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Goddess of Desire (dtluna@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 22-May-2017 20:11:32 UTC 
Goddess of Desire
Started reading "Against Democracy" be Jason Brennan.
Night, Fediverse.- Hallå Kitteh likes this.
- Hallå Kitteh repeated this.
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Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2017 02:21:04 UTC 
Hallå Kitteh
@dtluna @ue Basically, rule by the people for the people, but with more filters against ignorance and less popularity contest.
http://drmaciver.com/ is a big fan of more random voting, partly because it's the only way to get away from all the problems of Arrow's Theorem except that part about determinism (duh :-) ). -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 02:03:09 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@ue @dtluna That's more of a problem with single-person constituencies. If you need a president, choosing one by random vote is probably a bad idea. But choosing an electorate by random vote, which then chooses a president by approval voting, is probably an awesome idea. For the extreme version of this, check out the convoluted Doge election system, which involved several rounds of approval voting and random voting, each electorate electing the next, to make manipulation really hard. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 02:34:18 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@dtluna @ue
http://rangevoting.org/VenHist.html
> Thus the process for electing the Doge, as of 1268 (when it was employed for the election of Lorenzo Tiepolo), had reached this amazing almost-final form [Lane p.111; also described by Lines p.156]:
> 1. Choose 30 of the Great Council members (of whom there were 1000-to-1500, typically; all male) by a random process;
> 2. Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
> 3. The 9 name 40 nominees;
> 4. The 40 are reduced to 12 by a random process;
> 5. the 12 name 25 nominees;
> 6. Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
> 7. The 9 name 45 nominees;
> 8. Reduce them to 11 by random processes;
> 9. The 11 named 41 (all of whom had to be age≥40 years);
> 10. The 41 elected the Doge (from among nominees they chose; any of the 41 could write a name on a slip of paper, and from then onward, that name was a candidate) by range3 voting!
> This choice theoretically was subject to approval or veto by the mass of the people (assembly) but I am unaware of any instance in which that veto was exercised. This perhaps meant this step was a mere formality with the People not really having any power. But another interpretation is that the threat of a veto kept the Grand Council honest in its choice – they refused to risk the embarrassment of a veto. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 02:47:50 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@dtluna @ue @xj9 Two PDFs on the Venetian system:
> Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf
> 64% Majority Rule in Ducal Venice: Voting for the Doge
http://faculty.apec.umn.edu/jcoggins/documents/Selected%20Publications/Majority.pdf -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 02:51:33 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@ue @dtluna Basic knowledge of the system you're actually voting within, for one.
An article by the author: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/against-democracy-17605 -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 02:59:07 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@dtluna @ue @xj9
> As an analogy, suppose a jury were deciding a capital murder case. But suppose instead of carefully considering the evidence, the jury found the defendant guilty out of caprice or malice. Suppose a third of jurors paid no attention to the evidence, and just decided, by coin flip, to call the defendant guilty. Suppose another third decided to find the defendant guilty because they dislike his skin color. Suppose the final third paid attention to the evidence, but found the defendant guilty not because the evidence suggested he was, but because they subscribed to a bizarre conspiracy theory.
> If we knew a jury behaved that way, we’d demand a retrial. The defendant’s property, welfare, liberty and possibly life are at stake. The jury owes the defendant and the rest of us to take proper care in making its decision. It should decide competently and in good faith. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 03:13:54 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@dtluna @xj9 @ue Near the end, the article defines 4 forms of epistocracy:
Restricted suffrage: No basic civic knowledge, no vote.
Plural voting: One voter, one basic vote. Pass some knowledge criteria: Add more votes.
Epistocratic veto: In addition to a Supreme Court that vetoes on a legal basis, have further epistocratic/meritocratic veto institutions for other fields of knowledge.
Weighted voting: Control for social/ethnical factors, and let the result be proportional to a hypothetical well-informed population of the same composition. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 03:37:25 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@dtluna @xj9 @ue
This was an interesting article. Apparently "epistocracy" was originally coined by another scholar, David Estlund, basically as a strawman against which to defend democracy. Brennan pretty much took that strawman, steelmanned it and came to defend it. :-)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-case-against-democracy -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 04:35:07 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @xj9 @ue I think the suggestion in the article works: Use undiluted democracy to choose the criteria, because even though people may be uninformed, they probably have a decent consensus on what informed means. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 04:36:48 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @xj9 @ue It seems Brennan's article was written after the book, because the New Yorker article complains specifically about the lack of a suggestion on how to technically draw the line between illegitimate voter suppression and epistocracy. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 06:37:01 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @xj9 @ue That's an attack vector to any society. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 06:39:25 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @xj9 @ue The hole I see in using pure democracy to decide the threshold criteria for epistocracy is that people might think it's in their own interest to lower the bar to zero. But that failure mode is today's democracy. And probably people are afraid enough of other people's incompetence, even if they Dunning-Kruger their own, that they will decide on a reasonable bar. -
Constance Variable (lambadalambda@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2017 06:40:55 UTC 
Constance Variable
@dtluna @ue
> How to fix democracy by only allowing people like me to voteghostDancer and Hallå Kitteh like this.Hallå Kitteh repeated this. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 00:01:40 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @ue Unless one follows one of the suggested models, controls for demographics and emulates a world where every social class were educated. Of course, that makes it more complex and therefore less transparent and more open to manipulation. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 00:04:20 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@dtluna @netkitteh @ue That's exactly it, and that's what Brennan attacks in his article:
> This widely held view is odd. Democracy is not a poem or a painting. Democracy is a political system. It is a method for deciding how and when an institution claiming a monopoly on legitimate violence will flex its muscles. Government is supposed to protect the peace, provide public goods and advance justice. It’s not in the first instance an institution intended to boost, maintain or regulate our self-esteem.
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/against-democracy-17605?page=3
The question is whether we use democracy because it works, i.e. has fair and productive outcomes, or because we are ideologically dedicated to the idea that it is the pinnacle of governance. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 05:43:37 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @moonman @ue As every state before the 18th century had slaves at home or in colonies, or traded in slaves, we cannot learn anything about politics or ethics from them.
Philosophy starts with the French Revolution. Everything before then is just immoral darkness. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 06:31:42 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @moonman @ue
Given that you missed the obvious sarcasm and the barb pointed at your attempt to discredit Rome because they were a "slave state", you're apparently pulling wool over your own eyes. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 06:32:48 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @moonman @ue
> are you saying that we cant learn from the intricacies and contrasts between different slave societies and how democracy was used differently between the greeks and the romans?
You're talking to yourself, dude. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 06:35:05 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @moonman @ue You seem to be saying that there were some ancient Greeks that practiced universal suffrage. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 06:40:11 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@dtluna:
>> Not a prerequisite really, because even the Greeks were complaining about the ignorance of the voter.
@netkitteh:
> since he obv isnt talking about greece Ill assume he means slave state rome.
Why is it obvious that you can't be talking about Greece if you are saying there were people who complained about voter ignorance? Several Greek philosophers go on and on about how superficial and populist politics is.
Why is it relevant that Rome was a slave state when there wouldn't be a non-slave-state for near two millennia and had never been a significant non-slave-state at that point?
Ancient Greece was built on slavery. That's how philosophers had time for philosophy.
@dtluna @moonman @ue -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 06:48:46 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh If by "he" you meant @moonman, are you not considering military training "education"? It was a requirement in Sparta and in Athens.
@dtluna @ue -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 07:51:41 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @moonman @ue
You seem to be insinuating that Athens was all egalitarianism, pastoral bliss and kittens, whereas Rome was an cold-hearted war machine. I don't buy it.
Both societies were money-based marketplaces where people accumulated wealth.
There were rich people in Athens. You had special political access if you owned property. They had hereditary aristocrats. The citizens managed to limit the aristocrats' power over time, but so did the Plebeians in Rome.
I don't see how slavery was qualitatively any different between the two societies. It was slavery. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 07:52:53 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@moonman @netkitteh @dtluna @ue Neither of them was epistocrat in the Brennan sense: They didn't have a civic test and there was no attempt, subverted or otherwise, to base suffrage on competence. It was only based on ethnicity, class, gender and property.
Both of them were epistocrat in the Estlund sense, in that they thought women weren't intelligent enough to be voting citizens, or it wasn't their place, and that people without property weren't fit for office.
They only sincere attempt at epistocracy I've seen in history is the Chinese Imperial Exam and the systems inspired by it. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2017 08:04:11 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @ue In order not to confuse things, or undermine what @moonman said: Their class system incidentally meant that every voting citizen had an education.
Brennan is trying to pick the raisins out of that cake. You don't think it's possible, or that it's ethical, but I don't think that's a foregone conclusion. -
Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Friday, 26-May-2017 10:28:26 UTC
Hallå Kitteh
@netkitteh @dtluna @moonman @ue
That sums up our disagreement pretty well, and I don't think we're getting much further here either. My whole hangup was on you "couldn't have been about Greece" bit, because I think all systems we have seen have limits on access to governance.
Here's my final thought, which should probably be in a new thread if someone wants to spawn a whole new conversation around it:
Is the age of 18 a better boundary for suffrage than basic civic knowledge?
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