I think we haven’t tested democracy variations quite far enough. I agree that the first-past-the-post model in capitalism has proven extremely vulnerable to mis/disinformation, and made it possible to benefit from the idiocy of your peers. But I don’t think we’ve seen, say, RCV and proportional representation + robust finance laws prove nearly so bad.
Also, I think this take is disingenuous to the roots of democracy. It is a social technology used for legitimacy in tons of situations by many groups, for a variety of reasons. Often it is neither dumb nor a method of obvious control.
Popularity is a bad concept for representation. We don’t need to waste any more time figuring it out.
Natural leaders and the dynamics of unanimous rule cannot to be confused with large scaling elections that don’t find or promote these leaders. The system produces obvious garbage once scaled beyond a small group.
Hypothetically if you could have a population perfectly informed without bias they could make a good rationale choice. This is beyond unrealistic as you scale elections though because the information required to make a good decision increases beyond what most humans are capable of.
Much like capitalism, democracy seems only acceptable on a very small and well regulated scale which invariably grows into the monstrosity we deal with today.
On the extreme end, Quakers. Consensus is clearly a democratic voting scheme, and they’ve run everything from churches to universities to states to companies with it.
Consensus is quite hard to corrupt by design. You trade off some substantial amount of efficiency, and most groups aren’t willing to commit to working towards it.
They believe everyone’s got some good in them, and that good will end up getting the important decisions to happen. I note that they don’t seem to actually control for this belief all that hard. Perhaps anyone who doesn’t believe gets too impatient and moves on.
Any popularity based voting system is going to be corrupted. It really is a dumb concept used for obvious control.
I think we haven’t tested democracy variations quite far enough. I agree that the first-past-the-post model in capitalism has proven extremely vulnerable to mis/disinformation, and made it possible to benefit from the idiocy of your peers. But I don’t think we’ve seen, say, RCV and proportional representation + robust finance laws prove nearly so bad.
Also, I think this take is disingenuous to the roots of democracy. It is a social technology used for legitimacy in tons of situations by many groups, for a variety of reasons. Often it is neither dumb nor a method of obvious control.
Popularity is a bad concept for representation. We don’t need to waste any more time figuring it out.
Natural leaders and the dynamics of unanimous rule cannot to be confused with large scaling elections that don’t find or promote these leaders. The system produces obvious garbage once scaled beyond a small group.
Hypothetically if you could have a population perfectly informed without bias they could make a good rationale choice. This is beyond unrealistic as you scale elections though because the information required to make a good decision increases beyond what most humans are capable of.
Much like capitalism, democracy seems only acceptable on a very small and well regulated scale which invariably grows into the monstrosity we deal with today.
Eh - sounds like arguments against centralization of power to me.
Show me a Democratic model practiced on a large scale that has not descended into an oligarchy of corruption.
On the extreme end, Quakers. Consensus is clearly a democratic voting scheme, and they’ve run everything from churches to universities to states to companies with it.
Why do you think it is so effective for them?
Consensus is quite hard to corrupt by design. You trade off some substantial amount of efficiency, and most groups aren’t willing to commit to working towards it.
They believe everyone’s got some good in them, and that good will end up getting the important decisions to happen. I note that they don’t seem to actually control for this belief all that hard. Perhaps anyone who doesn’t believe gets too impatient and moves on.
Yes, I looked it up. A non adversarial voting system based around consensus. This is similar to a system I strive for in my workplace.
Thanks for pointing this out, while extreme it does offer some good insight especially for someone who is over the first past the post system like me.