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by pstuart 37 days ago
We need better democracy, where opportunities for corruption are minimized and proper representation is possible.

Campaign finance reform would be the foundation for this, otherwise we will continue with legalized bribery.

The other need is for daylight and accountability. As much as I loath the Web3 cryptocrowd, having some sort of public ledger of government operations would be incredibly valuable. Anything and everything related to government actions should be public record with the small exception of sensitive information (which itself should have oversight on not being abused).

This is an easy problem to solve (on a technical level), but the established political base will always fight against it they like things the way they are.

1 comments

I agree and we need to talk about specific things if we have any chance of turning ideas into change. The issue is these are complex topics not suited for a discussion platform where most activity on a post ceases within a day (and if it continues longer in rare cases, nobody sees it). But there are no really good platforms for this so everything is simplified into short statements which lose nuance.

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It's impossible for every person to have a well-researched opinion on everything. Opponents of direct democracy use this to shoot it down. But it applies to indirect democracy too.

The real issue we need to solve is how to make sure people (whether all citizens or representatives) only vote on what they actually understand.

I think votes weighted based on the score of a knowledge test would be a good start if the test is well-designed. But we need to figure out how to decide what the questions are (what is relevant, what is enough in-depth, what is too specific, etc.) and what the correct answers are (some topics are still a matter of debate even among experts). And that's hard.

It's hard in a cooperative environment (e.g. engineers deciding which factors are relevant to their proposed solution) and it's even harder in an adversarial environment like politics.

I would love to see something like that. The trick would be to keep it from being gamed to lock valid voters out.