[striking]

So what if I, the biggest fan of Ice-T ever, decided to delegate all of my votes (on taxes, on wages, on anything ever) to Ice-T?

People would gain power just by being popular. Not in the sense of "popular democracy", more like "pop music". And then, just like today, we have figureheads that battle it out based on our elected opinions.

So what's the point? It removes the friction in voting by using the web, but that opens up the whole identity thing where computers can pretend to be people or people pretend to be other people and hackers and ads and so on and so forth.

Democracy generally works well the way it works now. Eventually something happens that pisses off the public, and they fight back. Otherwise, the politicians are stuck making the choice between "crap" and "crappier". And the world works pretty well.

[darawk]

> People would gain power just by being popular.

This problem already exists. Liquid democracy does not eliminate it, but it should lessen it for a couple of reasons, but probably most importantly because it gives people continuous control over their delegation decision. Right now the election cycles themselves exert tremendous undue influence over political outcomes, an implementation side-effect that is not an inherent property of democracy or particularly reflective of the popular will. Liquid democracy ameliorates this side-effect.

For that reason alone, it is worth serious consideration.

[shardt]

W.r.t. the Ice-T example, a good liquid democracy implementation would still have several advantages over what we have now: 1) If Ice-T does a poor job, his delegators complain that something bad was "done in their name", they can trace to their Ice-T delegation and remove it. They don't have to wait two or four years for an election cycle. 2) Even if Ice-T doesn't know much about, say U.S. foreign policy, he may find someone who does and whose personal values are in pretty good alignment with him and his fans. So, Ice-T delegates his us-foreign-policy votes to the expert he trusts. 3) Ice-T may take his increased power seriously and start learning more about foreign policy so that he can do a good job. And option 1) puts him in check if he does not.

[Zigurd]

I'd rather you delegate your decisions to Ice-T than Donald Trump. The question is whether this system is an improvement over current forms of representative republic, which have rotted into democracy-lite as a fig leaf on oligarchy.

[Sven7]

Would it be an improvement? Depends on the issues. Think about the Greek Debt crisis.

Pretty sure everyone would take their vote back from politicians under pressure to make the difficult calls, and vote to hang the bankers and put off interest payments.

[Zigurd]

Your position appears to be that the professional politicians who got Greece into the crisis by cooking the debt books would be better than the Greek people at getting them out of the crisis.

[crdoconnor]

>So what if I, the biggest fan of Ice-T ever, decided to delegate all of my votes (on taxes, on wages, on anything ever) to Ice-T?

Just exactly how many people do you believe would actually do this if they could? Do you think all of the people who trust Ice T to sing to them would actually trust him to make decisions about foreign policy?

>People would gain power just by being popular.

No, that's how things work now. With a system like this you gain power by being trusted.

>Democracy generally works well the way it works now.

Are you in favor of a corporate takeover of government?

[theatgrex]

yeah but now you are switching your argument from won't work because people cant hold all the issues in their mind to wont work because people will decide to delegate their votes to idiots ??? And hackers.

If you believe that generally democracy works pretty well now then I agree that it isn't a good alternative.

If you don't believe that then it is an interesting alternative. that attempts to solve some of the problems that modern democracy doesn't. Like people who think differently about different topics and want their differing opinions to matter.

[striking]

Because people can't hold all the issues in their mind, they'll pick a person that seems reasonably good at making decisions. Maybe I wouldn't pick Ice-T, but perhaps a scam artist who pretended to know about science?

People who think differently about topics eventually have their opinions recognized. There are certain things that could never happen (e.g. mandatory gun buyback will never be looked into because of the 2nd Amendment in the US, although I hear it worked well in Australia), but beyond those, eventually, good ideas tend to bubble up. For years people demanded universal healthcare in the US ("it works well in Canada!"), and the politicians fought and raged amongst themselves to decide that yes, now is the time to implement it. And it seems to work.

If you want to change your country, don't try to make a new system to supplant the existing one. Try to fix the old one. Or at least vote in it, so your voice is heard in the meantime.

[Steko]

> Maybe I wouldn't pick Ice-T, but perhaps a scam artist who pretended to know about science?

Seems like a silly objection, you could also vote for a scam artist for office under the status quo and that would be much worse than delegating your vote to one. At least with delegated votes most people wouldn't choose scam artists and the odds of scam artists/idiots winning office would be much lower.

> People who think differently about topics eventually have their opinions recognized.

This is simply not true, as 18th century Poland could attest if it hadn't been wiped out by it's own governmental paralysis.

> If you want to change your country, don't try to make a new system to supplant the existing one. Try to fix the old one.

This is contradictory. One way of fixing something that's broken is with a better system that has some fundamental differences.