[pp.int.general] VIlfredo goes to Athens. /era Re: Liquid Democracy - a summary attempt

[carlo von lynX]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 02:53:05PM -0300, seykron wrote:
> I think that at this point we mostly agree on some things despite
> specific tools:
> 
> * Liquid feedback does not solve core problems of representative
>   democracy.

You can criticize other things about LQFB, but you can't say that
it does not solve the core problem of representative democracy
being corruption. It is a lot harder to corrupt a moving target
such as a superdelegate.. and it is a very bad investment if
that superdelegate after your corruption efforts suddenly loses
all his delegational power. In practice, it is a much less
rewarding job to be a lobbyist in liquid democracy then it is
in a regular parliament. Also, you can't lobby all the super-
delegates at the same time, because they are not in the same place.
Even better if people delegated less, then we don't have too
strong delegates. So if you use LQFB with less delegation, one
thing is for sure: the core problem of representative democracy
is solved.

> * Direct democracy and consensus is a difficult practice and it also
>   has its own issues.

Why do you reduce the immense problems of direct democracy to mere
"issues" ?

> * In any case, participation requires engagement from people. Liquid
>   feedback platforms do not help on this, but a bad implemented
>   consensus process neither.

Scalable software solutions do help on this very well. The reason
why the political propositions of the Berliner pirates in 2011 was
so advanced was because thousands of people participated in it.
LQFB has this very nice ability to get the most intelligent and
creative proposals out of people *iff* people are collaborative
and sincerily trying to work out the best. If they are in a
confrontational mode instead, LQFB can turn into a battlefield.
Again, active participation could weed out the proposals from
people that aren't being collaborative.

I presume that not only some tweaks to the software but also some
good choices in regulations can improve the probability that LQFB
will be employed the way it operates the best. That's also the case
for other software.

And a frequent meta-problem of politics is to correctly and
unemotionally identify the problems, analyse well and come to
conclusions that have a logical and scientific foundations.

Too frequently I hear people say something like the toaster
burnt my bread so I throw it away and use the microwave instead.
When maybe it was just a question of correcting the parameters.
And of course doing bread in the microwave will be very awful.