14 Comments
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Kent Altman's avatar

Positions that are currently elected should instead be filled the way we do jury duty. It’s clean. It’s simple. Everybody already understands how it works.

I do also agree that it’s a big pill to get people to swallow in a climate of society having believed for centuries upon centuries that decision-making is a skill that only true authority figures possess. So how do you combat that?

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Arjun's avatar

Yes.

Making decisions is so old and outdated. We can't do it well at all.

It's all about arriving at decisions.

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Kent Altman's avatar

Nobody is perfect but everybody makes decisions every single day of their lives. There should be no pretension that informed people cannot come to informed conclusions and decide which action to take together toward mutual success. It’s really not hard.

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Arjun's avatar

Yeah, we're saying the same thing but with different words

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Arjun's avatar

Yeah. I don't partake in that scheme anymore

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Reasonable Horses's avatar

I do know a vital system for humanity that is fully trustworthy. The risk is meeting evil face to face, but that’s only temporal. “To all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). Your post, “Humanity Needs a New Operating System,” dials into results of becoming and making disciples. You have the drive and talent to make it happen.

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PostEgoPolitics's avatar

First you need to get enough people to want this sort of change. That’s your first problem. All other problems are tertiary until there is a strong enough desire among the majority for radical change.

Right now the combination of our existing (and corrupted) systems and human nature keeps most people from the kind of deep introspection that facilitates personal growth. Until enough people transcend that you’ll be stuck working with a small minority and affecting any radical change will be a long shot.

Until then civilization will likely keep moving toward Brave New World—not 1984—but with technology Aldous Huxley never envisioned.

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The Society of Problem Solvers's avatar

People didn’t want the change from centralized music to Napster. Or from centralized CNN to podcasts or Substack. Or to Bitcoin. If you build the system and prove it is more trustworthy and works, people will migrate and it can happen fast. We don’t need everyone. Just the first 1000

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Crixcyon's avatar

The last 170 years proves that.

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Rickie Elizabeth's avatar

I agree that traditional institutions have lost their feedback loops but I’m curious how your alternative avoids replicating the same dynamics.

Swarm systems may outperform voting on paper but performance depends on how inputs are framed , filtered and weighted. So as usual my questions would be… Who sets the parameters? And who moderates? Who handles conflicting truth claims/bad actors/or emergent ideological tribalism? How are norms enforced?

If it’s “the protocol,” I’d want to know who designs and governs that, and what incentives they’re exposed to, so that it can avoid falling into the exact same failures as old systems.

Also: do these systems allow dissent, or do they optimize for convergence? Consensus is efficient, sure, but sometimes the problem is convergence.

I’m curious whether you see a role for adversarial or pluralistic layers here, or if this is more about replacing slow, corrupt deliberation with faster collective heuristics.

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Rickie Elizabeth's avatar

Also, why do we assume the answer is a new platform rather than a reworking of power distribution itself? Genuinely curious what the reason boils down to.

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GadflyBytes's avatar

Voting and democracy are flawed, but so is humanity. Filling governmental positions with a lottery system is ripe for corruption. That can be gamed more easily than a system based on voting, because people know who they voted for and can discuss it with others.

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The Society of Problem Solvers's avatar

A lottery would be ripe for corruption, agreed.

Filling individual roles with a large number of people we nominate would be much better. Then use collective intelligence systems to make decisions.

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GadflyBytes's avatar

What is a voting process, if not a collective intelligence system?

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