...I’ve been waiting for like years to talk to someone like you [laughs] about something like this. I really appreciate it. It was fabulous!!!
You...
You’re expecting the elections, you’ve got problems.
That’s really well put. Yeah, cheaper elections that are at least as secure, are a really good thing.
That’s right. People can more meaningfully be engaged in the one they are selected for and actually be more thoughtful.
I hear you.
That’s an excellent point.
If you think of information theoretically, yeah, you’ve got this one bit, it’s maybe really easy to influence that one bit in one direction by throwing everything at it. Whereas if you have a 1,000 bits coming up, you can’t really effectively...You can think of it too as a channel ...
...because actually it’s even less secure than having a higher bandwidth, because then you can’t manipulate it in the process. That’s funny, yeah.
Yeah, or with a block of time. That one bit per year is a dangerous thing...
I’m sorry. I didn’t quite get the way you...
Like if you look at the Brexit thing, it was a single question, there was a whole run up to it. It was so easy for the media to manipulate it, the Facebook people, all this stuff, you could target it and overly influence the outcome. Whereas if you...
Say again.
You have to really put forward good arguments against a thing, because people...
These plebiscites have not gone well. It’s not more democracy of that "Everyone has to vote on only one thing," nature which has proven to be a bad thing. Random-sample voting obviates that by making it so that it becomes almost infeasible to try to manipulate all opinions on many ...
Don’t forget, also, it’s not necessarily a good thing that everyone vote on something, because that limits the number of things, but it also means that press, media, propaganda, whatever can be used to influence those votes, as we’ve seen.
Thanks for recognizing that. That’s a nice use of random-sample voting to get it going. Don’t forget, the petition process, one other thing, it doesn’t scale to the set of issues that random-sample voting would allow.
You’re going to lower the expense. [laughs]
...the election, I’m just talking about whether the question should be put on the ballot.
It’s not just the...The random-sample voting does exactly what this signature thing should...
...than signatures, which are more or less a joke. Be careful, you lower that threshold too much, you’re going to get a lot of rubbish and the whole thing’s going to be discredited. You have to be a bit...
Interestingly, if you read the random-sample voting paper, you’ll see that random-sample voting would be a much better way to validate a petition as non spam...
That’s awesome. I’ve studied initiative processes around the world. I know that there’s usually a threshold where you have to submit it at a police station and this and all that and the period you have to get them, and so on.
Really?
We could have a global contest to find out the highest priority issues for the global population. That’s nice to know. "Well stated," as I said. Then, we let people submit proposals for independent entities that will try to address those issues separately.
It didn’t take me long to spin up a whole scheme that really when you go against their eight criteria, the questions they had and all, worked perfectly. It’s like this, "We can do global votes now, because it’s so cheap." [laughs] Imagine that.
I did. Here’s the interesting thing. I don’t know if I’m going to win or anything. I didn’t hear anything, but I don’t care. I thought, "That’s interesting. That’s a problem. I’ll just see how random-sample voting might be used to do something like that."
Exactly. I submitted something to them.
It creates a whole different culture when you have even the little bit of direct democracy that they have. It’s scalable both in the complexity and size. It scales nicely with the size, because the size is the more votes you can have without burning up too much bandwidth of ...
When Swiss meet people they haven’t known before, like random meetings of people at cafes or on buses, or whatever, they are inclined to have debates about issues, because the people that have a responsibility to figure these things out as opposed to positioning themselves and arguing and quarreling. Newspaper ...
Most people are mystified, "Why do they lie to us? Why did even a good guy like that...?"
Why would someone like that once they got elected all of a sudden support and actually take all the Bush policies and make them more "Bushian?" I don’t think it was from his own conscience and free will.
Why was Obama not who he said he was? Was he a rotten guy? How many rotten guys do you know who would volunteer to be, what did he call it, he called himself a community organizer, his job title? Basically, he worked in very poor districts in Chicago trying ...
Then, sorry to have to say this, but the bad guys get another bite at the apple, because even if that system even with such a restricted bandwidth uplink were to work, then they can work their magic on the representatives.
Yeah, it’s such a limited channel, one bit. [laughs]
Just from an information theory point of view.
Also, you’re right, then the transparency, which you were a fan of, has revealed this, made this really obvious to people.
Federal legislators don’t have time, obviously, they don’t have time to read all the legislation so that the complexity has scaled beyond the 5, 10 1,000 people that vote for a representative idea where you might have actually known...That was the original concept, but that doesn’t work anymore.
It’s also, there’s that bit and the basic thing is that it’s effective. Another aspect of this is that the granularity of voting for leaders is so blunt compared to voting on issues. What’s actually happened, I’m trying to make a point that you might find it beneficial if you ...
Really. From a pure security guy’s point of view, that’s clear.
It was worth coming here just to hear you say that.
I personally am not a big fan of celebrity and the main way that the public generally thinks about voting as a way to choose these leaders, because it extends this representative democracy thing, which is so broken in my opinion.
Probably they won’t start doing the wrong thing and that’ll be an impetus to make it. I don’t know how that applies to political parties in a multiparty system as they get elected and they negotiate themselves about how they want to form the government, which totally betrays the same ...
Screw it. We’ll just keep voting on them because that costs us nothing. There’s room for thousands of elections concurrently, we just keep voting to make sure that we think that person’s doing a reasonably good, I’m not saying make it a hair trigger thing, but at a certain point, ...
Instead of wasting a good fraction of the government’s time with these periodic lame duck sessions and the campaigning periods, which is raised to a ridiculous level in the US, you just say, "Screw that. Why vote a person in for four years if typically they don’t do what they ...
As soon as the public says, "Hmm, he cheated us. He lied. He’s not really going to do what he said he’s going to do," and then we’re going to keep voting that way, then the secession rules kick in and everyone moves forward.
You can have rolling elections. You can always be voting on a certain issue. Like the prime minister, "Do we still think he’s doing what he said he was going to do when he ran for office?" Or whatever.
Let me ramble, if you don’t mind, just for a minute or two about some of the cool things you can do when you have really inexpensive elections, 1,000, 10,000 times cheaper.
Like that sort of stuff.
You can’t, whatever, you know the examples that come up. You can’t decide what kind of plants to plant in a park if you haven’t decided yet to have parks.
