I worry that a lot of it comes from scale. It’s expensive/tricky to scale up human flexability; I think I’ve seen well meaning people design systems they intended to be human, and got much worse results than the lawyers and bankers. There’s some skill here.
Just logging that this doesn’t match any data I’ve seen, unless you take Nazi to be an obscenely broad tent. Sources + definitions required.
Oh that’s fun. I like this, but you really need that RCV to avoid vote splitting. I wonder if it’s better off as approval? Strategic voting around a sortician option would be very weird.
Cause RCV for a sotrician option is, statistically, likely to pick a moderate voter who leans towards the thing you dislike. There’s something anti-inductive here.
The upvotes are in! There’s at least dozens. 2 dozens.
Consensus is quite hard to corrupt by design. You trade off some substantial amount of efficiency, and most groups aren’t willing to commit to working towards it.
They believe everyone’s got some good in them, and that good will end up getting the important decisions to happen. I note that they don’t seem to actually control for this belief all that hard. Perhaps anyone who doesn’t believe gets too impatient and moves on.
On the extreme end, Quakers. Consensus is clearly a democratic voting scheme, and they’ve run everything from churches to universities to states to companies with it.
There are indeed ways to design it poorly; I’ll just point again to juries to say that we know how to do it competently. I’ll rephrase the objections in terms of juries (but please note the quotes are from a hyperbolic strawman, and not literally what you said. I hope my replies to the strawman are still useful).
“People who don’t care about the particular law/case will refuse to join a jury and they’ll all get stuck in endless deliberation” - being on the jury is not always optional! While there are strategies to avoid being a juror, the large majority of folks don’t use them. People get real nervous about perjury. Also, we have several levers of control here. Congress salaries+benefits aren’t bad, getting an important position might be akin to winning a lottery. Many folks skip voting day because they feel uninformed or are required to work, but we educate jurists and require companies to give time off for their service. Finally, if a jury is stuck we call a new one; by random draw we’ll eventually get a lot of all people from one side or the other. Gridlock is only ever stochastic.
“People could bribe the juries for the outcomes they want!” - extremely risky, the state knows who is on the jury at the same time as everyone else, predicting it ahead of time is impossible, and we strongly regulate the interactions of juries + invested parties once they’re chosen. Note that we can assign political decision bodies to fairly narrow issues, so managing this at scale isn’t so difficult.
Eh - sounds like arguments against centralization of power to me.
Which, under a sortition vote, would mean we would have a chance!
I think we haven’t tested democracy variations quite far enough. I agree that the first-past-the-post model in capitalism has proven extremely vulnerable to mis/disinformation, and made it possible to benefit from the idiocy of your peers. But I don’t think we’ve seen, say, RCV and proportional representation + robust finance laws prove nearly so bad.
Also, I think this take is disingenuous to the roots of democracy. It is a social technology used for legitimacy in tons of situations by many groups, for a variety of reasons. Often it is neither dumb nor a method of obvious control.
I remain a huge fan of sortition. You randomly pick a bunch of people who are willing (and/or able) to do the job, let guardrails veto some of them, train them and let them cook. An unordered list of things to love:
We already do this for the life-or-death task of juries. We have the technology.
(Second choice is RCV w\ MMP; fairvote does good work.)
This is very similar to how we do it with juries; a body of the people to stamp/implement the laws written by congress and rules for reading them from judges. I think it’s an improvement.
But I do want to vouch for how teachable people can be. And I think it really changes how we fund/run/manage education when ‘functioning in the senate’ is a mandatory skill.