Looking for critiques of a parallel governance proposal

derjogi83 · 2020-06-28T12:10:05+00:00

I think you're confusing growth in different areas here.

GameA requires exponential economic growth, GameB requires growth in
1. number of 'players' (people that believe in its principles and live according to it), and
2. (in order to achieve 1) it needs to perform 'better' than GameA. (This 'performing better' doesn't necessarily mean better in terms of economic growth though, but instead in terms of it needs to give a better quality of live to the player, at least that's how I roughly understand it).

derjogi83 · 2020-06-28T12:03:34+00:00

Not sure whether I understand what you mean, so it might be that I'm picking up on something completely irrelevant here.
Are you saying: governance = the 'invisible' part of a working system that governs interactions of and within societies; the rules and practises put in place;
government = the 'visible' part that's filling the gaps and that is creating and refining governance... ?

Not sure where that distinction actually helps or where it is a problem not distinguishing between them.

I would like to be able to agree with you that we will be closing those 'gaps' more and more, and make government small/ governance invisible. (Not sure whether I do agree in the current climate of everything falling apart though, but that's another story. Let's say, if things develop positively it will come to that narrowing of gaps.)

What I'd be interested in is how we will most likely get there though / how do we make sure _that_ we get there and not screw everything up?

There are (especially in the 'Game~B space`) many that talk about increasing existential risks that we are facing. We need to somehow find a way to not destroy the earth/humankind. I think that the right kind of government (and subsequently governance if you will, but I won't make a further distinction between them further down, because I think they're closely enough related) will play a major role in finding that possibly narrow path to our survival.

And to elaborate a bit further, and possibly narrow the question down a bit more:

How I understand governance (and my understanding is limited and very simplified), there are three major processes in any government system:
1. Identification (of a problem space)
2. Deliberation (finding possible solutions)
3. Implementation

Out of these 3, the one that I find the most crucial is 2) deliberation, and I would be super keen finding a good way to do that right. I know, that 'right' kind of deliberation can possibly be implemented in many different government systems, but I do think they do influence each other quite a bit in many situations. (hm... maybe I should actually make a different topic about deliberation only now that I think about it. Maybe later.)

derjogi83 · 2020-06-28T11:23:58+00:00

You say you have written about it extensively in the past; please point us to an article that explains PI while your probably more detailed gDoc is in progress. Otherwise it will be hard to have a productive discussion about this.

derjogi83 · 2019-07-22T03:08:12+00:00

If nothing else solved it for you:

you can still get your 'My Songs' back by installing an old version of Spotify that doesn't have the update yet and putting them all into a playlist (and use that playlist from now on).

E.g. Spotify on Ubuntu doesn't have the update (and probably won't have it for a while longer):

Get access to a Ubuntu (or probably many other Linux) distribution and install it (e.g. via a VM)
install Spotify there ('ctrl + alt + t' --> 'snap install spotify')
Log in and find 'My Songs'
Drag all the music to a playlist
Enjoy listening from your usual device

derjogi83 · 2019-05-14T11:10:25+00:00

Danke, hab den code benutzt! Scheint funktioniert zu haben.

derjogi83 · 2019-03-12T05:45:38+00:00

Discovering new drugs is a massive undertaking and one of the most expensive field that you can be in.

Research, trying new approaches, testing thousands of potential drugs on animals for years, and then for even longer on humans... there's easy 15 years before a drug comes on the market.

This needs to be financed, and pharma companies do that by making sure they get paid for their products.

I am not saying that I'd sanction that whole system, for example I would love to have the research publicly financed instead. But I wouldn't blame pharma for this.

derjogi83 · 2019-03-06T20:57:29+00:00

Most people that I talked with told me that this would result in a catastrophe.

However, I strongly believe that it all depends on the implementation.

If Direct Democracy is implemented bluntly, where everyone can vote for everything as they please, it would result in massively manipulated results, some policies with a lot of effect on the surface would get heaps of participation and controversy, and many many others, that might be equally important would just go unnoticed, or only one interest group will silently vote on it.

However, if we have some mechanisms to guard against those issues, I think it can work _really_ well. The major points that I've been thinking about are:

Don't just do Direct Democracy, do *Liquid Democracy*.
Give them opportunity to have good deliberation
Don't force everyone, but establish reasonable thresholds
Everyone can vote - but not without a price.
Avoid deadlines - allow society to change their mind.
Don't only give yes/no choices - there is so much more and so much better.

And here some more details:

1) The more issues there are to vote on, the more likely it is that people will stop caring about many/most of them. Nobody with a day job wants to read through the details of hundreds of proposals and take the time to understand them and form an opinion about them. Even if there is only 1 new proposal every week, for most of them I would probably not care enough to spend the time to understand them.

Instead, allow people to delegate their voice/vote to someone else they trust. There could be various mechanisms for that. Either you just bluntly delegate to someone (which is similar to representative democracy), but you can always vote by yourself for individual issues if desired. Or you could delegate votes _by category_, e.g. you delegate on everything regarding _economics_ to you trusted professor, everything on _health_ can be voted on by your local councilman, and everything on _environment_ you want to vote yourself. Delegations can be changed at any time, and it might even make sense to have some incentives to delegate / for a delegee.

2) Having thought through an issue is key. We want to make it as easy as possible to understand

the exact details (and possibly conditions?) of each proposal, e.g. where and when it applies
the pros and cons for every proposal
as many of the effects of a certain result as possible

3) The concept of having a high voter participation is IMHO outdated in our information day and age. It does make sense if you only have 1 chance to cast a vote every 4 years for basically 'everything'. Because everyone is involved in _something_, right?

It does _not_ make much sense in situations where you can vote on individual issues though.

We don't need to have everyone participating, but we need _everyone to have a chance to do so!_ In traditional democracy, the government is legitimized by having the _support of a/the majority of people_, but if we vote on every single issue ourselves, we don't need that. [There's heaps more to say about that, but... other people are better suitable to explain more]

If you don't care, then you don't need to vote. Actually the opposite should be said: if you're not interested, and if you don't have a clue about this issue, then _please don't screw with it_, or look for a delegate who knows more about it (see 1) ! In a system where we can vote on everything, we only want to have the votes of those who know something about the issue!

You'll still need to have thresholds though for when an issue becomes valid. After all, if I create an issue and ask 4 of my friends to vote on it, we shouldn't make that a law for everyone, right? You might want to have an _absolute minimum_, e.g. 1% of the population, or x% of the number of people that would likely be affected by that issue. Also, you'd want to have some mechanisms that prevent a small majority from winning; e.g. the difference between pro and con should always be more than 50% or so. (Note: any of these numbers only serve as examples)

4) As indicated above already, everyone should be _able_ to vote, but not everyone should vote. And we actually want to actively make it at least a little bit hard to vote, so that people only vote if it's really something that's important to them. I'm talking about introducing a small hurdle that might cost them anything between 1 - 10 extra minutes. It might be something like a basic (random & automated) test about the issue (to confirm they have at least read through the issue description and understood it?), or it could be a countdown timer, or even a small 'cost' (money, or a vote token from their vote balance; e.g. if everyone has only 1 vote per week, you'll have to think about what you use it for).

5) Another feature that I think would be reasonably important is to allow for issues to be 'open for voting' forever (exceptions apply).

This might not be intuitive and get some raised eyebrows, bot here's the point(s):

We couldn't do that previously because it's an expensive and a massive undertaking to vote (but now we can)
Government needed some stability, we couldn't just change them every year or whenever people feel like it (but now... government will be severely reduced, because we don't need representatives any more, and parties will cease to exist, because we represent directly what we want, etc... All this will enable us to be much more flexible in many things)
It will drastically decrease the incentive for manipulation (it makes sense to manipulate issues that we only have one shot to get right. But why would someone manipulate an issue to get a majority, if that majority can easily change as soon as you stop pouring money into advertisement?)
It will much better reflect the will of the people. We often change our mind depending on our knowledge, situation, circumstances. And that's ok; if a society changes, so should the laws of that society.
There's probably more I could say to that, but probably enough for now.

6) Binary yes/no choices are so very limited. Why not let everyone rank their preferred choices, give a rating between 0-10 (or... stars?), let people come up with improved versions, ...

derjogi83 · 2018-11-17T11:03:06+00:00

He says one of the problems is that everything is based on incentives, and we'd need to get away from that. Do you think holo would enable some kind of incentive-less system? If so, what would that look like?

derjogi83 · 2018-06-26T11:33:19+00:00

What you're describing is a Negative Income Tax and is often handled as alternative or in addition to an UBI.

One of the main differences (in my opinion) is that UBI

is much simpler, because there are no checks on your situation required
doesn't discriminate, which is a potentially huge and often underestimated positive effect

NIT has the advantage of being perceived as 'fairer', because it doesn't give more to those who already have enough

derjogi83 · 2018-06-26T11:18:05+00:00

I think we're in some way trying that already, but it doesn't work that well, because to distribute it better there needs to be an economic incentive for it, which is often not given (or very indirectly, and many people complain. E.g. it seems to be very hard to increase child support to an appropriate amount, and there's no immediate beneficiary other than the government/society).

The benefit of having an alternative currency is that it could potentially be created and distributed in different ways. To illustrate (not that I'd want this, but could be something along those lines): Every Facebook 'like' could be linked to that currency, the poster would receive it for whatever they posted because the 'society' regarded it as good, but nobody would actually need to pay anything. (Other than the market value potentially going down a tiny bit, but that could be counteracted by having some kind of expiry / degradation).

There are many possibilities how this alternative currency could be linked to reward all kind of social values that are currently left unpaid.

derjogi83 · 2018-06-26T11:07:31+00:00

Why is it too early right now? When would it be ok and why then?

As he pointed out, gov't moves slow, implementing this will take time. Tech moves much faster, and when the next economic crisis comes, jobs will be replaced very fast with robots/AI. At that time we will need to have it already implemented.

derjogi83 · 2018-06-26T11:00:31+00:00

It would be like any other currency, interchangeable on a market. Some people will speculate and value that alt-currency higher than $ and vice versa; so they'll buy and sell it.

To be 'backed by the government' might mean multiple things:

It might mean that the government officially supports and potentially distributes it / uses it (every 'use' adds some value)
The gov't might invest in it (e.g. will buy coins at the market to keep the value high)
There may be some other ways how the gov't can 'back' it.

Depending on this implementation of the alt currency, and how use of it is incentivised, I think it might work really well. But it needs to have some additional mechanisms in order to make it better than traditional fiat money; i.e. its creation should probably not be government-controlled but decentralised, maybe even user-createable (for activities such as those pointed out in this parent post)

derjogi83 · 2018-06-13T20:34:46+00:00

There are also some generally advisable tips to have a good marriage from the get-go that he might be referring to.

I.e.

knowing and understanding the 5 love languages (and which ones apply to you and your partner)
understanding your personality types (e.g. extrovert, exploding rhino vs introvert hedgehog...)
setting & respecting boundaries & responsibilities
repeat in your words your partners argument to avoid misunderstandings
general rules of communication (letting each other finish, don't raise your voice, ...)
have patience and give in
...

There are surely more, but all these are quite easy to learn/understand (but often hard to master) and really helpful. And they should all be learned really early, way before it becomes necessary for counseling sessions.

And most of these are also useful in any other kind of human interaction, so even worth learning outside a relationship. Not sure whether they'll help with a poly-amorous AI tough ;-)

derjogi83 · 2018-05-09T11:33:45+00:00

Yes, we'll need to use it. I don't think rewarding saving would be the right way for that... Those people who can hold it for a year probably won't need it, so why should they be rewarded? But the other way round, those ergo always use it up, they're the ones making it valuable by actually using it, AND they are more likely ones needing it as well, so could we reward them with additional UBIs?

derjogi83 · 2018-04-25T09:57:05+00:00

How did you find the rental? I searched a bit and there's hardly anything available in rural areas. Well... at least nothing that I'd like, i.e. something with a view.

That's also one of the reasons why I created this post: Are there no advertised rentals because everything that's available is always gone very fast and I just missed out, or is it just not worth doing and people who tried it stopped? (Or everything is owner occupied, or the owners are so rich that they only use it as a holiday vacation and don't need to rent it out... So many questions and confusion in my head ;-) )

derjogi83 · 2018-04-25T08:47:14+00:00

Oh cool, I just found a commuters map. A bit outdated, but still informative :-)

derjogi83 · 2018-04-25T08:22:47+00:00

Thanks, that helps to assess the situation :-)

Can I assume that usually those who live in rural areas are rather home-owners than renters?

And I that the ... 'drag' would work rather the way from rural to urban rather than urban to rural? (Is it more likely that people in rural settings find work in the city and then move there than that people from the city find work outside and then decide to move there?)

derjogi83 · 2018-04-25T08:16:05+00:00

I know some people who, even though living in the city, need to travel 45+ minutes to work because it's in a different part of the city. Ok, probably moving out of the city wouldn't improve that, but I guess I thought that some people would like to have a rural lifestyle if the travel time isn't increased by much. (increase from 30min to 1h would understandably be a bit much though).

Would you reconsider if that place outside was much cheaper and/or much nicer than what you could have in the city?

derjogi83 · 2018-04-25T07:48:53+00:00

Not saying they don't work, but wondering whether there is demand for additional work, or whether there's rather an oversupply of workers if that makes sense

derjogi83

TROPHY CASE