[pp.int.general] 'Liquid Democrazy': Pirate Party Sinks

Francisco George francisco.george at gmail.com
Sun Feb 24 16:27:44 CET 2013 

There is a very interesting post by Ricardo Galli, a very well known
Argentine blogger that resides in Spain(Mallorca) and the funder and
creator of Meneame.net a news agregator very succesful here. (reddit is
kind of copy of Meneame), the code is Open and free.

News are posted and then they are voted, if they climb they'll go to the
frontpage. People can comment the news and vote too for there favourite
ones.

But there is a problem...news and comments are too biased depending who is
online voting and comenting and this makes the dissent opinions from the
majority dissapears. When really some of them are worth of attention.

So in its Article he talks about people's Biases and it is a interesting
opinion, I'll paste here his google translated opinion about BIASES

*Bias and misinformation*
>
> * *

> *Is studied, experienced, proven and widely recognized in the academic
>> and professional psychology and psychiatry the problem of bias. This is
>> inevitable, affects us all, every minute, every opinion and every
>> perception of the world. It is what makes us ignore information that does
>> not meet our standards and knowledge previously acquired, which selects
>> information that validates what we think (selection bias) and ignore what
>> contradicts it.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *
>> *
>
> *There are many books that explain our biases, one recent Thinking, Fast
>> and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Nobel, who researched extensively on the subject.
>> We have two ways of thinking, the more "intuitive" and "common sense", and
>> a more rational. Kahneman calls the first "System 1" and "System 2" to the
>> second.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *Contrary to what seems to assert Punset, System 1 is always running does
>> not stop, is the one who makes quick decisions and we call "intuition" and
>> "common sense", those that do not require laborious reasoning or
>> calculations. Use "tricks" such as "association", when it perceives
>> something new associates it with something known immediately. System 1 is
>> the primary responsibility of our biases.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *The only thing that can minimize bias is System 2, but it is very
>> "lazy", costs start it, and it's exhausting (consumes so much energy that
>> when we are focused us consume more glucose). In addition, System 2 is
>> influenced by first impressions or decisions taken by the System 1 (for
>> example, the well-known "trick" of priming), so the task of eliminating our
>> biases not only very hard, it is impossible eliminate them completely.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *In various studies and experiments have shown that the bias is typically
>> amplified in a group. If a person "moves" a bit, the whole group goes with
>> it. Thus, a group can make decisions even more radical and biased which
>> would each individual separately. Thus, among other reasons, James
>> Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of the Crowds puts certain rules so you
>> can really drawn a valid response from a group of people, including
>> independence.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *The amplified bias often leads a group that a tolerant person before
>> differing views, become intolerant to these same views, does not give any
>> validity. This generates a positive feedback is minimized or destroys any
>> interaction with people of different views, which effect is known as the
>> echo chamber.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *Internet is very vulnerable to the echo chambers. There system of
>> "social networks" that promote communication between similar people, and
>> therefore easy to create echo chambers. It's pretty common in Twitter, or
>> Facebook. But not only these exclusive social networking happens in forums,
>> on Reddit, and any system used to disseminate and share information.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *This problem of amplification bias is related to other more common every
>> day, the creation and dissemination of false information and hoaxes. But
>> not a problem of the Internet, it only made it faster. Nate Silver explains
>> in his book The signal and the noise. Mistakes and misunderstandings are
>> common in human communication. Before committing errors of scribes to copy
>> the books. The printing error rate decreased, but allowed those produced
>> otherwise divulged much faster. I quote a sentence from the book:*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *The printing press changed the way we make mistakes. Transcription
>> errors routine became less common. But if there was one, was reproduced
>> more, as in the case of Adulterous Bible. Complex systems such as web have
>> this property. Can not fail as often as simpler systems, but when they
>> fail, they fail miserably. Capitalism and the Internet, both incredibly
>> efficient to disseminate information, create opportunity for dissemination
>> both the good and the bad ideas. Bad ideas can produce disproportionate
>> effects.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *Examples of such disproportionate effects: mortgage bubble, tens of
>> thousands of people accusing an innocent pedophile, politicians who call
>> early elections because he was convinced that it would increase their
>> advantage, or even thousands of people attending a party mistakenly called
>> Facebook.*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *It also produces other effects, such as information and data that remain
>> erroneous or obsolete last until centuries. We have countless myths we take
>> for sure, but not more than that, misinformation, which spread quickly, and
>> it is impossible to rectify. Samuel explains it well in his book Arbesman
>> The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
>> (which also talks about the speed with which information is disseminated
>> erroneous).*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *For example, it is false that the director of the U.S. Patent Office
>> (Henry Ellsworth) declared in Congress that did not make sense to keep the
>> office because there would be no inventions, actually said the opposite. It
>> is also false that frogs do not jump from a pot if the water is heated
>> slowly (in The Atlantic tried to kill this myth, several times, without
>> apparent success) or luchasen Luddites against weaving machines (actually
>> demanded to give them training , were very complex for its time, and had to
>> manage without knowing).*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *You could say that we are surrounded by information that is reported
>> very quickly, and we found the following problems:*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *Inevitable biases that make us uncritically accept information that
>> confirms our beliefs.*
>
> *The disclosure is very fast, but also about the misinformation.*
>
> *Misinformation, once disclosed, is very difficult to correct.*
>
> *Cameras are created and amplified echoes radicalized errors.*
>
> *Misinformation persists for a long time.*
>
> *We took important decisions-personal and social-with our bias, ignoring
>> the enormous complexity of the world, and above based on misinformation.*
>
> *When I have read this far, you're probably thinking:*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *Okay, so what do you do to avoid these problems in Blogger?*
>
> *
>> *
>
> *The reality is that the goal for this point was to tell him that we
>> launched a few weeks ago to avoid these problems, and the [good] that is
>> giving results. I wanted to make a brief introduction to the problem, how
>> difficult it is to find a solution, even how hard it is to analyze it
>> correctly, we describe some of what I studied (I recommend these books),
>> and I got the brick that you read.*
>
>
You can find the complete post here including the changes made to the code
to now reflect the first trials in moderating the effects of "biases" in
Meneame.

http://gallir.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/favorecer-el-disenso/

Personally I think this is one of the main problems that PIRATES
faces...and I don't mean in their organizations...but in the debates that
we have online.

David Arcos(PP-CAT) is a Moderator of Meneame and surely will also be of
great help explaining the changes.


2013/2/24 <pp.international.general-request at lists.pirateweb.net>

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>    1. Re: 'Liquid Democrazy': Pirate Party Sinks amid Chaos and
>       Bickering (Eduardo Robles Elvira)
>    2. Re: 'Liquid Democrazy': Pirate Party Sinks amid Chaos and
>       Bickering (Anouk Neeteson)
>    3. Re: 'Liquid Democrazy': Pirate Party Sinks amid Chaos and
>       Bickering (Zbigniew ?ukasiak)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2013 11:07:08 +0100
> From: Eduardo Robles Elvira <edulix at gmail.com>
> To: Pirate Parties International -- General Talk
>         <pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net>
> Subject: Re: [pp.int.general] 'Liquid Democrazy': Pirate Party Sinks
>         amid Chaos and Bickering
> Message-ID:
>         <CAHwZu3cbmR-nvB6TMwDNdPSDSeL5bq=
> wUawOw+vrknAaUz+3nQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Nicol?s Reynolds <fauno at kiwwwi.com.ar>
> wrote:
> >> 2. Maybe we are really trying something impossible by fighting the
> >> 'iron law of oligarchy':
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy - maybe we should
> >> accept it as a reality, analyze it and try to make it a smaller effect
> >> it instead of trying to have politics completely democratic.
>
> Hello:
>
> I'm Eduardo, one of the (founding) members of the spanish pirate
> party, which as you might know is no stranger to organizational chaos
> and bickering. I'm also developer of the tool agoravoting.com and
> member of the local *party* Piratas de Madrid.
>
> This topic is very interesting to our movement: if we want to create
> something more democratic, how can we achieve that avoiding the arise
> of oligarchy? The wikipedia page about it [1] is a very interesting
> read, thanks Zbigniew. Basically the idea is that when a group gets
> bigger it requires some leadership and bureaucracy for practical
> reasons to keep things efficient, and this promotes oligarchy and
> corruption. "The relative structural fluidity in a small-scale
> democracy succumbs to "social viscosity" in a large-scale
> organization." (quote from wikipedia)
>
> I imagine that what happened is that people are trying to keep social
> viscosity down in a large-scale organization, and *this* leads to
> internal inefficiencies: people stop working on productive things and
> start fighting against each other. We could call this "social
> temperature". This means that the pirates have done what any of us
> would have expected from them: fight concentration of power, fight
> bureaucracy, fight corruption, fight emergent oligarchy.
>
> Kudos for them, I'm quite proud. And this has probably kept the matter
> in a liquid state, so they have won that battle. Problem is, when
> temperature rises pressure also rises. The problem of course is that
> power, bureaucracy and all that doesn't rise for no reason: as we said
> earlier, it happens to try to make things efficient and practical at
> bigger scales. I feel the pain misunderstood leaders of the german
> pirate party as I felt it when it happened to some of the leaders in
> the long wars of the spanish pirate party. The pressure they must feel
> right now is quite hig, for you know liquids are incompressible.
> Liquid democrazy is a nice term for this, congrats to the person who
> coined this term.
>
> Democracy seems to work better at small-scale, I think this is
> something that we can probably accept. This is why hierarchy usually
> arises: we can have "democracy" at different layers, to keep it
> efficient, but of course this makes difficult for people to climb the
> ladder of power to an upper layer and leads to oligarchy and
> corruption, oops.
>
> Please don't take all this reasoning badly; I'm with all of you that
> like liquid democracy and as a pirate, I'm just struggling to make it
> better, to make it work at larger scales. Solutions to mitigate this?
> Here are some thoughts:
>
> 1. Transparency. This avoids corruption, because political corruption
> is kind of the opposite of transparency. Transparency  means a lot of
> things: it should be transverse at all representative layers,
> obligatory for those that represent us, but also people should keep an
> eye and organize, because "given enough eyeballs, all bugs/corruptions
> are shallow" [3].
>
> 2. Self-determination/federalism/individual free will. We don't like
> to be told what we can or can't do: we believe in free will. Even in
> groups, individuals are the ones that ultimately take the decisions.
> With our free will we choose to organize in groups, so it's a matter
> of sense that with the same free will we can choose to leave that
> group and join another one or create one ourselves. This is the
> principle of federalism or self-determination, and it's also the same
> principle behind liquid democracy. This means that we need to give
> back power autonomy to small communities.
>
> I think point 1 is important as counter-balance mechanism to power,
> and mechanism 2 is a good valve scape to pressure. We didn't know it
> at the time, but when the Spanish pirate party was completely "chaos
> and bickering", we applied "divide and conquer" strategy [4]. Lots of
> unproductive fights were going on for a long time, this meant that
> there were still people that wanted to do productive things. After
> all, if you have pressure it means there's something inside.
>
> The pressure escaped by the creation of multiple local parties.
> Remember, democracy works better in small-scale. And how it worked!
> Catalans created a new political party in Catalonia and even achieved
> two councilors in some municipalities, for example. They were the
> first to do this bold move, and lots of "pressure" escaped through
> this valve and Catalonia has currently one of the best organized
> pirate parties in Spain, and we have some other new political parties
> in Madrid, Extremadura, Galicia, etc. As a phoenix, we will arise from
> the ashes, one might say.
>
> Of course I do not have any magical answers to solve this complicated
> problem. It'd be best if we didn't have this pressure that seems to be
> quite related to our kind of organization. We need a way to make the
> recipient (which is our organization) bigger so that temperature
> doesn't need to get higher, and we need small escape valves to keep
> pressure from going to the roof. Perhaps we should find a way to
> remove the recipient and convert this in a cloud, another fancy term
> nowadays in the Internet. But can be a cloud democratic? how does one
> create and maintain such a cloud big and strong without acid rain? =)
>
> Finally I recommend you all to read the book "Direct Democracy", free
> to download in multiple languages, which talks about matters like
> federalism, direct democracy mechanisms, etc - I found it to be an
> interesting read [5].
>
> Best regards,
>           Eduardo
> --
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_corruption
> [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law
> [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer_algorithm
> [4] http://www.democracy-international.org/book-direct-democracy.html
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2013 11:15:50 +0100
> From: Anouk Neeteson <jakobsheep at gmail.com>
> To: me at travismccrea.com
> Cc: Pirate Parties International -- General Talk
>         <pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net>
> Subject: Re: [pp.int.general] 'Liquid Democrazy': Pirate Party Sinks
>         amid Chaos and Bickering
> Message-ID:
>         <CAMUTSpXFxveAEv-DEiUJgq+M2NhCKaVO=
> JjKSqLYo4NkVf7G0Q at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> Thank you Travis for your openess. I understand your point much better now.
> What I ment to say with ego versus individual is what you explain here as a
> brain virus. I also visiualize it that way. Egoism stands for the reasoning
> from solely the self-interest as where individualism stands for taking
> account of the other individuals on a equal base. That is the world of
> difference that would change the world when understood and practised.
>
> pirately,
> mrNatural
> On Feb 24, 2013 9:08 a.m., "Travis McCrea" <me at travismccrea.com> wrote:
>
> > Of course it is, we are people (and I am generalizing here, so please
> > forgive me I know it doesn't include everyone) who were bullied and
> teased
> > in school, we were outcasts and now that we have our own clique we are
> > developing the same patterns that the cliques in High School did. We are
> > becoming bullies to people in our group and looking at our differences
> > instead of our likenesses.
> >
> > Throw that in with a group that is statistically more likely to have
> > Aspergers (or something else on the Autism Spectrum or social deficit
> > disorder), and you have the Pirate Party. We cannot change how our brains
> > work, however, we can look within ourselves and try to see what we are
> > doing so that we can be nicer to each other. It's harder because we are
> not
> > trying to be mean, we are not trying to ride someone hard, but we usually
> > do and once we see that in ourselves we can work to fix it.
> >
> > People with an ASD also have a bigger problem with people telling us what
> > to do. We don't want you to boss us around or think that you are somehow
> > better than us. The libertarianism in our party probably in large part
> > comes from that, and it's not necessarily wrong to question authority? I
> > don't have the answer for how we respond to this, I have my opinions on
> > leadership and I know many of you have different views on it. However, we
> > should recognize that the general group of people I am addressing this to
> > (which includes me) have an unnatural aversion to people in leadership
> > roles and while we shouldn't give them arbitrary trust, we should treat
> > them with understanding that they are doing a lot to make as many people
> as
> > they can happy.
> >
> > Maybe I will get flamed for this "blah blah blah you can't generalize"
> > "blah blah blah politically correct things about ASD"? so I just want to
> > repeat this isn't for everyone, if you read this and see a little bit of
> > yourself in it? then it's for you.
> >
> > *Travis McCrea*
> > Pirate Party of Canada
> > The Ultimate Ebook Library
> > Kopimist Church of Idaho
> >
> > Phone: 1(206)552-8728 US Call/Text
> > IRC: irc.freenode.net, irc.pirateirc.net (TeamColtra or TravisMcCrea)
> > Web: travismccrea.com
> > IM: teamcoltra at 451.im (jabber) teamcoltra (AIM)
> >
> > On Feb 24, 2013, at 2:49 AM, Francisco George <
> francisco.george at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > Let us face the truth...we are all affected by the same virus!
> >
> >
> > https://twitter.com/SalernoMax/statuses/305344760963543040
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-pirate-party-sinks-amid-chaos-and-bickering-a-884533.html
> >
> > ____________________________________________________
> > Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> > pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> > http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
> >
> >
> >
> > ____________________________________________________
> > Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> > pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> > http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
> >
> >
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2013 11:46:11 +0100
> From: Zbigniew ?ukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com>
> To: Pirate Parties International -- General Talk
>         <pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net>
> Subject: Re: [pp.int.general] 'Liquid Democrazy': Pirate Party Sinks
>         amid Chaos and Bickering
> Message-ID:
>         <CAGL_UUv2kcFRnrYpX=
> sgwzNLcUuFRK9pxYExJDYjwniidLaQWg at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Nicol?s Reynolds <fauno at kiwwwi.com.ar>
> wrote:
> > why is liquid feedback nonbinding? this has always been a big wtf for
> > me... (also the concept of liquid democracy :P)
>
> I don't know German law - but in some cases the law does state how the
> decisions are made.
>
> I can see how LF can help with the oligarchy problem - but on the
> other hand it can also lead to vote selling (for money or for favours,
> or in a horse trade of policies) and thus making it worse, not to
> mention the problem with computer security which is really under
> appreciated I believe.  And then there is also:
>
> "Time and again, a majority of the party's members express support
> online for a particular idea, only to scrap it at the party's next
> real-world meeting."
>
> Why that happens?  Does that mean that different people vote in LF?
> People change their minds?
>
>
> >From what I've read on this list the Italian Pirate Party wants to use
> LF as the sole voting method - I hope we'll learn from them how it
> worked there.
>
>
>
> --
> Zbigniew Lukasiak
> http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
> http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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