Re: [GNU/consensus] Liquid democracy vs blockchain anarchy

[carlo von lynX]

On Tue, Sep 06, 2016 at 01:35:52PM +0000, hellekin wrote:
> On 09/06/2016 07:27 AM, carlo von lynX wrote:
> >>
> >> You shouldn't put them all in the same bag: liquiddemocracy is a time
> >> sync that requires professional users to keep an eye on things for
> > 
> > That has not been the case in the past, why should it be a precondition
> > in the future?
> 
> What about: we didn't have a global scale influence before?

That was an argument that convinced people in 1996. See Howard
Rheingold's desperate attempts to explain to people that the mere
existence of the Internet would not automatically bring better
democracy along. The populocracy and manipulocracy we are living
in now is a proof that he was right and the optimusts were wrong.
Unfortunately, history teaches us nothing, so the new generation
of optimusts is all into blockchain and stuffs.

So far the net scaled for cloud systems, but not for democracy.
Liquid feedback is a democratic platform that scales and works,
so that is major important news. It's not a hype.

And no, LQFB has not needed "professional users" to make a winning
electoral programme in 2010. Fact.

> >> others. I can't imagine one second such an approach will work that
> >> promotes a unique ('rational'?) interface to political issues through
> >> written language with no human interaction. It's the kind of technology
> > 
> > Who impedes human interaction?
> 
> If you're spending your time online reading and replying to other
> people, you're not spending that time with other people interacting.
> 
> More generally: politics that requires sitting on your bottom and
> denying verticality of the spine cannot account for humans--and
> historically: hasn't.

Human interaction doesn't scale up, so it impedes participation.
Also, it is a good vector for corruption. LQFB cannot automate
governance, but it can make legislation participatory and resistant
to corruption, and that is a huge step forward for human societies.

> > It's just more screen work than paperwork, more transparency by
> > documentation instead of getting convinced by a lobbyist over a beer.
> 
> The lobbyist has more bandwidth over a beer than over a wire, that's why
> they use more beer and less wire.

That's why we have to reduce the political impact of such approach.
And now we can. We just need to want to.

> > We can see how successful human-to-human politics has been in the past.
> 
> When it wasn't repressed by bureaucracies, it fared rather well. I see
> we don't understand politics in the same terms.

You are looking at it through some pink-painted glasses which I cannot
share. The idea that bureaucracies are the only problem whereas legislation
has never been corrupt is... indeed hard to understand. I remember we had
better understanding of each other last time you sat in my garden. Looks
like I haven't been lobbying you well enough in the last months.  ;)

> >> non-verbal dimension in human communication that is not captured by this
> >> system. We already know what a statistical perspective on politics is
> >> able to bring to the world. We don't need more autistic politicians.
> > 
> > Do you have any papers backing your position or are you just opinating?
> 
> Just look around you.

Well, the enhanced transparency and accountability of a public driven 
legislation system can only reduce the effects you describe. So you are
yelling at something that probably is a part of the solution.

> >      http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07723
> 
> Thanks.  But I simply cannot equate politics with voting, and the
> legislative process.  This is certainly 'better' than what's here now,
> but calling that politics is against my religion.

LQFB is not voting. It's a months long procedure of enhanced transparency
and debate that makes it hard to push populist bullshit or hidden agendas
but rather makes it easy to converge towards properly argumented proposals.
And the paper has proven that the mechanism works. By wiping it aside with
populist argumentation you are acting just like a politician.

> > What those non-pirate people found was that the promise of liquid
> > democracy actually proved true: delegations were "stabilizing" the
> > political outcome of liquid feedback
> 
> Sounds like Belgian politics: looking away from conflict and finding
> grace in soft consensus.

Trying to be funny?

> > What we know now is that the liquid modeling of a representative
> > approach actually work
> 
> Who cares about a representative approach when we can have municipal
> federalism with human-scale politics at work?  Think about it, before it
> disappears under the guise of 'terrorism' because it breaks the
> consensus of Washington.

There is a huge mistake in this approach: Federalism doesn't work.
We have already tried this with the 'Soviet'. Each soviet can
nicely take care of small municipalities, but when the challenge
is to scale up to states, nations or the entire planet, then you
start having those assemblies of representatives which are exactly
the problem of current politics: Representation. The result was
the Soviet Union and I don't really see how to fix that failure.

By the way, it's not a good habit to decorate arguments with polemics.

> > Still, there are reasonable and unreasonable ways of setting
> > up a liquid democratic platform. Depending on the legal
> > architecture around it you can either reap the best of both
> > direct and representative democracy or earn the worst of
> > both worlds.
> 
> Glad to read this.

I've seen it happen.

> > Let's understand: electronic democracy has many enemies - anyone who
> > would prefer to have things done their way rather than having to
> > listen to some thousand strangers clicking their vote from their sofas.
> 
> Those are the worst: they think they know, while they can only be
> influenced by what they read online from, say, the new mainstream media.
>  They're also spine-deniers, so that's perfectly sane for them to
> participate in 'liquid democracy'.  I like my democracy solid, or
> plasmic, not liquid.

That's why it is so important to have a method that inhibits opinionitis
and brings out the rationality in them. Luckily such a method is feasible.
After all the problem is socio-structural, not within the people themselves.
It needs to be addressed appropriately, not by declaring war to democracy
or by thinking that anarchy would be in any way better.

> > And being against something is usually much easier than being for it.
> 
> What about being indifferent to it?  I'm simply not convinced relaying
> debates with machines can scale to 'representative' politics.

Luckily we have facts, so we don't need to put our trust in opinions.

> > Demagogy and populism does the rest. As frequently in politics, if
> > we're not going to be scientific about this, we will succumb.
> 
> 'Scientific' approaches to politics led to the worst political
> nightmares throughout the XXth Century! Nazism and the final solution,
> Stalinism, etc. Even in the USA, under the Randian influence of, e.g.,
> Alan Greenspan and his 'rational' view of economics (that he finally
> accepted was wrong), anything 'scientific' about politics has been

Wait, wait, those were *using* the word scientific while they were
actually ideological. I am *really* taking a scientific approach.
If you're going to burn everything by the use and abuse of voca-
bulary, then I can find things to burn every single word you say.
Let's not degrade into superficiality, please.

> ideological at best.  Science cannot account for politics, because
> science is about reproducible phenomena, and humans are about unleashing
> the most irrational behaviors in the guise of the purest rationality.
> You can't reconcile science and politics without going to disaster.

That i think is a fallacious assertion. Also you are performing a
straw man fallacy here. I didn't say that political decision-making
itself can be entirely scientific. I said that the LQFB method for
decision-making is scientifically proven to provide better democracy.

> Science cannot take over the subjective, and there's nothing like an
> objective policy, unless you're considering the politics of robots; even
> then, robots belong to algorithms that are political in nature, and thus
> not objective.

That is a debate I already had, although not with you. I will respond
even though you are implying I proposed a solely scientific/rational
legislative procedures which I didn't.

Of course there is no way of taking the objectively *correct* political 
decision, but there is a way to inhibit people from taking political 
decisions that are based on *lies*, *falsities* and objectively *incorrect*
options that some lobbyist instilled into them.

Whenever a proponent bases policy on objectively false facts, a several 
months lasting debate allows for enough time to debunk such falsities.
This means that the proposals that ultimately go to vote are within
the span of what isn't bullshit and thus reasonable political choice.

> > I still haven't seen a scientifically convincing use of blockchains
> > that I couldn't have done with secushare pubsubs over gnunet without
> > damaging the environment.
> 
> Please do! You know well how much I like to remove these conditionals.

Thanks. Urge tg to fix the bugs in his code and we can start.  ;)

> >> Since we know about the quantum, we don't live anymore in an either/or
> >> world. Sustaining that vision is retrograde and harmful.
> > 
> > What does the quantum have to do with that?
> 
> Aristotelian logic cannot account for the fact that a photon behaves
> like a particle and like a wave, or that the same photon can be observed
> in different places.  The quantum vision requires going beyond dualism.

Oh yes, of course there are a lot more bullshit technologies out there
in the world beyond blockchains. There is also the cloud for example.

> > I like that you agree on the most radical thing I said.  :)
> 
> I've been working on hyper-rationality and its effects.  Ayn Rand, her
> followers, and indeed the Californian ideology are prime suspects for
> large scale restrictionism.  We can't disagree on Objectivism.

Her ideology falls apart by the simple fallacy that egocentricity
does not trickle down. The trickle down economy she inspired was a 
lie that only made rich people richer. It is absurd that this broken
ideology is still carried forward by criminals and idiots. Her 
insisting on being rational was a mere exuberance of her excessive
self-esteem. Her architecture of thought may even be rational, but
it is pointless if it is built on top of a fallacious axiom.

> But we certainly disagree on the nature of politics.  Liquid Democracy
> is about finding a consensus, converging towards 'the best' outcome.  In
> my view, politics starts where there's conflict: and this antagonism
> cannot resolve in a compromise, but in a tension; this tension in turn
> doesn't revolve around an imaginary center that should be found and
> pursued, but each time around a concrete center that's moved through
> political struggle.  Replacing the political 'arena' with a race for
> consensus at any price is simply diverting the political struggle to
> follow the political agenda of the ones in power.  When you're leading
> the game there's no reason to change its rules.  Occupying people to
> nitpick over details online while moving geo-strategic 'assets' sounds
> very much like anti-political to me.
> 
> P.S.: I notice now the topic '... vs. blockchain anarchy'.  As an
> anarchist, I don't condone this term.  'blockchain anarchy' doesn't mean
> squat to me.

We have global problems like a capitalist race to the bottom, an
ecological race to the bottom, a democratic, social and digital
race to the bottom of civil liberties and decency.

None of that can be addressed by anarchy.

The liquid democratic principle is the only mechanism I know that
could be used to make a whole humanity express common goals and
channel the authority to have them respected.

> P.P.S.: sliding away from the topic is not going to help having a
> conversation.  I don't have that kind of time, nor for liquid democracy
> either, nor any other time-sink system that takes the place of life
> itself, and that's my point.

I mentioned it because it was part of my argumentation.
You were free to not jump at it.

> Let me add something regarding the topic: "Liquid democracy vs
> blockchain anarchy".  You're framing something, again, in terms of
> Either/Or.  This is not the case.

Yes, there are many more Or's than just anarchy.

> If Liquid Democracy works for the Pirate Party, let them have it.

The Pirate Party didn't work for Liquid Democracy, at least not in
Germany.

> What I cannot stand is the will to reproduce the
> patriarchal-conquistator-totalitarian (PCT) view that if that works,
> then 'we' should scale it up and use it systematically.  No.

It is years that I am looking out for anyone to offer an alternative,
but so far LD is the only chance I see to fix the world in a democratic
way.

I used to look down on my grand-pa for being a monarchist, but by now
I understand that representative democracy was not good enough to
replace a sensibly run monarchy. It needs a better form of democracy
than what we are in, now.


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