Re: . 2.7 Million Morons

Laurel Amberdine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>I've read all the preceding posts, and I hope I have some inkling of your 
>proposal.  Let me see if I understand:
>
>1) citizen of this political entity does their thing -- some kind of work,
>I suppose -- for a predetermined amount of decision making power
>
>2) at regular times, the citizens who have some decision-credit get
>together to make laws and solve problems (or, perhaps, elect
>representatives or apppoint people to positions)
>
>3) instead of money, this decision-making-credit is the stuff which is 
>used in trade (?? I'm not sure on this)
>
>Am I completely off?  I haven't got any scotch to help me along.  (Which
>is just as well, I suspect.  Wine will have to do.)

Pour yourself a large glass...   ;-)

OK, here is a brief outline of the framework that I am imagining. Keep
in mind that this will be a very complex undertaking, even as a pilot
program for a small community. It would be insane to think that one
person could develop such a system by themselves, especially in the
time allotted to posting to usenet. So cut me some slack with the
details. Also, keep in mind that I cannot devote the energy to
properly prepare the reader for this proposal. Anyone who wants to
have new ideas given a fair hearing needs to devote considerable time
to the rhetorical approach by which it is introduced (in other posts
where I have been talking about getting people to understand that they
are participating in information processing, I was not trying to say
that this would bring magic upon the land; it was merely meant as a
way of getting them to take the political market idea seriously). An
author has the opportunity to prepare their reader for considering new
ideas, but it must be done well (and it is not easy) or the reader
quickly forms an ignorant (but to them, satisfactory) opinion on the
matter and closes his or her mind. Here I can only give a miniscule,
and entirely inadequate, preparation, so please force yourself to
withhold judgement for a while.

The basis of democracy is the participation of citizens in their own
governance; it simply cannot work without an active, intellectual
involvement of the people. The cynicism that accompanies modern
representative democracy tends to refute that this involvement
actually occurs. Ordinary people are seen as powerless pawns in a game
controlled by large corporations and arrogant politicians. The only
involvement that many people realize is the chance to cast a vote
every 4 or 5 years, with the only real benefit of this action being a
punishing defeat for an unpopular politician. Dissent is effectively
handled by a free press but the majority of citizens are entirely
separate from any contribution to the forming of policy and the making
of legislation. This isolation occurs even at the local level and even
more so at the national level, a situation that fosters a culture of
apathy that becomes self-fulfilling. 

There is a common attitude that the rank-and-file of the citizenry has
neither the interest nor the aptitude for an intellectual involvement
in government. In fact, the cynicism is so deep that the very
existence of an intellectual component among the lives of ordinary
people is laughed at. This is simple untrue, everyone participates in
intellectual activity; even Joe Sports, discussing a trade by the
local football team, is engaging in an intellectual pastime. Anytime a
person confronts a problem they are engaging in intellectual activity.
The problems may be grand (e.g. unifying gravitation with quantum
mechanics) or they may be trivial (e.g. crossword puzzles), but all
humans need to satisfy their intellectual curiosity; more so their
social busybodiness (see elsewhere in the thread). And, in fact,
political decisions in a representative democracy are made through a
process that engages many, many citizens (but far from a majority of
them). The problems confronting governments are distributed across the
many minds who participate in political parties, special interest
lobbies, petition drives, mass media outlets, and many other avenues
that can lead to influence. The "activists" who contribute to the
policies and platforms of such organizations are generally regarded as
people who are well outside the mainstream of society, but many such
people begin their involvement simply by pursuing a single topic that
engages them. When they find that they can have influence, they become
part of the body of citizens who actually contribute to policy, rather
than simply exercising a right to vote for a representative.

The problem, at present, is matching individuals to topics that
actually interest them, and then separating those topics from the
canon adopted by one of the political parties. Since there are only a
few (and often only two) political parties in a democratic state that
have any chance for real influence, a citizen is faced with the entire
body of policy, much of which is irrelevant to their concerns. The
citizen quickly concludes that involvement in a political party is
only for policy-junkies rather than ordinary people who have a
specialized focus and no concern for how it fits with some grand
political philosophy. We are left with professional lobbyists who
discover that their ability to influence politicians has value to
special interest groups; value that provides a pretty good salary.

In the near future, information technologies will supply every human
(at least every human who has the good fortune to live in a prosperous
and democratic country) with the information that matches the
interests, abilities, and temperament of their individual intellectual
curiosity. The same information technologies can also be used to link
like-minded individuals for the purpose of refining their arguments
and presenting their concerns to the wider population. By matching
individuals with the information that they feel passionate about,
people can become part of an intellectual community that is centered
on the shared interest, and they can contribute to the development of
that topic through the collective cognition of the community. For
those topics that fall under the roles of government, people who
contribute to a community can have a genuine role to play in forming
policy and legislation. But these technological avenues need to be
molded to provide the maximum involvement of the citizenry, both for
the growth of democratic governance and for the growth of the
individual citizens.

Every individual brings a separate experience to the community, a
separate perspective from which questions of justice and governance
can be posed that might not occur to others with a different
background. The intellectual snobbery of the intelligentsia is
misplaced when they sneer at the ability of ordinary citizens to
govern, due to their limited intellectual capacity. It is misplaced
because they can act collectively to solve harder problems than the
intellectual snobs can solve individually. This is a hallmark of
distributed thinking, where all the information that bears on a
particular problem can be summarized and integrated into a form where
individuals can now see the problem from a much broader perspective.
Political problems have a public life and character: they become known
and discussed to the extent that they affect people's lives. Although
only a few people have the time to develop arguments for particular
solutions to public problems, and test them against criticism, these
people draw on the weltenshaung that arises when the problems are
widely discussed by the population. The more people we can draw into
the process of developing arguments and thinking about these problems,
especially when the individuals who participate are passionate about
the particular problems, the better we can find consensus and
solutions to political problems.

This is not to say that there is a societal mind, or collective
consciousness; there isn't. Just as there is no collective strongman
when a bunch of burly men pull on a rope, nor a collective
master-of-trades turning out cars on the assembly line, neither is
there a collective genius emerging from a community of like-minded
intellectuals. There is collective action and collective cognition,
but these are wholly different from the emergence of an individual
entity from collective behavior. We retain our individuality when
partaking in collective cognition (just as with collective action),
the benefits come from distributing problems effectively among
individuals so that smaller, simpler problems can be solved and then
synthesized into a collective solution. Enormous gains can be made in
productivity through collective action, and similar gains can be made
in intellectual capacity through collective cognition. In the former,
products can be made much faster by moderately trained people who
distribute tasks than by highly trained people who perform all the
work. In the latter, problems can be solved that are too complex for
even the smartest member of the group to solve individually by
breaking down the larger problem into smaller problems and
distributing them to individuals (allowing many individuals to work on
the same problems and then later choosing only the best solutions).

The economic market is the best example of collective cognition, where
we have millions of people engaging in their own small economic
transactions, and also many people acting together in companies and
corporations, engaging in economic transactions and economic planning,
and out of this collective activity an overall solution emerges as to
the optimal use of resources. Of course this optimum is heavily
influenced by human psychology, which is often bizarre and
inexplicable, so we see an allocation of resources that is very
different from what we expect when we simply scale up a model of a
tribal economy. And yet, the market does cover people's needs without
the dramatic shortfalls or overproduction that is characteristic of
planned economies (in addition to the apparently wasteful property of
supplying people's wants). There are other examples of collective
cognition, smaller in extent and more focussed, that are easier to
examine, and don't carry the emotional baggage of economic ideologies.
The practice of scientific research is perhaps the best model for the
way in which information technologies might engage individuals in
political decision making.

Scientific professionals facilitate collective cognition through the
institutions of conferences, peer review, and professional societies
(through which strangers can communicate on topics of concern to the
society). The institutional support for interaction leads to
continuous, raucous debate over issues by interested parties. The
presence of a final arbiter for all disagreements (empirical
experiment) means that all participants will eventually reach
agreement on issues where consensus is lacking, but the vanguard is
always noisy and contentious. The benefits of this way of doing things
is a rapid dissemination of information to individuals who are most
interested, and the division of large problems into manageable
problems. A further benefit is the enormous enjoyment that individual
scientists derive from the search for answers. The driving force is
individual curiosity; a scientist becomes enveloped by a problem and
searches for a solution. A layperson may find themselves just as
curious about a problem (whether scientific, social, economic, or in
any field whatsoever) but lacking the means to find a solution.

New knowledge is produced by individuals identifying unsolved problems
and then following their questions into terra incognita. It is in the
seemingly useless pursuit of following questions wherever they happen
to lead that one finds true leaps in understanding. When the solutions
(which probably still appear quite trivial) are presented to the
larger community, then connections and analogies are built which can
rapidly expand the knowledge-base. Access to information is only one
part of the process of eliminating the distinction between amateur and
professional. In order to make a contribution to a field of study, in
order to generate new knowledge, an individual must interact with that
community. The problems are tackled by the collective and therefore
any contributors must be communicating and participating in the
distribution, individual solution, and synthesis of problems within
that community.

An individual discovers what their interests are, and what they care
about, by pursuing their curiosity. By facilitating such pursuits,
society benefits from their contribution to collective cognition.
Ordinary citizens are usually hidden well behind the scenes in
political decision making; they don't stand a chance in public debate
with professional rhetoricians who have honed their arguments and
presentation style, and therefore shy away from it. By fragmenting the
organizations that participate in political decision making (from 2 or
3 political parties to thousands of political "companies" or
"corporations"), we can involve (and recruit) interested citizens to
speak to their own interests and expertise in a forum where they do
not have to develop a complete and unified political philosophy.

We are more than mere economic beings: we have a social life, a
professional life, an emotional life, a personal life, and an
intellectual life in addition to the roles of consumer and producer
that make up our economic life. It is foolish to use the results of
our economic life to draw inferences about our social and intellectual
beliefs when the technology to query these beliefs directly now
exists. The economic market distributes the problems of allocation of
scarce resources to many individuals and processes that information in
a manner that makes tremendous use of collective cognition. It does
not address problems associated with societal pressures; for that we
have government. We can make use of the information processing
capacity of the market structure for governance, involving all members
of society and enriching their intellectual lives in the process, by
creating a separate market for political decision making. The
technology now exists to run a market based solely on information
rather than goods and services. Such a market would deeply enrich our
personal lives and make our society far more democratic than it is
now. There would not be a need for every individual to become
thoroughly knowledgeable about every aspect of the society, and well
steeped in political philosophy: the distributed cognition of the
market would allow each individual to participate according to their
own interests and level of expertise, just as individuals now
participate in economic decision-making through their actions as
consumers and producers.

Therefore we need to develop a separation of economy and polity. Just
as the separation of church and state frees us from the fundamentalism
that drives a tyranny of the holders of truth and allows us the
freedom to worship as we see fit, the separation of economy and polity
will free us from the tyranny of the wealthy and allow us to pursue
the politics of our choice without undue influence from our economic
status. I believe this can be achieved while preserving the optimizing
character of the free market, but rather than using the economic
market we create a parallel political market. People will become both
economic agents and political agents who act in their own
self-interest; the "invisible hand" of the market in both cases will
guide the economy and policy toward optimal solutions on an ever
changing fitness landscape. 

The proposal built upon the organizing principle of the separation of
economy and polity can also provide a hierarchy of governing
structures that allows local decisions regarding policy to become
paramount. A political globalization to accompany, and facilitate, the
economic globalization that is already occurring. We will put forward
an Article of Confederation that is global in its scope-a
confederation of communities. Joining confederation will require the
adoption of a specified constitution that specifies the laws
concerning the relations between communities and a charter of rights
and freedoms that specifies the relations between individuals. A free
market for political transactions is created and kept separate from
the economic market (by law, political currency cannot be exchanged
for economic currency). The political currency will consist of
individual voting rights.  

Within a community votes must be earned but they can be spent
individually or invested as part of a collective venture (specified by
contract). Each citizen will be allotted one vote per legislative bill
for residency in the community where the legislation applies, but
additional votes can be earned by working on a piece of legislation
that is passed into law (the amount earned is a function of the number
of votes in favor of the bill). Votes can also be earned by working to
interpret legislation (e.g. jury duty, commissioned inquiries, etc.).
All voting is public and contracts concerning the use of votes by
individuals are enforced by constitutional law. All such contracts
regarding votes are of the form where one party agrees to use their
vote according to the wishes of another party, subject to
pre-determined constraints on the legislation being voted on. In fact,
all political representation is contractual.

All jurisdictions are local, the boundaries being geographic,
determined by the mutual consent of the community within those
borders. Joint action between communities can only be entered into by
passing legislation setting conditions on the joint legislation. Once
a joint action is entered into, the result is arrived at by a vote
subject to the conditions and is mutually binding on all constituents.
Such joint actions can redefine jurisdiction boundaries (making them
smaller or larger). No limits (other than the total number of
communities in the confederacy) are placed on the number of
constituencies that can participate in a joint action.

So here we have a system that can include the vast number of different
communities without threatening their essential character, while
providing a unified governing structure that allows individuals to
pursue their own interests, allows trade between the communities, and
prevents the force of arms to be used other than for upholding the
law. We have participation of individuals following their own
self-interest (political agents) to ensure the optimizing effects of a
free market while at the same time we isolate power (the influence of
one person over another) from economic considerations. 

Some random desiderata concerning this proposal:

- A global confederation of communities. Joining confederation
requires the acceptance of a charter of rights and freedoms and the
adoption of specified international laws concerning the relations of
communities.

- Separation of economy and polity (prevent the tyranny of the wealthy
and preserve the freedom to practice the politics of your choice) is
the organizing principle much as separation of church and state was
behind early democracies. A free market for political transactions is
created and kept separate from the economic market.

- The currency of economics is money and the currency of politics are
votes.

- Votes must be earned and can be spent individually or invested as
part of a collective venture. Each citizen is allotted one vote per
legislative bill for residency but additional votes can be earned by
working on a piece of legislation that is passed (the amount earned is
a function of the number of votes in favor of the bill). Votes are
also earned by working to interpret legislation (e.g. jury duty). 

- Putting forward legislation for plebiscite must be paid for in
votes.

- Voting is public and contracts concerning the use of votes by
individuals are enforced by law. Exchanging money for votes (or vice
versa) is prohibited by law; all contracts regarding votes are of the
form where one party agrees to use their vote according to the wishes
of another party, subject to pre-determined constraints on the
legislation being voted on. All political representation is
contractual. Public voting records allow inspection to maintain
honesty.

- All jurisdictions are local, the boundaries being geographic,
determined by mutual consent of the community within those borders.
Joint action between communities can only be entered into by passing
legislation setting conditions on the joint legislation. Once a joint
action is entered into, the result is arrived at by a vote subject to
the conditions and is mutually binding on all constituents. Such joint
actions can redefine jurisdiction boundaries. There is no limit on the
number of constituencies that can participate in a joint action.

- Administration and enforcement of legislation are economically
driven, paid from taxation of the constituents. 

- sponsorship for drafting legislation (minimum number of sponsors);
perhaps not necessary if there is a cost (in votes) for bringing forth
new legislation.

- legislation is binding on those communities who agree to vote on it

- all communities pay an amount (some percentage of GDP per capita) to
maintain an inter-community army that enforces constitutional law

- intra-community policing is internal to communities

- Each resident in a community is assigned a vote with a unique
identifier for each piece of legislation that is voted upon.

- Vote identifiers contain a voter ID as well as a community ID. The
vote can be used for any legislation that is brought forth in that
community (if the community splits between the time of issue and the
time of use, then it is valid for any legislation that is brought
forth in any of the new smaller communities; likewise if communities
merge, the vote is still valid in the new larger community). A vote
can only be used once and its use is public (the resident and the way
that the vote is cast is a matter of public record, accessible to
anyone in any community). 

- Votes can be saved or invested as part of a political coalition. 

- An individual can cast as many votes as he likes (from zero to his
entire savings) for a particular piece of legislation.

- Binding contracts can be entered into through which a resident gives
their votes to a political enterprise that uses the votes by proxy.
The enterprise can reward investors with interest on their investment
(if the enterprise drafts legislation that wins votes, those votes can
be assigned to the investors).

- Legislation passes when a minimum number of voters cast votes and
the number of votes in favor of the legislation is greater than (some
percentage...50%, 60%?) of the votes cast.

- Legislation that passes confers a windfall of votes to those who
drafted the legislation. The number of votes earned is a function of
the percentage of the voters who cast votes, the number of votes cast
(not the same as the number of people who cast votes), the margin of
victory, and the size of the community or constituency of a joint
action.

- Votes are cast over the internet when a call for votes is announced;
a request for comments precedes the vote. Those who make comments do
not earn votes if the legislation passes; only those who are authors
of the bill. The procedure and format is uniform throughout the entire
confederation.

- People will spend their votes on issues that they are passionate
about and that they have knowledge about. They will not have to engage
in the discussion of issues for which they have little knowledge or
interest. This will allow the debate to become more focussed and more
productive. Our increasingly complex world simply does not permit
anyone to be knowledgeable on all issues that must be resolved
politically.

So this is all pretty vague right now, but that is not to say that it
cannot be made more precise. I'm not thinking that we should institute
this next week. But if you made it this far, at least you didn't say,
"I already see a problem..." in the first paragraph.  ;-)

Comments and criticisms are welcome.

Ken Muldrew
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(remove all letters after y in the alphabet)