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Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

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

#101

Post by ZenoArrow »

AmIFirstToThink wrote: post #78
skummetmaelk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. It's harder to bribe all Joes. 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…

>> 1. It's harder to bribe all Joes. >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 t…

> "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.

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

#102

Post by anigbrowl »

erispoe wrote: 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…

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.

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

#103

Post by anigbrowl »

reitanqild wrote: post #99
vertex-four wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primarily because HN is very libertarian-leaning, and has a lot of people who do not understand people or societies as a result.

I'm not sure if these idea is very libertian though. Also really not sure about HN and libertarianism. HN seems to be more interested in (Scandinavian style) socialism IMO.

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 :)

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

#104

Post by anigbrowl »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #85
erispoe wrote: 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…

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.

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

#105

Post by goodroot »

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.

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

#106

Post by ZenoArrow »

Spivak wrote: post #87
manigandham wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. 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.

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

#109

Post by bb611 »

clarkevans wrote: post #19

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…

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.

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

#110

Post by imron »

erispoe wrote: 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…

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael...
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