Large Scale Decision Making

i need to read this a few times to really get it in my head. i want to make some notes and come back to it.

theres a couple of things i am not sure about, but i want to be certain i have read it all properly. does the original author contribute here? or is there a way i can connect and dissect his ideas directly?

if you are a member of Loomio Community you should be able to respond to the author @purplelibraryguy in the thread where he posted the original.

https://www.loomio.org/d/YIWQobn9/scaling-loomio-functional-decision-size

this is excellent @purplelibraryguy , really useful. my father philip green wrote extensively on Egalitarian Philosophy in books such as The Politics of Inequality and Retrieving Democracy, so in theory I know whereof I speak, which is actually the segue into my point.

right now there is another binary hidden in this structure: expert and non-expert. and the way it's broken down? everyone in the group is equally an expert, and everyone not in the group is equally not an expert. that's the problem with consensus based non-hierarchical decision making--it treats everyone's opinion as if, a priori, it comes from the same knowledge base. so the PhD and the layman are the same when voting on an issue that the PhD wrote her thesis on, in an extreme example.

but we know this isn't true. we know people spend time become more versed in certain areas or on certain issues. and we have a mechanism that is prevalent already in web world that might be of value. perhaps either weighting or narrowing of voter pool could occur over the course of a debate based on user or community ranked expertise values. if someone has previously had community rated excellence in being helpful around economic issues, that fact should be both seen by the community during a debate (avatars with numbers next to them?) and PERHAPS also lead to such numbers allowing for that person to have more than one vote. in this system everyone is still voting, everyone is still given a chance to have input or their voice heard, but quickly "the cream rises to the top" for lack of a better metaphor, and the discussion starts to be first moderated, then led, then decided (or closed, i should say) by those with the best knowledge base to make such decisions or take such actions.

That runs dangerously close to elitism for my liking.

An expert should be able to make informed proposals. But allowing experts to have a final say without anyone else getting a say... thats not really democracy.

There has to be a way to add the value of knowledgeable experts without removing the access of those who are effected by the outcome.

Ultimately making any person more valuable than another in any way leaves us in the same place we are now.

I recognize the immense value that an expert would possess. But the risk of not having real democracy always concerns me.

Again I want to reread all of this and see what else can be taken from it. a more thought out position to follow.

@directadmin yes absolutely, that's why i'd propose a weighted system for voting. it's a form of representative democracy, essentially, where your "representative" can shift based on any given issue, and where said representative has the "extra" weighted vote based on community perceived expertise. someone with an "8" on the Austerity Economics scale (said 8 coming from 8 people upvoting them, perhaps?) would have 8 votes instead of 1, essentially. so then one could "lobby" those who have more expertise, and suddenly they become ad hoc representatives.

I saw some of that. But. To be honest i haven't had brain capacity today to really absorb it.

My knee jeek reactions to representatives comes from a place of genuine concern.

I want to give this the attention it deserves.

and i don't want to be a prisoner to my base reactions.

Thanks for getting back to me. Ill tag u when i have really considered what you wrote.

No. No philosopher kings. Knowledge is useful. It's good for people to know things. But if you know what you're talking about, explain it to people so they can use that knowledge as a basis for making their decisions. If you have to railroad them with extra votes, then maybe your knowledge wasn't so great after all.
Anything where you give people weighted votes means some institution is deciding who is more equal than whom. You're creating a "co-ordinator class" as described in Parecon literature. Who decides what knowledge is relevant and worthy of multiple shares? People in the path of resource extraction projects being told they know nothing and the decisions belong to mining engineers or whatnot, have been dealing with this kind of thing for a long time. No, expertise is to draw on, not to rule with.

In any case, the basis of egalitarianism is not that the people will necessarily rule "the best". It is that each person is equally a protagonist and moral agent, equally a bearer of responsibility, equally a subject and object of social or political events. Any given person is ruled by political decisions just as much as someone with more money, education, breeding, or whatever other elite marker, therefore they have equal right to partake in those decisions.

In practice, a scheme such as I'm describing is going to tend to give those with expertise in (whatever thing) a significant voice, because they're the ones most interested. So for instance, say you have some kind of working group that is making decisions about fisheries off the coast of British Columbia. There are academics that are interested in that, and they'll join. And there are fishers who are interested because it affects them, and they'll join. And there are First Nations folks who do fishing, and some of them will join. And there are some people who are just interested who will join. But people who neither fish nor study fish nor have traditions of fishing mostly won't because they don't care. And maybe at some point the fishers and the first nations will want to do something that most of the academics are really certain is a bad idea, and the academics are outvoted. If they think it's important, the academics should be able to punt the thing out to the broader British Columbia Natural Resources and Sustainability group that the fisheries group is a subset of, and make their case there.

@purplelibraryguy

Thankyou! This is what i think too. That people who care about something will gravitate to it.

I don't think i have a single question after that response.

Great conversation.

Thank you very much for your perspective @purplelibraryguy . I mostly agree, and this especially resonates with me: "But if you know what you’re talking about, explain it to people so they can use that knowledge as a basis for making their decisions."

I have been rather silent on this, but not without thought. In preparation for tomorrow here are some of these derived from my personal knowledge in change facilitation, human development, consciousness and neuroscience.

1. To me it seems we assume that all decision making is done rationally using conscious knowledge and data. With conscious knowledge I mean knowledge that a person is aware of i.e. not knowledge that is tapped into through self-reflection, feedback from others etc. So unconscious knowledge is what we use in tapping into collective wisdom, just like in this discussion where everyone contributes their beliefs, understanding on a topic. Wisdom lies in the unconscious i.e. the things we are not aware of.

Also, neuroscience shows that we are anything but rational. In fact our emotions have ruled our mind and actions (amygdala in limbic brain) for far longer than judgement simply by the way the brain developed.

The part of the brain used for judgement, organisation, strategy (in pre-frontal cortex) does not fully develop til 20 to 25 and sometimes even 28 years old. Until then emotions definitely rule. Connecting the limbic brain and PF cortex apparently creates emotional intelligence. There are plenty of people who do not make that connection. Due to this the norm of decision making, expert or not, is also based on personal beliefs learnt through life experiences and situations, and psychological development.

So as you see you can create a perfect decision making model and not get it perfect, simply because everyone's mind works different.

Based on my work with Direct Democracy Process (DDP) (Lewis Method if you want to Google it), the only way this wisdom can surface if you include many different people in the process of decision making. That is a representative spectrum of the population. Success has been reached in combining DDP with other communication methods which draw out individuals wisdom. The beauty of DDP is that you don't move on until the people present understand what the minority has to say. As part of this process is also acknowledging that everyone in the room has authority on the subject, not just the expert, some people speak from experience. And to ask what it would take for them to come along. This comes close to a consensus model of decision making. But on the way it tries to bring out all the knowledge people hold, even the unconscious knowledge.

It seems to me that to make good policy we need to engage the people in the development phase rather than just in voting on the final product i.e. making the decision. The sharing of knowledge to support this process is then essential.

1. Looking at Swiss direct democracy and voluntary voting shows that only a minority of people are interested in actively participating. This has the danger that policy is one sided and decision making supports this. Again representative policy development would stop this to a large extent.

I think that the Australian system of mandatory voting stops much of the progress from happening in this country. You can see how much political views are 'inherited' in a family. This inheritance effectively shapes the experiences and beliefs of people into the future. So families who have an active discussion about politics will have raised kids and young adults interested in political discourse, while those who do not will not. E.g. a way off example is sport. If you get kids interested in a sporting club around 10 years of age, they will become attached to that sporting club. It works with other interests too.

As we currently have a large apathy towards politics, decision making will exclude all those that don't have the awareness, the interest or the mindset capacity to digest political discourse. Politicians self-interest and the medias terribly biased reporting does not help to break through and hold the attention span of people for more than a few days. This does not help decision making.

1. Just read an interesting article on Successful Leaders Thinking and decision making. While it is business related it is adaptable to other disciplines. It looks at integration of ideas. A couple of stand outs:
   • Anyone could think like this, but most people don't learn it because it pushes you outside the comfort zone.
2. We need to learn to deal with uncertainty and complexity. Most people want simple and clear.

In today's world simple and clear is mostly not available. Most issues are complex, messy and intertwined. Hence, people don't go to the trouble to understand, because it takes too much effort. We can see what happens when politicians are trying to break it down into simple. In Switzerland the people voted and agreed on an initiative which has implications with the Bilateral agreements with the European Union...its a massive legal headache.

Oops forgot the link to the article:
https://hbr.org/2007/06/how-successful-leaders-think/ar/1

"The beauty of DDP is that you don’t move on until the people present understand what the minority has to say."

"It seems to me that to make good policy we need to engage the people in the development phase rather than just in voting on the final product i.e. making the decision."

Great points.

"In today’s world simple and clear is mostly not available. Most issues are complex, messy and intertwined."
We create the complexity. It is the main tool of the powerful. We are 'forced' to jump through many hoops, but really, the hoops don't exist. They are not rules of nature, they are created by humans.

As for the complexity of technology, yes it is complex but I think it is being increasingly simplified.

I think complexity is something that can be changed.

@claudiaperrybeltra , thanks for your thoughtful contributions here. I'm having a hard time getting anywhere Googling with Direct Democracy Process (DDP) and/or Lewis Method. Can you please verify if this page is what you mean? That page seems to translate pretty well into English, but it's not very informative from my perspective.

I certainly agree with including diverse people in the decision process, especially the critical aspect of developing proposals.

Sorry, my mistake its Deep Democracy. here is the link
http://www.deep-democracy.net/

I also think Claudia makes very good points. The unfortunate part is that the kind of deep deliberation you're talking about, where people stop to assimilate and understand the ideas of people with minority opinions, is I think particularly hard to scale up.

It may well be that ultimately, no matter what we do to overcome it, there is a bias in direct and deep democracy towards small. This suggests that if we're ever running a society in that kind of way, we'll be better off trying to make the economic structures and so forth smaller and less far-flung and complex. And there will probably be a natural bias in that direction. I don't think everything can or should become local; both on a practical level and a cultural level I don't think that's ideal. But at the same time, it seems like the current social and political culture actively prefers and pushes towards big, complex and tangled, partly because it's a power model with hierarchies. If your objective is power and you reach the top of a hierarchy, how can you continue to get more? Make it a bigger hierarchy, extend it somehow. And partly it seems as a somewhat deliberate device to overcome challenges from below by making decisions and power as distant and apparently irrelevant to ordinary people's lives as possible, as invulnerable as possible to challenges from things such as naturally smaller-scale direct popular democratic processes. So I agree with Joum, mostly.

I do think the mechanisms I'm suggesting in my first post can make it possible to keep decisions mainly small, leaving the kind of deep deliberation Claudia's talking about possible, while scaling decision-making overall to a wide scope capable of challenging current models. But such a system will still work better if things are less huge and entangled, leading to fewer reasons to kick decisions out to larger groups and so less decision-making overload and fewer decisions being made in larger fora that make the best deliberation methods harder.

I don't want to oversimplify things, but I keep coming back to the idea that binary propositions should succeed or fail based on a mandate for supermajority support. It's a very simple principle. It incentivizes people to learn how to find common ground.

It's not necessarily any harder to find a supermajority than a simple majority. It just requires less aggressive proposals. (If a proposal would require a lot of 'selling'/ marketing, then it probably will and should fail.)

The common ground, or supermajority, of a large group is smaller than the common ground of a smaller group. This is perfectly natural. Thus, to whatever extent supermajority is stressed, decentralization and local rule/ autonomy is stressed. But that's not to say that there wouldn't be some common ground at the largest possible scales of direct democracy-- even globally.

Hmmm . . . well, I'm Canadian, and in Canada we have experience of requirement for a significant supermajority for key decisions. It has its downsides. It is so difficult to reform our constitution that many needed reforms and/or updates have been abandoned, and often in Canadian politics the mere words "But doing that would require a constitutional amendment" are enough to kill an important idea. Nobody ever wants to face another round of constitutional wrangling that gets nowhere. This is why, for instance, we still have an unelected senate unaltered from the earliest days of Canada as a country. Nearly everyone dislikes the current setup, but there seems no way that any particular proposal would be able to command the required supermajority to change it.

So, I'm not saying no supermajority requirements. But I'd suggest going easy. Too high and you'll never get anything done.

On a side note . . . I see a philosophical problem with supermajority requirements. That is, there's an ethical defense of simple majority requirements. There's a different ethical rationale for consensus requirements. But any particular supermajority rule is essentially arbitrary, or at best a pragmatic compromise deemed (by a supermajority?) to generate good outcomes. It doesn't really bother me if I find the case for the good outcomes persuasive. But that raises questions. What is the optimum rate of success for propositions? What is the optimum level of controversy required for a proposition to fail? How do you determine something like that?

the idea that we can "make things less tangled and big" per @purplelibraryguy pre-supposes a different problem set than the one we actually have. what we have learned over the past 30 plus years is that the world's interconnections are baked into our reality, and that the scale of the problems we face are massive, not small. there are places where the idea of micro-decision making is great--and there are even places where big problems (electric power transmissions distribution) have small answers (micro-grids and local control over solar power arrays that feed a small neighborhood or favela).

all of that might play into a "smaller is better" paradigm, and i'm well aware of how "too big to fail" went down here in the US. but the bigger truth (!) here is simple: the most important issues facing humanity are transnational, multilateral, and require people to behave like they share their policy and politics with other people who don't look like them. global warming, whose effects are going to be greatest, initially, for the poorest amongst us, whether in micronesia or bangladesh, does not get solved by micro-actions. one can like that or hate that, but it doesn't change its essential truth. these types of problems require expert guidance (we are talking about the most complex systems humans have ever tried to understand), massive response across numerous stakeholders and so on. so while one can hope to reform the behavior of individual stakeholders (corporate or governmental, intra or international) one cannot realistically propose to make the solutions "small" in any sense of small d democracy. one must listen to those who have devoted their lives to helping the rest of us survive on this small and lonely orb, and one must take actions on massive scale using massive instruments of power in order to solve these problems.

I think supermajority has typically been hard to achieve because people don't 'have' to pursue that option. They can usually pursue a more aggressive simple majority alternative, even if that effort runs into a supermajority roadblock further down the road--for instance, U.S. Senate filibusters and Presidential vetoes. (So much energy wasted in 'symbolic' votes. And then, when the 'stars' align properly to remove the filibuster and veto protections, look out!)

Simple majority appeals to people's desires to simply get their way; to not communicate, to not compromise. They try to cobble shaky coalitions to get everything they want, regardless of how much it will alienate others (whom they may regard as enemies.)

I understand the philosophical clarity you find in simple majority voting, @purplelibraryguy , but I don't consider that clarity to be an ethical justification. I personally don't think there is any ethical justification for any majority to impose their will on any minority. I'm a pragmatist, however, and I know that coercion and violence aren't about to magically disappear regardless of what we seek politically. I seek simple tools to generally reduce coercion and violence.

I believe in voluntary associations whenever possible, and I think we have all the technical tools and knowledge we need now to develop our voluntary associations with a great deal more of collective intelligence and collective learning than we have previously. So, naturally, I believe in raising the bar for decisions made 'by' groups with varying levels of involuntary membership-- i.e., citizens of political entities. Few people statistically speaking have realistic choices in their national citizenship, and personal agency is limited even on the level of state/province and local living arrangments-- especially for poor people. So, I think the goals of government at each level should genuinely reflect the interests of diverse minorities.

I really do think that we could achieve actionable supermajorities on many key subjects, including the need for sustainable energy, environmental protections, reducing wealth disparity and many other subjects. However, people are very deeply wrapped up in their partisan struggles for supremacy.