What's your thought on the current state of PPAU internal democracy? Should we experiment with a new voting system?

Please note that the amount of “quiet revolutions” needed to optimize our three answers here before a “final resolution” (which could be next) increased with increasing size and complexity of the text. :wink:

The term “revolution” in physics is defined as the amount of revolutions needed to drill a hole into a board. From this background, we define “quiet revolutions” as the amount of mental revolutions, i.e. iterations of information and discussion phase, to solve a specific problem.

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What’s up with you, Pirates?

You wanted to know what’s real liquid feedback. You wanted this thread to think out of the box of the fucking categorical accumulation error. But now, when you are informed, you keep quite and further praise politics without any quality measurement of people’s will?

What can be more important to change the system to meet the people’s needs and those of future generations?

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I like you to elaborate on the reason to not change. Is is because the current system is already responsive enough for you? Or is it a concern to the danger of testing a new system?

Or do you have some nuances between the two to elaborate upon?

Short answer is no.
Just look at the number of participating members.
Is participatory democracy not one of our core tenets?
In my experience we don’t use or even develop the tools to make group decision-making nuanced, scientifically grounded, systematic and effectively scaleable.

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The reason why we don’t actually have a democracy, but a “demon(s)cracy” can be substantiated by at least 3 cornerstones:

  1. Our current political system – in terms of black-and-white framed decision-making by quality-unspecific majority voting and false dilemmas – is primarily based on ideology and psychological mechanisms of mass manipulation, similar to psychological experiments of conformity and authoritarianism by Asch (1951) and Milgram (1961). Thereby, instead of measuring the voter’s (free) will, representatives’ performance and common welfare, what is measured is the success of mass manipulation.

  2. There is an inherent homunculus (pseudo-explanation) within the current theory and practice of direct and representative democracy, when it comes to explaining psychologically how conscientious and value-oriented decisions and free will are concretely formed in best practice without reverting back to a god, demon or homunculus. We have a pseudo-democracy because no scientifically based discussion systems exist to transparently structure and implement collective intentions, to measure the will of the people, and performance or level of qualification of delegates, nor to prove claims of politicians working in the interest of welfare and representativeness.

  3. There is insufficient separation of state and church. In spite of scientific progress, the staged vowing under God (e.g. by members of the government) still replaces the measuring of reason and common welfare (i.e. a systematic, transparent and quality-oriented reality check combined with real-time control and protection of basic rights). Thereby, mental corruption, deterioration of values, and alienation can not be sensitively recognized, and external or political top-down control are the rule rather than the exception.

Summary:
While in a Demon(s)cracy it is measured how well mass manipulation has worked while reverting to God, in a real democracy appropriate discussion tools such as an Extended Liquid Feedback concretely measures what the voter wants, how well someone is suited for an office, to what extend a proposal is suited to solve a specific problem of importance (or met specific quality criteria) and how much a solution matches our core values and universal human rights (the actual “Black CORRUPTION Box” before the final resolution).

s.a. https://janonymous-and-the-rabbit-hole.net/2018/05/24/enough-of-demonscracy/

We think that the actual political ideology-framed standard of pseudo-democracies, with socially repressing minorities instead of majorities and black-or-white-thinking psychologically interferes with free and conscientious decision making. Therefore the actual standard is not suited to intelligently solve complex problems of mankind and to transparently depict free, pluralistic opinion formation as a product of collective self-awareness, self-organisation and conscientious reasoning (i.e. something like the Weltgeist).

@mofosyne, what do you have against more (collective) self-consciousness and reason as a precondition of not mass-smashing against the Eisberg? :wink:

I do not see a reason to stay behind scientific innovation to improve decision making and learning of politics in coherence with human rights and to use digitalisation for empowerment of the people in conscientious reasoning, media competence and collective problem solving, except perhaps from the view of ruling elites.

Within ELD, there will be different or other mechanisms of an open, goal- and value-oriented collective problem-solving that teaches, and requires other and more sophistic soft skills and ideals than the actual used habits of persuasion and conformity associated with political carriers. I do not want to be successful in such a system, except in fixing the aforementioned bugs.

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This. I want this. Power to the people!

the layout of the forum threads can be confusing, but I think mofosyne’s request to elaborate was directed at tim (who withdrew his post) rather than at you, and might not reflect mofosyne’s personal stance. :wink:

That said, I also think that self-consciousness of the collective and Reason are necessary for us to be able to navigate & sail around the iceberg.

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They obviously don’t want a better world. They are not interested in philosophy of collective self-consciousness and Weltgeist, nor to validly measure their own priorities. We are damned to die without a chance for a real humane change.

As I said in the other thread:

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This is a complex academic topic. I’ve been turning over ideas in my head for ways to implement it, but parts of the model are above my head as well. Is there a way we could eg restructure the forum code of conduct using this model?

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Dear Miles,

thanks for your comment and question. What do you mean with “forum code of conduct”, exactly?

You are right, (self-)consciousness and democratic self-organization of a collective intelligence, associated with empirical methods from social sciences are a rather complex topic.

However, an ELD upgrade of internal party democracy can be implemented step by step at an elementary level (i.e. a certain scaling method) to modular level (i.e. a certain discussion method).

Dear Pirates,

I apologize for my negativism in my comment before and for the many complex issues and long texts I presented here. It might have also overloaded your time capacities.

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Could you help us out by laying out some of the steps we can try?

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Dear @miles_w and Pirates,

I am sorry for answering so late.

Thank you very much for your interest and this very nice open question. Of course, it is a pleasure for me to introduce you to possible first steps towards practising Extended Liquid Democracy (ELD).

To remind you, the Goals of Extended Liquid Democracy are:

  • to ensure an open, pluralistic and humane win-win scenario for discussion and selection of contents before the final resolution (instead of only and always the same monistic quality-unspecific majority voting constituting anti-pluralistic, polarizing win-lose scenarios without ensuring basic human rights, progress and representativeness)

  • to ensure a value-/goal- and client-oriented (i.e. quality-specific) discussion/rating and transparent selection of issues before the final resolution

  • a reduction of alienating (mass-)manipulation and top-down government

In the following, we therefore developed 3 introductory modules for Quick and Selective Consensus and quality-specific majority voting (Traffic-Lights Module) that refer to the discussion and selection phase before the final resolution.


In summary the 3 introductory ELD Modules consist of:

  • three discussion methods, each with an info/brainstorming and a discussion/rating phase, and a certain cut-off point (for selecting accurately fitting priority issues)

  • three primary criteria of quality measurement (Formal Precision, Relevance and Suitability/Fit)

  • three levels of measurement (please see the following footnotes)


With metric quality measurement (Selectional Consensus), for example, one can transparently determine the intensity of needs and the extent of differences in quality between proposed issues.

With ordinal quality measurement (Traffic Lights Module), one can (only) determine the rank of needs or suitability of proposed issues, i.e. more relevant, suitable, i.e. better or worse, but without knowing the absolute intensity and extent of differences.

With nominal quality measurement (Quick Consensus), one can (only) determine wether a proposed issue has a certain quality or not, but without knowing the absolute intensity, extent of differences and rank concerning the expected quality of issues in question.

The ELD Theory thereby proposes that the level of measurement and the scale’s range have to be adopted according to the amount of issues to be discussed and differentiated from each other, which will be fully enrolled within the advanced version of ELD. s.a.:

"Between the Yes and the No,
there is the [innerdemocratical] scope
of the Self [and the Weltgeist]"
J. Kuhl

ultraleichte%20Teilchen

"… the unity with it Self,
given by itself [the individuality],
is exactly the liquidity of differences…"
G.W.F. Hegel


Proposal for a start-up ELD architecture

As a minimal start-up architecture for beginners to practise und learn the principles of ELD, we suggest the following modules 1) to 3) with three different quality measures and measurement levels:

1) Quick Consensus ELD Module: For preliminary reduction of redundancy and optimization of comprehensibility, clarity, formal/logical accuracy, and comparability of collected proposals and arguments on different argument levels. Therefore, a closed (quality-oriented) question is asked that is related to Formal problems with 1 single, a pair or bunch of proposals and that can be answered by either “Yes” (1 = one or more problems) or “No” (0 = no problem = quick consensus), e.g. “Do you see any concrete problems or possibilities to reduce redundancy and improve comprehensibility, clarity, accuracy and comparability of proposals x and y?” “Do you have any formal objectives against a proposal?”. This step ensures that all proposals are Formally equivalent and therefore comparable to eachother before any other content-based quality rating is performed, if possible without being confounded by any misspellings, missunderstandings, formal differences in issues’ description, and relatedness to different levels of abstraction etc.;

2) Selective Consensus ELD Module: For gathering, prioretizing and selecting the most important problem(s), interests/needs, content-based common goal criteria, core themes, tasks, solutions and lower level arguments. In contrast to a quick consensus procedure, selective consensus building starts with an open question and gathering of priority issues, partly including a passive solution (ps) reflecting the current status unchanged, or without the need to be changed, e.g. “There is no problem”, “Everything is fine”, “No (additional) common goal criteria” (brainstorming phase); whereby in the following discussion phase, each formally equivalent issue is rated on a seven- or eleven- point metric rating scale ranging from “strongly irrelevant” (-3 or -5 ~ high resistance) to “strongly relevant” (+3 or +5 ~ low resistance), in case of more than 2 or 3 issues to be rated. Additionally, reasons for higher or lower resistance as well as suggestions to improve Relevance are simultaniously gathered. Group mean scores of each priority issue are finally used to rank issues with highest priority on top; and to select a previously fixed number of most relevant issues, or all issues with Mean priority scores (Mp) above a certain cut-off point, e.g. Mp > 0, Mp > Mps, Mp >= 2 etc.;

3) ELD Traffic-Lights Module: For quality-specific majority voting based on ratings of 1 to max. 3 openly gathered or preselected solutions, including a passive solution (ps) that reflects the current status remaining unchanged, e.g. “Everything stays the same” . After ensuring comprehensibility and formal equivalence, each solution is rated on an ordinal traffic-lights scale according to their Suitability/Fit with the most relevant common goal criteria. Besides ratings for “No Fit” (-1 = red ~ resistance), “Conditional Fit” (0 = yellow ~ ambivalent) and “Good Fit” (+1 = green ~ no resistance), the ELD traffic-lights discussion process differentially captures (the most relevant) reasons and suggestions to further improve the solution’s fit, i.e. reasons for no Fit (= cons / disadvantages), concrete change suggestions to improve the solution’s Fit (= conditions for a better Fit), and reasons for a good solution’s Fit (= pros / advantages).

These are the basic, introductory modules, we would suggest.


Next steps for advanced ELD users

The next step for advanced users would be the context-sensitive combination and iteration of these 3 introductory ELD modules.

At the most advanced level of practising ELD, the discussion methods with primary quality measures (as described above) and additional secondary quality measures, as well as different scales’ range and levels of measurement (i.e. nominal, ordinal or metric) vary, depending on the stage of collective will forming and convergence, as well as the specific goal of a discussion and the amount of issues to be rated and differentiated from each other.

I hope, this helps you.

Sincerely,
Jana

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This is a remake of Hegel’s Weltgeist including Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (see text below) in the context of an Extended Liquid Democracy

Extended Liquid Democracy
Awakens the threefold Weltgeist.

When we look at our evolution
This is the universe looking at itself.
If we measure worldwide Hierarchy of Needs,
This is the Weltgeist coming to Self-Awareness
With Reason as its final purpose.

One vote for some. Ten votes for some.

Dear @miles_w and @Solo_Recluse,

please imagine, you would participate in a concrete ELD discussion, which enfolds more than one hierarchy level of arguments and that consists of an iterative process to optimize proposals before final resolution.

You may recognize that there always is only one vote for one element on a specific level of the arguments’ hierarchy: An improvement or change of a proposed argument A leads to a new vote for a different element, i.e. argument A’ - while your past vote for other competitive arguments B, C, D (on the same hierarchy level) without further optimisation stays the same element or vote, as long as you don’t change it.

Furthermore, the usage of different quality criteria at comparable hierarchy levels does not mean that there have to be different, unstandardized amount of votes in such processes. In many cases of practising ELD, a group needs to work through different questions and parts of a standardized path to a problem’s solution (to reasure common welfare) that uses different quality measures at different questions, e.g.:

  1. What is the most important problem to be solved (problems rated by Relevance)
  2. What are the most important goal criteria characterising a sucessful solution of the most important problem? (goals rated by Relevance)
  3. Which solution is most suitable to solve the problem according to the most important goal criteria? (solutions rated by Suitability/Fit)

Before, however, the content of proposals for each question 1. to 3. can be rated by Relevance or Suitabily/Fit, you need to optimize comparability and formal/logical accurance which is no additional content-related voting of proposals but rather a context-sensitive marker of any problems concerning Formal Precision.

Of course, there may be cases in the course of collective will forming, where the same proposal gets more than one vote, but with different quality measures. For example, if there are more than 3 solutions before the final selection of 1 or 2 most relevant, fitting solutions via Traffic-Lights Module. Thereby, 1 or 2 proposals selected until the final resolution will be propably rated and selected by Relevance, rated and selected by Suitablity/Fit, and finally rated by quality-unspecific majority voting in the final resolution.

However, if there are one or more concrete needs to optimise a proposal which is indicated by a yellow rate in the Traffic-Lights Module, the selection of the most relevant needs for optimization, or the most relevant or suitably optimized proposal A1’ from a bunch of optimized proposals for A (i.e. A1’, A2’, A3’) etc. are associated with a lower arguments’ level, which is meant by multiple voting for differing arguments on different hierarchy levels.

Hope this helps.
Do you have any more questions?