One issue that I’ve rarely seem addressed directly is changing population sizes. Historically a lot of systems (e.g. one-man-one-vote democracy) have relied on the fact that adding voters is slow and expensive. But with reduced travel costs, artificial wombs, and eventually the possibility of digitally replicating people an arbitrary number of times, this assumption could cease to be the case. At that point dividing up rights on a per capita basis looks more like an invitation to abuse.
This issue has historically been addressed by corporations through allocating votes proportionally to shares, not people, or by coins through proof-of-[work/stake]. In the future it could be as easy to multiple people as it is to multiple legal entities, email addresses or wallets.
Can you explain how this viewpoint is substantively different than say, the Greek concept of “Aristocracy”, which is seen as highly positive by the classical Greeks?
The point of my question is to understand the net contribution of this idea (other the mechanics of the additional step of reducing of vote weights not to zero, and putting this all in a spreadsheet). It also suggests we can just examine the related literature, which should be pretty large?
Hmm, I’m not sure I quite have the intuition for what ‘Aristocracy’ means in your link—it seems the Greek definition differs from the Hobbesian one for example.
But I think the answer is that I am outlining a problem, and there are many different potential solutions. To use the crypto example, both proof-of-stake and proof-of-work could be valid solutions, even though they are quite distinct. So while perhaps Aristocracy might be one solution I’m not sure it would be the only one, unless defined very broadly.
One issue that I’ve rarely seem addressed directly is changing population sizes. Historically a lot of systems (e.g. one-man-one-vote democracy) have relied on the fact that adding voters is slow and expensive. But with reduced travel costs, artificial wombs, and eventually the possibility of digitally replicating people an arbitrary number of times, this assumption could cease to be the case. At that point dividing up rights on a per capita basis looks more like an invitation to abuse.
This issue has historically been addressed by corporations through allocating votes proportionally to shares, not people, or by coins through proof-of-[work/stake]. In the future it could be as easy to multiple people as it is to multiple legal entities, email addresses or wallets.
Can you explain how this viewpoint is substantively different than say, the Greek concept of “Aristocracy”, which is seen as highly positive by the classical Greeks?
The point of my question is to understand the net contribution of this idea (other the mechanics of the additional step of reducing of vote weights not to zero, and putting this all in a spreadsheet). It also suggests we can just examine the related literature, which should be pretty large?
Hmm, I’m not sure I quite have the intuition for what ‘Aristocracy’ means in your link—it seems the Greek definition differs from the Hobbesian one for example.
But I think the answer is that I am outlining a problem, and there are many different potential solutions. To use the crypto example, both proof-of-stake and proof-of-work could be valid solutions, even though they are quite distinct. So while perhaps Aristocracy might be one solution I’m not sure it would be the only one, unless defined very broadly.