Re: [apsa_itp] a quiet revolution in democracy

[Michael Allan <mike@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 05:47:13AM -0400, David Bray wrote:
> Michael - you may also want to search for Group Decision Support Systems
> (GDSS) as the information systems field in the 1980's researched
> text-based democratizing systems similar in several ways to what you
> outline below. ...

I did a quick search, looking for a connection with delegate cascades,
and pyramidal meritocracies... (no luck).  Because that looks to be
the critical dependency; it all rises or falls on that.

>                Further, while I'd like whole-heartedly to see improvements
> with democracies, Peter's comments are quite true and represent large
> obstacles to the proposal: 
> 
> >People aren't political. 
> 
> Flaws include the fact that the e-democracy probably will have
> companies/lobbyists doing pyramid schemes to "buy" people's votes, just
> automated through the Internet. "Click here to earn 700 Linden dollars a
> day to spend in Second Life" ($2 USD)... or "Free access to mp3's or
> hi-res video if you align yourself with the XYZ party!" Instead of being
> an e-democracy, it will become more of an "e-market" where voters will be
> courted (duped?) like consumers in exchange for their votes. 

But secret ballots prevent that. So, if we felt that laws against vote
buying could not be enforced, then we could resort to secret ballots.
It would be just like traditional electoral system, in that
regard. (But it would be better if vote buying could be dealt with by
other means. Secret ballots have disadvantages of their own, being
harder to implement, and harder to police.)

> Second, where will people get the time to wade through all these bills?
> Automated programs ('bots') would probably emerge to do edits as proxies
> for people/corporations/lobbying groups. No one will have enough time to
> read all the laws that are proposed, so while you propose that people
> could "defer" to the judgement of others -- how will you explicitly set
> these controls (would you have to do it for each bill, again time
> constraints). Also, such deference no longer remains a democracy, but a
> sort of networked system of vassals pledging to their lords, almost like
> democracy remixed with feudalism. 

Hilarious! But seriously, I do not worry where people would find the
time.  If a hundred or so full-time legislators can manage it
(somehow), then a hundred-thousand or so part-timers would far surpass
that effort -- even by contributing, on average, just one day a
year. In fact, many of them (more than a hundred, I bet) would
actually work at it full-time. (We might have the opposite problem:
too many people taking time off from their jobs and other
responsibilities, for politics!)

> Third, an e-democracy would have profound information security
> ramifications, how do you (1) know the person voting really is that
> person, and (2) that the person's account hasn't been hijacked or
> zombified? These same security problems confront VISA, Mastercard, and
> corporate banks and have not been resolved. You could issue digital
> certificates to everyone, but in practice that's a huge headache; still
> probably would have 'phishing' for votes. 

True, security is a serious design and operational constraint.  I am
not qualified to say too much here (no direct experience in this) but
I know that many other applications face similar constraints, so we
would not have to invent that wheel.  We would use the current state
of the art. If it is not yet good enough, it probably would be, soon.
(Financial networks are among the apps with similar constraints.)

> >People are twisted. 
> 
> An e-democracy assumes that giving more decision-making power to the
> masses is a good things. But I'm not sure this tenet has been proven as
> humans, in large groups, can do some fairly nasty or violent actions. Who
> will prevent a majority from abusing (or enslaving) a minority? Recall the
> Stanford Prison Experiment and the tragic results observed there? If you
> can obtain IRB approval, you may want to run an actual field study to test
> your ideas of an e-democracy, to see if human beings behave as rationally
> as an e-democracy would require. This could contrast theory with observed
> behaviors. 
> 
> On a more basic level, will everyone vote only for their own local
> interests, and thus the good of the 'nation' is lost as laws and bills
> that only benefit largely populated area passed? With any democracy --
> electronic or no -- will enough people vote for the good of the state,
> even when this may not align with their own immediate self-interests?
> (Does this even happen now?)

Peter makes similar points, in the other threads. I will try to answer
there. It all seems to depend on the strength of the vote cascade, and
the pyramidal meritocracy.  (But I am mostly out of my depth in
this. I need to read more. And I agree too, it needs to be tested.)

> ... one last thought on wikis-like activities: Wikipedia 'shows biased
> page edits' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6947532.stm

Wikipedia is an interesting battleground. :) But biased page edits can
only occur with a centralized 'push' model of collabortation, where
contributions are pushed into a shared, central text.  The
collabortative model underlying community law-making is strictly
'pull', which makes it immune from external biases. (Participants have
their own texts, and nobody else can modify them.)

-- 
Michael Allan

http://zelea.com/

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