Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] Anybody checked out placeavote.com?

[Henri Nathanson <henri.nathanson AT gmail.com>]

... because the subject is so very important, cross-posting is really appreciated.

2014-06-16 23:11 GMT+02:00 Martin Stolze <pirate.martin AT stolze.cc>:

​

​Mike,
Thanks​ a lot​ for the food of thought. In fact, this entire subject has kept my mind racing quite a bit recently​. I think I understand now what you meant when you wrote that single voting sites won't matter.

I checked out Michals stuff(Votorola?) some time ago. Some nice graphics, but I did not see much interesting thoughts on democracy.

 

My initial​ line of thought was mostly driven by the ​dismal EU election that let me to believe an opinion-forming system seemed overdue. 

This opinion system stuff is 99% non-sense. That is my humble opinion. Opinion is like social-shopping to e-commerce. You can have e-commerce without social-social, but not vice-versa. E-commerce and the market system do deliver goods, a voting system does aggregate power in the same structures. Please use an economic view on democracy.

 

The next best approach appeared to be anything that worked, even a single congressman acting as a proxy in a too-big-to-fail-government appeared like the gateway drug that could push the door wide open.
I entirely understand your sentiment and grasp this aspect now. In fact if I had the capacity, the geek in me would love to hack something like an aggregator together. Though the details are extremely tricky, i.e. just the AI for language processing would be insanely complex.
I agree that there is already a conscious out there, it is very scattered. On an individual level it is hard to navigate and certainly impossible to identify the 'current shape of aggregated opinion'.

Aggregated opinion is like double - or aggregated - non-sense. Sorry to say that.

 

Throughout this very interesting discourse I learned that the 'viable platform' will not just emerge out of the current derangement. However, I don't think an aggregator is useful either, at least from a political point of view because I see too many possibilities for abuse and it runs into the classic problem of all centralized systems. - >From an economical point of view I could see a chance to identify signals and patterns in the noise and isolate indicators that could provide guidance. (From that point of view it's also obvious that it is too complex ... the NSA or Facebook may have the capacity and the access needed)

Skip that "oh, the data is so insecure" and run with the "centralized vs decentralized" idea. That actually is the basic thing. Though, differently as you and others see it.

 

As I am digging deeper and deeper I am forming a strong opinion that neither, voting platforms nor opinion-aggregation are actually attainable goals or at all worth pursuing.

How deep?

 

Throughout this discussion 2 challenges became apparent. The first concerns the underlying dilemma that wasn't obvious to me yet. It’s basically infrastructure. maidsafe.org or ethereum.org made the current restrictions quite obvious to me. The second one concerns the opinion forming process as a whole, in its essence: Its limited cognitive capacity, stupid.

May I add http://v-initiative.org/ ?

I did not have the time to digg through all that bitcoin stuff yet. But as I see it, it is technically a very interesting approach. I can really understand many people are totally excited about it. And it its decentralized paradigm is - just from the word - the same paradigm, which offers a thorough understanding of democracy. Democracy is just the civilized version of natural power structures, structures of dominance, which can evolve within a centralized or dezentralized setting. By that, democracy needs to have the same structures as such "natural" structures of dominance. And there are two basic forms of democracy, a centralized version, direct democracy, and a decentralized version, representative democracy. Things known today do not just appear out of nowhere. But you can put a version of democracy coming by a decentralized understanding of it, on a single server plattform. Or you can implement it within a decentralized technical solution. The latter may be useful, if you want to cyber war China or want to really mega-safe a state level it structure. But for today, we just need a bit of understanding, a basic server, and some bold people, which get a first instance running. The bitcoin guys may run with their system and reproduce todays unsufficient structures. I don't figure they get an understanding of a decentralized democracy just because they run it on a decentralized infrastructure.

 

What I mean with Infrastructure is that we are stuck now in this semi centralized internet that is just not sufficient to enable people to communicate on a level that would be necessary to form a complex consciousness. When I say communication I don't just mean talking, writing, reading but combining information and providing context and structure as you say. Think for example about your health record, it exist only rudimentary but is insanely important or think how people behave, or how they communicate with the consume decisions they make. This information has a much higher value than 'voiced opinion'.

From this angle the future of democracy may look much more like the Carbon Tax than a voting platform we envision today. In order to approach any of that we need to be able to measure the "distance" of an "information-object" to a single individual's mind. Only if we could measure this distance we may be able to formulate a problem that we could try to tackle with software.

We currently believe we just need to present some kind of platform that allows for individuals to structure and present their opinion. We thought the internet reduced the price for communication to almost zero and consequently connected people so that they would just naturally use it as something to cooperatively make decisions. We forgot the limited cognitive capacity. Every human can only be concerned with so many things. The last meter, the connection to the mind, is the bottleneck. Advertisers understand this limitation very well.

Oh well. I stop here and better put my time into my book on democracy. As Einstein said, there are only two things, which are infinitite... but human stupidity is more infinite. We are historically stuck into direct democracy. I really wonder how long it will take us to see: decentralized beats centralized democracy.

 

People attribute this limited capacity to a limited set of issues. We thought that just because we reduced the possible(!) distance to every piece of information on a technical level and made it actually accessible, people would take note. But of course, the only thing that happened is that they have more choice, not more capacity. Instead of concerning themselves with more available information they must filter more efficiently from a greater variety.
Engaging in politics or generally the vow for democracy is not more than a new year’s resolution to lose weight, or a subscription to a Cursera course. Those who really make it a priority are less than 1% and are already predisposed to the subject.

To picture this better: I observed a teenage girl that was eagerly engaged with her smartphone while her parents didn't seem too happy that the little screen took priority over their presence. It goes to show that the priority was given to the distant friend behind the screen based on the enhanced communication ability. She can't focus on both and is forced to choose. This choice was just not available in the “good old pre-internet times”. Having overcome physical distances does not equal cognitive distance.
Antonio kept shouting "#IDIOCRAZY" in response to this discussion on one of the mailing lists. What he actually meant to say is that he can't understand how different people have different priorities for different information and don't allow their limited cognitive capacity to prioritize what he deems important.

Measuring the distance between a pieces of information to the individuals cognition is probably an exercise in graph-theory and psychology.

From there on we could​ start​ interacting​ similar to behavioral taxation. The basic premise of the carbon tax for instance is, that an extensive carbon footprint is discouraged by increased taxation while the levied tax is directly redistributed to everybody equally, leaving those with a small carbon footprint with a surplus. All of a sudden we have bidirectional communication that makes the issue at stake tangible and thus increases priority. Everybody would become part of politics instead of being disfranchised with some arbitrary vote every couple of years. Enabling people to constantly or directly vote on anything as we envision today with our current voting tools is equally void.

The beautiful efficiency of the free market could put everybody into the area, think about 'tax credits' that everybody could assign to particular issues. Those 'tax credits' are simply derivatives of a sovereigns finance. We can just lean back and watch. For example an Animal rights organization would go out of its way to lure people’s “tax credits” into their pockets with pictures of cute baby dogs. This could span an entire secondary market (delegation!) in which actors compete for the 'tax credits' while the government itself focuses on administration and allocation according to the derivative that “tax credit” would be.

A deeper approach based on block chain technology would be to issue (colored) tokens to individuals and allow them to attributed those to certain causes or functions that would force those who rally for a cause to interact constantly with the constituency. - The Pirate Party could issue token's as a derivative of 'membership' (similar to votes) or even reflecting individual contribution. Those tokens would be assigned to an idea, a workgroup or campaign and reflect the distribution of resources that we have at our disposal. 

Currently, people are taken out of the equation and there is just no feedback loop that would trigger engagement and promote bigger issues on the cognitive priority list. - It's like playing poker without wagering money.

To me, it seems appurtenant that we need to enhance the internet with a storage layer, a computation layer and in extension with medium(s) of exchange that respect individual freedom.

Inevitably, without it, everything we develop is as useless and fugitive as necklace beats without a connecting chain.

Thanks to Muriel, I am looking forward to identify and contribute to efforts that help the post-snowden web 3.0 off the ground on liquid-democracy-international AT llistes.pirata.cat! (https://xifrat.pirata.cat/gestors/mailman/listinfo/liquid-democracy-international)

--Martin

PS If I lived in Toronto I would probably invite Vitalik Buterin over for a beer ;)

On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 4:01 PM, Michael Allan <mike AT zelea.com> wrote:

Martin said:
> ... finding a way to moderate a bigger discussion. Voting is only

> part of it, facilitating discussion, moderation, identity and trust

> management are other parts. ... I think you are much deeper into

> that then most around here. Hence my surprise that you think this
> won't matter!

Sure it matters!  My own surprise is to find anyone else who thinks
so!  That's why I hang out in the AG Meinungsfindungstool list (though
I don't know German).  They're the only other tech folks I know who
understand the priority of discussion and opinion-forming systems.

Now if only they understood the structural utility of votes for that
purpose, then we might be working together.  Unfortunately they see
votes as mostly for decision systems, like everyone else.

> As for the Aggregator, frankly - No, it doesn’t make sense to me. I
> believe you are onto something but I am not quite able to grasp it.
> Votes won’t be public, maybe opinions. If you wanted to aggregate
> them you could simply use google news and filter a bit. Certainly
> you will have the fun stuff that draws in users.

Yes, the content would be opinions (think water), but the structural
form that carries that content across long distances would be votes
(think aquaducts).  But don't picture *decision* votes here or you'll
miss the point.  It's not a decision situation (freezes), but rather a
discussion and opinion situation (flows).

So here's the situation we're working to support (all of us, I speak
as a non-Pirate).  People are out there in the world discussing some
issue that might later be decided in a separate, central decision
system (it's always central).  That upcoming decision might be months
away, or years away, but no matter; they're curious to learn what the
correct decision would be.  In other words, they want to reach a rough
consensus before the fact.  So they argue for alternative courses of
action and express opinions on which is best.  So far, so good.  This
much is already possible out there, with or without digital democracy
sites, tools, etc.

But the participants are spread across many discussion sites that are
independent of any central control or coordination.  This complicates
things for the newcomer (important) who wants to orient himself, or
for the existing participant who wants to catch up on developments.
For these purposes, the most important information is the current
shape of aggregate opinion.  What are the alternative choices that
people are discussing?  What is the level of support for each?

This is the top view of the issue at a glance (think headlines).
Without it, we're unlikely to see much of a discussion; the newcomers
simply won't come.  Yet only a vote aggregator can project such a top
view.  It's fairly simple to hack together (I've done it in a test
prototype).  We just scrape the votes from where people are talking
about the issue, translate them to a common form, then publish the
totals for everyone to see.  For source sites that lack a voting
facility, we stick a vote button on the aggregator itself.

Basically we jump *on top* of the whole show, loosen the "reins", and
hang on tight.  (Are there any Cowboys out there?  You Pirates are
difficult to convince. ;-)

> Meanwhile, how about you help pushing a viable platform? It’ll make
> later aggregation even easier because you know all the details!

I'm open to that (thanks).  I guess we're all looking for that first
viable platform.  I see viable things we can do, but I don't know if
I'll convince anyone.  Meantime I'll keep working with my experimental
prototypes and documenting some of the technology we've hammered out
over the years.  My newer docs are rights reserved till I learn where
to publish them; I might have to publish in academic journals to get
the critique I need.  (This is to answer your question about GPL.
Votorola's software and manuals are still MIT - never were GPL.)

Thanks too about the resume, Martin, I might take up your offer some
day.  There's a limit to how many years I can work without pay. :^)

Mike

Martin Stolze said:
> Hello Michael,
> This is quite off topic. But I can’t resist because I believe that you have
> actually come up with some awesome contributions and I wanted to ask anyway
> why you dropped the GPL license.
>
> On a bigger scale, the gist of what the pirate party is up too is finding a
> way to moderate a bigger discussion. Voting is only part of it,
> facilitating discussion, moderation, identity and trust management are
> other parts. Think of an old light bulb that only converts 2% of the energy
> intake into light. -The assumption is that we can reduce this loss by
> applying software that translates the cognitive surplus of all pirates into
> efficient decisions.
> I think you are much deeper into that then most around here. Hence my
> surprise that you think this won't matter!
>
> Anonymous voting is a snooze. //I disagree on ideological grounds.
> >
>
> As for the Aggregator, frankly - No, it doesn’t make sense to me. I believe
> you are onto something but I am not quite able to grasp it.
> Votes won’t be public, maybe opinions. If you wanted to aggregate them you
> could simply use google news and filter a bit. Certainly you will have the
> fun stuff that draws in users.
>
> But that doesn’t help us. All we need is one implementation that doesn’t
> suck and gets a little traction. Once people are hooked to the idea they
> won’t turn back. The developed world is packed with old people who have too
> much time on their hands and know everything better, think about how happy
> they will be!
>
> If you want to leap forward on a big scale you will have a better chance by
> predicting the outcome upfront. The failed intrade.com comes to mind, they
> let people put their money on elections and events and obviously given
> enough participation they were incredible accurate.
> On the other hand, rumor has it that the intelligence community is
> factoring their forecasting on aggregated opinions that can easily be
> qualified by reach. -Show me a Facebook profile and I tell you what’s on
> the ballot.
> I don’t think we have the capacity for any of this - but if that’s what you
> are aiming for you may want to leave a copy of your CV over here rentec.com
> :)
>
> Meanwhile, how about you help pushing a viable platform? It’ll make later
> aggregation even easier because you know all the details!
> Martin
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 8:02 AM, Michael Allan <mike AT zelea.com> wrote:
>
> > Hello Martin and others,
> >
> > > If you hear social network you think Facebook, if you hear video
> > > playback you think “VLC” if you hear digital democracy you think
> > > ...?  let me know. ...
> >
> > I'd say vote aggregators, aka "vote mirrors".  How would Facebook work
> > if the users were anonymous and hiding behind pseudonyms?
> >
> > Answer: It wouldn't.  And digital democracy?
> >
> > Same answer.  Anonymous voting is a snooze.  That means the votes of
> > digital democracy (DD) are going to be public; at least the fun ones,
> > the ones that draw in the users.
> >
> > But that means anyone can copy the votes from different voting sites,
> > translate them, and then aggregate them to show the big picture.  The
> > aggregator would be a useful service because it's the sum of the votes
> > that matters, not the place at which they're cast.
> >
> > The upshot is that individual voting sites don't matter enough to
> > worry about.  There's no need to wait for a viable site to emerge from
> > the pack and take the lead.  Instead we just wait for the first
> > aggregator to start scraping from the pack as is, levelling all the
> > contenders in the process.  That'll be the shape of the future.  All
> > eyes will shift to the aggregators.  Add a simple "me too" voting
> > interface to an aggregator, and the voting-only sites are doomed.
> >
> > Does that make sense?  (I'm keen to start coding the first aggregator,
> > if anyone else is interested.)
> >
> > --
> > Michael Allan
> >
> > Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
> > http://zelea.com/

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