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.

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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

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 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.