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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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal income is not a libertarian idea, it's socialist. Block chains are a technology, nothing more, nothing less. Big banks are using them and they have nothing to do with libertarianism. Direct democracy is orthogonal to libertarianism. Structure of government is independent of desired role of government. Calls for direct democracy have surged from liberals in the US after the second wrath of the electoral coll…

Universal income as a replacement for all current Government social support functions is an idea that came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role in social support, and forcing people to take control of their own lives. Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently p…

Nearly all of the articles supporting basic income have nothing about repealing other social programs. If it did start as libertarian it has definitely been hijacked by socialists to increase government entitlements rather than optimize them.

"blockchain" is not the same thing as decentralized currency. Don't conflate the two. The block chain just enables decentralized currency.

Also, block chains don't prevent a government from seeing what you are doing or levying taxes against you. Pseudononymous currency is only one of the interesting things you can do with block chains.

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

#132
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the same when with 1 million people in a small area. You can't break San Jose into separate democracies.

Given globalism, many cultures with clashing political beliefs tend to end up as residents of the same countries, states, counties, cities, even individual ridings. Representative democracy was never designed for this use-case. Countries—or at least city-states—used to have pretty uniform cultures overall. So, a much bigger bullet to bite: if we want representative democracy to continue to function under global-freed…

>When most everyone in a place is from one culture, it's much simpler for everyone in that place to agree on what they want;

What happens when those communities want oppressive/discriminatory regulations (e.g. those who want sharia law or only white people)? Are you okay with them doing that?

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

#133

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. 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..." Are you just interested in making arguments for arguments' sake? Besides that, all of your comments are good examples about why direct democracy is not a always a good idea - because most people don't have enough time/desire to think issues through, and yet they are willing to be adamant about t…

So, let's trust a few who are even more distracted because of demands on their time and brain power.

Arguing for 500 congressman with all the power is arguing for all the "Research Institutes" which write the laws for them.

How many years would it have taken if we had forced those 500 to write just 2300 page ACA/Obamacare?

> why direct democracy is not a always a good idea

Always? When did I say always? I specifically said it had least things working against it compared to other methods. You could have second coming of Christ and these lands will be blessed again in his kingdom, but we are discussing state of affairs till that happens, aren't we?

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

#134

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. 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…

Are you waiting to bet that current President can be "educated" to change his views because he has intellectual curiosity? He is representative democracy in action, isn't he?

Are you willing to say that you support the President, because he is result of representative democracy?

>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.

Is that "something within" a requirement for our elected representatives? If not, aren't they just as equally susceptible to the same bubble think?

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can have gun rights and abortion rights. You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration. You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue. You can have higher taxes but lower regulations. You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending. You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code. Well, you can. But will that really happen? Especiall…

See Prop 8 where the Mormon church and other groups predominately not located in California lobbied hard (and won). The authors are proposing that for everything? Say good bye to civil rights.

I am glad we used "oligarchic dictatorship" to overcome it. Phew. That was a close one, wasn't it?

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

#136
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given globalism, many cultures with clashing political beliefs tend to end up as residents of the same countries, states, counties, cities, even individual ridings. Representative democracy was never designed for this use-case. Countries—or at least city-states—used to have pretty uniform cultures overall. So, a much bigger bullet to bite: if we want representative democracy to continue to function under global-freed…

>When most everyone in a place is from one culture, it's much simpler for everyone in that place to agree on what they want; What happens when those communities want oppressive/discriminatory regulations (e.g. those who want sharia law or only white people)? Are you okay with them doing that?

I'm not going full-blown Archipelago (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...) here. I'm not suggesting that these communities should be like the city-states of old, fully empowered to make local law that "works for them" (however awful) without national law prevailing over it. You can't make a municipal bylaw banning white people from your city; municipal bylaws do not work that way.

More generally, things like human rights are still properly built up and decided by the metaethical process of culture clash, rather than something subjective to any individual culture. Humans are humans before they're members of any individual culture, after all, and there is definitely a core set of things all humans need, whether a given culture believes they do or not. It's in our best interests to keep cultures with different ethics interacting, such that the conversation on such subjects doesn't miss out on anyone's viewpoint.

And I'm also not suggesting that people who are persecuted by the social mores of their culture shouldn't be able to leave their culture—renounce it—and join some other culture. Other countries might not feel strongly on this point, but America was, in fact, founded on immigration of what Sharia law would call "apostates": people fleeing and renouncing cultures that they had irreconcilable differences with. In fact, I'm surprised that America has no specific enshrined protection for apostates, such that violence committed in the name of cultural apostasy would be considered a hate-crime. (I guess it's harder to recognize cultural violence than racial violence, because both the attacker and the victim are of the same race, and the victim hasn't always made any formal renunciation of their origin culture. But that doesn't mean it isn't just as frequent.)

Instead, what I'm specifically talking about here is using intentional communities/culture ghettos to make (proportional, but maybe also FttP?) representative democracy work better. Basically, to eliminate gerrymandering by making ridings into "natural kinds", where it's clear where the boundaries of a riding are. One culture-ghetto = one riding.

If a culture-ghetto has a large enough population, you wouldn't split it to give it multiple representatives, because that would reintroduce the potential for gerrymandering; instead, you'd just either have a riding elect multiple representatives proportional to its size (presumably using positional-choice voting or somesuch); or you'd give have it elect a single representative, but give that representative votes in the House proportional to the size of their constituency.

Consider that, right now, we have the "seeds of" policies like Sharia or white-separatism within every community, because every community has some people who would prefer those things. Every representative has to consider how much their community cares about these issues—and they might even play one side against the other, favoring a minority position if they'll gain more votes from that minority than they'll lose in the rest of their riding. And, besides that, a representative can just end up mistaken about how much their constituency cares about an issue. Or paid off by lobbyists to care about the issue, and then justify caring by pointing to the minority who does. All of these effects mean that we can actually end up with quite a few representatives who are in favor of these minority viewpoints.

Culture-ghettos change this. Everyone from a given culture Foo, within a regional catchment area, will end up living in the same place—and so the same riding. If the Foos (and only the Foos) are in favor of some weird policy Bar, then it'll be very clear to anyone with eyes that the representative of the Foo riding should be supporting Bar (and there's probably political corruption involved if they aren't), and that the representatives of the non-Foo ridings shouldn't be supporting Bar (and there's probably political corruption involved if they are.) You can quickly do a 100-person sample of beliefs of a riding, compare it to the platform of the representative, and use the correlation as a measure of how well they're serving their constituency. Obviously, this makes corruption way, way harder. But it also makes minority positions obviously so. If only the Foo riding like Bar, then only one representative in the House will be voting for Bar.

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Note how this seems actually kind of scary: what if the riding's minority is something like "LGBT people"—probably what you'd see from the core of San Francisco after ghetto-annealing took place. How do ideas like equal rights for gay or trans people bubble up into federal law if minority viewpoints are suppressed? But, note, this is what a House of Commons is supposed to look like; suppressing minorities is what it does by design, by having its members vote blindly for their constituents' beliefs (coherently extrapolated using statesmanship), rather than voting their own conscience.

Thankfully, the complete system is not just the House. The Senate is supposed to be where the people voting their conscience reside, and that's where things like amendments grant new rights come from: Senators recognizing and empathizing with the plight of minorities that have nothing to do with them other than sharing their society.

Right now, the House is just a Senate with very short terms. It's so vague what Congressmen are representing that they're allowed to "play Senator", expressing opinions nearly nobody in their constituency actually has, with little repercussion. With the House this way, the Senate just seems redundant. But, given a properly-functioning House, the Senate is a very important counterbalance: it applies a more technocratic eye to the House's inherently short-term populist moods.

Half the problem of American politics comes down to a system originally designed to play these two forces (short-term populism and long-term political-science debate) against one another, tilting over because one of the two forces is not in play. If the House is busy pretending to be a Senate, the force of populism has no say in legislature. This frustrates the people, and so you get reactive populism inserted wherever it will fit, like the Executive or the Judiciary.

If every Congressman thinks themselves a statesman rather than a proxy for the beliefs of you-and-yours, no Congressman will make law that serves your needs. So, a President ends up elected based on their seeming sameness to their electorate, in the hopes that maybe they can represent their needs when Congress can't; and everyone from local judges to supreme-court justices attempt to rework the law set by Congress in their own hands by pursuing trials only for precedents they want set to create overriding case law they can believe in. The horse is lamed and limping, and a functioning Congress making functional law is the broken leg.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

Are you waiting to bet that current President can be "educated" to change his views because he has intellectual curiosity? He is representative democracy in action, isn't he? Are you willing to say that you support the President, because he is result of representative democracy? >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 dire…

What I'm suggesting is that if big business and mass media can can effectively control the population, it doesn't matter if they have to control 500 or 500,000,000.

I'm not suggesting we wait for elected representatives to get better, a more direct form of democracy would be preferable, but there needs to be a shift in the way we engage with information and debate before that will make a positive difference. In other words, the priority should be sorting out the news media first.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you waiting to bet that current President can be "educated" to change his views because he has intellectual curiosity? He is representative democracy in action, isn't he? Are you willing to say that you support the President, because he is result of representative democracy? >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 dire…

What I'm suggesting is that if big business and mass media can can effectively control the population, it doesn't matter if they have to control 500 or 500,000,000. I'm not suggesting we wait for elected representatives to get better, a more direct form of democracy would be preferable, but there needs to be a shift in the way we engage with information and debate before that will make a positive difference. In other…

>there needs to be a shift in the way we engage with information and debate before that will make a positive difference.

What do you think is going on while, as you suggest, entire population of the country updates its capability to deal with information presented? Are we not being influenced?

Is that an achievable goal? Why in a highly educated, highly liberal, highly resourceful society like USA we still lack this capability? Is it because at the end of the day we are emotional beings, not rational?

>What I'm suggesting is that if big business and mass media can can effectively control the population, it doesn't matter if they have to control 500 or 500,000,000.

They would try to control as many as they could for their benefit. Do you think we should make it easy for them by asking them to influence 500 or should we band together and use our numbers as a deterrent to mass influence?

"If they can effectively control...", but you are assuming it to be foregone conclusion. I think the battle is still raging on and more people we have on our side that they must influence the better, instead of just 500.

>In other words, the priority should be sorting out the news media first.

Will it ever be completed sorted out to be fair all the time, to all the parties?

I believe we have created this current phenomenal prosperity, not by assuming people doing right thing all the time, but despite there being bad elements. Hence, I appreciate what we have much more.

Anytime I hear, "and, over here all of us do the right thing.", I bet against that solution being successful.

If there is one thing that I agree with bible is that humanity is fallen. We must work with that assumption as we design or evaluate solutions.

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

#139
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must think us Libertarians get insanely promoted and upvoted on HN or something. The truth is no where near that.

I see a lot more libertarian ideology appear on the front page than anything else, politics-wise, even if there's reasonable arguments in the comments. From blockchains to direct democracy to universal income, and a while back, an incredible amount of writings on property rights for some reason.

As much as I can see those topics as being enablers of Libertarian ideals or as being "libertarian"-themed, I don't think the majority of their proponents on HN promote them for those reasons.

I must say, I did miss the discussions/writings on property rights. Would have been interesting, as it's one of the two fundamental tenets of Libertarianism.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm suggesting is that if big business and mass media can can effectively control the population, it doesn't matter if they have to control 500 or 500,000,000. I'm not suggesting we wait for elected representatives to get better, a more direct form of democracy would be preferable, but there needs to be a shift in the way we engage with information and debate before that will make a positive difference. In other…

>there needs to be a shift in the way we engage with information and debate before that will make a positive difference. What do you think is going on while, as you suggest, entire population of the country updates its capability to deal with information presented? Are we not being influenced? Is that an achievable goal? Why in a highly educated, highly liberal, highly resourceful society like USA we still lack this…

> "Is that an achievable goal? Why in a highly educated, highly liberal, highly resourceful society like USA we still lack this capability? Is it because at the end of the day we are emotional beings, not rational?"

Let me put it another way. If we started using direct democracy tomorrow, which areas of policy do you feel informed enough to make policy decisions on? The economy? Foreign policy? Education? Healthcare? The military? Any others?

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