But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively.
No. You're missing a huge component: values. Political choices are typically between conflicting sets of values or between competing interests of social groups.
Debate rages endlessly between pure capitalists and those who want some socialism thrown in.
What exactly is a "pure capitalist"? This is a strawman frequently erected, but there seems to be a major absence of real people with views that can be described as such.
when we can't take it any more.
Who's "we"? Society is heterogeneous. Some want redistribution right now, some would never want it.
If the average government official is smarter than the average member of the populace, it's potentially a win to have the government make decisions for population members.
Again, no for the same reason. Values are hugely important and you're ignoring them. Besides, government officials have their own incentives which do not necessarily reflect the well-being of the population. And, I hope you have heard that power corrupts..?
Debate rages endlessly between pure capitalists and those who want some socialism thrown in.
That's not a good set up for rational discussion. Rational discussion works much better when you discuss actual policy issues than when you discuss highly loaded catchphrases.
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists.
As something which provokes the worst impulses, I consider it good training as well.
who say people can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves
But they can be trusted to make decisions for others if they're smart? Intelligence doesn't give one knowledge or shared values.
Much of your discussion is flawed because you ignore values. Clippy may be smarter than all of us, but I'm not going to be his sheep because I don't want the universe converted to paper clips. Values matter.
At a certain point we hit diminishing returns for additional innovations
Actually, accelerated returns mean we get more bang for increased innovation each year. This year is always the worst year ever to hinder innovation.
As for giving up on Capitalism, not gonna happen. While you focus on Capitalism, many who support it are focused on a Free Market. We like the Free part, not just the mountains of stuff it helps produce.
So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal.
Only in one-on-one conversations or very small groups. If you try to use politics as a rationality test in a room with too many people, someone is going to fail and get triggered, and in the process they're going to cause everyone to have a very unpleasant evening.
Aren't government officials also incentivised to do stupid things? If so, replacing them by smarter people won't solve many problems.
There is a rich literature, normally referred to as "public choice", which looks at the incentives facing government officials. There's far too much to describe in a short reply, but the Wikipedia article is a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people.
Yes, and the irrationality comes in before the discussion even has a chance. In these kinds of discussions, almost without fail, people take their circumstances as a given, and then ask what set of policies would be optimal. The (mistaken) assumption being that their circumstances are immutable while policy is entirely malleable and controllable. The opposite is true. That is, we have the most control over our own situation, and the least control over publi...
As Taleb points out here it's not even clear that socialism promotes less inequality.
...In the U.S., when I look at a room with hotshot businessmen in 2014, I know that the 2024 one will be different (except for businessess subject to bailouts). The same cannot be said in Europe or in places where the state is powerful. And if I look at the bureaucratic and academic establishments, the only people who would drop out of the 2014 cohort are the retired/deceased ones.
Static measurements of inequality are defective (in addition to their traditional lack of math
it's not even clear that socialism promotes less inequality
As a socialism survivor, I can confirm that equality is not only about money.
In socialism, an important Party member could have exactly the same salary as everyone else, and yet be a thousand times more rich than the average peasant, if we use a meaningful definition. They would get a lot of stuff and services for free, as a bribe; it wouldn't be even considered a bribe, because everyone would do it to maintain good relations with the powerful Party members. They would be allowed to use privately many things that technically are a common property, but it is a property inaccessible to the average peasant. They could get almost everything they want (as long as there is not a political reason against it) without using money. So the fact that they would have the same amount of money as everyone else would be completely irrelevant, even if it was true, which it probably wouldn't be anyway.
Money is just a civilized way to get stuff and services. If you have power, you simply take the stuff and services, without paying. In socialism, people even give it to you "willingly", because they are aware that if you are in a bad mood, you could ruin their lives and lives of their familes just by making a phone call.
I like the idea of vote copying. With good implementation, it would make entering politics easier and cheaper, just like blogging made story publishing easier and cheaper. Specialization means that there will always be a specialized "political class", but the costs of entry (in both dollars and number of followers) could be significantly reduced. Right now, you need thousands of followers and millions of dollars to start a political party. With a good system, if there are five people willing to follow your vote, you could already have a micro-par...
Re: Capitalism.
Even if we accept the premise that socialism reduces inequality, your argument boils down to that we should make the poor a little worse of (relative to where they'd be otherwise) in order to make the rich significantly worse of in the name of "fighting inequality".
In addition to the already mentioned differences in values and incentives when having a government official decide for you, there is also an information problem - a more intelligent person can do worse than you when deciding for you because they lack your local knowledge, both of your situation and your preferences.
Capitalism as Delayed Gratification. You don't "have capitalism" you have a mixed system, wit fairly strong elements of redistribution, and a large private sector that is regulated but not micromanaged. Cranking up redistribution is not a disconntinuous shift, to socialism, as some commentators would have you believe. Cycling between free market-ish solutions and redistribution-ish solutions is an emergent feature of most democracies and therefore does not need to be invented.
If the average government official is smarter than the average member of the populace, it's potentially a win to have the government make decisions for population members.
Let's assume the average government official is smarter than the average member of the populace - of North Korea. Is this "potentially" a win, and for whom?
I think you need to make your reasoning conditional to what Karl Popper considered to be the necessary ingredient for free societies: The ability to remove the government without violence.
I noticed something interesting reading the comments on this thread. I consider myself to be someone who's politically non-ideological (that is to say, I don't identify with any particular political affiliation), and when I wrote my post, I was feeling playful... I didn't have any strong feelings about what I was writing about. Similar to how one might feel if one was trying to figure out the best strategy for beating a video game. However, reading the comments to this post, I find myself getting annoyed with the commenters for the political bias I perc...
representative sample of ten thousand smart neutral people is plenty.
I can be neutral about politics of Bahrain but I per definition can't be neutral about the politics of the country in which I'm living. Being a citizen of a country means having interests.
The obsession about neutrality in US political discourse is quite a strange thing.
Specialization of labor FTW.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says in the Dictators handbook: "The difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in th...
Interests are important. If Jane is a well informed rich person, and you are a poor person, handing your vote to Jane might not end in a solution that is optimized to your interests.
Liquid Democracy sounds OK if everyone is equal and all transactions are voluntary,, but those are naive assumptions. I can envisage situations, where, eg, some Victorian style paterfamilias browbeats his family into handing over their votes. Perhaps listening to well informed commentators and then casting your own vote is the low hanging fruit here.
Your vote redirection idea is interesting, but a simple 1 to 1 mapping may make it just as difficult to find a surrogate voter as it is to research a valid candidate. I've tossed around the idea of a learning system where you could log your preference for multiple issues, then based on those preferences, the system could predict your preference on future issues based on the logged preferences of others. I think a system like that would be a great aid for representatives to use to visualize the current thoughts of their constituents, and could be an intermediate step towards the system you propose here.
Regarding vote redirection in a direct democracy. Straightforward implementation is incompatible with ballot secrecy. This can be remedied by allowing each person to cast two votes: a public vote and a private vote. Redirected votes copy the value of the public vote, but only private votes are counted directly.
It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy.
The idea is called liquid democracy.
As far as practical attempts to implement it goes there's https://makeyourlaws.org/ and Liquid Feedback that for example get's used by the pirate party in Germany.
As far as "be a sheep"; most people are doing this already to some extent. They draw their opinions from a combination of media they watch and friends and social groups they identify with. Directly evaluating a policy can be very difficult, so they instead rely on a network of trusted opinions.
Letting people do it totally passively, however, could be bad. We know that people lean heavily towards default behavior when possible. So if the person you mirror starts deviating substantially from what you expect of them, you will be unlikely to change ...
The "sheep" approach makes some things much more gameable. Lobbyists could just find people with lots of followers and bribe them (whether outright or more subtly). You could say this happens already and your proposal just makes it more efficient; true, but that's by design. It's supposed to be hard to change the nation's mind. It's supposed to be difficult to turn money into votes. I also worry that this proposal disenfranchises those who are too stupid to use the system optimally; presumably we have good reasons for wanting to live in a democra...
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: