Yeah, the legislative process sure could use a few more debugging protocols… hopefully the Venn diagram of coders and legislators will develop some significant overlap in my lifetime.[quote=“zathras, post:5, topic:71853”]
I am referring to unsolved problems such as the lack of transparency of any electronic secret ballot system, and the lack of secrecy of any truly transparent electronic ballot system.[/quote]
Yeah, that’s a tough one, but I have a feeling the problem can be sidestepped…
As for direct democracy, the problem is, people aren’t smart enough. If you ask a question that only 5% of the electorate have the intelligence, motivation, and/or time to understand, you might still get 15% voter turnout. Which means, your result will be two-thirds noise at best and two-thirds lobbying and demagogy at worst.
IME, in a digital community with around 150 regular members and reasonably good moderation, it’s possible to foster a culture that delivers a useful signal-to-noise ratio; respected contributors can be allied with the moderators in suppressing noise. When one can call such a place home, one is actually part of a functioning community, something increasingly rare IRL; outside many of our experience. In such a situation, many of the hardwired mental shortcuts and other cognitive biases that are often such a pain in the arse start actually working for us, allowing us to make a representation of the community in our minds, embedding us in a larger organism.
I say our body politic can only truly thrive when we abandon as much formality as possible, and allow our fundamental operating system to be the basis of our government. A community that engages issues according to the inclination and informal standing of its members can indeed be a mechanism for achieving if not consensus then most often a clear enough mandate for the community’s chosen representatives. These representatives could hopefully be chosen without resort to formality, which is beset with hazards of corruption; rather by community discussion and debate, which is relatively transparent to members of that community.
It’s an interesting question, to what extent higher-order organisation is desirable, but I think it’s a given that a considerable degree of coordination and cooperation amongst such communities would not only be necesssary to manage all the aspects of industrial civilisation we tend to take for granted, but (given sufficiently enlightened design) could actually do a far better job of sustainability and resource management, being a system explicitly designed to favour facts over money.
It’s all a bit hazy in my mind since it’s just a bunch of hunches without any collaborative input, but I’m pretty sure @William_Holz can help join the dots…
