At 05:09 PM 3/23/2008, Juho Laatu wrote: >The method now presents one very clean viewpoint. The >method introduces some clear benefits but also some >problems. I'd maybe try to find a method that would >keep most of the benefits and eliminate most of the >problems. (There could be many paths forward.)
I began, over twenty years ago, with a similar idea, only the group size was tentatively ten. The size of three solves some problems and introduces or exacerbates others. However, the essential idea of negotiating agreement in small groups was there. The problem of proportional representation was resolved by allowing the groups to coalesce, in small numbers, around the chosen "delegate," rather than being some enforced or random or geographical combination of fixed number. Thus the representatives vary in the "votes" they represent, and I realized that this was essentially proxy representation. I did not start with the proxy concept and then apply it to elections, I started with distributed elections on a small scale, modified the concept to deal with proportional representation, and then realized it was proxy voting, only layered flexibly, formed from the bottom by direct choice rather than from the top by fiat. Thus it becomes possible to implement on a small scale in peer associations, and, what my study and the limited experience I've had so far tells me, is that it provides benefits even when only a few people use it. These people become more organizationally efficient. This already happens informally, most organizations would break down if it did not. But the formal structure makes responsibilities clear, without restricting the freedom of the members. At a certain level, direct democracy becomes impossible, that is, you cannot have a single Assembly of the Nation where everyone can speak. The noise makes it utterly impractical. It is essential in representation that the represented be able to communicate with the representative. Political scientists have long been aware of the gap, that, say, a U.S. Representative represents so many constituents that for direct communication, with the vast majority, is impossible. Thus indirect communication must be used, and the question is how this is done. When it is done from the top, i.e., the Rep hires staff who filter communications for him or her, frequently the necessary rapport with the public is missing. As an example, when we adopted our Ethiopian daughter, we ran into government bureaucracy. A form which had been submitted, with all fees paid (hefty), everything in place, duplicating what had been submitted four years earlier (all the fingerprints had to be taken again, etc.), was going to take months to process. Out daughter was waiting in Ethiopia, in an orphanage; at this point she had been adopted by proxy there, she was our daughter by Ethiopian law. But the U.S. requires these forms and procedures. So we called two Senators, Kerry and Kennedy, since we live in Massachusetts. Kerry's office did nothing. Kennedy's office called us the next day and said that the forms had been approved and we would be notified by the agency -- and we were then able to book our tickets. One day. Now, Kennedy was an expert at this, he had excellent staff with years of experience. Kerry is a relative newcomer. The Kennedy staffperson who was handling adoption affairs was an expert, and very easy to talk to. Does anyone wonder why Kennedy is utterly unbeatable in Massachusetts? We found out. But it does not always happen that way, as we saw with Kerry. Don't get me wrong, I like Kerry, actually I like him very much. But his staff was inadequate, it seemed. They never even got back to us. (My wife visited both offices in Boston, in person, with her plea for assistance.) Now, delegable proxy sets up a representative system where you choose your personal representative as someone you trust, but the assumption is that it is someone who will talk to you. In other words, you could choose Clint Eastwood, but ... what would you gain? In fact, you would be assigned to an underling, who might or might not be compatible with you. One of the foundation concepts for delegable proxy was as an idea filter. If I have an idea -- say I think we should hold a national election by meeting in groups of three -- what can I do? I can break myself trying to present it to many people. But suppose I have a proxy. If I can't convince my proxy, someone I chose for trustworthiness and an ability to listen to me, maybe it is not such a good idea. If my proxy is not going to pass the idea along, he or she will tell me why. If I really don't accept the answer, I can either change my proxy, or, alternatively, if I can convince *anyone* else, they can approach their proxy. Massively redundant entry points exist for ideas; however, they are filtered from the start. So new ideas get both a fair hearing *and* the center is protected from noise. In the other direction, the business of government (or management of a large association) is complex and most members would not be interested in most of the traffic. The proxy network, in the other direction, protects them from that noise, while -- in the open systems we propose -- they can, if they wish, follow any of it. Voting is done by those informed, normally, though every member does have the right to vote, the vast majority won't. And that, too, is necessary. One of the very dangerous aspects of modern political systems is the idea that everyone should vote. No. People should have trusted representatives who routinely vote, except when the people are sufficiently informed to have a sane opinion. Who decides if they are sufficiently informed to vote? They do. And, presumably, they will listen to the advice of their proxy. They are not compelled to accept it. Hence, when I see the triad representational system, I see it as familiar, with a new aspect (the very small size of three, which has some appealing characteristics), but I also see it as requiring coercive implementation from the top. (If you cannot agree on who represents you, that is, the two who are not represented don't agree, you are not represented. While that seems to make sense, it forces representation through people with whom one does *not* have rapport. It neglects the critical aspect of voluntary connection. So I'm not terribly interested in it. Mr. Gohlke also wrote to the Election Methods Interest Group with his idea, at the yahoogroup [EMAIL PROTECTED] When I wrote that such discussions were not appropriate at that list, because it is a top-level list for a family of lists, with detailed discussions taking place in those virtual committees, and that he could form such a committee to study his idea easily, he apparently did not get it, and went away in what may have been a bit of a huff. The fact is that EMIG is much closer to his concept than he might realize. It's as if he wanted to stand up on the floor of the Senate and make his proposal. That access is carefully controlled. Now, it is not currently a moderated list, so he was able to make his post, but, indeed, if that happens very much, I expect that the top-level list will indeed become moderated. The idea is that this list is for overall coordination and for announcement of polls with regard to committee reports. EMIG is not going to make "decisions" as such, but it will report consensus, thus making its reports a possible foundation for a new kind of peer-reviewed publication. Why is that important? Well, if any of you have tried to write about election methods on Wikipedia, and have stuck around long enough to see what happens, most of what we routinely no cannot be asserted there, because there is no peer-reviewed publication. Hence EMIG was started. And it's a delegable proxy organization, though at this level of activity that is not very significant. But the idea is that there is no reason *not* to be a member of EMIG if you are interested in election methods. You can be a member, and have an effect, doing nothing, simply by joining and naming a proxy. Now, if you *never* participate, your "vote" as represented through your named party may start to be deprecated. In order to understand this, one must understand that EMIG will report "raw" poll data. I.e., this member voted this way. The proxy table is a separate thing and, as we have been realizing in various experiments, there can be many proxy tables, plus many different ways of analyzing the results. A publisher of this new "peer-reviewed journal" can set his or her own standards for adequacy of approval. My goal would be that it meets or exceeds what is routine with standard academic publications, and I won't go into detail at this point. This is already way too long. It's happening, one step at a time. So far, several rungs on the ladder have been scaled. It has come to the point that opposition is beginning to materialize, which is actually a huge accomplishment. And, boy, is it opposition! The proposal page on Wikipedia is WP:PRX (enter that into the Go field on any en.wikipedia.org page). You will notice that it is marked Rejected. What that means is that one user placed a rejected tag on it, before it was even presented. I took that tag off, since I clearly considered it premature. Then, when we actually had an idea of what was being proposed -- which was astonishingly simple and did not involve voting -- the Rejected tag was replaced, and I was not willing to edit war over it. Particularly since I didn't care if the proposal was Rejected or not. It did not depend on central approval *at all*. (The specific implementation was central and was vulnerable, but that is only one of countless methods of implementing it.) However, that was not enough. Proposals on Wikipedia are not ordinarily deleted, not if they are fresh or have some historical or preventative value (like "don't even think about trying this if you don't want to see your computer melt, we have R E J E C T E D this). This proposal was nominated for deletion, and many, many not-voters voted to Delete (Wikipedia is a bit self-deluded, they don't vote, but they do, as turned out to be really visible in this case). Why? It was about voting, they said, and we don't vote. Where did they get that idea, that it was about voting? The nominator for deletion told them that and an ancient rule of on--line discussion, I've been seeing it for twenty years, is that most people don't actually do the footwork, they comment in a knee-jerk fashion based on shallow impressions. A few voices, mine included, said Keep as Rejected (which would be the norm). Along comes an ordinary user, but a very experienced one, who closes the deletion process as Keep as Rejected, in spite of near-unanimity the other way. Why? Well, it's supposed to be about the arguments, not about the not-votes. As one might imagine, the not-voters were outraged that this obviously biased person, who they thought was an administrator, disregarded all their not-votes and applied policy and guidelines, having read the arguments. (He was actually an ex-administrator who could have become one again any time he asked.) Anyway, they appealed the debate to Deletion Review, and, to make a long and turbulent story short, the original deletion review was re-opened. Few additional people commented, and it was closed with the same result. There was a serious and dedicated effort made to *delete* the proposal, not merely to mark it as Rejected. And there were attempts, similarly, to delete the related files, those also failed. At the same time, the one who proposed it -- it was not me -- was blocked for disruption, a complicated story in itself. The Wikipedia article on Delegable proxy was set up for deletion debate as not notable, original research, etc. That article had, in fact, been started by me in 2005, when I had no clue about Wikipedia conflict of interest policy. It was not much more than a dictionary definition, and it was not of "Delegable proxy" but of "Liquid democracy," a name which was current for a while, not my invention. The name was changed later. I did not vote in that debate, though I commented, because of my conflict of interest, and I also expected, by notability rules, that it would be deleted. About a day after it was, we found a peer-reviewed publication of "delegated democracy" with some nice charts and mathematical analysis of the social welfare function of what is, essentially, delegable proxy, and I could, if I cared enough, take the article through Deletion Review and probably prevail. But I did't care about the Wikipedia article all that much though it had become quite an extensive article, if "creatively" sourced (It's now on electowiki, I think). We don't need it, people find their information by Google, even when it is on Wikipedia. What I cared about was that people, quite a few people, heard about it. At this stage that is quite enough. In a year, when they see the idea again, they will be more open. That's what I've found. I did not arrange for all this publicity, I merely had to react and respond to questions and opportunities. (Those of you who have been watching me for a few years may be able to realize how much has shifted. I am no longer the voice crying in the wilderness, there are now others working on this, and there will be more, little by little.) It's been a fascinating process, and there are many stories to tell, full of drama and insights .... :-). It is a little more exciting than the Election Methods list, I must say. Too exciting, really. I need to get the book written, and Wikipedia is Endless Distraction, highly addictive. The Deletion attempts were only the beginning. At least one sock puppet has appeared who is dedicated to disrupting anything done by the original proponent of WP:PRX, who, being a typical impulsive ADHD wikignome (the DP proponent), the kind who are in a position to understand FA/DP at this point, has been blocked twice since then and this time it may stick, even though what he finally did was the equivalent of, say, jaywalking on an empty street. The disruption and outrage over that toothpick of an offense was stirred up by this sock puppet, who was, of course, claiming that this user and I were the same person (preposterous on the face, but also doubly preposterous because with the first flap, an investigation had been done and IP evidence showed that we were quite distinct); the sock puppet has now been blocked and things may quiet down for a while. Meanwhile the network is starting to be built. At last one enemy of the proposal reads this list, but nothing is being done which is contrary to Wikipedia policy or guidelines and it is the nature of this proposal that the tighter you make the controls to prevent it from happening, the more it is likely to happen. The enemy of FA/DP is apathy, despair, and ignorance, not the oligarchs who might fear it, though it does not contemplate attacking them. (What's the oligarchy on Wikipedia? Well, I have various theories. First, there is the "cabal," the operating core of users and administrators who are highly familiar with how the arcane process works and who thus control it. That is what I'd call a "natural oligarchy," we can expect opposition from it, but not a particularly evil kind, they generally mean well (and simply believe that anything that lessens their relative power, since they are the experts, must be harmful). But there may be another kind of opposition. The new efforts to "get" that original proposer, and me, had a new level of intensity and hatred behind them, and I've taken to calling the puppet master the Grand Panjandrum. I've used that term in the past for Rob Richie, but that was a mere analogy, he is practically the soul of collegiality in comparison. In this case, it is much more like the actual Grand Panjandrum. Who very much does not want Wikipedia to succeed, and who does, in fact, understand that Wikipedia is beginning to fail due to the problems of scale, and realizes that delegable proxy would prevent that. The Grand Panjandrum has other names, and is known from ancient times; there are many interpretations of the reality behind this concept, but from those with sufficient experience, the reality on an archetypal level, at least, of this entity is beyond doubt. This is the ancient enemy of humanity, whose main characteristic is contempt for these bags of "dirt," and whose modus operandi is to induce us to hate each other and fight. Of late, he's been winning on Wikipedia, which is one reason why so many long-time users have been leaving. The atmosphere in areas concerned with central policy, particularly around deletion, and in some of the outer reaches as well, has become increasingly poisonous. It's possible it is too late. I am, in fact, withdrawing from direct attempts to influence Wikipedia policy and will focus instead on purely building the network. Which, as a Free Association, has no intrinsic bias, though it may have accidental and temporary biases based on the accidents of membership. How to Change the World in One Easy Step. Go Back to Sleep, We Will Change It For You. (My wife hated that slogan. Sinister. Uh, what do you think will happen if we remain asleep? They are changing the world for us. Well, not for us, for themselves.... But everyone needs to sleep part of the time. Who will take care of things while we do? Do we choose these people or does someone else choose them for us?) ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info