Imagine that you need to buy a new car. What is the better way for you to make the decision?
- Gathering a lot of information about potential cars, having a few discussions with your family, test-driving many cars, and mulling your options over a few days.
- Going to a big car mall and having all your family members and all the salesmen argue and talk back and forth for two hours at which point you must make a decision.
The first option is clearly way better (car salesmen specifically use time pressure to get you to make a bad decisions).
Or imagine you're trying to figure out the truth of some controversial matter, such as a difficult scientific question. Which way is more likely to arrive at the real ground truth?
- All interested parties publish essays or other documents making their full detailed case and describing their evidence, and all respond to and critique each other over time.
- Two arbitrarily selected "sides" have a time-pressured debate where the laughs and jeers of the crowd are the main way the sides are judged.
Again, a live event is extremely likely to devolve into a mere charisma contest, whereas publishing letters and papers is literally the process of peer review that made science so successful.
It's obvious why a live event with time-pressure is worse for figuring out the truth: humans have two distinct "modes" of thinking, System 1 and System 2.
- System 1 is fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, unconscious. This is our proverbial "monkey brain" that autopilots us through our lives and is mostly driven by instincts and urges. It goes into hyperdrive when in a competitive live meeting.
- System 2 is slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious. This is the part of us that's produced math and science and philosophy and art. It can only engage when given calm and quiet.
My goal is to convince you that our democratic systems need to use something more like the scientific method and less like a dumb live debate.
Governance meetings don't scale, and representatives are corruptible
Basically every governance system I can think of uses live meetings as the only venue where the main "rubber hits the road" decisions are made. If live meetings are where real decisions are made, then Direct Democracy at scale simply isn't possible.
If you've ever been to a parliamentary-style meeting you know what I'm talking about: it's difficult to get everyone on the same page in a meeting of fifty people, let alone 5,000. People who are barely paying attention derail things with dumb questions, social idiots commandeer the proceedings with minutiae no one cares about, and eventually people start voting more to get things over with than to carefully select the best course of action. To even keep a bare semblance of order requires a meeting secretary who charismatically exerts authoritarian control, which can easily spiral into real issues being ignored or frustration erupting into a chaotic shouting match.
The historic solution to chaotic meetings was making them smaller by selecting representatives: presidents, senators, boards of directors, etc. Entrusting representatives doesn't even necessarily lead to less chaos (we've all seen clips of congressional clown shows), and it risks the even worse problem of corruption and capture leading to a tyranny of the minority.
We don't have to choose between complete chaos and the risk of corruption!
Weighted Direct Democracy
In the age of the internet it's possible to implement basically any method of decision-making we want, and my specific proposal for a first option to try is Weighted Direct Democracy.
Here's a short description:
- Every voter has some number of "voting weights". Depending on the nature of the organization every voter could have different quantities.
- All the decisions of the organization can be voted on directly by the voters, wherein the voters place their voting weights on decisions or elections they actually care about and ignore ones they don't.
- Various techniques such as voter initiated elections and direct elections for documents are used to decouple decisions from arbitrary events and schedules.
The organization can still use delegates and representatives such as parliaments or elected officials, but the voters are always able to override any decision they make or trigger an election to replace them. The artful combination of all these systems allows an arbitrarily large number of people to coordinate and make decisions without everyone having to weigh in on every decision all the time.
Live meetings are still important
Would this mean live meetings or events would go away? Definitely not, since meeting in person is such an important part of a group of people growing to understand and trust each other.
An ideal outcome is for the intensity and purpose of online vs offline to completely flip with each other.
- Essential communication happens asynchronously in online spaces specifically structured to push that communication toward shared understanding. Official elections happen asynchronously as well using smart weighted mechanisms.
- In person meetings are specifically focused on socialization and collaboration, using any appropriate format such as presentations, workshops, hackathons, unconferences, or even purely social gatherings like potlucks.
Help us out!
All of these ideas are experimental right now, but all good ideas started as mere theories. Help us make these a reality, by making a donation or helping out with our open source work.