Comment by roenxi
1 day ago
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
I'm not certain.
Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.
I'm less familiar with other examples.
> Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book.
Link?
> We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.
And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone.
Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences.
The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs.
Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries.
I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess.
And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.
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Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
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If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
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Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.
That's why term limits exist.
Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.
IMO:
1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.
2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.
3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.
I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.
But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.
What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…
I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.
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I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.
I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.
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Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.
> Banning campaigning would go a long way.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?
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The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s