“True. Equalizing the influence of all parties (over the long term at least) doesn’t just risk giving such people power; it outright does give them power. At the time of the design, I justified it on the grounds that (1) it forces either compromise or power-sharing, (2) I haven’t found a good way to technocratically distinguish humane-but-dumb voters from inhumane-but-smart ones, or rightly-reviled inhumane minorities from wrongly-reviled humane minorities, and (3) the worry that if a group’s interests are excluded, then they have no stake in the system, and so they have reason to fight against the system in a costly way. Do any alternatives come to your mind?”
1. True, but is the compromise beneficial? Normally one wants to compromise either to gain useful input from good decision makers, or else to avoid conflict. The people one would be compromising with here would (assuming wisdom of crowds) be poor decision makers, and conventional democracy seems quite peaceful. 2. Why are you interested in distinguishing humane-but-dumb voters from inhumane-but-smart ones? Neither one is likely to give you good policy. Wrongly-reviled humane minorities deserve power, certainly, but rebalancing votes to give it to them (when you can’t reliably distinguish them) is injecting noise into the system and hoping it helps. 3. True, but this has always been a trade-off in governance-how much do you compromise with someone to keep the peace vs. promote your own values at the risk of conflict? Again, conventional democracy seems quite good at maintaining peace; while one might propose a system that seeks to produce better policy, it seems odd to propose a system that offers worse policy in exchange for averting conflict when we don’t have much conflict.
“I may have been unduly influenced by my anarchist youth: I’m more worried about the negative effects of concentrating power than about the negative effects of distributing it. Is there any objective way to compare those effects, however, that isn’t quite similar to how Ophelimo tries to maximize public satisfaction with their own goals?”
Asking the public how satisfied they are is hopefully a fairly effective way of measuring policy success. Perhaps not in situations where much of the public has irrational values (what would Christian fundamentalists report about gay marriage?), but asking people how happy they are about their own lives should work as well as anything we can do. This strikes me as one of the strongest points of Ophelimo, but it’s worth noting that satisfaction surveys are compatible with any form of government, not just this proposal.
Hopefully this doesn’t come across as too negative; it’s a fascinating idea!
“True. Equalizing the influence of all parties (over the long term at least) doesn’t just risk giving such people power; it outright does give them power. At the time of the design, I justified it on the grounds that (1) it forces either compromise or power-sharing, (2) I haven’t found a good way to technocratically distinguish humane-but-dumb voters from inhumane-but-smart ones, or rightly-reviled inhumane minorities from wrongly-reviled humane minorities, and (3) the worry that if a group’s interests are excluded, then they have no stake in the system, and so they have reason to fight against the system in a costly way. Do any alternatives come to your mind?”
1. True, but is the compromise beneficial? Normally one wants to compromise either to gain useful input from good decision makers, or else to avoid conflict. The people one would be compromising with here would (assuming wisdom of crowds) be poor decision makers, and conventional democracy seems quite peaceful. 2. Why are you interested in distinguishing humane-but-dumb voters from inhumane-but-smart ones? Neither one is likely to give you good policy. Wrongly-reviled humane minorities deserve power, certainly, but rebalancing votes to give it to them (when you can’t reliably distinguish them) is injecting noise into the system and hoping it helps. 3. True, but this has always been a trade-off in governance-how much do you compromise with someone to keep the peace vs. promote your own values at the risk of conflict? Again, conventional democracy seems quite good at maintaining peace; while one might propose a system that seeks to produce better policy, it seems odd to propose a system that offers worse policy in exchange for averting conflict when we don’t have much conflict.
“I may have been unduly influenced by my anarchist youth: I’m more worried about the negative effects of concentrating power than about the negative effects of distributing it. Is there any objective way to compare those effects, however, that isn’t quite similar to how Ophelimo tries to maximize public satisfaction with their own goals?”
Asking the public how satisfied they are is hopefully a fairly effective way of measuring policy success. Perhaps not in situations where much of the public has irrational values (what would Christian fundamentalists report about gay marriage?), but asking people how happy they are about their own lives should work as well as anything we can do. This strikes me as one of the strongest points of Ophelimo, but it’s worth noting that satisfaction surveys are compatible with any form of government, not just this proposal.
Hopefully this doesn’t come across as too negative; it’s a fascinating idea!