How a social network could save democracy from deadlock

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50127713

by eddyparkinson • 7 years ago

95 36 7 years ago

humanrebar2• 7 years ago

And rather than showing the messages that divided each of the four groups, Pol.is simply made them invisible.

This seems like a good way to find some initiatives through consensus. The main mechanism seems to be giving a "conversational veto" to everyone in the discussion. A "let's move on" button, basically.

I find that very interesting. It would certainly help with concerns that "my legislature does nothing". It might actually be an interesting mechanism for legislatures themselves to deploy internally to set agendas, though it would necessarily weaken the power of the factions that actually set legislative agendas (the majority party, the majority leader, etc.).

On the other hand, giving a strong and hidden minority veto also doesn't seem to help with the issues that actually divide citizens.

- Would not talking about Brexit anymore actually help the U.K.?

- Should the U.S. Congress not pass a budget anymore, to avoid balancing it?

- Maybe all legislatures agree to broadly humane treatment for refugees, but how would they agree on healthy levels and categories of immigration?

- The biggest divisive issue in the U.S might actually be abortion, which generally isn't debated so much as such. It's also clear that not addressing the issue isn't making the underlying problems go away.

- More broadly, would the U.S. have ever done anything significant about civil rights if consensus was required first?

EDIT: Maybe I'm a bit too pessimistic about civil rights... the constitutional amendment process does require two kinds of consensus for ratification. And many amendments did deal with civil rights.

calmworm• 7 years ago

I interpreted this differently. It’s not about ignoring the polarizing issues or tough topics. These issues would still be presented and discussed. It seemed to me it was all about finding the commonalities between groups then drafting statements that both could agree on.

Retric2• 7 years ago

Politics is complex and deadlock preserves the current situation which some group considers preferable to change.

Consider, (53+25) = 78% of the US population believes Abortion should be legal in some or all situations. That’s why a total ban is rarely debated it’s a campaign issue, but making it illegal would quickly cost elections.

Restrictions on the other hand also have popular support (53 + 21) = 74%. Thus rather than a ban one party pushing for more restrictions. This is not a failure to achieve a ban, but rather a middle ground with significant popular support.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

humanrebar2• 7 years ago

My points were more that:

- Sometimes the controversy is about the process, such as historical efforts for suffrage for women.

- Sometimes 90% vote benefits for themselves at the expense of 10%. Most unbalanced budgets fall in this category.

- Sometimes 10% people preserve benefits for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Especially concerning about automatically hiding debates without consensus is that it hides things that are important or urgent but haven't reached consensus (yet).

Maybe there are other mechanisms to provide transparency there, but the article did not seem to describe any.

rayiner• 7 years ago

Abortion is also a very interesting example of tactical voting: https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-.... Just 28% of people support making abortion in the second trimester generally legal, but every state allows second trimester abortions. (Recent laws have not yet taken effect.)

So legal with restrictions is a middle ground, but there is a ton of debate and tactical voting within that middle ground.

Johnwbh• 7 years ago

It reminds me a bit of the old dinner party rules of not talking politics, sex or religion. You keep things harmonious but at the cost of more interesting conversation. And doesn't help when you're forced to tackle controversial issues

heisenbit• 7 years ago

I found it quite interesting that they removed the reply button. Afaik HN also has a limited reply button - there is no notification attached to it. This discourages talk/debate like discussion (lack of personal reaction) and encourages more a discourse style interaction around the facts.

johnday2• 7 years ago

The opportunity to reply is only invoked after an increasing amount of time, which I think is dependent on the depth of the conversation. In other words, the further into a conversation you are, the more time you are forced to take to think on the other person's response.

xorand• 7 years ago

Great idea! I was thinking about how to make votes (aka likes) more like real votes. Maybe by updating the number of likes of a post once every 6 hours.

anoncake3• 7 years ago

Can you draft a reply before that times has passed? I wonder how that would influence the conversation.

refset• 7 years ago

For more context on the Polis platform, watch "Clojure on the cyberpunk frontier of democracy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tBVMAm0-00

lbj• 7 years ago

Democracy in its current form is bound to fail - The greek inventors specifically warned of exactly our brand of democracy.

johnisgood3• 7 years ago

http://www.anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm might be worth a read.

chmod7754• 7 years ago

The author does a lot of fun thought experiments that don't hold up long under critical scrutiny.

Take for example: "On the other hand, if, as it is now fashionable to maintain, the majority of voters in a democracy are prohibited from doing one thing—ending the democratic elective process itself—then this is no longer democracy, because the majority of voters can no longer rule."

It is still a democracy, because the majority of voters did not the surrender the power to make that decision to anyone, but in fact nobody is able to make that decision at all. There's no non-democratic entity who could decide so in place of the majority, because it is something that simply can't be changed. Every decision made is still made in a democratic process.

Just because you can't decide that the sun should drop out of the sky, does not mean you are not a democracy. It's simply another decision nobody can make. It's completely outside the scope of your democratic decision making.

Edit:

Another example would be a company in which all decisions are made in a democratic process. Well why can't its workers decide that murder should be legal? The obvious answer is that it is simply not a decision they can make, but is instead at the discretion of the country they operate in.

big_chungus• 7 years ago

Which is why originally, we didn't have what we have today. We had a modified republic which allowed democratic elections of some officials, but not of others. Keep in mind that senators were elected by states for a long time, a good thing if you as me, as they were intended to serve as a sort of moderate gerusia and be less accountable to the whims of the public. Electors for the presidency weren't directly elected either, in many places. Again, I think this helped us see a president more as a leader and less like a head-man.

Indeed, too much democracy can lead to disaster. We're seeing already that we end up with mob politics, populism, and candidates competing as to who can spend more of the other side's money, pass more laws they hate, etc. I hate it, and this is why the federal government was supposed to be elected mostly indirectly and given a small role to play.

known• 7 years ago

Unlike social media, traditional media "generates" opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democr...

emsign• 7 years ago

It's funny I just thought about this yesterday. "What if my smartphone loses network connectivity. How many apps on it will stop working? 95%? I miss the old days when storing and processing my personal data was done 100% on my own devices. Sharing that data with others wasn't really a problem and people had websites as always accessible billboards where they presented themselves as well." Sure the social media "network" aspect wasn't there, but it wouldn't be impossible to achieve that today while the bulk of the data resides on people's own devices.

Ever since the shift of storing the user's data not on their devices but in the cloud and ever since rendering ad blockers useless by tailoring not just the ads but the actual content towards the user's behavior and biases, the internet has gone down the drain. And more and more people are fed up with it.

Societies can be "hacked" via social media, that technology is out there and it is being used not only by superpowers like the US or Russia, but also by political actors in smaller countries like Myanmar or Ethiopia. People die. Mobs incited by fake news campaigns on Facebook kill people. Elections get hacked, not by manipulating voting machines but by manipulating people's minds using the same technology advertisers use. That's some scary stuff. Social Media manipulation is the nuclear bomb of the early 21st century, it's that hot new weapon every sleazy political actor wants to get their hands on. And so we are in a new Cold War, actually it's many cold wars. Unlike the one in the 50s-80s these new ones are invisible and don't feel as scary, which makes them... more scary?! Weapons of mass propaganda... we have to take action to render them useless by abonding social networks and cloud services as we know them today. But that can only happen with a better replacement that's harder to manipulate and that has a higher incentive to be used by the masses.

Without an internet connection your smartphones and even your PC becomes either almost completely or at least partially useless. That is not scary because we have to fear network issues or censorship but it's scary because it means so much of the information acquisitioning and processing is out of our control. Modern devices are perfectly capable of handling all the user's data and then some, they have the storage capacity and they have the processing power, the only reason the cloud still exists for end user's is because analyzing everyone's data makes them money.

And you can't even blame developers and companies jumping on this bandwaggon. Everyone else does it, the tools are out there, ready to be used, and that sweet ad money pays the bills or the investor's demand it because they think that sweet ad money will reimburse their investment.

But is it ethical? Hell no!

It seems like nobody is thinking about putting that processing power and that storage capacity that people own in their pockets to use. I welcome the initiatives that do exist, but I feel like that only something massive, something disruptive can change that.

foobar_• 7 years ago

https://github.com/g0v/vue.vtaiwan.tw

English translation anyone?

K0SM0S2• 7 years ago

I am very much convinced —have been for about a decade— that this is the general way to go. To fundamentally give democracy to people in a much more direct fashion, a peer-to-peer design true to what democracy actually is. Starting with the local / small issues (if resistance is met at the top, unlike the Taiwainese example it seems).

tus88• 7 years ago

While a nice idea, the problem is convincing people that compromise is a better alternative to winning.

th-th-throwaway• 7 years ago

Gamified Nuance. What a brilliant idea.

I don't know if this particular design will work but I expect to see a lot more attempts now that the idea has entered the public consciousness.

Current social networks are gamified for virality which implicitly rewards the lack of nuance. So statements that are as short, simple, and wrong as possible will spread faster within the supporters while encouraging flaming from the opposition. This is such an inherent property of every social network in existence that I didn't even realize fixing it was an option.

How a social network could save democracy from deadlock

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