[clcaev]

Thirty years ago I was enthusiastic about what we now call liquid democracy. Elders, to whom I spoke that lived through WWII, saw dynamic+direct democracy as extremely dangerous. I now share their opinion.

To have a healthy world, we need to start with democratic engagement on every block, of every district in every city, in all counties of every province, in all nations across every continent of our shared planet. Critically, it must be completely human mediated, even if it is daily effort for most people everywhere. This is how we must spend our "great AI productivity boost".

I am responding to nested comments; this is not meant to diminish the importance of the linked effort.

[martin-t]

What is the underlying problem and what are the potential solutions?

> saw dynamic+direct democracy as extremely dangerous

Are you saying that humans, on average, are bad/harmful/evil? Or that they commit to decisions without thinking them through and act on emotions instead of reason?

Because if the first, then making democracy indirect or otherwise limited should not help.

So I believe it is the second. Then the question becomes either how to get people to vote more rationally or how to weight votes by rationality. The second options is not well explored.

[clcaev]

The principal danger is the concentration of power. We should start by rejuvenating and supporting local communities and institutions, interpersonal human connections with primacy. Bottom up governance seems critical, it is where political discussion (with real examples) might happen without becoming a spectacle of identity.

[martin-t]

> The principal danger is the concentration of power.

Absolutely. Good people can cooperate or reach compromises for mutual benefit. Bad people are each in it for himself - while they do form alliances sometimes, ultimately working together is unnatural for them and often temporary.

Requiring any position of power to be always distributed among many people obviously makes it hard for a single person to abuse power but less obviously disadvantages bad people by its very nature on a deeper level.

> local communities and institutions

I have an idea which I for now call consent-based society. I need to think about it a lot more but for now:

People talk about rights and freedoms but can't decide where the rights of one person end and another person's begin. If we focus on consent, it may become simpler. People could then form larger and larger groups based on agreement (consent) to rules - a house, small village, city, state. But only as long as it benefits them - consent can be revoked at any time.

But of course, historically, nation states emerged because large hierarchical power structures are advantageous at war and it'll take a long time to get people away from considering them natural, correct or inevitable.

---

Anyway, I don't think your post really answers my question though. From what I read, liquid democracy seems like a form of bottom up governance.

[clcaev]

I'm curious to hear more of this "Informed Consent" based framework. I think disclosure of potential negative outcomes from a decision would help.

My concern with liquid democracy is about speed and predictability. Politics involves human relationships, traditions, compromises, etc. I'm worried rapidly switching would further erode local rule and undermine bottom up democracy. Recall referendum/elections seems to work well enough, they create a newsworthy topic so people may have time to absorb and adjust.

Regarding your question. Human behavior seems more a function of circumstances; trying on someone else's shoes can be heartbreaking, so it's often rationale to look the other way. Emotional decisions must be acceptable in a democracy: who am I to decide if someone else is being rational?

For the US, we could start by dramatically expanding the house of representatives so races become more about local human connection rather than party identity. The Senate seems immovable architectural debt, however, its role to buffer sudden change seems important.

[martin-t]

> I'm curious to hear more of this "Informed Consent" based framework. I think disclosure of potential negative outcomes from a decision would help.

Maybe I was too optimistic. Instead of deciding who has what rights, we have to decide what requires consent and what does not.

Currently, in most legal systems, using any physical property of a person requires their consent - even if it just means walking about a plot of land they own without harming or devaluing it in any way. I want this to extend to intellectual property - if someone wants to build in top of my work, they should require my consent. This is partially motivated by 10 years of my work being effectively stolen by "AI" companies without any compensation for me.

There's still the issue that for example parody (or other examples or "fair use") is building on top of the original work but should probably be allowed. And that a lot of work is performed by groups - do you need consent from all of them or just more than half?

But I think it can be solved, it just needs more thought.

Maybe consent would end up as just a reframing of the current system but it can still be useful if it forced people to take different perspectives.

For example every salary negotiation is to some extent exploitative because the parties don't have equal information nor equal bargaining power. And a lot of people (ancaps especially) will try to keep denying this. Likening this to consent in sex can force them to either admit there's a massive power differential (and that we should try to reduce it) or claim power differentials are not an issue in sex either (and face the social challenges of defending that opinion).

> Emotional decisions must be acceptable in a democracy: who am I to decide if someone else is being rational?

Maybe emotional was not a good phrase. What I have a massive issue with is people reacting to events and looking (voting) for the easiest solutions without considering their downstream effects.

There's also the fact politicians just lie without repercussions and people don't vote based on an objective reality but based on their impression which is based on what they hear.

How to solve that? As elitist as it sounds, I'd like to see a system where smarter people have a stronger vote. How much stronger? Idk. What is smarter? It could be raw intelligence, or knowledge of the subject matter or better skill at detecting lies and manipulation or a combination of those. It's hard but it should be talked about.

[clcaev]

I choose to think our current political challenges are human nature and historic, but increasingly unmoored by modern social isolation and addictive media without the dampening love (and healthy stress) of community. Ubiquitous estrangement within families is tragic; poignantly, the recent TX home death of a UK daughter by her father raised few eyebrows, let alone atonement or a societal reckoning. The prevalence of school shootings are another modern symptom. This runs very deep, there have been legal restrictions against extended households for decades, contractions of public spaces (libraries, malls) and barriers to community environments. We don't connect with neighbors let alone strangers: Amazon delivers to the doorstep. Now we even have AI "friends" trained by far off people with maligned incentives as our closest companions. We have forgotten how to cooperate. This isolation is toxic to the soul, it cannot and will not end well.

We urgently need 180° pivot, towards vibrant human-centered community centers and surrounding commercial districts within a few short blocks or a few minute gratis bus ride. This isn't luddite -- modern technology needs to support a human world, not the inverse. These centers must become the foundation of a renewed civics and democratic revival.

Technology is a necessary scaffolding for a modern, human-centered revival, especially with communication, logistics, transportation, and certainly democratic deliberation. Even so, universal participation in a slow-moving and bottom-up representative government with anonymous paper ballots is essential to restore the consent of the governed and relative peace.

[clcaev]

Please be do careful about elitism. It's one thing to rely upon expert testimony or administrative roles, its quite another to assert a technocratic leadership.

In a human-centered world, people know and generally trust their local family doctor, for example, not carefully forged media personalities.

[JanisErdmanis]

In essence liquid democracy makes votes a transferable currency bringing it fairly close to what money already is. It would be really hard to prevent existence of an exchange rate between money and vote transfer making that a capitalist dream (until markets themselves gets monopolized).

[tracker1]

I'm of a similar mindset... pure/liquid democracy is literally rule by mob. It can only amplify choices made by feeling over substance.

As an ideal, I've always favored a libertarian mindset... my freedom should extend so far as it doesn't impede on another's rights. Which is a really broad interpretation... I think the further we allow govt to get away from that, the worse things get over time. Freedom is important.

[keybored]

> I'm of a similar mindset... pure/liquid democracy is literally rule by mob.

Rule by people is literally rule by derogatory term for people? The “literally” seems to suggest that this is supposed to communicate more than a personal feeling towards a subject. And yet.

[tracker1]

If the majority of people think it's okay to kill off a specific subset of society, does that actually make it okay/good?

Worked up mobs make horrible decisions.

[keybored]

If some moneyed elites as well as associates that are high up in culture, science and similar decide to make a network based on enslavement, child molestation, human trafficking, rape, and torture, does that make it okay/good? Oh wait, that already actually happened.

[tracker1]

Are you claiming that was a good thing? Your argument doesn't make any sense in the context given.

My entire point is some things are absolutely wrong, even if a majority of people would support it. Your point above does nothing to counter that argument.

[keybored]

The contrast is a between thing that really happened with a (so far) hypothetical.