Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] Abschied

[Scott Raney <scott AT metacard.com>]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 10:05 AM, Martin Stolze <pirate.martin AT stolze.cc> 
wrote:

> 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).

Progress!

> 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. ;)

An appreciation for irony helps me through.  Here we are trying to
design systems that help people make rational decisions, and yet the
people designing them seem to have the same penchant for making their
decisions based on faith/prejudice rather than aspiring to that goal
of rationality!

> 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.

It's only important that we *recognize* that this happens and design
our systems to function in spite of this behavior.  One way to do that
is to insist on a simple majority decision rule rather than
"consensus".  Given that this kind of irrationality exists, IMHO the
only way to achieve consensus is by:
1) Suppressing dissent (which seems to be the approach janonymous
prefers, as I keep seeing STFU as the response to my questions).
2) Failing to make a decision at all
3) Investing enormous (and as a practical matter, unavailable)
resources to diagnose and "correct" the irrationality

> 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?

We might quibble about the philosophical interpretation here (e.g.,
what is the perspective from which we assess "perceived" utility?) but
I believe that is not necessary.  All we need to do is recognize that
irrationality exists and design accordingly.

Bob Altemeyer has a good example of this kind of irrationality in his
book in which he describes an experiment where he manages to get
authoritarians to target *themselves* for discrimination.  Pretty much
regardless of where you stand on the "perceived utility" issue, that's
got to be considered irrational.

> 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?

Again, how you characterize this is a philosophical issue, and not one
I think we need to resolve before we can design a system that
functions well in the world as it exists.

> 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.

I don't think it's correct to assume that the authoritarians make
*random* decisions, just that they will sometimes *all* make decisions
that are not optimal (e.g., in Altemeyer's experiment those 25% of
authoritarians would vote to put all authoritarians in jail, or ban
them from the voting system!) optimality being assessed however you
want (their own well being, the well being of the community as a
whole, etc.)

> 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.

Correct: Our hope is that *all* the decisions are made by the people
in the broad middle of the normal curve (who I call the Neurotypicals
in my book).  These are people who are not well represented in our
current representative government systems (let alone any more
authoritarian form of government!) because social dominators and
authoritarians are the people who like holding these positions and are
even the most likely to vote when it comes time to choose those
representatives.  We need to design the system to make it easy and
efficient for them to participate, or they simply won't do it.

What I was hoping to achieve with my posts was to get someone on this
list to defend "consensus" as a design goal (decision rule) and/or
defend the proposal to have moderators or juries who would "correct"
irrational or other disruptive behavior.  Anyone want to try to do
that?  Feel free to post in German if that's an issue: I
Google-translated this message to German and back to English and can
still get the gist of my argument, so I believe we can have this
discussion using one-way translations:
https://translate.google.com
  Regards,
    Scott

> Cheers
> Martin