Hey nice! AGI and improvements to representative democracy systems are both right up my alley!
That said, I think the AGI tie in might seem kind of superficial in that having more functional governance and societal coordination mechanisms would help with all sorts of stuff so I think it makes sense to frame this reasonably in a reasonably AGI timeline agnostic sort of way. That said, ya, I see your point that this sort of thing is made all the more dire when thrown into relief by our âtime of troublesâ and âlongtermists on the precipiceâ style thinking. Your call here, but I am sure it is not necessary to believe random âLLMs will change the worldâ predictions to believe that certain democratic reforms make sense.
In my experience, a lot of people in online EA spaces are pretty willing to talk to you if you reach out, so I think youâll have decent luck there if thatâs what youâre after. Not as confident about how to find more serious collaborators for a project like this.
A few ideas I would throw out there for the sake of brainstorming (many or all of which you may already be familiar with):
independent redistricting /â anti gerrymandering schemes
merging voting districts and proportionally allocating positions > requiring majorities (ie. Mixed-member proportional representation) to negate âwinner take allâ/â minority under representation
ranked choice /â transferable voting to diminish spoiler effect
open primaries might be a good idea to disincentivize the party system from filtering for radical candidates as hard
liquid democracy to let people vote directly on issues that matter to them instead of going through their rep at all (eg. imagine being able to disagree with your senator whenever you want and cast your individual .0000002% of a vote directly on whatever issue)
People talk about quadratic voting too which is probably worth knowing something about from a mechanism design standpoint, but in my opinion doesnât really stand out as a solution to anything on its own without a better way of defining what each actors budget of voting credits would actually need be applied to /â split between in any given round.
Also, I definitely second the idea of using a citizenâs assembly. In my opinion, the power of random sampling + time to learn about and focus on an issue is really OP and really under utilized by representative democracies. The statistical mathematics around approximating large populations with small random samples are really underutilized here and working in our favor. Honestly, there is tons of adverse selection in the electoral process (eg. this book deals with some elements of that).
If you havenât seen CGP Greyâs âPolitics in the Animal Kingdomâ series, you might love it! Also the Forward Party in the US tends to push for similar ideas /â platforms, so they might be worth checking out.
I think this kind of work is very valuable! Nation states might yet be the death of us. It has been terrible watch the democratic backsliding and corruption in my own US of A (in fact I will be one of the protestors this 10â18 No Kings Day). Plus, I agree with your sentiment that there is a lot of headroom. Personally, I think this has less to do with the rise of cyberspace and more to do with the fact that existing polities were just never particularly optimized around the sorts of ideals we are aspiring towards here. Classical Age Greece and the revolutionary United States were both slave states with a lot of backwards ideas after all.
Hey nice! AGI and improvements to representative democracy systems are both right up my alley!
That said, I think the AGI tie in might seem kind of superficial in that having more functional governance and societal coordination mechanisms would help with all sorts of stuff so I think it makes sense to frame this reasonably in a reasonably AGI timeline agnostic sort of way. That said, ya, I see your point that this sort of thing is made all the more dire when thrown into relief by our âtime of troublesâ and âlongtermists on the precipiceâ style thinking. Your call here, but I am sure it is not necessary to believe random âLLMs will change the worldâ predictions to believe that certain democratic reforms make sense.
In my experience, a lot of people in online EA spaces are pretty willing to talk to you if you reach out, so I think youâll have decent luck there if thatâs what youâre after. Not as confident about how to find more serious collaborators for a project like this.
A few ideas I would throw out there for the sake of brainstorming (many or all of which you may already be familiar with):
independent redistricting /â anti gerrymandering schemes
merging voting districts and proportionally allocating positions > requiring majorities (ie. Mixed-member proportional representation) to negate âwinner take allâ/â minority under representation
ranked choice /â transferable voting to diminish spoiler effect
open primaries might be a good idea to disincentivize the party system from filtering for radical candidates as hard
liquid democracy to let people vote directly on issues that matter to them instead of going through their rep at all (eg. imagine being able to disagree with your senator whenever you want and cast your individual .0000002% of a vote directly on whatever issue)
People talk about quadratic voting too which is probably worth knowing something about from a mechanism design standpoint, but in my opinion doesnât really stand out as a solution to anything on its own without a better way of defining what each actors budget of voting credits would actually need be applied to /â split between in any given round.
Also, I definitely second the idea of using a citizenâs assembly. In my opinion, the power of random sampling + time to learn about and focus on an issue is really OP and really under utilized by representative democracies. The statistical mathematics around approximating large populations with small random samples are really underutilized here and working in our favor. Honestly, there is tons of adverse selection in the electoral process (eg. this book deals with some elements of that).
If you havenât seen CGP Greyâs âPolitics in the Animal Kingdomâ series, you might love it! Also the Forward Party in the US tends to push for similar ideas /â platforms, so they might be worth checking out.
I think this kind of work is very valuable! Nation states might yet be the death of us. It has been terrible watch the democratic backsliding and corruption in my own US of A (in fact I will be one of the protestors this 10â18 No Kings Day). Plus, I agree with your sentiment that there is a lot of headroom. Personally, I think this has less to do with the rise of cyberspace and more to do with the fact that existing polities were just never particularly optimized around the sorts of ideals we are aspiring towards here. Classical Age Greece and the revolutionary United States were both slave states with a lot of backwards ideas after all.