[pp.int.general] liquidfeedback myths? /was Re: LQFB: status quo in Germany // was: liquid feedback papers and/or data?

[Cal.]

On 27 April 2014 13:50, carlo von lynX <lynX at pirate.my.buttharp.org> wrote:
> Since I am active in both German and Italian PP I see how
> the German bias is offuscating some thinking, also some
> fiction has established itself as mainstream party thinking.
> So let me add some counter-information:

It's peculiarly funny how you call that "fiction."

> On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 03:32:40AM +0200, hyazinthe at emailn.de wrote:
>> Currently the area "binding online resolution system" is heavily under construction in Germany.
>> We used to have an unbinding LQFB, but for various reasons it is not accepted to a worth mentioning degree.
>
> The unbinding LQFB worked exactly once, in the year 2010 when the
> Berliners wrote their election programme. Almost everyone was
> convinced of it, everyone was motivated, the proposals were
> astoundingly more advanced then what a regular editorial process
> could have come up with so the rhethoric of "swarm intelligence"
> was born - because it described best what we actually experienced.
> The regular assembly just ratified the choices made in LQFB and
> we had an amazing programme that had a relevant role in winning
> the elections. In a survey Berliner pirates said that the liquid
> democratic principle was the most important ingredient to their
> success:   https://lqpp.de/be/issue/show/635.html
>
> I would add there was another essential ingredient to our 2011
> success: humility. We were humbled by our collective intelligence
> and by the electorate who actually started to believe in us. We
> have quickly lost that humility after the elections and it has
> impeded a constructive use of LQFB ever after. I have never again
> seen an LQFB project work so well as the original deployment.

I remember you accounting that to "magic."

Today, I feel confident enough to say that lqfb only works in Berlin.

>
>> Right now in April 2014 probably not more than 30 people use it; it easily could be thousands
>> of people in the scope of the german pirate party.
>
> Thirty is such an exageration I must assume you are biased by
> your own agenda.
>
>> At the same time it got obvious, that we urgently need a binding online resolution system:
>> When you have special success, thousands of members and a couple of them in parliaments,
>> there is a strong structural need for making official basicdemocratic (!), fast resolutions
>
> "Basic" or direct democratic voting has two very serious problems:
> - When used in small scale, loud minorities can take over the votes
>   (so called domination of the extroverts or dictatorship of the actives)
> - When used in large scale, you introduce populism since the majorities
>   will decide by whatever is their current thinking without any obligation
>   to fully understand the issue at hand or listen to other opinions.
>
> These problems are both addressed by liquid democracy.

Addressed and not solved. You are being a propagandist.

> As much as you
> don't like some aspects of LQFB, you can't deny that it is a superior
> model of democracy to either direct or representative democracies with
> their long history of respective failures.

You are confusing democracy and voting. You are again being a propagandist.

To say superior, greater than, you need an order relationship. Are you
saying lqfb produces more democracy? That has been debunked some
messages ago.


>> 4. Not so good verification process
>> Establishing a verification process is an important preparation of making LQFB binding; you need to make sure that behind every
>> vote there is only one real person. The current verification process is not implemted, yet, but is really not the best and not really data reductive
>> One can fix it, but the attitude of the people behind LQFB is "this is not a problem, YOU are the problem".
>> Whenever there is any problem regarding LQFB, you instantly meet unwillingness to accept the issue as a problem and additionally solve it.
>
> This is a problem specific to Germany.

That is not. The "YOU are the problem" attitude is the very base of
your message, and the base of every reply to a lqfb question I have
ever heard (or given).

> Other pirate parties
> have understood that the participation in a voting platform
> is a political act which deserves to be transparent like we
> expect other political groups to be transparent. It's ridiculous
> that Germans expect their privacy to be respected when they are
> acting as politicians.

Are you joking or what?

You are de facto excluding privacy-concerned people from pirate parties.

It is absolutely unreasonable to say that politicians aren't entitled
to privacy, if we agree that's a person's right. If you aren't
entitled to privacy, I don't even need to call my friends at CIA to
blackmail you; when you are a politician, that becomes very big
problem.

>
>> 3. The interface is very unattractive and not very functional
>> The current interface scares a lot of people away, is very difficult to access, and doesn't make lust to deal with the system.
>
> An alternative UI has been developed and deployed, yet people
> stick to the old one. In Italy the UI has never been an actual
> problem: If decisions in LQFB are binding you have a motivation
> to deal with possible imperfections and just live with it, and
> that's what happens. People use LQFB day-in day-out. Of course
> you should contribute your ideas for improving the UX and UI,
> but still - democracy is not simple, there is only so much
> that you can improve - and do you stop riding the train just
> because the ticket machines have horrible usability?

I can hate books because I don't like their typography, so, yes.

>
>> 2. Super delegation problem
>> A super delegation means, that extremely much votes are concentrated on one single person what enables this person to decide alone
>
> No doubt after the success of 2011 Berliners were so enthusiastic
> about the delegation principle, they used it abundantly also in the
> national LQFB with a side effect of dominating the votes over other
> regions of Germany. I'd say that was a bit over the top.
>
> It is important to understand however that the problems with
> direct and representative democracy are serious and big and
> cannot just be ignored and denied as you are suggesting to do.

Nobody is denying those problems. Nobody even spoke about direct or
representative democracy.

> Liquid democracy in principle addresses those problems, and even
> if a single person collects a particular high number of delegations
> it is still less bad than regular representative democracy: because
> you can remove that delegation at any time.

You are assuming that a person without time to vote has time to
control and validate their delegates' ones.

> Secret vote is necessary in an election of a
> person because after that election the person stays in power for
> a certain number of years.

There is no relationship between hypothesis and thesis.



Somewhere around here was mentioned the demotivational effect of
delegation kings. That is a very important point and I was eager to
destroy you counter-argument, but you self-kindly ignored it.


>> to fill the hole, which removing delegations left, with a kind of advice/recommendation system;
>> so, you can't give your power to another person, who then technically decides for you, but
>> you can follow people you trust regarding certain topic areas or concrete topics, if you want;
>> when you follow them, that means, that you can read what they think of certain
>> proposals, if they make a comment on certain proposals.
>
> Which is exactly how LQFB is actually being used everywhere where
> a binding permanent assembly has been implemented with it. You could
> spare yourself the work by simply enforcing that delegations are
> disabled if a person hasn't been participating frequently enough.

Everywhere I saw lqfb used most delegation where based on social
connection, not actual knowledge of issues. What you said is just a
lie.