But it should be treated as a relatively safe ID, it's even used for voting. If you feel uncomfortable, just have one device for eID, and one for everything else.
I think it's a great tool if we want to implement some sort of liquid democracy feature.
Host a platform like this at city hall, county building, capitol building, schools.
Only a human can access a terminal. Have humans monitor ingress/egress.
A more generalized solution that solves the specific problem inherent to all these digital ones.
You have a point but I am not sure it is the one you intended.
Technology must assist local, bottom-up governance, rather than being supplanted.
This is how representative democracy is meant to work... you work/talk with your local representatives who work as part of a larger body on your behalf. Part of the problem in the US is we stopped growing the House of Representatives, which should be about 4-5x the size that it currently is, so you have much closer local representatives.
We've lost our sense of culture, purpose, pride and nationality with each generation. And while a lot of it may have been mostly propaganda, there's something to be said for civic cohesion.
> What ZKPs don’t do is mitigate verifier abuse or limit their requests, such as over-asking for information they don’t need or limiting the number of times they request your age over time. They don’t prevent websites or applications from collecting other kinds of observable personally identifiable information like your IP address or other device information while interacting with them.
If we allow incumbents to make photo age verification and upload of ID to third-parties to be the solution, we will have a much worse solution.
And going forward I think that any communication without establishing some kind of trust boundary will just be noise.
It's also illegal to steal things but that happens much more frequently because it's often fairly easy to get away with.
and then layer on citizenship on top if you want to use this for polling, voting, etc.
> You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
Wanting to flip the tortoise back over was why he failed the test.
It's funny to think of how the US government is effectively a decentralized web of trust system. Building one that works, that has sufficient network effects, auditability, accountability, enforcability, so that when things are maliciously exploited, or people make mistakes, your system is robust and resilient - these are profound technically difficult challenges.
The US government effectively has to operate IDs under a web of trust, with 50 units sitting at the top, and a around 3,000 county sub-units, each of which are handling anywhere from 0 to 88 sub-units of towns, cities, other community structures.
Each community then deals with one or more hospitals, one or more doctors in each hospital, and every time a baby is born, they get some paperwork filled out, filed upward through the hierarchy of institutions, shared at the top level between the massive distributed database of social security numbers, and there are laws and regulations and officials in charge of making sure each link in the chain is where it needs to be and operates according to a standard protocol.
At any rate - ID is hard. You've gotta have rules and enforcement, accountability and due process, transparency and auditing, and you end up with something that looks a bit like a ledger or a blockchain. Getting a working blockchain running is almost trivial at this point, or building on any of the myriad existing blockchains. The hard part is the network incentives. It can't be centralized - no signing up for an account on some website. Federated or domain based ID can be good, but they're too technical and dependent on other nations and states. The incentives have to line up, too; if it's too low friction and easy, it'll constantly get exploited and scammed at a low level. If it's too high friction and difficult, nobody will want to bother with it.
Absent a compelling reason to participate, people need to be compelled into these ID schemes, and if they're used for important things, they need a corresponding level of enforcement, and force, backing them up, with due process. You can't run it like a gmail account, because then it's not reliable as a source of truth, and so on.
I don't know if there's a singular, technological fix, short of incorruptible AGI that we can trust to run things for us following an explicit set of rules, with protocols that allow any arbitrary independent number of networks and nodes and individuals to participate.
Yes 100%, that's why the government needs to offer it, make tampering a serious offense, and dynamically defend its integrity from attackers.
> incorruptible AGI
Not a lot of alpha in planning for scenarios where we get that
I'm assuming it's equivalent to lobste.rs implementation: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
The cost of this is adding a ton of friction to joining.
I'm just using this as a specific example. Not saying that there aren't hateful sentiments or people behind comments or positions... only that depending on how such policies are interpreted you can't even debate sensitive issues.
Now, scratch my belly and pay for my hair and tall implants with your taxes.
It's such an unpopular idea for so many different reasons that this has managed to unify some very different groups of people in opposition: feminists, conservatives, disaffected liberals, and many others.
Off the top of my head, a possible method is a proxy or two or three, each handling different components of authentication and without knowledge of the other components. They return a token with validity properties (such as duration, level of service). All the vendor (e.g., Polis) would know is the validity of the token.
I'm sure others have thought about it more ...
The problem is that lots of sites need/want email address. So would need system for anonymous email, and that would either need real email to forward, or way to read email.
- Not having just upvote or downvote, but upvote as funny or insightful (slashdot)
- Not allowing to vote or comment until some karma has been reached (new accounts inflame topics and disappear later, having influenced).
- Invite only so one can block while chain of accounts.
- Not allowing to vote or comment every day or every hour, but randomly (more difficult for bots)
- Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors.
- Having a way to allow replies only from the account you are answering to (so that bots do not switch places while moving the topic).
- Post history public (on reddit it can be made private, so a bot is posting hate in many communities and one cannot cross-check)
- Some sort of graph of statistics of accounts that comment together.
- Paying a small amount as friction for bots (linked to card, etc.)
I guess with AI there would be even more. These are some from the top of my head.
So allow only LLM generated posts?
If someone cannot be bothered, why should we bother to read what they have to say? I think it is a good signal.
EDIT: plus it is not an allow or not allow. The more errors the more downvoted, so it is a small adjustment.
I think an llm approach could be good. You make suggestions in however insane language and it converts the format to something boring and mundane accepted by all clients.
Some people are to brief, some elaborate more than necessary.
Says who? Having good grammar is a signal that the person cares enough. I am surprised more forums do not use this signal.
It also had me completely convinced that one should only listen to what is said rather than how.
So, (lol) with me you score extra points if you properly em dash but not the kind of points one would want.
I think I can find some common ground with people who have different views on corporate taxation if we both go over some data and economics and think about it and consider various tradeoffs. Especially if we chat face to face to avoid any 'keyboard warrior' effects.
I probably can't find much common ground with people that believe that condensed water vapor formed by the passage of airplanes is actually a mind control device from the planet Zargon.
I guess the theory is that you put the entire spectrum of positions on the line which allows fully biased positions on each end to exist. Then biased people on both ends will vote on slightly less and less biased positions that they still agree with and you'll see the true shared positions. But I still think that if you don't have a perfectly equal number of positions to vote on for each side you'll end up with the same problem we already have in society, people are being given biased questions not necessarily by strength but by amount. Therefore they will subconsciously and consciously conclude that the world wants them to be more towards the position that had more questions presented.
In addition to the problem with biased questions you note, there are often built in assumptions that make yes or no responses impossible.
People are free to believe what they want but when a platform is overrun with bots spewing this 24/7 (reddit, for example) we are giving a platform to those lies/falsehoods.
IMO that is the issue, we should make it difficult for those lies to spread, but the incentives are not aligned with engagement. If the platform provides measures to disincentivise spam, hate spread with low-effort there will be less of it. Just like spam. And less people tricked because of it.
I think the first step is always to separate a fact (I.e., X happened), from why did X happen. Afterwards, you move towards the steps that could prevent X from happening, or reactive protocols to X that minimize the chance of conspiracy theories, etc.
Of course it will not work with all, but, in my opinion, with enough of “alternative facts” lovers that it will be sufficient.
For things that did not happen? Yeah. I am not sure there is something that can be done beyond pointing out inconsistencies in their reasoning and proves. However, typically, those things are about believes that mascaras as rational reasoning, and there is nothing you can do about beliefs.
Remember, after WW2 there were people in Germany who did not believe the Allies that Hitler and Co did terrible things.
To have a healthy world, we need to start with democratic engagement on every block, of every district in every city, in all counties of every province, in all nations across every continent of our shared planet. Critically, it must be completely human mediated, even if it is daily effort for most people everywhere. This is how we must spend our "great AI productivity boost".
I am responding to nested comments; this is not meant to diminish the importance of the linked effort.
> saw dynamic+direct democracy as extremely dangerous
Are you saying that humans, on average, are bad/harmful/evil? Or that they commit to decisions without thinking them through and act on emotions instead of reason?
Because if the first, then making democracy indirect or otherwise limited should not help.
So I believe it is the second. Then the question becomes either how to get people to vote more rationally or how to weight votes by rationality. The second options is not well explored.
Absolutely. Good people can cooperate or reach compromises for mutual benefit. Bad people are each in it for himself - while they do form alliances sometimes, ultimately working together is unnatural for them and often temporary.
Requiring any position of power to be always distributed among many people obviously makes it hard for a single person to abuse power but less obviously disadvantages bad people by its very nature on a deeper level.
> local communities and institutions
I have an idea which I for now call consent-based society. I need to think about it a lot more but for now:
People talk about rights and freedoms but can't decide where the rights of one person end and another person's begin. If we focus on consent, it may become simpler. People could then form larger and larger groups based on agreement (consent) to rules - a house, small village, city, state. But only as long as it benefits them - consent can be revoked at any time.
But of course, historically, nation states emerged because large hierarchical power structures are advantageous at war and it'll take a long time to get people away from considering them natural, correct or inevitable.
---
Anyway, I don't think your post really answers my question though. From what I read, liquid democracy seems like a form of bottom up governance.
My concern with liquid democracy is about speed and predictability. Politics involves human relationships, traditions, compromises, etc. I'm worried rapidly switching would further erode local rule and undermine bottom up democracy. Recall referendum/elections seems to work well enough, they create a newsworthy topic so people may have time to absorb and adjust.
Regarding your question. Human behavior seems more a function of circumstances; trying on someone else's shoes can be heartbreaking, so it's often rationale to look the other way. Emotional decisions must be acceptable in a democracy: who am I to decide if someone else is being rational?
For the US, we could start by dramatically expanding the house of representatives so races become more about local human connection rather than party identity. The Senate seems immovable architectural debt, however, its role to buffer sudden change seems important.
Maybe I was too optimistic. Instead of deciding who has what rights, we have to decide what requires consent and what does not.
Currently, in most legal systems, using any physical property of a person requires their consent - even if it just means walking about a plot of land they own without harming or devaluing it in any way. I want this to extend to intellectual property - if someone wants to build in top of my work, they should require my consent. This is partially motivated by 10 years of my work being effectively stolen by "AI" companies without any compensation for me.
There's still the issue that for example parody (or other examples or "fair use") is building on top of the original work but should probably be allowed. And that a lot of work is performed by groups - do you need consent from all of them or just more than half?
But I think it can be solved, it just needs more thought.
Maybe consent would end up as just a reframing of the current system but it can still be useful if it forced people to take different perspectives.
For example every salary negotiation is to some extent exploitative because the parties don't have equal information nor equal bargaining power. And a lot of people (ancaps especially) will try to keep denying this. Likening this to consent in sex can force them to either admit there's a massive power differential (and that we should try to reduce it) or claim power differentials are not an issue in sex either (and face the social challenges of defending that opinion).
> Emotional decisions must be acceptable in a democracy: who am I to decide if someone else is being rational?
Maybe emotional was not a good phrase. What I have a massive issue with is people reacting to events and looking (voting) for the easiest solutions without considering their downstream effects.
There's also the fact politicians just lie without repercussions and people don't vote based on an objective reality but based on their impression which is based on what they hear.
How to solve that? As elitist as it sounds, I'd like to see a system where smarter people have a stronger vote. How much stronger? Idk. What is smarter? It could be raw intelligence, or knowledge of the subject matter or better skill at detecting lies and manipulation or a combination of those. It's hard but it should be talked about.
We urgently need 180° pivot, towards vibrant human-centered community centers and surrounding commercial districts within a few short blocks or a few minute gratis bus ride. This isn't luddite -- modern technology needs to support a human world, not the inverse. These centers must become the foundation of a renewed civics and democratic revival.
Technology is a necessary scaffolding for a modern, human-centered revival, especially with communication, logistics, transportation, and certainly democratic deliberation. Even so, universal participation in a slow-moving and bottom-up representative government with anonymous paper ballots is essential to restore the consent of the governed and relative peace.
You have a point about community but I think for different reasons.
Historically, most communities were created by randomness - closeness by physical proximity, childhood friend of a childhood friend, etc. Today many communities emerge around a common topic or interest and it leads to echo chambers. People used to be around people with different opinions and they had to accept that because for 20 people there were 15 opinions and no side got the upper hand. Now you have 20 people with 2 opinions split roughly 80:20 and the 20 are afraid to say anything for fear of being ostracized. (Numbers pulled out of my ass.)
And another reason is the lost of not just anonymity but also plausible deniability. You say something offline, 5 people hear it and you can judge their reaction, whether to go on or better keep your mouth shut. And of course they can pass on that you said it but with each step, the claim loses credibility and becomes gossip. Now you say something online, it's there forever. Even if you can delete the message, 5k people say it and there's always this one asshole who takes screenshots so even if you change your mind later, he can and will use them against you. (And don't let me get started how screenshot aren't links so even if you clarified you position later, he effectively takes it out of context in a way that he has the final word and you don't even know about it.)
A few weeks ago, I had a shower thought: A social network where LLM-generated or other people's posts get your name assigned to them randomly from time to time. So that 1) people are used to seeing random crazy shit said by you (any everyone else) and not taking it seriously 2) when you actually say something you want to take back, you can just claim it's one of those posts you didn't actually write. It's a stupid idea but I'd also like to see it tried to make sure it's stupid...
That being said, I have been thinking about a social network with multidimensional voting and a network of trust more seriously. One effect would be that posts from people you know personally would be assigned a much higher weight and it might lead to restoring bottom up communities you talk about.
Anyway, I agree with a lot of what you say but don't have much to add.
In a human-centered world, people know and generally trust their local family doctor, for example, not carefully forged media personalities.
For one, I don't believe people should need to be led. Being led makes sense when quick decisions are more important than optimal decisions, such as in war. Other times, people should be free to lead their lives as they wish.
Another thing: experts can explain their opinions. I cringe every time I see a political discussion without a white board, diagrams, graphs and tables. It's just empty words them. If a politician thinks his decision is a good way to reach a goal, he should first state that goal, then discuss why his solution leads to it, what side effects it has and what alternatives there are. But the general public is partially incapable of this level of sophistication and partially disinterested.
The single most important thing I learned last year is "you can't make people care". It was from a talk about (I think) software freedoms, I haven't even watched the rest of the video, maybe it's one of the 893 videos I have bookmarked to watch later, but it made something click - as if I suddenly gained words to describe how I felt for years.
The reality of politics is that most people don't care about most things but their vote ends up influencing them anyway. I'd like elections/voting to be split into sufficient granularity that people only end up voting about the stuff they care about.
Finally, I don't think elitism is bad when it's justified. If somebody spends 50 hours researching who/what to vote for and another person spends 1 hour watching a political discussion while making dinner, their votes shouldn't have the same weight. IMO the only controversial part is how to measure that in a way that cannot be gamed or abused.
I suggest reading Elinor Ostrom’s book, Governing the Commons. It describes fundamentals of successful cooperative organization. Specifically, successful cooperatives don’t grow bigger, they replicate bright spots while staying local and small, using umbrella organizations to coordinate similar or intertwined activities. This seems much more aligned with historical, decentralized hacker values. Ostrom describes democratic and expressly voluntary ways of organizing inherently monopolistic economic activity. For some industries, those with overwhelming network effects, I think it provides a model that is neither privately held nor government controlled, and when collaborative and nested, a workable decentralization.
I added it to me to-read list.
And yes, I do also think scaling is the biggest challenge in bottom up / democratic / cooperative organizations, but I think their critics overstate it. Democratic states might be dysfunctional on many levels but they do function enough to not fall apart, mostly. Anyway, I guess I'll know more when I get to the book, thanks.
As an ideal, I've always favored a libertarian mindset... my freedom should extend so far as it doesn't impede on another's rights. Which is a really broad interpretation... I think the further we allow govt to get away from that, the worse things get over time. Freedom is important.
Rule by people is literally rule by derogatory term for people? The “literally” seems to suggest that this is supposed to communicate more than a personal feeling towards a subject. And yet.
Worked up mobs make horrible decisions.
My entire point is some things are absolutely wrong, even if a majority of people would support it. Your point above does nothing to counter that argument.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the board of the org that runs Polis.)
Then it dawned on me.
Edit to add: I think the white and blue theme helps. Those are police colours in Sweden...
But the bigger issue is the control of money: hierarchical institutions disintermediate workers from the way the fruits of their labor are put to use. Money spent or paid in taxes is aggregated and misused by third parties against the wishes and against the providers of that money. Essentially, your labor is used against you. This is true regardless of where someone is on the political spectrum.
A platform for debate or voting isn't going to resolve this fundamental problem.
Right?
Proof of personhood would require proof that every entity in the ring was an actual person.
Ah, very nice! I have been trying to figure out if this was possible!
I also think it has potential (partial) solutions. I'm thinking that there are many ways to prove identity information. You could use something like tlsnotary to prove that you can log in to a certain web page (i.e. you are an employee of corp X). You can prove that you know someone that know person Y given certain encrypted data.
I just think that Zero-knowledge-proofs are very under explored. As I understand it, and I am not an expert - more or less anything that can be proven algorithmically can be turned into a zkp. Any question that algorithmically can have a yes or no answer can also avoid leaking further information if handled in a zkp way.
I just learned like a few basic examples of zkp and I realized that so many proofs can be made this way.
Perhaps effective moderation is achievable today through, dare I say it - bots? They certainly seem capable of it now, perhaps more effectively than the average human?
>and end lobbying with all the corruption it has.
You never get rid of these people, you just move who they are.
Now Mr Beast and whoever is slipping him cash is your political representative because of the power of their parasocial relationships.
>"because a lot of people are ignorant!" then you put effort into educating them.
This won't work, not because people are ignorant, but because of entropy.
As a human you can only learn so much so fast and you don't have time to learn everything that a government knows or does. You're going to remain ignorant on most complicated things because that's the default state of the universe. People with money/power still have more time and effort available to push the vote their way, and they will target the education first (much like right now).
You can also use it as a trigger to create media attempting to objectively inform the oblivious if they drift to far away. These should be large expensive efforts with not-propaganda at the top of the agenda. Show the giant weapon the martians are building in earth orbit.
You can also keep the representatives as the default vote. That way, if their financial backers or those blackmailing them try to sneak in their usual bullshit you can log in and change the vote.
If the representatives picks their own representative anyone can be your representative. You can at any time change your vote to your mum and ignore politics
I also envision each law requiring a minimum number of yes votes to be activated and a minimum number of no to deactivate.
If there are few enough yes votes and enough no's the law is deleted. You can change your vote at any time.
Have some algorithm to implement the changes over time so that Mr beast has to make many months of effort.
Government employees are to work on new law proposals to replace the least popular ones. If they fail to read the room hard enough first their salary is reduced and eventually they get fired algorithmically. If they get it right often enough we increase their salary endlessly but they still get fired if they get it wrong repeatedly. If they don't know anymore new courses and new diplomas are created.
I also want to give the voter a monthly payment for each diploma they got. Asking people to do important work for free makes no sense. How much is up to the voters.
The moderation stuff seems targeted mostly on keeping a lid on trolls and tempers.
I'm working on a Google Maps for human perspectives, that extends polislike vote data: https://patcon.github.io/polislike-human-cartography-prototy...
A presentation on my old prototype, describing my philosophy behind extending the tool: (the first 15 min gives the gist) https://youtube.com/watch?v=sSqo_m4cL2Q&list=PLMgSnvCsIgoFrV...
And a shorter video talking about plotting routes through "perspective space": every route is a chain of people with the most continuous chain of values (for e.g., from progressive left to alt right)... what might it be to host an event or conversation with the members of such a trajectory through perspective space? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v-SMbs1reE&list=PLMgSnvCsIgoF...
I believe we can make maps of reactions [to information] on topics of societal impact, and we can literally make a new "National Weather Service" for helping as many people as possible understand the storms we live within, in a near instantaneous and fully enfranchised way.
The internet could have really been a great tool to bring humanity together, if it was structured in that way for the common good. Instead we get SM where mud-battles and the resulting polarization are part of the perverse business model: engagement drives revenue, and there's no better way to keep people engaged than with a loop of extreme emotions and comments shouting the same shallow arguments at each other all over again without any meaningful progress.
Only imagine how quiet those platforms would become if discussions were actually structured for consensus instead of dissensus. I mean, yeah, a huge win for society - but a big loss of money, distraction and control for Elon, Zuckerberg and their BS billionaire friends.
Why is that especially valuable, according to your vision?
Also, the graph feature, it seems a bit suspicious, it feels like it will be used to see where the majority of opinions about something then used by candidates to manipulate the public about the XYZ popular opinion, which is affirming our current politics right now, instead of actual leadership that changes the public opinion. It’s similar to those YouTubers who usually start with decent contents only later to change it to title clickbait cringy ones because they are following the audience.
I wonder what algorithms they are talking about? Can't find any papers referenced :(
Looking at the clustering code it looks like they are using kd-trees with knn. Old skool!
Hate to say it, but the concept needs to be gamified and turned into an app. This is the only way you’re gonna get the average citizen today to engage. Need to implement viral loops and gamification to even get peoples’ attention on something like this, much less hold it.
No, I don't think that's true. First I'm not sure I even agree that all "average citizens" should need to engage, it has to engage the ones that cares, not absolutely everyone. And I don't think success should be measured in "engagement" here, but I'm also not a laissez-faire capitalist, so maybe that's where the difference comes in.
There are similar platforms in relatively wide usage already, https://decidim.org/ being one of them, and as far as I know has zero gamification, because again, "engagement" as in "users spend time on the website" isn't and shouldn't be the goal here.
Please no, LLMs have been shown to introduce biases from training data into the generated "summaries". LLMs should go nowhere public policy.
Jokes aside, this looks interesting. I have my doubts about the grandiosity of the claims re: helping entire "cities, states, or even countries find common ground on complex issues," but I'm somewhat captivated by the idea of using it for local issues in cities or small towns like mine.
Wanting people dead or imprisoned simply for existing is the sort of inconsistent view that is likely easiest to change by moving people out of radicalized spaces...
I just don't see how polis would do this. As far as I can tell this is largely about asking a questionnaire and then a polity can view the different responses and try to find legislation that's acceptable to the largest group of people.
There are some people you can reason with but if someone has priors they aren't willing to examine there's not much you can do. I don't think we could workshop our way to civil rights.
What’s your point? Everything you’re saying on this thread seems negative and puts the product (Polis) into a negative light as if somehow it’s trying to do more harm than good, or can never work because <insert extremely small issue here compared to the task of country-wide governance of millions of people>.
Something like Polis would be good for putting forward ideas throughout the year leading up to the vote, as it would find a consensus of ideas and help shape what you eventually vote on (you decide as a body corporate.)
Some Strata are hundreds of people in size.