If majority of people in a country want to persecute an outnumbered subgroup, then what prevents the majority of delegates wanting the same as well?
You have an implicit assumption that the delegates are going to be smarter and better people that are going to lie to the majority to get elected and then will valiantly protect the subgroup.
But that have not happened anywhere. In fact in every case it is the delegates who organize persecution of various subgroups, even in situations when the share of population truly wanting to persecute subgroup is far from being a majority.
I refuse to believe that anyone reading this is incapable of remembering at least five historical examples in which the public was happy to treat an unpopular group unjustly.
There is no foolproof system that can guard against it, however declaring 'rights' and delegating the responsibility to protect them to the judiciary at least is a mitigation.
Direct voting does not replace judiciary or even senate, it only augments the house of congress.
If that is the Direct Democracy you had in mind, than we have no disagreement.
What I originally commented on was this:
So do you believe in democracy or not?
I take issue with the implication that it's all or nothing. If we characterize anything less than a direct vote on every issue as anti-democratic, then the only people left standing will be kooks.
I hope you will agree that the overall goal is maximizing freedom and autonomy, that is allowing every person or group to pursue happiness the way they want make mistakes or good choices and bear the consequences.
The representative democracy has a problem with delegates not faithfully representing the people they are supposed to represent. It allows politician to be elected by campaigning for issue X which is popular with majority, then do Y and Z that almost no one wants, and then campaign again on other party undoing X, leaving people no way to communicate that they want X and not Y Z.
Social media have greatly increased the impact of this instability, the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting, and yet many people vehemently argue against that. Meanwhile there is a much more interesting discussion: how to make cooperation between people more efficient using the new technologies that we have.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting
I take the original comment to imply exactly that, since it positions someone taking issue with any direct vote as being against Democracy wholesale. If I missed something, @terminalshort can reply to clarify.
the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
There are two issues:
1) What are a good set of rules for the system.
2) If the existing system can no longer self-correct, how can one implement a good set of rules.
'Direct vote' might address the second issue. It's not the only way, but it's better than a violent revolution.
I'm not opposed to all direct voting, but it does have inherent problems. The most obvious is that the world is far too complicated for a majority of citizens to research all the issues that affect them. In a well-functioning representative democracy, a politician would have the resources and time to understand the issues. Granted, that seldom is the case in reality.
That is the same argument proponents of planned economy use. It doesn't work in reality because no one knows what other people need and no one cares. Representatives care about being reelected, but they have a very hard time figuring out what people want of them because vote ones in 4 years, or angry people on social media is too unreliable channel of communication.
The monetary system under capitalism is not the same as direct democracy.
A planned economy under direct democracy would be at least as bad as a planned economy under a representative democracy because the average voter has even less knowledge about economics and business than a government planner.
The best thing about direct democracy is that, unlike representative democracy, we don't have it and therefore cannot instantly think of its flaws.
The average person reads under a sixth grade level, cannot perform long division, and quite possibly couldn't tell you how many years have passed since Jesus was born.
Whether a direct vote is appropriate for an issue depends on which is a greater danger: the corruption of a politician, or the ignorance and flakiness of the average voter.
Well it kinda is the same, in any transaction today two people vote to transfer goods and the rest of the people in the country vote to take a percentage of that as tax.
We only need to make sure that decisions affect the smallest number of people possible and only those who make decision bear its good or bad consequences.
Same can work with other issues, like do we want to build a road or stadium, how do we want to deal with homeless in our part of the city etc.
Online, open voting, with possibility to trade votes, and requirement to reach almost 100% accept vote for decisions, can work much better than systems we have now.
As for average person being not smart, average buyer poorly understands biology, and ends up buying things that are harmful to eat or eats to much, but we do not have representative doctors who will decide who eats how much in restaurants. The important thing is to create an arrangement where poor choices of a person do not affect others.
Why do you think that similar law could not be passed without direct vote? The problem is not direct democracy but the fact that it is being done in a wrong way.
Voting should be done without anonymity, online. One should be able to either vote for everything manually, or delegate the vote to any other person.
If some change is supported by 100% of the voters it should be implemented immediately. But if smaller percent supports the change, then there needs to be a vesting time (e.g. 10 years for 60%, infinity for 50%+1).
This allows people to either trade support for policies (i'll vote yes for your initiative if you vote for mine, or give me money), or to get high level of support locally and try out various laws on local level.
The same site that manages voting should also show detailed budget of city/state/country, where people can see where their taxes are being spent and should be able to redirect the money they have paid.
First, how about if you show that you've spent more than five seconds thinking about why every democratic country on earth uses secret ballots? Why are secret ballots codified in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights?
There are other parts of your scheme that are also spectacularly bad ideas, but let's just deal with this one for now.
That's a very good question, for instance for most of its republican period Rome did not have secret ballot, and voting was open. That have changed in 138BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_laws_of_the_Roman_Repub... and have caused major instability, political violence and eventually demise of the republic.
The issue was that the poor people could vote for Gracchi brothers, but were too afraid to protect them, and one without the other only have brought to a worse outcome where they could not vote at all.
Even today if you are afraid of saying openly what policies or which politician you support, how can you hope to enact these policies?
Secret ballot started being introduced in US starting from 1888 and it did not bring any of positive changes that its supporters thought that it would.
In places where a group can intimidate majority of voters and force to vote one way, secret ballot does not help at all because that group can also fake the results. It even makes situation worse, by hiding the actual data from opposition.
Gosh, you make it sound like the near-universal use of secret ballots is all just some sort of misunderstanding that could be rectified if only everyone would listen to you. Tilt away if that's your favorite windmill, I guess.
Well if you knew a good reason for secret ballots you could tell us that, instead of telling that you are smarter than me. You really should take another look at hn commenting guidelines, it is useful outside of hn too https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Billionaire goes: get $10 off at my store, called Scamazon, for these votes (lists votes). And naturally even the $10 is manipulated to be recouped with dynamic pricing.
What we have now is a politician saying vote for me and i'll pass laws that will give you 10k in next 4 years, people vote for the politician who then takes money from scamazon gives 10 to voters and takes 10mln to get elected again.
Eliminating the middleman makes things better already.
But more importantly with vesting time, large number of votes, ease of reversing a decision in a new vote, take $10 and vote for something that costs you more simply won't work.
The main factor reducing gulf stream is increase of fresh water runoff into Arctic ocean. So maybe we should invest into building Sibaral Canal diverting some of the water of northern rivers towards Aral sea, and by that saving both Nordic and Central Asian countries.
Fitting the concept of god into a cosmological model is rather easy.
If we agree that everything we see is described by physics, then everything including us is simply a computation. And in principle someone can build a machine to carry out such a computation.
People in such a machine will be more or less like us, and the creator of that machine will be exactly like god, outside of space and time, omnipotent, omniscient but having to run the simulation to see what everyone does.
From this point of view creating universe 6000 years ago and making it look billions of years old does not look that insane, just a workaround for finite machine time.
So the main disagreement is not about existence of god, or materialism vs idealism, but whether a human is equivalent to a computation or not.
Alternately, an individual set things in motion that they couldn’t control or stop, and thus the universe was born. God could just be a random entity that got in over their proverbial head. We think creating a universe requires thought or intention but it could be a big mistake.
The main idea of what I am saying is that some entity could have kicked things off, for whatever reason, and not be able to stop or control it. Perhaps they were just like you or I, and they released some tech which formed the universe as we know it today. Perhaps they are outside of this universe and cannot see into it or control it, perhaps they were inside and were obliterated, perhaps they are still here somewhere sitting around waiting for the universe to end, who knows! Everyone expects a god to be all-powerful or something, but they could be some mortal being who only had a lot of power for a moment when they knocked over the first domino. We probably can't know how the universe started, in any case, so this is all just brainstorming for new sci-fi and fantasy novels at this point.
Russians also had the money until government did not start to take away that from people who had lot of it. When government can confiscate all of the money of a rich person, only those on the side of government will remain rich.
If you look closer you'll see that this rockets are key to billions of people living on other planets, to cheaper internet, to better telescopes, to satellites controlling weather.
Ultimately this is an important step towards a future with healthcare providing thousands of years of life, and unlimited housing space.
Well, US spends 1.5 trillion on social security and only 20 billion on NASA, so "present" is kind of overrepresented. Redirecting that little bit so that a few more people can live without working, or can get expensive treatment to live a few more years is stupid, not inspiring.
We live in the present, so I'd expect it to be overrepresented. I expect most people don't give their kids more money than they spend on themselves, for instance.
Your second sentence showcases some wildly negative biases. I suspect we could probably save money by improving the efficiency of our social programs and end up with even more to spend on scientific advancement.
Historically most people used to spend for children and grandchildren significantly more that on themselves. The current situation when people go to other countries and then say we do not have money for more than one child is abnormal, and can't go on very long.
I agree that there are many better ways to organize social programs, e.g. replace all of them with negative tax, when some percentage of all tax collected past year is divided equally between all citizens of any age.
Sure well organized society is very impressive, e.g. invention of capitalism and private ownership is the greatest invention ever made, but the point i was trying to make is that it is only a foundation for really exciting stuff like science spaceships, immortality.
The money transferred from tax payers to people without money is in effect a price for not breaking the law.
If AI makes it much easier to produce goods, it reduces price of money, making it easier to pay some money to everyone in exchange for not breaking the law.
Fuel rods in nuclear reactor last 3-7 years giving high level of reliability in case of a blockade, while LNG storage is enough only for a few months in the best case.
It's almost certainly impossible to create a species of fish that can take things from the ocean floor all the way to the surface for any significant percentage of the ocean. And we are certainly nowhere near having the ability to bionegineer such complex behaviors, we're far enough that you wouldn't even have a reasonable estimate for how long it might take to get there.
Why is it impossible? it can be as simple as a bottom feeder species that goes to the surface to poop, basically like whales, or have cells in their gut that produce fiber making their poop float to surface, or a combination of seaweed that produces floating wood, and a fish that builds nests on it. The second version is probably in reach of current technology.
Look up the blobfish and how it more or less explodes when taken from the deep ocean.
Very, very few animals can handle the pressure differential between the top and bottom of the ocean. It's pretty much just whales, and they can only do it because they're so goddamn big
You have an implicit assumption that the delegates are going to be smarter and better people that are going to lie to the majority to get elected and then will valiantly protect the subgroup.
But that have not happened anywhere. In fact in every case it is the delegates who organize persecution of various subgroups, even in situations when the share of population truly wanting to persecute subgroup is far from being a majority.