Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] Abschied

[Scott Raney <scott AT metacard.com>]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 5:29 PM, janonymous
<janonymous AT news.piratenpartei.de> wrote:
>
> PS @Scott
>
> "Accept dissent, and assume that decisions will not be reached
> through consensus."
>
> First, I do not have to accept dissent, when the preconditions of the
> opinion forming are characterised by misinformation, conditioned reactions,
> egocentric motivs or manipulation and when the process of judgement is
> obviously biased by contrast effects or other perceptual biases.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

So you propose to eliminate dissent by "correcting" these
biases/fallacies/etc.?  How do you propose to do this?

Isn't this what those "juries" are for, identifying flawed thinking
and then taking corrective action?

> This is in line with the challenge to support an unbiased and self
> determined judgement in order to empower people to participate in self
> organized collective decision making.

You're right, that's a challenge.  By my understanding of human
nature, an impossible-to-solve challenge, especially for
authoritarians who will stubbornly resist any efforts to force them to
behave rationally (it's just not how they're wired!).  Seems to me
it'd be a lot simpler and more efficient to design our new systems to
work even with the flawed input that real human beings will generate.
The only reason for rejecting that approach that I can see is if you
believe that *even on average* the input is so flawed as to render a
usable decision unlikely.  Do you believe that?

> Second, if you really think in such a black-white manner that decisions will
> not reached by consensus, you are in dissent with you own attempts to stop
> authoritarian rule making. So perhaps, you should evaluate your own inner
> dissent (or cognitive dissonance) a little more to reach an authentic
> argumentation here.

Umm, I'm not planning to *preclude* consensus, which is what you seem
to be implying.  I'm just saying that any system designed with the
misconception that this is a reasonable goal simply won't work in the
real world (although it might in very homogeneous organizations like
religious orders and open source projects).  It also seems to me that
by proposing juries and moderators handle this "correction" work that
you've also seriously underestimated the resources required (people's
time and effort, elapsed time to render a decision, etc.): Even if you
*could* somehow get everyone to behave rationally the cost of doing so
would be so high as to render the system impractical.

But I still haven't heard a convincing argument as to *why* consensus
is necessary.  Is this just a philosophical preference, or is there
some reason why a simple majority or supermajority won't work?  And
wouldn't it work vastly more efficiently?  Is this a fear of "tyranny
of the majority", because near as I can tell that's about as rare a
thing as a rational and unbiased human being...

Nor did I receive any reply to my question about corruption: How do
you eliminate the possibility of corruption in any system that
requires representatives/moderators/juries/etc. to deal with
disruptions?  Why not instead design the system so that The People
make these evaluations themselves?  Sure, they may not be able to make
a proper logical or psychological analysis of the disruptive
individual, but we've been dealing with people like that for millions
of years and I think we've evolved some pretty sophisticated
mechanisms for recognizing and dealing with these kinds of problems...
  Regards,
    Scott

> Good luck!
>
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