At 03:26 AM 11/15/2005, James Green-Armytage wrote: > What if the interest groups that Bush relies upon for support (e.g. >evangelical groups, energy companies, etc.) were strongly opposed to the >Iraq war in the first place? Do you think he would have made the same >decision? I doubt it. Policy isn't formed exclusively by governments; >other organizations often play a large role. More democratic organization >of these groups could augment the popular impact on policy.
Mr. Green-Armytage and I must have some kind of telepathy thing going.... Actually, what I've been writing about these oh-so-many months is really what almost anyone would come up with who spends some time with the fundamental problem of government. The problem is that we usually don't do that; we look at this or that smaller problem, such as how to hold an election. It's not that these smaller problems aren't important, they are. But they exist in a context, and until we look at the context, we are not going to understand how to solve the problems. The context is how people organize or are organized to cooperate and coordinate. The great shift that has taken place over the last few centuries is that it has come to be widely accepted that government by the consent of the people is not only more just, it is more efficient, and societies based in this, to the extent that they enjoy broad consent, will be more successful, partly because when people consent, they are more likely to actively participate, to bring all they have to the table. We are also coming to understand, better, what has been called the "wisdom of crowds." It shouldn't be a big surprise, really. The intelligence of the human brain is vastly greater than that of any individual cell; indeed, something new comes into existence when cells can communicate rapidly. And if one looks at how cells are organized into a central nervous system, and if one is familiar with the kind of structures that delegable proxy would create, one could not fail to be struck by the similarity: these are fractal structures, where each link in the structure is a filter and repeater (i.e., it is a selective repeater). It is a little unclear who first came up with the idea of delegable proxy. I *may* have some documents showing priority, but not by long, and it is quite clear to me that the idea arose independently in at least four different places. I've been working on it, in my mind mostly, for about twenty years, but I started writing extensively about it only in 2002. Delegable proxy is a formalization of what people already do. People *do* act as representatives for each other, informally, all the time. It is what makes many small organizations work. Formalizing it, though, will create a far more reliable structure, wherein people will know exactly how to communicate with the collective, and the collective will know exactly how to communicate with the people. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
