On 09/06/2016 07:27 AM, carlo von lynX wrote:
>>
>> You shouldn't put them all in the same bag: liquiddemocracy is a time
>> sync that requires professional users to keep an eye on things for
>
> That has not been the case in the past, why should it be a precondition
> in the future?
>
What about: we didn't have a global scale influence before?
>> others. I can't imagine one second such an approach will work that
>> promotes a unique ('rational'?) interface to political issues through
>> written language with no human interaction. It's the kind of technology
>
> Who impedes human interaction?
>
If you're spending your time online reading and replying to other
people, you're not spending that time with other people interacting.
More generally: politics that requires sitting on your bottom and
denying verticality of the spine cannot account for humans--and
historically: hasn't.
>
> It's just more screen work than paperwork, more transparency by
> documentation instead of getting convinced by a lobbyist over a beer.
>
The lobbyist has more bandwidth over a beer than over a wire, that's why
they use more beer and less wire.
>
> We can see how successful human-to-human politics has been in the past.
>
When it wasn't repressed by bureaucracies, it fared rather well. I see
we don't understand politics in the same terms.
>> non-verbal dimension in human communication that is not captured by this
>> system. We already know what a statistical perspective on politics is
>> able to bring to the world. We don't need more autistic politicians.
>
> Do you have any papers backing your position or are you just opinating?
>
Just look around you.
>
> http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07723
>
Thanks. But I simply cannot equate politics with voting, and the
legislative process. This is certainly 'better' than what's here now,
but calling that politics is against my religion.
> What those non-pirate people found was that the promise of liquid
> democracy actually proved true: delegations were "stabilizing" the
> political outcome of liquid feedback
>
Sounds like Belgian politics: looking away from conflict and finding
grace in soft consensus.
>
> What we know now is that the liquid modeling of a representative
> approach actually work
>
Who cares about a representative approach when we can have municipal
federalism with human-scale politics at work? Think about it, before it
disappears under the guise of 'terrorism' because it breaks the
consensus of Washington.
> Still, there are reasonable and unreasonable ways of setting
> up a liquid democratic platform. Depending on the legal
> architecture around it you can either reap the best of both
> direct and representative democracy or earn the worst of
> both worlds.
>
Glad to read this.
> Let's understand: electronic democracy has many enemies - anyone who
> would prefer to have things done their way rather than having to
> listen to some thousand strangers clicking their vote from their sofas.
>
Those are the worst: they think they know, while they can only be
influenced by what they read online from, say, the new mainstream media.
They're also spine-deniers, so that's perfectly sane for them to
participate in 'liquid democracy'. I like my democracy solid, or
plasmic, not liquid.
> And being against something is usually much easier than being for it.
>
What about being indifferent to it? I'm simply not convinced relaying
debates with machines can scale to 'representative' politics.
> Demagogy and populism does the rest. As frequently in politics, if
> we're not going to be scientific about this, we will succumb.
>
'Scientific' approaches to politics led to the worst political
nightmares throughout the XXth Century! Nazism and the final solution,
Stalinism, etc. Even in the USA, under the Randian influence of, e.g.,
Alan Greenspan and his 'rational' view of economics (that he finally
accepted was wrong), anything 'scientific' about politics has been
ideological at best. Science cannot account for politics, because
science is about reproducible phenomena, and humans are about unleashing
the most irrational behaviors in the guise of the purest rationality.
You can't reconcile science and politics without going to disaster.
Science cannot take over the subjective, and there's nothing like an
objective policy, unless you're considering the politics of robots; even
then, robots belong to algorithms that are political in nature, and thus
not objective.
> I still haven't seen a scientifically convincing use of blockchains
> that I couldn't have done with secushare pubsubs over gnunet without
> damaging the environment.
>
Please do! You know well how much I like to remove these conditionals.
>> Since we know about the quantum, we don't live anymore in an either/or
>> world. Sustaining that vision is retrograde and harmful.
>
> What does the quantum have to do with that?
>
Aristotelian logic cannot account for the fact that a photon behaves
like a particle and like a wave, or that the same photon can be observed
in different places. The quantum vision requires going beyond dualism.
>
> I like that you agree on the most radical thing I said. :)
>
I've been working on hyper-rationality and its effects. Ayn Rand, her
followers, and indeed the Californian ideology are prime suspects for
large scale restrictionism. We can't disagree on Objectivism.
But we certainly disagree on the nature of politics. Liquid Democracy
is about finding a consensus, converging towards 'the best' outcome. In
my view, politics starts where there's conflict: and this antagonism
cannot resolve in a compromise, but in a tension; this tension in turn
doesn't revolve around an imaginary center that should be found and
pursued, but each time around a concrete center that's moved through
political struggle. Replacing the political 'arena' with a race for
consensus at any price is simply diverting the political struggle to
follow the political agenda of the ones in power. When you're leading
the game there's no reason to change its rules. Occupying people to
nitpick over details online while moving geo-strategic 'assets' sounds
very much like anti-political to me.
==
hk
P.S.: I notice now the topic '... vs. blockchain anarchy'. As an
anarchist, I don't condone this term. 'blockchain anarchy' doesn't mean
squat to me.
P.P.S.: sliding away from the topic is not going to help having a
conversation. I don't have that kind of time, nor for liquid democracy
either, nor any other time-sink system that takes the place of life
itself, and that's my point.
