John Huang

Karma: 83

John Huang 29 Oct 2025 14:47 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: cata’s comment on: Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
Its quite simple. Voting is irrational. The probability that your vote is pivotal is about inversely proportionate to the voting population size.
That means any expected reward you get from voting is small. Even in a school board election there are often thousands of participants.
When people start voting for non selfish reasons they’re only going to devote a small amount of time to essentially a charitable or recreational activity. They’re not going to get informed. They’re not going to make a deep dive.

John Huang 16 Jun 2025 16:00 UTC
2 points
−12
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Intelligence Is Not Magic, But Your Threshold For “Magic” Is Pretty Low
We already deal with entities with theoretically limitless capabilities. They’re called either corporations or states or organizations. Organizations potentially are ever growing.
Of course if AI ever obtained superhuman abilities, the first place these abilities would be deployed is in a corporation or state.
The great AI danger is a corporate danger. Wielding a corporation, the AI automatically obtains all the abilities of the individual humans making up a corporation, and AI can manipulate humanity the traditional way, through money. Any ability the AI lacks, well, AI can just hire the right people to fulfill that niche.
If AI obtains state power, it will manipulate humanity through the other tradition, war and violence.

John Huang 30 Mar 2025 18:17 UTC
1 point
0
on: LLMs may enable direct democracy at scale
Imllementing direct democracy is vastly simpler than implementing a LLM. It’s called sortition. Randomly select people to form the legislature instead using elections. Random people are a better direct, descriptive representation of the public. Voila, it’s not actually direct democracy, just like relying on LLMs is not actually direct democracy, yet it’s vastly more simple to implement.
Like with any agent, whether AI or random or elected, all agents will suffer from principle -agent problems and problems of corruption.

John Huang 6 Nov 2024 16:11 UTC
1 point
−2
on: Advisors for Smaller Major Donors?
Here’s my solution to your problem. Small major donors should collectively organize together and make decisions democratically.
I would therefore expand the donor lottery into a democratic committee. Instead of selecting only 1 participant, select ~10 participants, similar to jury duty. With more participants, we enjoy more diverse opinion and a better representative sample (Yes 10 is a terrible sample, but it’s way better than 1. If the number of members in the pool increase, the sample size should be increased). More people also facilitate better deliberative discussion and information sharing.
The rationale of a lottocratically selected committee is also different from a donor lottery. Lottocratic committees have democratic legitimacy (often called “sortition”). They are created similarly to how jury pools are created, with similar democratic credentials.
As the sample size of the committee increases, it becomes more and more legitimate as a representative statistical sample of the donor membership.
The tradeoff is cost. A lottocratic body of 10 is 10 times more costly than a body of 1. But it’s also much more efficient than individual action. Imagine 50 people are in your pool. A lottocratic body of 10 reduces cognitive load by 5x. In my opinion, the body of 10 will also make better decisions than a single temporary dictator.
A variety of reasons why collective decisions are often better include:
- The practice of deliberative democracy—Deliberation can produce better informed results.
- Division of labor—Effective committees can organize research tasks and divide up cognitive labor to enhance decision making.
- Condorcet’s Jury Theorem—Greater number of participants increases decision accuracy.
- Median voter theorem—Greater number of participants activate the possibility of tending towards the median preferences of the pool.
A single winner in contrast invites chaos to charitable selections, and is unrepresentative of the whole.

John Huang 24 Oct 2024 3:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ZY’s comment on: Could randomly choosing people to serve as representatives lead to better government?
>Do you think there is a situation where selected random people do not want to be in office/leadership and want to pursue their own passion/career and thus due to this reason may do a bad job? Is this mandatory?
I think a robust way to design the assembly (or multiple assemblies like with Bouricius’s model) is to have many different people serving different term lengths. Some people may serve a term of only a couple days or weeks. Others might serve for years.
For short-term service, I would make that mandatory. Everyone is required to come.
For long term service, maybe those should be voluntary.
As far as incentives go, there’s a range of enforcement options for “mandatory” service. Perhaps you can just pay a big fine, as a percentage of your income, as an alternative to service. There probably ought to be mechanisms to defer service so you can time things a bit better with your life circumstances.
The typical Citizens’ Assembly will also offer benefits such as child care, parental care.
A high paying salary will encourage the lower and middle class to participate.
I have trouble coming up with ways to help small business owners to participate though. Could a small business owner drop their work for an entire year, even if it was well paid—especially if the small business is so small there are no managers to cover their role? Perhaps there could be alternatives for them, such as part time work coupled with work-from-home.
>What are some nuances about population and diversity? (I am not sure yet)
I have yet to hear about a case where Deliberative decision making techniques were tried and failed due to excessive diversity or cultural factors. I’m not an expert on the latest and greatest research here so I may be wrong. I do know that deliberation experiments have been performed all around the world, including East Asia, Africa, and India.
An example deliberative poll was performed in Uganda, paper linked here:
https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/146/3/140/27163/Applying-Deliberative-Democracy-in-Africa-Uganda-s
I haven’t fully read this yet. Note that James Fishkin is the guy that performs and advocates for these “deliberative polls”.

John Huang 22 Oct 2024 4:54 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Hastings’s comment on: Could randomly choosing people to serve as representatives lead to better government?
I’m not that concerned with lobbyists ruining the deliberative proceedings. I think you’re underestimating normal people a bit. They have state power to shut down annoying and undesired feedback if they wish. I also think the assembly will tend to trust their own advisors, whom they hired themselves, over outside self-proclaimed expert lobbyists.
My bigger concern is with corruption and bribery. Because we’re dealing with very normal people, we also ought to expect normal criminal behavior. We ought to expect assembly members getting arrested from time to time, and doing all the normal things we expect from 500 random people.
I think bribery is a sufficiently high concern that a police force should constantly operate to perform sting operations and monitor elicit behavior from assembly members. IMO, this should already be happening with elected officials too.
Another big concern is whether a purely lottocratic assembly would self-regulate its own corruption. It has some interest to, in that the lottocrats help their future selves, after their term has ended, by creating future rules that would regulate corruption. Terril Bouricus attempts to create a system where layers on layers of assemblies check and re-check the work of other assemblies to mitigate corruption concerns.
I can’t easily conclude whether election or sortition would be better at corruption mitigation. With elections, opposition parties have an incentive to investigate their enemies to root out corruption. HOWEVER, the same opposition parties have an incentive to lie about the results of investigations, leading to an environment of fake news, where voters cannot distinguish between a political attack and actual corruption. In the American context, bribery is about already legalized with campaign donations.
Sortition could possibly lead to a ridiculous scenario:
Imagine the public is outraged at the insane level of corruption of the sortition-assembly. However as a new assembly is formed by lottery, these anti-corruption sentiments are suddenly rotated into office. The members of the public hate corruption, as does this new assembly! The question is, would the members of the assembly be able to do the Machiavellian about-face and suddenly embrace corruption? I have a hard time believing they would, though I have doubts. In my opinion, normal people being utterly normal, would rather do the easy thing and yes, go ahead and regulate the corruption while enjoying their government salary. Getting to serve in office is already a win-win, why not win and also be declared heroes? Alternatively they can “Go Breaking Bad”, embrace corruption and pilfer the state coffers. They can win big (for now) but will become despised. What do you think normal people would do? High risk high reward, or low risk medium reward? I don’t think going “Breaking Bad” is the best of ideas. Elected politicians use their offices to protect themselves from legal challenge. Obvious example, Donald Trump using the presidency to overcome his legal problems. He’s obviously not the first politician to cling to office in order to protect themselves. Lottocrats can’t do the same. Lottocrats soon lose their powers and become vulnerable.
What links here?
- DusanDNesic's comment on Could randomly choosing people to serve as representatives lead to better government? by John Huang (23 Oct 2024 11:36 UTC; 3 points)