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Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

github.com

31–40 of 140 posts

Re: Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

#31
post #12

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 Switzerlan…

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.

Re: Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

#35

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?

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, whe…

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.

Re: Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

#36
post #12

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 Switzerlan…

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.

Re: Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

#37
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.

Re: Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

#38
post #12

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 Switzerlan…

You can always give veto power to direct vote, and keep the government organized as usual.

Re: Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

#39

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?

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.

Re: Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

#40
post #12

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 Switzerlan…

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 author…

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?

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