From: Sean Roach <roach_s@alph.swosu.edu>
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 14:32:14 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Commerical applications (was: Development and validation (fwd)
Message-ID: <199701232232.OAA28577@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 05:20 PM 1/23/97 +1100, proff@suburbia.net wrote:
...
>The catch is that positive votes are inherently more valuable than
>negative votes, since to obstruct progress requires a number of votes
>equal to the outstanding proposals, but to move forward a proposal only
>requires a number of votes equal to the proposal.  Blind obstructionism
>(and blind advocacy) are uneconomical.  That's the point of having
>more than one vote to potentially spend on an issue, with potentially
>more issues than you can vote on all of them.  You will have to pick
>you battles carefully if you want to avoid being lost in the noise.
>
Here you risk the media controlling the vote even better.  First they push a
tearjerker proposal early in the year to swallow up all of the votes, then
they ask for special interest legislation to protect their respective
monopolies on grounds of ecology, (one paper means more trees, one TV
station means clearer communication, etc.)


...
>For reciprocity, it's possible to charge off percentages in the
>win/lose case to bias the power concentration: if your side wins, it
>costs you one less token then you voted, etc..  Again, initial
>bylaws are established through constitution provision: "we have the
>power that is being shared, therefore, these are the weights".
>
...
This prompts people to vote with who they think will win as opposed to how
they feel.  In this case the media shows numerous charts showing a pending
landslide in thier favor.  What do you know, everyone voted in favor of the
media just to recycle votes.

...
>Heh.  I was thinking more in terms of its value as a cascade trigger
>to increasingly complex social organisms in the Internet implementation
>space.  Representational democracies (republics, really) came about
>because of rate limits on communication.  The US could not elect a
>president by popular vote because there were no methods of verification,
>and communication rates were limited by travel time.  Therefore, the
>US has an Electoral College.  But a side effect of this structure is
>a bias for bipartite seperation of interests, instead of seperation
>into as many interest groups as it takes to do the job of mapping the
>interest space.  This bias is not removed because the bipartite
>interests have (and must continue to have) the power concentration.
>This leads to continued "wasted vote syndrome", where people vote
>for the lesser of two evils instead of voting their conscience... an
>effect of mass psychology.  Similar pressures prevent the polling
>times from being changed to opening at 8am EST and closing at 8am EST
>to prevent early returns from earlier time zones influencing the
>outcome of elections before people in later time zones have even voted.
>For example, Ross Perot got almost 20% of the vote in the 1992
>election, but 0% of the electors.  He would still have lost, given
>the actual values.  There is actually a case in US history where the
>winner of the electoral vote lost the popular vote... the president
>was not chosen by the people, but by the electors.
...

Actually, our founding fathers thought that the people were morons, a
reasonable assumption since news carried so slowly and most people were more
worried about how to survive the winter than how to read.

...

>Yep.  The reason I went weighted, by the way, was the volunteer
>nature of the project.  In theory, number of vote tokens spent
>should be proportional to willingness to actually volunteer.  As
>you point out, there could be feedback here as well: for instance,
>if a proposal passes, if it is completed, the tokens spent on
>the vote could be refunded to those who voted for it.  If it dies
>on the vine, the tokens could be refunded to those who voted
>against it.  Being right would give you more license to participate,
>and being wrong would not, etc..  Again, a matter for the initial
>bylaws.
...

Not being right, just agreeing with the concensus.  Remember that most of
the Germans eventually agreed with Hitler, that did not make them right.

By the way, the general populus is still mostly morons.  Even with a higher
literacy rate.  Most of them seem to use it to read the National Enquirer
and Hollywood based publications.