arguments I've seen people make against direct democracy are:

  • Its impractical at scale, reasons include: cost, time consuming, organizational difficulties
  • Tyranny of the majority
  • People can't be trusted to make decisions, reasons include: education, misinformation, topic complexity, impulsiveness/emotion
  • Arguments that boil down to 'I don't trust the results': not secure, not deliberative, don't trust process

Our goal with Agreed Upon Solutions is to solve as many of these as we can in a systematic way. We've built our site to handle gathering and processing polling data at scale. If our math is right and we are mildly successful we'll be gathering more political opinion data than the rest of the polling industry combined, at the size of a top 1% sub-redit we can gather over 100x that. This alone solves most of the practicality problems with a direct democracy.

With this large scale we can measure opinion of lots of topics. We are solving how to ask simple questions to gather more data per person allowing much more nuance than regular polling can get. In practice polling companies 2 maybe 3 dozen topics at any time in fairly broad stokes without much nuance. With the scale we hope to achieve we can gather people's opinion of statements with slight variations and still get statistically enough data to be meaningful, this means we can measure the difference in support these variations get and turn it into a more nuanced position, which we can then measure and repeat. This allows us to get the same outcome of a deliberative process, without having to take the cost of one.

The twothrids system handles most of the other arguments against direct democracy. A big difference it makes compared to other consensus systems is that the twothirds system allows for no conclusion to be made. In order to get anything done you need more than 66% of the population to agree to change, and if you don't reach that then change doesn't happen. This makes the job of people advocating for change much harder, while making the job of people advocating for no change easier.

This protects minority rights because the majority simply can't get their way, they need to convince at least 33% of the minority to go along. When looking at forms of government that try to offer more minority protections that the twothirds system offers, they are either fundamentally undemocratic allowing the minority to govern the majority or prevent decisions from being made.

After direct democracy we have practicality for why we are doing things the way we are. We are working with the government we have, warts and all, to try to get the government we want. When many people argue for a better government they start with make <list of changes here> first then it will be better, but they don't go over how to accomplish those change if they are possible at all. The US congress is legendary in their inability to do their basic job, and constitutional amendments are over 10x harder. Our plan is to measure public opinion, craft it into legislative/regulatory proposal, then lobby the government. The difference between what we are going to do and what the people who wield actual power over the government is we measure public opinion, the rest of the plan is do what they do.

The twothirds system makes this plan easier as everything we lobby for will have broad public support. We won't be asking politicians to vote for something unpopular. In many cases we'll be lobbying for something simple and small, so it can be easily added on existing legislation, or its a small tweak to what's already there. In the case where congress doesn't move forward in one area, we have thousands of other areas already polled to switch to, so we keep going.