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The "overlearning the game" problem

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Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#81

Post by jacques_chester »

david927 wrote: post #50
jacques_chester wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think polling is what has done it, because it shortcuts the feedback cycle between representative and represented. Edmund Burke made the point eloquently in his speech to the voters of Bristol: "Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to…

That's an interesting link, Jacques; thanks. Remember, though, at that time the world was ruled by monarchies and it was thought that people were too stupid and illiterate to be part of their own governing. It's 2011, and no one can debate this: It's up to the people to decide themselves whether they want to someone to override their will or to respect it. No one has the power to say, "Should we trust the will of the…

> Remember, though, at that time the world was ruled by monarchies and it was thought that people were too stupid and illiterate to be part of their own governing.

Note the date. The Glorious Revolution -- establishing the ascendancy of Parliament over the Crown -- is more than a hundred years in the past when he made this speech. The American Revolution is but 2 years away. Before long Burke will be reflecting on the horrors of the French Revolution.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#82

Post by rgoddard »

tomjen3 wrote: post #26
wisty wrote: post #10

It's related to Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. This is often the result of attempting to overoptimize a system. You can optimize a race car to a huge degree, because you know exactly what you want it to do. You can't optimize a schooling system, because you don't know exactly what you want it to do. A little noise is a go…

I don't think it is a good idea at all. If the political power boiled down to picking paper over scissors, the loosing side may very well ascribed no legitimacy to the outcome. That is almost certainly going to end far worse than actually counting all the votes (i am looking at you, supreme court). The same problem happens with your exam example. Why is it fair that someone less competent than you got in? A better so…

What might make sense would be a combination. Have some barrier to entrance to limit the people to choose from, but then select randomly from the remaining candidates. For example, to be considered for an elected position, you first have to receive %x of the vote, or maybe only select from the top 3. This way you help to ensure that the person being elected is representing some of the population, but hopefully eliminating some of the games.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#83

Post by henrikgs »

david927 wrote: post #32
tomjen3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct democracy killed Socraties. The current system, flawed as it is, does a reasonable job of prevention the most stupid ideas from getting Mainstream attention. The people deciding political issues wouldn't be the reasonable and smart people who hang around here. It will be the people who stand around picking funerals, people who never graduated high school, functional illiterates and the drug dealers in the inne…

Direct democracy killed Socraties. No, no it did not. Direct democracy means the legislative branch doesn't use a proxy. There are still two other branches. How is this so hard to understand? Elected representatives are supposed to fully represent their constituents . There is not supposed to be a difference between the rep. and who they represent. What direct democracy says is that the proxy of a representative has…

Why is it false or elitist to assume that someone working full time on a subject is "smarter" than everyone else on that particular subject?

I am pretty sure 99% of the lawyers in US would do a better job than me defending anyone in a trial. Every car mechanic in the world would do a better job than me fixing some mechanical problem in my car. Does this mean that I am dumb? No, it just means I devote my time to other areas of expertise.

I really cannot see why this shouldn't apply for politicians as well.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#84

Post by david927 »

roel_v wrote: post #71
david927 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saddened to see he's being down-voted. His arguments are rational and sophisticated. I think people are just disagreeing and that's not a good reason to down-vote. That said, I down-voted you . Don't reduce this argument to name calling. People are voting up my arguments; you seem to be in the minority in not finding the alternative I'm suggesting to be better. That's fine. I wouldn't belittle you for it.

You're not suggesting an alternative, well maybe in the most abstract sense, but in your post several levels up from here there is not even a hint at how to address even just the most obvious flaws in letting people vote for each bill. There's no 'argument' made, just a cry for revolution - of the type that is very common amongst high school and undergraduate students; rising from a simplistic world view that fails t…

There are over 13,000 full-time lobbyists for the 535 representatives in Washington, and their only job is, when legislation goes the way of the public and not the way of their sponsors, to use their financial muscle to bribe a different outcome. Despite decades of the public electing officials who say they'll fight it, it has only grown worse. You don't seem to have valid alternatives other than to be deeply shocked at the notion of changing it.

So I don't need to explain myself to you. I don't need to go into details. I don't need to get your permission. None of us do. You had decades; your turn is up.

The future will see open government and direct democracy via the internet as the obvious, logical next step of politics. The internet has transformed nearly every industry -- and now it's simply time to consider transforming politics. And those students, radicals and "juveniles" who are launching it, won't care what you think. You had your chance. You fucked up. Now it's our turn, whether you like it or not.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#85

Post by DanielBMarkham »

jacques_chester wrote: post #80
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #74

We run into this situation in programming quite a bit. The answer is refactoring: taking the principles and patterns that work, streamlining them, ditching the cruft that works for a few edge cases but mostly gets in the way, simplifying the underlying metaphor of the system, and re-asssembling. The only way to do this with much larger systems, such as systems of governance, is revolution or exploring new lands. Pers…

Refactoring is what political types call 'reform'. Reformations are safer than Revolutions, because revolutions dissolve all civil structure. They allow the ruthless sociopath to prosper. What programming has taught me is humility in the face of complexity. Refactoring only works because we can, at a stroke, reverse our changes; because we can place those changes in isolation and test the heck out of them. But societ…

I think we completely agree. I did not mean to imply anything but humility was indicated here.

"Reform" is a big, fuzzy word. A lot more brittleness and complexity has been added under that rubric. Systems of governance eventually get "over learned", that is, people adapt to the system and use it in more ways than it was intended. The ability of hundreds of millions of people to adapt is much greater than any amount of complexity that we can create. Yet we persist in the idea that by continuing to "tweak" the system, somehow magic will come from it. To me this is where humility comes in. We can never create a perfect government. The best we can do is have one that balances stability and refactoring.

Election cycles and constitutional amendment processes were supposed to do this. What we've found, though, is that legal precedent, statutory code, and an expansion of pure democracy and the role of career politicians, given enough time, puts us exactly where we didn't want to go.

Interesting side note: overly complex and brittle systems that people execute actually give dictatorial powers to those responsible for executing them. That is, in a computer system, the complexity creates program crashes and dysfunction, because the computer has to treat each instruction cycle and piece of data the same. In a system executed by people, a subtle social goal takes over: things still appear to happen. The system still superficially looks like it is working somewhat -- those in authority just selectively apply and bend the rules depending on whatever their whims are. If you've ever worked in a large organization with too much process, you've easily observed this: most struggle under burdensome rules, never being able to get anything done. A few, however, work completely outside the system, given special permission. These folks are usually kept off the radar so as not to upset the troops. Complex people systems don't ever stop working, they just make things miserable on most everybody and give a few permission to do whatever they want.

You'd think that modern tyrannies would look like old Libya: one guy in a funny hat ruling totally. But that's not the way it works any more. It's not one guy, it's a distributed oligarchy, and it's not out in the open, it's obfuscated.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#86

Post by david927 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #69
david927 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I think it's all bathwater. No more political parties. No more Coke/Pepsi choices of elected officials. No more outright corruption. Open government, e-democracy. The time has come.

You're a bit of a techno-utopian. In small groups with homogenous polities and aligned interests, this might work. In an opensource project, for instance. But even those fall into strife. Politics is part of human nature; the encrustations of western civilisation and elsewhere are not arbitrary.

You're a bit of a techno-utopian.

Maybe. But I think if you look at history, distributing power has always been the most successful strategies. Unfortunately, it's also the least popular with those who currently hold power, so it's often a knife fight.

I'm not quite sure it's as radical as you seem to think it is. Is voting for a Michelle Bachmann to vote on laws, or just voting directly on those laws, so different? Really? I'm not so sure. The internet has transformed every other industry. Can we not apply it to politics and leverage its power there?

homogenous politics

I've been arguing the U.S. perspective, and it is so divisive there that I don't think it could be worse.

Jacques, this will be my last post so: thanks for the great dialog. All the best.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#87

Post by usedtolurk »

dagw wrote: post #76
david927 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fantastic response. I'm shocked at how many people have unsubstantiated fears of simply eliminating an unnecessary proxy. The reason we didn't have direct democracy before is because it wasn't practical before -- not because those elected are superior and can ignore what the people wish for. It is now practical to have a direct democracy: If we can bank online, we can vote online. In contrast, there are 26 l…

If we can bank online, we can vote online. Only if you ignore that pesky anonymous voting problem. I want my bank to know exactly what transactions I made when, and keep detailed logs of those transactions. I don't want some government body have detailed logs of exactly how I voted.

I tend to agree with you, but as online "voting" systems become ubiquitous (likes, karma, +1's etc.) I can imagine a future where a public voting record would seem normal or even desirable.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#88

Post by dagw »

usedtolurk wrote: post #87
dagw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we can bank online, we can vote online. Only if you ignore that pesky anonymous voting problem. I want my bank to know exactly what transactions I made when, and keep detailed logs of those transactions. I don't want some government body have detailed logs of exactly how I voted.

I tend to agree with you, but as online "voting" systems become ubiquitous (likes, karma, +1's etc.) I can imagine a future where a public voting record would seem normal or even desirable.

That would require a future in which all people, despite radically different political views, can agree to disagree in a civil manner. A world in which people will never fear retribution or discrimination from those who disagree with them. A world in which the very idea of threatening or coercing people to get them to vote as you wish is simply abhorrent. As much as I'd love to live in such a world, I cannot see it happening.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#89

Post by SoftwareMaven »

tomjen3 wrote: post #26
wisty wrote: post #10

It's related to Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. This is often the result of attempting to overoptimize a system. You can optimize a race car to a huge degree, because you know exactly what you want it to do. You can't optimize a schooling system, because you don't know exactly what you want it to do. A little noise is a go…

I don't think it is a good idea at all. If the political power boiled down to picking paper over scissors, the loosing side may very well ascribed no legitimacy to the outcome. That is almost certainly going to end far worse than actually counting all the votes (i am looking at you, supreme court). The same problem happens with your exam example. Why is it fair that someone less competent than you got in? A better so…

It would just be recognizing the jitter that exists inherently in the system. You will always get a different number when counting the votes, so you can end up with a "50% voted for both" situation.

Why is flipping a coin worse than pretending the next count will be more correct? You kind of contradict your own point by implying the supreme court didn't supply legitimacy to the election. Nobody can blame a quarter for being stiffed with neocons on the heads side.

Re: The "overlearning the game" problem

#90

Post by tsycho »

wisty wrote: post #10

It's related to Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. This is often the result of attempting to overoptimize a system. You can optimize a race car to a huge degree, because you know exactly what you want it to do. You can't optimize a schooling system, because you don't know exactly what you want it to do. A little noise is a go…

Very interesting comment, hadn't heard of Sortition before. However, I see a few practical problems with this.

First, it makes it harder to fix any errors/cheating. You can ask for a reevaluation of exam papers or a recount of the ballot if you felt that something shady happened, but then what about the randomization phase. In the admissions example for instance, if after a re-eval, the composition of students in the >95 percentile changed, do you hold a new randomization to make it fair for the new kids who crossed the threshold? If you do that, is that fair to those who previously got selected in the previous admissions ballot, and weren't second time lucky? Would this lead to all the "losers" in the lottery to ask for re-evals just so that the lottery phase happens again? (given a large number of students, if there is any subjectivity in the evaluation, every re-eval is likely to change the composition, even if by a small amount)

Secondly, the losers in the lottery are going to feel cheated and angry, even if all evaluation was objective, and there was [provably] no cheating. I think most humans prefer an objective, unambiguous way of competing with each other, even when we think that the evaluation metric is flawed. So the unlucky competitors will feel angry post-lottery, even if everything was done in a fair manner.

Finally, it increases the chances of cheating/gaming the system at the randomization phase i.e. the administrator can game the lottery. And if/when the administrators do cheat, it is also easier for them to hide their cheating since the anomaly can be hidden within the random luck factor.

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