51–60 of 105 posts
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Outlaw lobbying/lobbyists. What's next?
Not possible in a country with freedom of speech protections
I get that Yarvin is an icky fascist bigot, but just read the political thinkers he got his ideas from. The idea that the elected representatives, much less the method by which representatives are chosen, have any meaningful impact on politics is just laughable.
I worked in tech, and after some formative experiences, shifted to working on helping ensuring ensure that tech's impact on society can serve the public interest. But that leaves the question of what "what is the public interest"?
Sortitition / lottocracy / deliberative democracy / mini-publics all roughly refer to the same way to answer that question — providing a representative microcosm with the space to deeply examine an issue, and come to a set of recommendations and decisions on it. Unlike with electoral democracy, it's faster to spin up and experiment with, and it's harder for bad actors to entrench power (elections can be useful, but they're one of many tools in the democratic toolbelt).
That thinking lead to https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-de... . That basic approach, has been somewhat picked up by Meta (https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ran-a-giant-experiment-in-g...) and Open AI (https://aligned.substack.com/p/a-proposal-for-importing-soci..., ~ leading to their democratic inputs and collective alignment work).
I've now started an organization focusing on applying this and other democratic paradigms to decision-making about AI (https://aidemocracyfoundation.org/) as a way to solve a variety of challenging governance problems across the AI stack. If you're curious about it, our ICML paper goes into more detail: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09222 .
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What "most countries" have a two-party system? From the summary below, most democracies actually seem to not have one. Spain, for example, used to be rather binary in early 2k, but its parliament has diversified since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system Maybe Americans should question why new parties cannot be formed that actually represent their people instead of looking to replace democracy entirely wit…
New Zealand isn’t on that list, but two parties generally take 70-80% of the vote. Last election (~65%) was an outlier due to the two leaders being pretty unpopular. However, NZ has a proportional voting system that leads to coalitions forming governments. This is considered a good thing, but can lead to…interesting outcomes. The current government is very much the dog being wagged by a couple of nasty tails. Current…
Hopefully a successful company, that is.
Frankly it couldn't work any worse than our current system. the problem with most politicians is that they're the sort of people who want to be politicians
At some point you need adults in the room(in mind, not age). Our system is obviously not great, but this is a way to make it much worse.
The system would then morph into a variant of representative democracy. Instead of millions voting for, say, around a thousand of various level representatives, you get a random thousand "voting" for "consultants".
These consultants would be directly hired by the random thousand to do the work for them. They would predicably have marketing campaigns to make themselves seem the right pick. They might even offer their services for free. Demagoguery and corporate sponsorship as usual.
In the end 1000 people would hire, say, 1-1000 consultants to represent them. Thus emulating the original process, or worse. The only difference is the tiny electorate, which increases volatility.
If you'd like to regulate it to prevent this, you'd have to expend an effort and fight similar pressures as with doing it in any other system.
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Outlaw lobbying/lobbyists. What's next?
This seems like an easy proposal, but I don't see many case studies of it being successfully implemented.
The issue with randomly selected representation is that the support staff start to become the ones who effectively make the decisions. This is the same issue with term limits (which to be clear, I'm in favor of, but we have to go in with our eyes open), which is that e.g. the congressional staffers gain power, especially if they persist across the end of the term limit. In these kinds of cases, you almost need term l…
Great. Now we have inexperienced legislators, inexperienced aides, and experienced lobbyists. That's definitely going to be an improvement rather than an absolute catastrophe. Term limits are like so many populist ideas: they sound great until you think at all about the consequences. Effective government requires people with a long tenure. That's how you learn how the system operates, that's how you build the relatio…
“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” -- William F. Buckley. Now more than ever. See "Franchise" (1955) by Isaac Asimov for an efficient version.
Would you rather be treated (medically) by the first 2000 people? Do you think code will be written better by the first 2000? I get being unhappy about current political class, but this kind of claims is wild to me.
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And if you try to place limits on staffers, then you’ll find even more legislation being drafted by lobbyists.
Outlaw lobbying/lobbyists. What's next?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with lobbying, it is an essential part of the government and can not be legislated away, without crippling the entire country.