While studying philosophy in college I learned the basic structure for framing an argument using premises and questions to drill down to the essence of a problem.
Shortly after learning this framework, I noticed I was using it for things totally unrelated to philosophy, and slowly this became the way I framed arguments in my head. It’s the quickest way to figure out the “core” or “essence” of what is being argued, and then work backwards from there to figure out the optimal solution within the required restraints.
This magical structure is: “If (premise1), then (question2), (question3)… So (premise4).”
The premise is the statement you believe to be true, and the starting point for your argument.
If both the question2 and question3 are true, and the first premise is true, than the final premise must also be true.
For more information on this framework visit: http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/vocab/validity.html
I believe that mixing this framework with a programming langauage will allow us to create a decentralized, distributed voting system.
One of the issues that comes with a voting system is how do you make sure the people voting are voting for the “right” thing. How do we know that they’re well informed enough on a specific topic to be able to have their vote be valuable to the discussion? We don’t want bozos voting on important things, that could end in chaos.
The reason we currently have a representative democracy is partly because people don’t want to have to deal with these types of things – they have other stuff to worry about. The other part is that a lot of people just aren’t smart – and you don’t really want them deciding things.
Using the mentioned framework, I believe we can reconstruct a voting system that allows even the lowest common denominator to become a valuable voting asset.
An example of an argument using this framework would be:
1. If all humans are created equal, all humans should carry equal rights. (premise1)
2. All humans are created equal. (question2)
3. Opposite sex marriage is legal. (question3)
4. Same sex marriage should be legal. (premise4)
Distributed Voting System
Anyone would be able to propose an argument for the community to vote on. The arguments would be created in a way that matches the framework above – using premises & questions.
Initially, the system would take your argument and put it through a curation period of 30 days where anyone could read the entire ”if, than” statement.
During this period, a proposed vote would need to gain / maintain a level of sustained positive engagement (discussion / sharing / views) to become active.
After becoming active, the system would send (question2) and (question3) randomly to an even distribution of nodes in the network. Ideally people would see no more than 2 simple questions per day, and the system would automatically balance the work load to keep it within the systems availability. The more nodes (voters) on the network, the more votes it can process at one time.
Voters would be asked to answer “True” or “False” to the question they are shown.
“All humans are created equal.” True or False?
or
“Opposite sex marriage is legal.” True or False?
These simple questions are sent out to the network, and if the majority of people vote “True”, then the question in the greater argument would become ‘true’, meaning if (question3) was also true, then premise 1 and 4 must be true as well, and the vote is passed.
Users would not be able to see the overall topic they’re voting on, they would simply answer a boiled down true or false question which strips all of the politics and social bias from the argument.
When posed with the question “Opposite sex marriage is legal.” – even someone who is homophobic would answer “true” because first it is a fact that opposite sex marriage is legal, and further – they don’t know exactly what the vote is for so there is no way for them to know that answering dishonestly would benefit their personal beliefs / ideals.
For all the voter knows, they could be voting to ban gay marriage – or maybe the greater logical argument isnt about marriage at all, but happens to use that logical point as a stepping stone to prove something else.
This allows the system to keep people honest, generate a vote result based on facts, and strip issues of their political or social biases.
It’s time to cut the bullshitaken.
—–
It would be really interesting to create a custom logic based programming language like prolog on-top of a blockchain to build a dynamic logic based voting system or something similar.
If you’re interested in jumping on this project we have a few really awesome minds working on this already and would love to add more people to the team. If you want to join, or have other ideas / questions – feel free to Contact Me.
– J
z zom
Feb 1, 2014 -
Voting will NEVER work because it is based on coercion – %51 will always rule the other %49. Democracy has an inherent flaw – therefore, just like when finding a bug in a compuer program – it should be removed.
Julian Sarokin
Feb 1, 2014 -
Fair enough — what do you see as an ideal system?
If we can solve coercion would it be possible?
It seems that any other system would need to have a singular figure making the decisions which usually ends badly.
z zom
Feb 2, 2014 -
Privatize everything, for a start..
Nicholas Howley
Feb 2, 2014 -
As someone who also studies philosophy, and politics for that matter (PPE at Oxford), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we might better construct political questions. Obviously, the “package of issues” system of party voting is far too crude for pluralistic societies with cross-cutting issues. Certainly, it would be an improvement to be able to gauge opinion on certain issues. However, there are a number of reasons why I think the use of a premise-premise-premise-conclusion “voting system” will be limited:
1. The terms we use in questions. Our definitions of “equality”, “fairness”, “security”, “power” and so on differ from person to person, and are almost always at the root of a political debate. A libertarian’s notion of “freedom” might be a wage-slave’s “entrenchment”, leading to his own loss of freedom. Political terms, just by themselves, create so much discord. Just take “affirmative action” for example – if the aim there is “equal treatment”, for some that means that affirmative action works, because it tries to level the playing field for college applicants of all races (so at the point of applying each has “equal opportunities”), yet for others affirmative action is manifestly a failure, because it gives undue consideration to the needs of the disadvantaged, and in some cases, the considerations at work in deciding whether or not to let someone in are different – for the dominant ethnicity, it’s just about their academic ability, whereas for minorities it might be also about the “ethnic diversity” they can bring to the college – there’s an “inequality of considerations” here, so affirmative action isn’t in fact a manifestation of the principle of equal treatment. In short, even the relatively harmless statement that “University applicants deserve equal treatment” can be read either as endorsing or counting against affirmative action, depending on your notion of equality. Judging by the many journals and books on political concepts, and the notion of “Essentially Contested Concepts”, it’s hard to see if we can ever reach a conclusion about the concepts we employ that isn’t normatively laden.
2. The inferences that follow. Matters on which we vote often involve a conclusion of a normative nature: a conclusion saying that something should be done, or that this would be a good thing to do. The example you gave is a perfect example. Yet one of the first things that a study of ethical theory teaches you is the famous “is/ought” distinction, Hume’s fork, “you can’t derive evaluative statements from descriptive ones”, “you can’t go from how things are to how things should be”. In everyday life we’re used to doing this, but it doesn’t mean that our conclusions are watertight – the sheer amount political argument is a testament to how much people disagree, even when they agree about all the facts of the case. Think about the number of court case outcomes people disagree on, or even harmless living-room debates over the rightness or wrongness of the actions of someone on TV – it’s not as though people are watching two different television programme: they agree about all the facts of the matter, but differ in their evaluation. Your example is different: it has an evaluative premise already, and often it’s been argued that you can move from a set of descriptive premisses and one evaluative one to an evaluative conclusion. Nonetheless, I do not believe your conclusion follows from the premisses: even if I agree with all the premisses. This is because even if it might be possible to move from evaluative premisses to conclusions, the operation is still often not watertight. You have to have much tighter structures. For example: a) It is wrong to kill someone if not acting in self defence or saving any lives b) John killed Jack c) It was not in self defence d) It saved no lives, therefore e) What John did was wrong – this is arguably watertight. My worry is that political questions rarely if ever can be this tight or simple, because often they are about generalisations in society, and rarely we ever decree something without having exceptions and qualifications to what we have said. Which brings me on to….
3. The context of principles. Is it necessarily a virtue to have an iron-cast deductive consistency in your moral principles? Only by one (deontological, Kantian) conception of morality. Many stress “common-sense” pragmatism and the need to know the full picture. We almost always need to know the full context of what we’re being asked about. For example: suppose we declare free healthcare a right. Are we going to keep operating on the lungs of someone who simply will not give up smoking? Or conduct multiple weight-loss operations on someone who admits they just like to eat a lot? Much more problematic is how unrepresentative single-issue decisions actually are. Representatives aren’t elected just to absolve us of responsibility or free up our time – representatives have a highly difficult and valuable job of juggling multiple demands, in particular economic demands. We might be like California and vote for higher spending on education and lower taxes, but we’ll bankrupt the state because we haven’t recognised the need for trade off. So should we develop an elaborate system of preferences? Unfortunately, Arrow’s impossibility theorem and Concordet’s voting paradox are both logical refutations of the idea that we can derive the optimal preference of “the people” or even a group of the people from the aggregation of their preferences. Simply put: governance and policy-making is incompatible with the use of single-issue voting or even preference-based voting.
4. Finally – you can’t take the political or social aspects away from some issues. This is a bit similar to point 2 but really recognises the deep-seated differences in values that people have, which leads them to adopt certain views on important issues. Abortion is probably the most obvious example – even without religious bias, people differ over what they think the moral character of abortion is and when life begins. We do, however, have to recognise that people will take their religious values as fundamental and preceding “rights talk”, which is a modern concept with no actual philosophical or metaphysical basis. Rights talk is currently the most effective way of articulating intuitions that most of us have about what is right or wrong, but for many who follow a religion, it is secondary, because their religion IS grounded metaphysically and represents the ultimate reality. So there will always be disagreement over fundamental values, and this goes with or without religion. We do things in western countries that are barbaric to other countries (individualism and the erosion of family units in particular), and vica versa. Is a doctrine of toleration and social laissez-faire the answer? Possibly, but even then, reflecting such a philosophy in particular political issues isn’t straightforward.
I might add to this a fundamental concern about voting outcomes – majoritarianism (which seems to follow from your system) has long been mitigated by minority rights, for example. Mainly, however, I think that the very nature of political problems does not admit of a logic-based solution, because of the “contestability” of the terms we use, the difficulty of getting evaluative conclusions from descriptive premisses (even when there are some evaluative ones in there), the fact that most political decisions are actually contextualised and involve trade-offs, the impossibility of getting aggregated preferences from votes, and the plurality of values in society. I think it’s a good idea for people to be polled a lot more so that a more specific picture about “public opinion” emerges than a party-based one, but sad thing is that there isn’t a logical method for reaching definitive political conclusions, simply because of the nature of what political issues are.
Julian Sarokin
Feb 2, 2014 -
Wow. Extremely insightful, thanks so much for commenting.
I think I agree with you on all your major points, and that this system wouldn’t work for the reasons you stated above.
My example may have been too ideal and didn’t allow for complex use cases to be played out (which is important, as most issues are complex).
What may be interesting is a dynamic system that allows groups to create their own set of laws based on their particular political and religious philosophies.
We would have a master set of “universal laws” like no killing, rape, etc. and then the other issues are left up to each individual and the group they opt-into.
The universal laws supersede any law created by a group, but groups can create any laws they choose.
This models the “federal government” and “state government” system – one federal government, and many state governments.
With this system, you’d be able to opt-out and join a different group at any time, or simply exist under the universal laws as a sovereign individual.
So Universal Law –> Group1 Law –> JuliansNeighborhood Law (Group2)
Anyone can create a group and set laws – they would then need to find people to opt-into those laws, but as long as other people follow similar princples, the can join the group.
This solves the problem of “whats fair to me might not seem fair to someone else” (affirmative action).
Also, the creator of the group would have no special influence – they would have the same vote weight as everyone else.
I think the overall system would need to be multi-layered in order to work. I agree that majoritarianism isn’t ideal – but if we split up into groups that agree with each other on most topics, than it seems to be a good way to move forward.
Your group could make it illegal to kill and eat a cow, but as long as I’m not part of your group, I would be free to eat cow. If I was part of your group and decided I wanted to eat a cow, I could opt-out of the group and as long as I dont break a universal law I can do as I please.
The reason for the opt-out is to keep groups and their laws honest. The second they start getting weird – people leave. This creates a self-optimizing system.
These are just some initial thoughts – I’d love to hear what you think. I’m going to go back over and re-read your comment in the morning with fresh eyes.
Great stuff!
– J
Julian Sarokin
Feb 2, 2014 -
I’d like to note that I didnt think at all about how these dynamic laws would be enforced, or what happens if someone breaks a law, or what happens if the severity of one group for doing something is far too drastic (death sentence for eating a banana).
Will jump back in the morning
– J
Sam
Feb 2, 2014 -
You couldn’t possibly organise the implementation of such various laws. I have often thought about crowdsourced voting such as this, and have come up with the following:
Individuals interact with a ‘mindmap’ in which there are relations between concepts. Anybody is free to create a relationship, and these can be voted for or against.
One example might be “all people should be held equal before the law”
Another being: “marriage ought to be the union between a man and a woman”
Another: “marriage ought to be the union between any two people, regardless of gender”
Another might be “If ‘all people should be held equal before the law’ then ‘marriage ought to be the union between any two people, regardless of gender'”
The same map would consist of definitions for ‘marriage’, ‘gay’ and ‘legal’ and ‘ought’ and all the other terms, accessible to each individual via random assignment.
As in your original proposal, random statements will be provided to users for voting on. One could imagine this might be accessible via a device like google glass or similar. You might read a news article, at which point a prompt asks you to define the words used or the relationships thereof.
Its unlikely that all people would vote on all sentiments, but by random sampling, consensus should be reached and bias avoided.
This would result in direct democracy, but would rely on adequate education to produce functional society. Otherwise, I fear it would not be productive.
Julian Sarokin
Feb 2, 2014 -
I really like the mindmap idea — basically instead of letting users enter in their own (possibly unique) premises / questions, they’d be building it mad-libs style from a set of pre-set concept-relationship objects.
– J
Nicholas Howley
Feb 5, 2014 -
Hi Julian,
Due to intense Ethics and History of Philosophy revision I’ve not been able to reply for a couple of days, but I’ve just gone over your reply again and would like to offer a few more thoughts…
The idea of a kind of “non-territorial federalism” is certainly very interesting. Historically, there have been cases of groups living closely together (or maybe in the same place) and following different rules depending on their culture or religion; so in the latter days of the Roman Empire, “barbarian” tribes and Romans mixed but followed their own sets of laws. A more recent example is the Ottoman Empire (effectively dissolved in 1919; became the Turkish republic in 1923), where Christians, Muslims, Jews etc. would all live under their own laws, and the Ottoman government simply left them alone as long as they paid their taxes. So on the face of it, it can work.
Unfortunately, the extent to which laws can actually be federalised will be limited, especially if moving from one set of laws to another is as easy as you would ideally like. Studies have shown that tax system differences with high mobility of people is unsustainable: if a particular “legislative area” (whether geographical or not) has a high rate of tax, high earners are likely to leave the system while those who would benefit most from redistributive policies would join the system, to the point where it collapses economically. In the extreme case, with fully dynamic laws, you would get those who want higher taxes “chasing” those who want to move to low-tax regimes, voting through higher taxes, causing the wealthy to leave and join another regime. It may be that the end point of this comes to an even distribution of those who would benefit from higher taxes, who (presumably) would have majority in each regime, causing a uniformity of higher-tax laws: but then federalism with respect to taxes has collapsed and a unitary government, in effect, has come back. In addition, you’d have to ask where the voting power of the wealthy had gone. I know you mentioned in another article the possibility of those contributing more tax getting more of a vote – but there are a number of ethical and political problems with this prospect, and empirically, the worry of the great majority of people is that the wealthiest already have far too much political power, and it is having adverse economic consequences on others. In addition, some funding arrangements will simply have to be geographically based, regarding services based in a locality (e.g. education, health care, fire rescue, child care, etc.).
The idea of culturally-based or social/ethical laws is much more promising, and you’re right, some fundamental universal laws will be necessary (e.g. those dealing with human rights, property laws, court procedure etc.). However, there are a couple of practical, consequence-focussed worries: 1) how would you be able to tell what laws someone was subscribed to and therefore how to act appropriately towards them (not in the sense that you would be bound by their laws but recognise that your actions with them are limited by what they are allowed to do)? and 2) wouldn’t it simply encourage social segregation, with people’s ethical differences set in stone and formalised? 2) for those that resist their community’s laws, isn’t the fact that they have the force of law a factor making it harder to get out? One might more easily detach oneself from one’s culture if it was felt only to be a cultural choice, something not binding or serious enough to need enshrining in law.
My overriding impression ultimately is that there actually may not be a need to articulate differences in practices and attitudes in group law, if ultimately you can’t actually bind anybody to following those practices (since they could leave at any time). In addition, a group law would presumably carry some sort of obligation by those outside that particular group to respect the group person’s ability to follow that law. This could be problematic where someone’s decision to adopt a particular group law requires him to give away a significant amount of his wealth to a religion, or spend extra time working on particular projects, or take on the responsibility of extra children to adopt – all obligations which could dramatically affect his ability to look after other members of his own family (especially his own children). The only way his fundamental family obligations might be enforced is if such obligations were part of universal law – but then can the obligations I’ve just mentioned under group law still have the force of law (demanding he follows it, and that others allow him to do so)? The subset of laws that can be followed without potentially great impact upon others becomes small. Personally, I think we have enough of an individualistic culture in the Anglophone world already, and too much emphasis on individual rights and capabilities at the expense of responsibilities and community ties. More such emphasis in the form of group law could threaten to cut family and community ties even more.
In short, group law might map onto communities and cultural groups, or it might be cross-cutting. If it maps onto them, I fear it is superfluous (since a sense of obligation to one’s cultural norms can be quite strong without law – just take religion for example – and in addition it doesn’t quite have the force of law if you can leave for another group law at any time), and would only lead to greater cultural segregation across a country if our differences are asserted more strongly and enshrined in law, discouraging in a way open conversation and education. If group law is cross-cutting, again it is surplus to requirements (people can choose to live by their own ethical standards anyway), and would involve only a greater assertion of individuality over traditional obligations towards those you have to, or choose to, live with and support.
I’m sorry I write such long essays. I have to write two every week at Oxford!
Bill Dietrich
Mar 10, 2014 -
Now that we have decentralized communication via the internet, we’ve been able to see exactly how stupid, or ignorant, or ideological, much of the public is.
Every Direct Democracy proposal I see (decentralized/distributed or not) is long on criticism of the current system, eloquent about the joys of new internet technology, and VERY short on how the new govt actually would function.
Who gets to decide what is a “big policy” issue worthy of discussion and voting, and what is a minor bill the voters shouldn’t be bothered with ?
We’d still have a Congress, right ? Congress does lots of stuff besides voting. Oversight, impeachment, constituent services.
We’d still have a President, Judiciary, all the executive branch agencies, the quasi-public agencies such as Fed and Post Office, right ? Most DD advocates can’t bring themselves to say “yes, this stuff all would continue to exist”.
http://www.billdietrich.me/Reason/RestructuringFederalGovernment.html#DirectDemocracy