As for the demarchists, The Orville had an episode about this. There are many reasons it does not work in practice at a medium or large scale.
> The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly
Demarchist society at/around Yellowstone was supposed to involve many millions of people, but the catch was the Glitter Band of federated space stations allowed a high degree of local control: different stations could vote themselves into being hippie communes or dictatorships or whatever, and one of the main roles of the overarching Demarchist organization (heh) was to make sure these little fiefs didn't violate the fundamental principles of the whole thing by preventing their inhabitants from voting in the broader hivemind or from leaving the station. That broader hivemind held together by largely staying out of hyperlocal concerns, focusing on the advancement of the overall system.
> they definitely ran into some problems
Yeah, though The Bad Thing that happens roughly halfway through the universe's chronology (some books set before The Event, some after) affects all the different polities and one of the more interesting aspects of the novels, at least personally, is how the different systems deal with this external shock; it's not quite that the Demarchist political system caused the event, although it did get itself into a variety of lesser scrapes.
It is a fun concept: representative democracy is indeed kind of a workaround for laggy, low-bandwidth communications. What's possible when that stops being a constraint?
The Demarchists were probably the most successful offshoot of Earth and are billions across multiple solar systems. They are not an hive mind and their societies are not exactly an utopia (but not dystopian either).
That may be true if your vote is also your guess. But if they are two different things (i.e. I vote for candidate A but guess candidate B will win) I don't see an issue. In theory it simply favors a well-informed citizenry.
I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
This is a terrible "theory." No voter can be fully informed. I'm not even talking about the asymmetric information that leaders have (information from spy networks, experts, etc). Literally no single person can comprehend all these connections and complexities involved in many things. This is what representatives are supposed to resolve, but they frequently fail us. Your vote always is and always will be a guess. There may be a handful of subjects you're qualified to be an expert on, but the rest are effectively guesses. An "informed" voter is one that knows they are uninformed and doing their best.
This isn't a comment encouraging autocracy, but one against this myth of "education is the end all be all solution." We should inform people as much as possible but also be encouraging nuanced discussions. Wisdom of the crowds is powerful, but we also need to recognize the limitations.
> I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
Absolutely not! We want to protect the secrecy of the vote. This can only encourage the degradation of that privacy. There are many ways to extract more information from votes without revealing identity. Cardinal methods, especially Score and STAR, give you a lot more information that you can use infer voter preferences. These methods also allow you to vote honestly, which defeats the entire purpose of your poll question.
The problem is that most people are biased towards thinking their favorite candidate will win, so if it's a close election then most people will guess the same as their vote.
> I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
Political betting markets are kind of like that. Though, with money on the line, participants have a stronger incentive to avoid bias than they would in a poll.
It is a fascist thing to assume that for every political question there is only one "right" answer and all the others must be wrong.
Aside from that, i agree with you, the "right or wrong opinion" mindset is dangerous.
How does one even do this? Wait a hundred years? It's still probably impossible to determine the outcome of alternative policies. The right/wrong mindset is not only dangerous, but impossible in principle. But the autocrats won't tell you that.
How? This is absolutely impossible. You can't run trials. Yes, we can analyze the effects of policies (which we should certainly be doing more of) but these results can also take decades. We can only do a singular experiment and so our sample is biased to all hell. There is no objective truth here, only results of a single experiment.
It is possible to use GPT-3 to impersonate someone. You give it a profile and it assumes the personality, then speaks from that point of view replicating its biases with uncanny ability. So what they did was to create a simulated poll using GPT-3 by aligning the model to personality profiles distributed identically to the real population.
The result? GPT-3 can predict how an idea would poll, how a population would react to a situation. So you can simulate various policies without actually having to test in reality. You can do MCMC like AlphaGO and see ten moves ahead.
It could probably be used to simulate the stock market and economy as well. Just train the model on the "digital exhaust" of companies to predict their future behaviour in aggregate.
This looks to be one of the most astounding uses of large language models. It would be of immediate interest to politicians, investors, advertisers, music and movie produces or any influencer.
It gives me heavy 'Matrix' and 'Psychohistory' vibes.
https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-sim...
The existence of adversarial attacks shows that most neural networks have pretty bad worst-case performance. Thus sticking GPT-3 into alpha-beta or MCTS could just as easily give you an ungeneralizable optimum, because optimizers are by nature intended to find extreme responses. Call it a Campbell's law for neural nets.
The actual AlphaZero nets are probably more robust because they were themselves trained by MCTS, although they still don't generalize very well out-of-sample: IIRC AlphaZero is not a very strong Fischer Random player.
Policy making is not about truth, it is about values and priorities.
https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...
Also, a paper on the vtaiwan process: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft/
IMO the problem with most {something} democracy systems is that they are voting paradigms that focus either only or mostly on how decisions are made but not how the options to decide upon are formed. This is true for the systems that you mentioned as well.
Moreover, the fact that decision-making and policy authoring are operations that take time leads to citizens' beliefs updating during the processes and after the fact, but with "old-school" type representative democracies there is no real-time mechanism to synchronise policy suggestions and voting outcomes with the new states of information accumulation by voters. "High-tech" democracies should take advantage of the technologies that enable fast and cheap communication but they should also have mechanisms that disincentivise the spam that inevitably follows cheap talk.
Regarding AI policy making, there are very interesting projects such as https://pol.is which address a lot of the problems that I mentioned above but, in my opinion, their output should be used as advise only. We have not yet exhausted human-centric democratic systems and neural networks are still privately-owned and privately-trained black boxes.
*Edit: Another counterargument that generally applies to neural nets making decisions for human activities is the argument of accountability. While you can put on trial a bad politician for their harmful-to-society decision making, who is to blame when the neural net will inevitably spew the wrong output on an issue that it has not encountered before and a policy decision will be made based on that? Will we put the developers on trial?
> GPT3 can simulate real people, Jack Clark
https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-sim...
Funny, as a biochemist, I always took it that minds had essentially been through unfathomable numbers and levels of iteration through cultural and biological evolution cycles, and that ANNs were the untrustworthy new kids on the block :)
> they are voting paradigms that focus either only or mostly on how decisions are made but not how the options to decide upon are formed.
Just wanted to second your thought here, as we seem to have converged on this independently. I've been speaking similarly about the framing of Polis. Facilitative processes often require cycles of expansion of possibility and then collapse into singular options (whether the options to vote between, or the yay/nay decision). This expansion/collapse is often called the double diamond process.
For example, civil society discussion is often expansion, deliberative assembly in parliament is also ideally about expansion. Putting forward electorial candidates is expansion. Voting (electorial or parliamentary) is purely collapse. Who participates in either the expansion or collapse is a critical feature that differs in all these.
Different levels of expansion/collapse of possibility space are stitched together in our old process, often built on technology of their era, usually created to suit the era of postal mail and telegraphs (communicating electoral results) and horse-drawn carriage (attending parliamentary proceedings). In its prime, Roberts Rules of Order was a cutting-edge social technology that (coupled with other parliamentary democracy infra), allowed as many people as possible to have their views enshrined in governing law.
Most digital innovation focusses on modernizing the collapse process inherent in voting, but it is the less interesting part imho.
Polis is a tool that involves new technology that potentially unseats Roberts Rules of Order as the universal technology of deliberation (expansion). It's dimensional reduction allows for a lightweight process that accepts TONS of participation. It facilitates larger processes where people can participate more directly in issue-based expansion of the possibilities on the way to collapsing into a singular decision or compromise.
It is a deliberation-support tool (expansion), not a decision-making tool (collapse).
Hope this helps others trying to grapple with the significance of tools like Polis :)
Hit me up on Twitter if this stuff is up your alley: https://twitter.com/patcon_
EDIT: Or there's an unofficial "Polis User Group" discord server for aspiring facilitators or server hosters: http://link.g0v.network/pug
I discovered AR in the last couple of years and find his world building and imagination incredible.
Loved his short stories collections and House of Suns.
I started the Revelation Space novels this year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
Science fiction author Alastair Reynold touches on different types of democracies in a couple of his novels. One example is the demarchists, cyborgs with a direct democracy where everyone votes on even minor issues using brain implants.
Another was a proportional democracy where voters who got the “right answers” in previous elections would have their future votes more heavily weighted, effectively becoming indirect representatives of other voters.