On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 5:57 PM, Flash Cards <***@yahoo.com> wrote:
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Post by Flash CardsExcept that none of the relevant subreddits there are even as active as this list.
You probably only looked at r/liquiddemocracy and r/DirectDemocracy . They
happened to be small, but the topics of LD and DD are often discussed in
different subs: r/democracy and r/futuristparty . They have many more posts
than this list. You guys sometimes are going for weeks without a message. I
think their people are much more likely to stumble upon your sub and join a
discussion. But maybe I am wrong. Do you have many newcomers here? I was not
following for the last 1.5 years.
r/democracy is busy, but mostly not related to decisionmaking systems.
The others are about as active as this list (which is to say, not very
;-)
Post by Flash CardsNot at all: I can certainly pick "the lesser of two evils", but expanding
that to "the lesser of 535 evils" is hardly an improvement,
You see no difference between 2 choices and 535 choices?
You apparently didn't understand my comment: There *aren't* 535
choices as most of those people vote the equivalent of party line.
Other than a few wingnuts like Rand Paul and Bernie that I'd likely
each assign some weight to if I could split by topic area (Paul for
defense, Bernie for social program reform, Warren for regulation,
etc.) I don't see any benefit to being able to delegate to any of
them. Indeed, things would certainly be worse if I had to delegate all
my votes to any one of those three...
Post by Flash CardsEver hear of "identity theft"? Who are these guys to ask for some of my
most sensitive financial information?
Should I stop using online banking and online purchasing now? Or what? I am
using it all the time. Still doing fine.
Braver man than I: I can count the number of companies that have my
credit card on one hand. I use Paypal for everything else, but even
then avoid buying anything from a site I don't already know (I buy a
lot of stuff through small-fry through ebay and amazon, of course, but
then, they never get my payment info). Life is too short to spend
weeks or months of it trying to undo an identity theft.
Post by Flash CardsPlaceAVote actually sent out letters to people, a very expensive
proposition and not even all that fraud-proof.
I do not remember that. You may be confusing something. PlaceAVote did not
have an ID verification, they only had plans for it.
Nope, they actually did this:
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/congress-is-broken-that-doesnt-mean-tech-can-fix-it/
Post by Flash CardsI still like my proposal to just let people claim names off the public
voter rolls because that at least limits the numbers of fake accounts one
actor can set up (I do track times and IP addresses and so can easily detect
a systematic attempt to create bogus accounts).
If you allow people to create multiple accounts it completely invalidate any
results your system produces.
In a fully operational system, sure. But how do you get there if you
turn most people off before they even get to the main site? Do you
think Avaaz and change.org lose sleep over this? I don't plan to
either: As long as we avoid obvious gaming of the system we can have
both low barriers to entry *and* some faith in the outcome of the
decisions actually being representative. I expect to add challenges
gradually, like making people reply to one of the weekly emails or log
into the system to keep their account active, or maybe forcing them to
make a comment or citation once in awhile if they don't do this by
habit: Once they're on the site there's all kinds of things we can
check to make sure it's not a bot or hacker casting votes.
Post by Flash CardsYou apparently missed the point of the bots (i.e., I recommend you take
more than 2 minutes to read the help system): They're just made-up data used
for bootstrapping.
Are the bots yours? Do you have trouble finding human users? I remember how
you were predicting that you would have hundreds of user right after you
launch your system. What happened?
Mostly I stopped marketing it when I discovered some fundamental flaws
in the design of Angular 2 having to do with routing (it was basically
impossible to route people to specific proposals using a URL, a
necessary feature to market it to issue-based voters). That limitation
in Angular has been fixed now, but I haven't had the time to port to
the newest release of it yet.
Post by Flash CardsThousands of fake accounts were created, then thousands of fake posts
promoting one product or another. Nearly all of them came from Russia, BTW,
"BTW" :) Is it my fault somehow? You are the one who takes security as an afterthought.
No offense intended, I was just pointing out that Facebook and the
Democratic party aren't the only ones that are having trouble with the
Russians...
Post by Flash CardsPlus, the proposed transition is the same: At some point you have trust
people elected using the old system to
follow the new one. I for one believe it's naive to think that will ever actually happen
Far higher chances than for a matchism-like system succeeding, IMHO.
Far higher chance of it becoming as popular (or more) than LQFB or
Rousseau, for sure. But history is littered with products and
movements that didn't actually ever really amount to anything because
of fundamental flaws that their creators didn't see or weren't able to
fix. Go big or go home, I say. If it takes me 20 or 30 years for all
these half-assed attempts to fail and proxyfor.me to rise to the top,
that's fine. My father (a social psychologist) actually ran a system
like proxyfor.me (albeit matching people to existing representatives
rather than to each other) back in the 1970s because he recognized
even back then that people are incapable of picking appropriate
representatives for themselves. He's helped me with this one some
because here it is more than 40 years later and he still hasn't given
up hope that eventually people will see the light ;-)
Post by Flash CardsI submit you haven't actually tried to read any of the bills the US congress votes on.
This is, actually, a lie. Do not be a liar.
And you're saying you prefer them to the example proposals in
proxyfor.me? Who's a liar now?
Post by Flash CardsThey're horrible! I've run some of them through Word's analysis tools and
they frequently come out at grade levels above 20 (that's a PhD). I found
one that came out a 25, which is *two* PhDs ;-)
That is why you may need representatives who can explain the bills to other
people. This happens all the time in real live. You resort to opinion of
experts all the time (doctor office, car repair, etc), but you are free to
choose an expert or change it at any time.
Ah, an elitist. Attitudes like that display a profound ignorance about
how the world actually works. Certainly anyone that trusts a doctor to
diagnose anything more complicated than the common cold is a fool:
They're certainly less trustworthy even than car mechanics are (and
that ain't saying much). Don't get me started on this because one of
the things that's been taking up enormous amount of my time the past
few months has been both my wife's and my doctor's failures to
properly diagnose and treat endocrine/hormone problems we have (e.g.,
in her case I believe that probably 90% of the cases of Hashimoto's
out there aren't diagnosed until too late and the thyroid has been
irreparably damaged or completely destroyed: My wife, on the other
hand, thanks to my insistence on going outside the insurance system to
get a proper diagnosis and treatment, is getting treatment early
enough that we're hoping that the damage can actually be completely
reversed). I've also had a few close friends die of cancer recently
that should have been diagnosed months or even years earlier but their
doctors dropped the ball.
But back to the writing of bills, I submit you're naive about them as
well: It's not that they're just inherently hard to understand, it's
that they're *intentionally* hard to understand because that's part of
how gaming the system works in misrepresentative democracy. The trick
is to make them so hard to follow that most people give up such that
the author can easily manipulate people into voting for something they
don't really understand based on trust/charm/log rolling/etc.
Post by Flash CardsThe samples currently on proxyfor.me are legitimate enough and far more
interesting to most people. Have you ever studied the petition sites
(change.org, etc.) to see what people are really interested in?
You are again trying to change the world to fit your tool. Many bills are
bound to be technical and hard to understand. Just like when doctors discuss
among themselves how to treat your illness, you might not understand most of
their conversation.
As above, I have the opposite experience: I order my own blood tests
and then tell the doctors what they say because they simply don't have
the time to invest in understanding them that I do. And on the rare
occasion they do order extra tests its invariably to cover their asses
in case I die rather than because they actually understand what is
required to diagnose or treat any particular disease.
And again, you're a fool (or maybe just severely insecure) if you
think that *any* bill can't be written such that you can understand it
with an hour or so's effort. I've spent a *lot* of time doing this
kind of thing (my lawyers hate me as much as my doctors do ;-) and
haven't come across anything they've written that can't be vastly
simplified if they'd take the time (which of course not only do they
not have any incentive to do, they actually *benefit* by making things
more complicated because of the job security it provides).
Post by Flash CardsIMHO you can't have it both ways: No revolution has ever succeeded by
working inside the system.
Lots of changes were achieved by evolution. I will live a revolution to you.
In politics? I can't think of anything, really. Certainly our current
governments work no better now than they did 200 years ago. And this
despite massive improvements in technology that should have made
everything much better. Trump and our current polarized do-nothing
congress I think are convincing evidence that government is actually
*worse* now than it was 200 years ago, at least in the US.
Regards,
Scott