Also, you’re right, then the transparency, which you were a fan of, has revealed this, made this really obvious to people.
Just from an information theory point of view.
Yeah, it’s such a limited channel, one bit. [laughs]
Then, sorry to have to say this, but the bad guys get another bite at the apple, because even if that system even with such a restricted bandwidth uplink were to work, then they can work their magic on the representatives.
Why was Obama not who he said he was? Was he a rotten guy? How many rotten guys do you know who would volunteer to be, what did he call it, he called himself a community organizer, his job title? Basically, he worked in very poor districts in Chicago trying to help poor people.
Why would someone like that once they got elected all of a sudden support and actually take all the Bush policies and make them more "Bushian?" I don’t think it was from his own conscience and free will.
Most people are mystified, "Why do they lie to us? Why did even a good guy like that...?"
When Swiss meet people they haven’t known before, like random meetings of people at cafes or on buses, or whatever, they are inclined to have debates about issues, because the people that have a responsibility to figure these things out as opposed to positioning themselves and arguing and quarreling. Newspaper readership, when they used to have newspapers, there were much better and more newspapers in Switzerland than anywhere else.
It creates a whole different culture when you have even the little bit of direct democracy that they have. It’s scalable both in the complexity and size. It scales nicely with the size, because the size is the more votes you can have without burning up too much bandwidth of people, it’s a beautiful thing. Already the size, the numbers worked out well. I’ll tell you another thing.
Exactly. I submitted something to them.
I did. Here’s the interesting thing. I don’t know if I’m going to win or anything. I didn’t hear anything, but I don’t care. I thought, "That’s interesting. That’s a problem. I’ll just see how random-sample voting might be used to do something like that."
It didn’t take me long to spin up a whole scheme that really when you go against their eight criteria, the questions they had and all, worked perfectly. It’s like this, "We can do global votes now, because it’s so cheap." [laughs] Imagine that.
We could have a global contest to find out the highest priority issues for the global population. That’s nice to know. "Well stated," as I said. Then, we let people submit proposals for independent entities that will try to address those issues separately.
Really?
That’s awesome. I’ve studied initiative processes around the world. I know that there’s usually a threshold where you have to submit it at a police station and this and all that and the period you have to get them, and so on.
Interestingly, if you read the random-sample voting paper, you’ll see that random-sample voting would be a much better way to validate a petition as non spam...
...than signatures, which are more or less a joke. Be careful, you lower that threshold too much, you’re going to get a lot of rubbish and the whole thing’s going to be discredited. You have to be a bit...
It’s not just the...The random-sample voting does exactly what this signature thing should...
...the election, I’m just talking about whether the question should be put on the ballot.
You’re going to lower the expense. [laughs]
Thanks for recognizing that. That’s a nice use of random-sample voting to get it going. Don’t forget, the petition process, one other thing, it doesn’t scale to the set of issues that random-sample voting would allow.
Don’t forget, also, it’s not necessarily a good thing that everyone vote on something, because that limits the number of things, but it also means that press, media, propaganda, whatever can be used to influence those votes, as we’ve seen.
These plebiscites have not gone well. It’s not more democracy of that "Everyone has to vote on only one thing," nature which has proven to be a bad thing. Random-sample voting obviates that by making it so that it becomes almost infeasible to try to manipulate all opinions on many issues all at once by means that would not succumb to real study and investigation by the voter.
You have to really put forward good arguments against a thing, because people...
Say again.
Like if you look at the Brexit thing, it was a single question, there was a whole run up to it. It was so easy for the media to manipulate it, the Facebook people, all this stuff, you could target it and overly influence the outcome. Whereas if you...
I’m sorry. I didn’t quite get the way you...
Yeah, or with a block of time. That one bit per year is a dangerous thing...
...because actually it’s even less secure than having a higher bandwidth, because then you can’t manipulate it in the process. That’s funny, yeah.
If you think of information theoretically, yeah, you’ve got this one bit, it’s maybe really easy to influence that one bit in one direction by throwing everything at it. Whereas if you have a 1,000 bits coming up, you can’t really effectively...You can think of it too as a channel of information theoretically of the propaganda mechanism that you’re not going to have enough bandwidth in that channel.
That’s an excellent point.
I hear you.
That’s right. People can more meaningfully be engaged in the one they are selected for and actually be more thoughtful.
That’s really well put. Yeah, cheaper elections that are at least as secure, are a really good thing.
You’re expecting the elections, you’ve got problems.
You...
...I’ve been waiting for like years to talk to someone like you [laughs] about something like this. I really appreciate it. It was fabulous!!!
