Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] Abschied

[Martin Stolze <pirate.martin AT stolze.cc>]

Hi Scott,
I am also cursory reading along but lack detailed insights to contribute much.
Let me say that I wholeheartedly agree with your observation of the "authoritarian mode" that is "activated" by perceived fear of having reduced access to (scarce) resources. It's a very powerful force that is commonly applied to aggregate votes.
Likewise, I cut you some slag for recognizing what you called the "scalability" problem (and your instance on free and open source).

I think the debate your getting into is one that requires believe and isn't governed by reason.
Don’t work yourself up too much. ;)

However, I meant to call you on the previous point of "irrational decisions" that probably falls back to your "authoritarian personality". I haven’t had time to read more on this but I can’t quite understand how this can be of any importance at all.
In my book there is no such thing as an "irrational decision". A decision (expressed agency) can only be perceived subjectively as irrational. Every decision is ultimately driven by a (perceived) assumption to maximize utility. The only conceivable way by which an irrational decision could come about would require a high level of entropy.
It is very improbable that anybody is rolling a dice to make a decision?

To me, the amount and variety of information people take into consideration to make decisions is naturally limited (by capacity and exposure). As a consequence, it appears that you mistake the fact that some agents are more limited for a personality trait?

Let there be 25% of people that only consider a limited subset of information (driving force) as basis for their decision (i.e. Religion).
Let there be a decision that can have outcome A and B. Along a gaussian distribution I would expect 12.5% of those proxies to make decision A and another 12.5% to make decision B exclusively.
Thus they cancel each other out. It seems like a beautiful feature of any democracy because the value of the remaining 75% appreciates automatically. The swing-voters are ultimately the deciding force.

Therefore I don’t understand why we should concern ourselves with anything "irrational" or better "close minded". At least as longs as there is any voting, they are neutralized naturally on both ends of the spectrum.

Cheers
Martin

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 2:10 PM, janonymous <janonymous AT news.piratenpartei.de> wrote:

You don not want to understand and you also do not check it because it is not you language. I wont translate it at the moment and until it isn't tranlated, please check you own actionism here. It is surely not the right time to promote your plan under this topic! Just stop talking to me or otherwise you will never get any information to understand what we are taling about here, because I will stop doing anything!

Scott Raney schrieb:

janonymous schrieb:

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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