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A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

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Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#131

Post by kmonsen »

bilbo0s wrote: post #67
forinti wrote: post #66

The greeks had two institutions we could use: ostracism and lottery. We should be able to vote on those we want out of politics and the most voted would have to seat it out. And a small portion of representatives should be chosen by lottery. Maybe 5% or 10%. These representatives, obviously, would not have to answer to their sponsors.

Those were always pretty interesting ideas to me, and I always used to wonder why the Founders did not replicate those facets of the Athenian Republic? It would solve a lot of our problems today.

The founders wanted a republic governed by rich landowners. Preferably white and wasp.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#132

Post by smallnamespace »

jackpirate wrote: post #123
crazygringo wrote: post #9

It's clever, but it doesn't solve the problem. Because the problem isn't with strong preferences -- it's with extreme preferences. If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on B-F. The problem with politics today isn't that people are si…

in a two-party election, we're often only given options A and G, or maybe B and F, but rarely C through E. This is the exact opposite of what economic theory predicts and my (admittedly biased) personal observations. Consider for example Hoetelling's Law, which states that competitors naturally tend to become as similar as possible in order to extract as much value from the competition as possible: https://www.uh.edu…

That only applies when there isn't a direct payoff from being against the other side ... which is exactly what the primary process selects for.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#133

Post by mindslight »

This approach is the direct opposite of what we need societally, which is less of the feeling of "throwing your vote away" from voting a strong preference, as in Instant Runoff.

Political division is a symptom, not the root problem. It is being driven by people already being made to cede to the "center", where "center" really means authoritarian warmongering surveillance as pushed by the press. Discouraging "zealotry" is just quashing dissent even harder.

Left and Right are merely two different manners of reasoning (inductive versus deductive, open world versus closed world, etc). Reacting against the totalitarianism, people try to escape in whichever direction they tend to think in. Parties then herd them into blaming the "other side" by focusing on the most outlandish of that groups's conclusions, which of course are totally alien.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#134

Post by TuringTest »

crazygringo wrote: post #9

It's clever, but it doesn't solve the problem. Because the problem isn't with strong preferences -- it's with extreme preferences. If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on B-F. The problem with politics today isn't that people are si…

Actually, I can see how this process actually solves the problem of extreme preferences, and does it in favor of those minorities who have the most to gain.

Suppose I belong to minority group X (say people with a rare disease, LGBT, immigrants...) whose life will literally change by approving or rejecting a bill.

On the other side, a similarly sized group Y strongly opposes the first group out of first principles from their ideology (reducing taxes, sanctity of heterosexual marriage, keeping the country "pure"). Usually this group will have strong opinions against several of those social issues, but none of them will really affect their lives directly. So, their votes will be divided among several issues.

Therefore, the votes of a small group will decide the outcome in their benefit on those issues that strongly affect them, unless:

1) an equal opposing group has the same extreme incentives (and in that case, the opinion of the overall population will decide), or

2) the opposing group is much larger than the small group.

I'd say that, in both cases, it is reasonable to think that the system is working as it should.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#135

Post by nradov »

greggyb wrote: post #89
dev_dull wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Increasingly partisan news media made possible by more fragmented media (first cable, then the Internet) Isn’t the entire mainstream media owned by only like 6 corporations[1]? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/these-6...

There used to be literally three channels. We've doubled!

Well 4 if you count PBS.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#136

Post by breuleux »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #113
breuleux wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I'm aware. I'm arguing for universal lottery, and I think it would work.

Bribery would be more rampant than it is now. With no career aspirations to keep them in line, unethical people would take the lobbyist money and run.

What would keep people in line is that this would be illegal. A lottery-based system is also problematic for lobbyists because they have to bribe many more people and they can't help elect the people they have already bribed. If they try to bribe the wrong person, they are in big trouble, because they will get investigated, and even if they succeed, they will have to do it all over again the next year (assuming yearly terms). It's also worth pointing out that a lot of what we call "corruption" is the result of politicians, CEOs and lobbyists going to the same schools, working in the same offices, and just generally being friends. They don't even need to bribe each other. They like each other. Lottery eliminates this aspect almost entirely.

I would say the biggest vulnerability of lottery, with respect to bribery, is debt: if a representative owes a lot of money, they are particularly at risk. Which is why I think the state should pay off all debts owed by all representatives (conditional to not peddling their influence, of course). We can disqualify people who owe excessive amounts so that this doesn't cost too much.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#137

Post by koube »

kmonsen wrote: post #129
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bribery would be more rampant than it is now. With no career aspirations to keep them in line, unethical people would take the lobbyist money and run.

Bribery is even more rampant now with career aspirations since reelection is costly. The job of politicians is to get reelected and they do it by being available to donors.

If we are able to reduce the question of no reelections to the question of whether we should have term limits, I believe we will find that no reelections will have the same drawbacks as term limits[0].

Lawmaking is a profession, and needs to be done by professionals. If it is not, studies show that power shifts towards other existing power structures, such as the head of state and to lobbyists[1], which would make a lottery based appointments counterproductive on the issue of corruption.

[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/01/18/five-reason...

[1]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/153244000100100...

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#138

Post by zerocrates »

YesProcrast wrote: post #71
hannasanarion wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Term limits in congress aren't really a good thing though. We have term limits for President because the President is uniquely powerful, they can almost unilaterally bend the aparatus of government to their will. If allowed to rule for too long, a president can easily become a dictator. The same is not true of a congressperson who weilds 1/535th of the power of a branch. Besides, if the people want to put someone in…

I have come to appreciate the wisdom of the Virginia governor's term-limiting system -- you can hold office as many times as you want, but you cannot succeed yourself. Voters can restore someone to office, but each term must stand alone, avoiding the, "What does every first-term President want? A second term." problem.

A limit system based just on non-consecutiveness is gamed pretty easily: look at Dmitry Medvedev's term as Russian president.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#139

Post by kristianc »

marricks wrote: post #42

I always hate the framing as “polarized”. There’s tons of things Democrats and Republicans agree on. Military spending goes up every year. Save for Dodd-Frank, deregulation has been common across presidencies for 30 years along with corporate tax cuts... The establishment gets things done, they really do, it’s just not things that help everyday people. I’m not sure how this would help that.

The problem is that while 'everyday people' no doubt have ideas which would improve everyone's lives, there is also very large to majority support for capital punishment and complete shutdown of immigration.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#140

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pohl wrote: post #77

This would be an interesting strategy to apply towards measuring how an open source community feels about difficult tradeoffs in design where there is no clear winner among many proposals, such as the recent survey meant to measure how people feel about the various async/await syntax proposals in Rust. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/biw1ic/asyncawait_syn... https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bju8di/asynca…

I don't know about this particular issue, but in general there's something to be said for beneficent dictatorship. My hypothesis is that sometimes the choosing of individual parts that are measurably better on their own, when combined produce something that is less than if the parts weren't optimally chosen but were cogently chosen to meet a particular ideology or end.
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