Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] Abschied

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

Hi Scott,
I added Altemeyer's book to my reading list but won't get around to study it anytime soon. As it stands, I can sense where you are coming from and I must disappoint you because you expend yourself on the wrong question.

To me it is a flawed approach to "design systems that that help people make rational decisions".
All of our decisions are exactly as rational as they can possibly be.
Everybody is equipped with reason and enhancing it is a matter of education/learning.
i.e. Coursera does that, everything else just fosters "faith/prejudice". Focusing on enhancing learning is a worthy pursuit!
The problem on this end is that it requires "Investing enormous (and as a practical matter, unavailable) resources".

On your list you forgot 4) Separate the different rationalities

"what is the perspective from which we assess "perceived" utility?"
I think Microeconomics has you covered already. Do you like the blue or the green T-Shirt? - The particular utility is inherent to each agent.
We can however compare in that we ask: Would you like one or two T-Shirts? If you add opportunity cost you can determine the marginal utility.

Another fundamental flaw: "but I believe"
With that you set yourself up for failure and construct an ineffective but justifiable ideology: "All we need to do is recognize that irrationality exists"
Yes we can, allahu akbar!

I could not find the example you mentioned but I am happy to take a look if you point it out. My suspicion is that "authoritarians" don’t identify themselves as such and hence their worldview is consistent. It is not irrational. Look again on your list:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases.

History has countless examples of people who seemingly act against their own interest. It is only that you can't comprehend with your mindset their mindset, that's all.

> 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

Not at all, this is not philosophy, we aren’t that far yet.
Let me phrase this differently.
4=f(2,2) ?
The degree of how {conscious a decision} OR {informed a choice} is = f(cognitive capacity, exposure to information) ?

It is by definition an issue we need to resolve before we can do anything. If you were to try you would probably recognize that we actually have a "system that
functions well in the world as it exists."
Very well in fact! So well that there is no other system that can out-compete it right now. North Korea tries, so does China or the Theocracy of your choice.

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.)

I don’t assume that "authoritarians make *random* decisions". I don't believe they exist. You do by insisting on vague "irrationality".
I think that we all "make decisions that are not optimal". In fact, to me, all decisions are "not optimal". Or show me the trading record of the guy who bought stock consistently at the all time low and sold exactly at the all time high?
Worst case, this is called a mistake, the optimal outcome is that the subsequent decision is made under consideration of the previous outcome. It's an iterative process. In fact, according to my current understanding, trial and error is the modus operandi of our beautiful optimization algorithm that we fondly call evolution.

The optimal outcome of any decision on a micro level is maximum utility for the agent. This does not exclude death by suicide attack if the personal utility function is determined "by the well being of the community as a whole".

> 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.

It appears inevitable that "believe" is followed by "hope". Otherwise you would not make unfounded claims like: Brave and upright "Neurotypicals" are victims of "authoritarian" cock blocks who prevent them from getting tail and keep la bella vita out of reach.

This part is pretty tendentious but I thought the same once upon a time, I am sure you’ll get around it as well.

Even if you had 99% authoritarians, all the power would rest within the 1% of swing voters because the rest cancels each other out. Looking at the margin of the last 100 years in the US, it appears to me like a pretty perfect distribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin

Don't forget that the political actors constantly recalibrate to insure the equilibrium.

It's overwhelmingly clear that those who make uninformed choices are perfectly neutralized. I understand that you identify those with a tendency to make uninformed choices as "authoritarian" and hence there is nothing to improve upon.

Only if you were an authoritarian yourself you would look at the other half and consider them as authoritarians.

Interestingly you aspire (just like the others) that the "broad middle of the normal curve" is supposed take charge. While that is exactly what we have and appears to me as the problem. I have a feeling that most people are just out of touch with reality and don't quite understand what the "broad middle" really is (false-consensus bias?).

I think that the future belongs to a system were decisions are made by a minority of very well informed people that are directly validated by the "broad middle of the normal curve". I used to think that liquid democracy with it's powerful delegation is the best approach but I tend towards competition these days. The pirate party is a great place to experience the different dynamics.

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.

I am drifting into a different universe than the meta gov or AG MFT people so I can't help you with that.
According to my understanding "consensus" or "moderators or juries" as central goal are inefficient and not worth pursuing.

I am looking at it from much more dynamic (opt-in) perspective whereby consensus is implicit and doesn't need further consideration.

Regards
Martin

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

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