[pp.int.general] liquidfeedback myths? /was Re: LQFB: status quo in Germany // was: liquid feedback papers and/or data?
carlo von lynX
lynX at pirate.my.buttharp.org
Sun Apr 27 15:46:19 CEST 2014
Oh, the Italians decided to dominate the debate again.. hehe..
unfortunately I can't just bail out if certain things are said.
It's the fundamental problem of mailing lists, they are easily
dominated by loud minorities.
Alessandro, does it matter much if 76 or maybe 40 people gave some
person some feedback on some idea on how to organize inner party
policy making? People have ideas all the time and it is nice that
so many people are still paying attention, considering the vote is
of zero binding value. Maybe if you insist hard enough you can
find a voting which is of actual relevance - but then you will be
confronted with participation in the hundreds. Damn.
On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 02:34:54PM +0200, Cal. wrote:
> It's peculiarly funny how you call that "fiction."
Yes, several points were ficticious, like claiming there are no
LQFB developers, claiming the UI could keep people from exercising
democratic rights or the myth of the excluded offliners.
> > I would add there was another essential ingredient to our 2011
> > success: humility. We were humbled by our collective intelligence
>
> I remember you accounting that to "magic."
Yes, I used the word "magic" as a placeholder for something that
isn't clearly understood as yet. I presume it was humility.
> Today, I feel confident enough to say that lqfb only works in Berlin.
Not sure if it still does as much as in 2010, but we've had our
share of people who publicly claim things contrary to the consensus,
too, if that is what you are referring to as Leninism. If that is
Leninism that could actually mean that Lenin was an intelligent man,
too bad only that at his time there was no technology that could
produce the necessary consensus, so he had to adapt his ideal system
to some form of representation, which then spoils it of the quality
of the results and of its legitimacy.
> You are confusing democracy and voting. You are again being a propagandist.
I am not confusing it. I am merely convinced that it doesn't work to
have people vote on something they didn't spend enough time upon
understanding it. And unfortunately it has been shown that if you
ask them for an opinion, they will almost always have one. No matter
how stupid or superficial. So if you call my convictions "propaganda"
you are merely insulting me, not challenging me.
> To say superior, greater than, you need an order relationship. Are you
> saying lqfb produces more democracy? That has been debunked some
> messages ago.
Not that I know of. LQFB isn't perfect, but it is by far superior
to having small groups decide things (lobbyism, corruption) or
making large groups take decisions on things they cannot be sufficiently
competent about - and probably at a frequency that would take them
more than full time to make an informed decision.
> >> 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).
Eh? At the Italian party the certification procedure is a the heart
of becoming a full party member. All participants in our LQFB are
certified. What are you talking about?
> > 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?
Can you stop this trolling style?
> You are de facto excluding privacy-concerned people from pirate parties.
No, there is plenty of space for activists, but if you are participating
in a political decision that will influence the future of your country
the electorate deserves transparency in how that decision came about.
Also no-one asked you about how many times you cheated your husband.
So please stop the superficial/populistic argumentations here.
> 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.
Blackmail about a political decision they made in the past? That
is not blackmailing. That is transparency. You can throw away
votings of the past when they are replaced by new votings, but
as long as the votings are the basis for the political activity
of your parliamentary representatives, it is a right of every
citizen to find out how those decisions were made. Otherwise we
are not better than some transatlantic trade organization.
> > 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.
The Meinungsfindungstool that refuses delegations is yet another
direct democratic tool. The Internet is full of those and the reason
LQFB stands out is because of its liquid democracy principle.
> You are assuming that a person without time to vote has time to
> control and validate their delegates' ones.
No, I assume that if a person votes on something in a scandalous
way that everybody starts talking about, that person will immediately
stop having such a strong political influence. This is a huge advance-
ment compared to representative democracy were you can yell at your
political leadership day-in day-out for betraying your interests,
and after 4-5 years you are back at having to choose the least worst
evil. People who speak of superdelegates as being similarly bad as
representative democracy are just lying to themselves, being emotional
on the topic rather then scientific. Usually they are the types who
would like to be the bosses of the movement and actual democratic
consensus has not been in their favour.
> > 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.
Ok, please refine by reading the appropriate wikipedia pages or
law text explanations for the respective laws that some countries
have on that topic. There are some missing elements in my summary
that lead you from hypothesis to 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.
Actually everytime you apply democracy there is something
demotivational about it. No democratic system is going to
fully satisfy you simply because you are probably not 100%
conformant with the general consensus.
If that hurts too much, don't be in a political party.
Parties are not made to foster everybody's ideas but rather
focus on those that they can agree upon.
Superdelegates are less bad than elected representatives.
Superdelegates are less bad than loud minorities.
Superdelegates are also less bad than populist voting
without intelligence.
You don't like superdelegates, because your opinion or
almost always contrary to the ones of the party majority.
It has nothing to do with superdelegates. Even the word
"superdelegates" is propaganda by people that are
dissatisfied by liquid democracy because their minority
opinions get their fair chance, but then lose out compared
to better proposals. And some folks just can't accept that
and rather blame the methodology.
That is how the hope for a better democracy is dismantled.
> > 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.
I didn't say anything about delegation happening by competence.
That was the original idea, but of course the people first of all
delegate by trust - then within trust they choose someone who is
likely to be careful on how she will use her voting power. This
doesn't always work out - I think LQFB can be improved a lot in
this area, for instance by having regulations that impede certain
types of populist rhethoric and eliminate unfair proposals. When
superdelegates "fail" it is frequently connected to the rhethoric
that was used in the proposal that lured them away.
Still all of this is less bad than electing a representation,
having the loud minority decide by itself or having populism
by default and reasonable debate as the exception.
Stop expecting perfection from liquid democracy. Accept that it
is merely the least bad of democracies and do something on how to
improve it - if that is really your goal.
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