brokenladder | Hello everyone. This is my first post, and I’d like to briefly touch on what I consider to be the most important central pillar of any society – considering a group of people living together like this would constitute a society. The issue is how we make group decisions. And that involves leadership. And leadership means selecting leaders, aka “voting”. I am affiliated with a group called the Center for Range Voting, profiled in the recent book Gaming the Vote. Warren D. Smith, the Princeton math Ph.D. who co-founded our organization, has done extensive calculations of “Bayesian regret”, to reveal that Range Voting – or simply scoring the candidates on a 0-10 scale to produce a winner – is, for practical purposes, the best voting method. http://rangevoting.org/UniqBest.html It’s improvement in representativeness over plurality (vote for one) is approximately as large as plurality improves over non-democratic random selection. That is enormous improvement, and we believe it would lead to vastly happier societies. Unfortunately, entrenched political interests and apathetic “average” citizens don’t care too much, and so we suffer horrible wars and other problems that could be avoided with better representation of the real will of the people: http://rangevoting.org/LivesSaved.html Far too often, people of a particular ideology choose to form their own societies. But the “problem” they can never avoid is that they cannot maintain ideological consistency. New people will be born and come up with their own ideas, like “I don’t like wearing this silly hat that our religion mandates.”  Besides, we want diversity, right? It’s generally a good thing. So what we need is a way make better compromises, and make societal choices that represent us well. By using advanced voting methods like Range Voting, Reweighted Range Voting (proportional representation system), and Asset Voting, the society that lives aboard a seastead could be vastly more successful in terms of real satisfaction with life and government than the citizens of any country in the world today or previous. I hope you do not miss this tremendous opportunity to tackle this keystone issue early on, rather than far too late. Regards, Clay Shentrup, San Francisco, CA |
Eelco | I hope voting becomes essentially obsolete. If things go as i hope they do, most decision will be made based on consent. While i do think there are minor issues that could be solved by the tyranny of the majority, since they outcome of the matter would have a smaller impact than the cost of rewiring society anyway, there shouldnt have to be any really fundamental disagreements between a group of people that bands together. One man one vote is very egalitarian, yet i think it would be the way to go within small communities. But any unions on a higher level are likely to simply demand a contribution proportional to population, and in any case a say proportional to contribution. |
Jesrad | I’m with Eelco on this. Voting is a very inefficient decision-making process (see the recent Nobel Prize of Economics on Mechanism Design for insight). In fact, from the very moment you have a group of people disagreeing, forcing a single solution on all of them will inevitably have bad repercussions down the line. Instead, each alternative decision should form smaller groups of followers and work from there. |
thebastidge | … it’s a means of indicating the decision you’ve already made. - The parliamentary procedure and debate, these are means of making decisions.
- Rules surrounding what items and options get voted on are also part of the decision-making process. Things like “X” requires a super-majority, “Y” requires a consitutional amendment, these things are formal process and procedure and become more important the larger the group.
- And these things are fair and equitable as along as the consent for them is acquired. So if I at some point declare my intention to join a community and abide by its social compact, then I am consenting to be over-ruled in certain individual cases IF I later come info conflict with the decisions of a majority of other individuals.
I’d be foolish to join such an association without some kind of opt-out clause or guarantees of personal liberties, but it would still be fair. Now, to be scrupulously fair, I can’t make that decision for another competent person. So when my children declare their adulthood, I need to have made sure that there is an escape clause for them to leave, or to modify the compact. |
Jesrad | Voting isn’t the same as acting out a decision, because nothing happens until the person voted in power does anything. That’s why I call it a decision-making process: you vote, then the decision that the elected guy takes can proceed, and that decision depends on who gets elected, to some extent. It mostly consists of accruing all the decision-making of voters and delegating it to one person or the other. If you see it as a communication tool, it’s an extremely poor one: you get nothing but a few bits worth of information every few years. A snail-delivered floppy disk has more bandwidth. As a side-note, natural law states that you always have a right to opt-out of anything, and that also includes opt-out clauses. The only thing you can’t avoid by your own will only is facing justice (if you’re pursued for breach of contract, expect to have to conform to pretty much what the opt-out clauses said anyway, at least in most cases). Example: your child wants out of the compact, but has used their free (as in beer) services as part of the social contract of the compact: (s)he can’t be made to remain in the compact against his or her will, but then has to compensate for the use of those services. Anything provided back to the compact comes in deduction. |
Carl-Pålsson | - Some seasteads will probably be dictatorships. For instance big corporations might build seasteads with apartments and/or industrial space for rent/sale under certain conditions. Thus the owner dictates the terms and the tenants will have to either obey or not rent/buy the real estate in the first place.
- With regard to voting, I´m a big fan of unanimocracy, or in other words democracy that needs unanimous support to make any new laws. That is- for a tenant-owned steastead.
|
thebastidge | Ah, but if you’re truly making it a society based upon free will, you can’t hold responsible someone who was brought into it without volition. children don’t choose to be born, and their parents are resposnible for resources they use. If part of ths social compact is that children will contribute to society once they become adults, then the parents are the ones on the hook for their cost should they choose to leave and not participate in the compact upon reaching their majority and declaring themselves an adult. |
Jesrad | That’s right, but only because (and as far as) the parent took the decision and not the child. |
Incognitum | Unanimous consent of whome? 100% percent of voters, of regestered voters? Of all people in a vecinity? Of all people in time? What happens if I move into your city and wish to repeal a law? |
Jeff-Chan | Voting isn’t necessary, or perhaps even desirable. All that’s necessary is the right to leave. Everything else will more or less take care of itself given that. Vote with your feet. Places with good policies gain supporters. Places with bad policies lose them. |
Carl-Pålsson | I think the idea is to have tiered jurisdictions. So, on a national level, perhaps only very basic crimes will be illegal (murder, assault, theft). If that even, perhaps there will be no laws at all on a national level. On the state level there are less people to vote so the chances are there will be some more detailed laws, and so on down the smaller areas (county, town). Are you really willing to move somewhere just to annoy people by repealing their laws? Consider that there should be plenty of cities that already have exactly the laws you find acceptable in such a system, so there should not be a whole lot of incentive for this kind of disruptive behavior. If complete unanimosity proves impossible one could try just requiring bigger majorities, like 75 or 90%, to make new laws. I do not think that there are any jurisdictions anywhere in the world where the big problem is that there are too few laws… |
Wayne-Gramlich | The right of departure is a form of voting — vote with your feet. A place with good policies is likely to have a feedback back system from its members. The feedback system is likely to be some form of voting system. Can we do better than a system that was designed 200 years ago? I think so. Do I know what it is? Nope! I have some ideas, but they may not be practical. |
vincecate | So I own “votewithyourfeet.com” and am someone who has actually voted with my feet (used to be a US citizen and am now Anguillian). When you are young and single, voting with your feet is not really that hard, even without a house that moves. After school all your friends are going in different directions, so going outside the home country is not so different. Yet only a small percentage of people really do it. But as you get older you get a stable job, a set of friends, a wife, her friends, a house, kids, their friends, mother-in-law, nanny, maid, employees, trusted mechanic, etc etc. When you are young it is just you, but over time there is a network of people that would be hard to leave behind. . The expression of people “putting down roots” is kind of accurate. Voting with my feet now would be much harder for me than when I was just out of school. So while I agree that this is the most important type of voting, and enough to make things work, I hope/expect there will be some well run and stable seastead co-ops where people don’t actually vote with their feet very often. You will get the same kind of support network when living on a seastead and it would be painful to have to change this very often. I think there is a good chance that some kind of voting will be part of a well run and stable seastead co-op. Just the possibility that people could leave should keep a rational co-op from doing anything too crazy. People might change co-ops as easily as they change states in the US now, (much easier than they change countries) but I don’t think it will be something that is done too often. |
thebastidge | And not always practical, because you may have joint ownership of assets that are eseentially indivisible. If I own 1/20th of a seastead’s hull, and I dsiagree with the other 19 co-owners, I can’t just take my chunk with me. There has to be agreements in place for dealign with these joint assets. Another scenario: I have obligations and responsiblities to minor children. My spouse also has obligations and responsibilities. We both have rights in this regard as well. If I vote with my feet, how do we deal with these joint rights and responsibilities? There will never be a society which is unanimous in all things. The idea that the best way to deal with disagreement in all cases is to break into smaller groups until agreement is achieved is extremely naive. It may be better in some cases, particularly where complexity is overwhelming, and the interests and choices of various groups are widely divergent, but even couples cannot agree perfectly on everything all their lives. By breaking into smaller groups, some actions are physically precluded from consideration. They become impossible to achieve. 5 people could not have built the Aswan Dam. Humans are not binary: it needn’t be “my way or the highway”. I can see that there are a range of actions and paths available to me, with varying benefits as well as unknown ramifications to each. Again, voting is a signaling method. The decision is already made on the individual level. I am not convinced that your way is better because more people voted that way. I merely make the decision that even though the decision was suboptimal in this case, the benefit I get from harmonious society is greater than the benefit of striking out on my own. |
Eelco | Sure, voting with your feet will always remain costly. But choosing the society you live in changes a lot of things. When i choose a society to join, im going to make sure its one which i wont have fundamental disagreements with. For instance, the issue of gay marriage will never even make it to the ballot. Instead, i might find myself having to vote over what color to paint our seastead. Some decisions, im content to hand over to the tyranny of the majority. Bigger issues might justify the cost of excercising your freedom of association. |
greyraven_r 887 days ago.
©2012 The Seasteading Institute