I am an advocate of democracy through sortition. I am also employed as a structural dynamic finite element analyst.
John Huang
Karma: 74
In my opinion by limiting your question to “defending liberal democracy” you are also vastly limiting potential remedies. The current resurgence of authoritarianism takes advantages of weaknesses of liberal democracy. “Defense” of democracy necessitates making the system smarter and more resilient to these authoritarian takeovers.
“Defense” may necessitate a transformation of the status quo.
Exactly what makes liberal democracy weak? One reason is poor collective decision making. Examples of bad collective decision making include:
Democratically controlled states inability to grow. Anti-growth and high cost-of-living policies of California, New York, and other blue states have encouraged millions of their residents to move to Red states. This foot-voting is a clear indicator of the incompetence of Blue-state policies, and simultaneously hands authoritarians like Trump more power.
Obviously the election of authoritarian Donald Trump who hopes to end democracy as we know it.
Incompetent internal party decision making systems that elected Joe Biden to be the presidential candidate in 2020, whose utter unpopularity, inability to engage in modern-style social-media driven policies, and senility was a large contributing factor to Democratic Party losses in 2024.
Whereas EA has funded some pro-approval voting initiatives in the past, it has not:
Engaged in any small scall randomly controlled trials to validate claims made.
Evaluate other voting reform alternatives such as Condorcet methods, multi-member districts with Single Transferable Vote, evaluate the possibility of proportionately representative systems, etc
Evaluate the potential for “Deliberative Democracy”
Evaluate the potential of Citizens’ Assemblies as used throughout the world in Ireland, France, UK, Canada, etc.
Evaluate the possibility of more direct democratic alternatives such as sortition where decisions are chosen by lottery.
As far as bothering to test and validate potential reforms:
Lobby labor unions to implement improved decision-making reforms.
Lobby political parties and organizations to implement improved decision-making reforms.
Lobby HOA’s to implement improved decision-making reforms.
Fund research into modeling and simulation of improved decision making with respect to mechanism design, economics, and social choice theory.
Lobbying smaller organizations may be more effective than attempting to run a full city or state referendum campaign for change, and build evidence whether interventions are actually effective or not.
In my opinion pure voting system reforms (such as approval and ranked choice voting) have low probability of success because they don’t tackle the core decision making problems of liberal democracy. Voting system reforms might improve aggregation, but if a majority of voters simply have incorrect information, they will still arrive at incorrect decisions. The only reform I’ve found that tackles the problem of voter ignorance is sortition, which I’ve linked above. In short, you can improve the decision making capacity of voters by paying them, and giving them enormous resources to arrive at better decisions. And the only way to scale such a process is by reducing the number of participants through a fair democratic lottery. As far as organizations advocating for this, it includes: Ofbyfor, Democracy Without Elections, INSA, Assemble America, BANR, etc. Full disclosure, because I believe sortition has the greatest likelihood of success, I volunteer in some of these organizations.
Ultimately we need a system that its own citizens believe in. People like Donald Trump succeed because citizens believe that the status quo is so bad, Trump is a valid alternative. Authoritarians succeed when liberal democracy fails its citizens. A successful defense of democracy demands improvement of democracy.
No, I’m requesting EA actually take the importance of improving democratic decision making seriously. Even if no action was able to stop these 2025 cuts, do you actually think “it’s over”? What about 2026? What about 2028? What about 2050? America is going to continue to make just stupid decisions until enough people get together and change the dumb way the system makes its decisions.
Moreover the second article isn’t about approval voting, I’m not sure how the only thing you got out of deliberation was approval voting.
If people in America were serious enough about improving democratic decision making, is it conceivable a reform could have stopped Trump? Imagine a new and improved Democratic Party was able to clearly demonstrate its ability to govern. Imagine a California government that was actually sufficiently competent to build high speed rail and more and more residential to attract more people into its borders. Instead Californians are fleeing because of rising costs.
Imagine an improved Democratic Party primary system that could elect a younger candidate that wouldn’t have grown senile by 2024.
Are these things *possible* within a small time frame? They certainly are. Trump himself demonstrates how quickly norms can be changed.
What’s wrong with US democracy isn’t just Trump, it’s an incompetent opposition party that people hate so much they’d rather trust something like Trump.
Finally yes, you mentioned approval voting. Would that ever be enough? Why are you putting all your eggs in just this one basket? IMO it’s a clear sign of EA’s myopia and lack of engagement with election theory, to ignore what is out there such as Single Transferable Vote, condorcet methods, and STAR voting. Even in this small niche of election reform in my opinion EA is far behind the theory.
>If you’re not proposing electioneering, what exactly is the program that you are suggesting could have prevented these USAID cuts?
“When should you have planted the seeds to grow a tree”? Just last year is a bit too late to grow a strong and capable democracy able to resist a tyranny.
A better year might have been 2016, when we were better understanding what the stakes were. That gives you 10 years. Or people have been complaining about the downfall of democracy since Occupy Wall Street. That’s 17 years (And people have obviously been complaining about democracy for far longer than that). But the next best thing might be now.
Throwing money at Biden/Harris 2025 is a method of last resort, particularly when it seems that money is highly ineffective in high-profile, money-saturated presidential campaigns.
Now let’s imagine that Trump actually does succeed in turning America into a dictatorship. Does that mean all hope is lost? No, there’s plenty of other countries where democracy can be strengthened.
>This forum might not be a bad place to start?
Plenty of ideas have been posted and ignored. I posted something for example on sortition which I’m a big fan of. Crickets. Neil Dullaghan made a great post about deliberative democracy here. What came of that?
Now maybe my idea is utter shit. OK sure, strikes and gutters. The silence is much more annoying.
In my opinion, attempting to electioneer in 2024 by pumping money towards your preferred candidate, has little to do with democracy. It’s kind of the opposite. You’re engaging in oligarchy, trying to buy power with money, to attempt to save what democracy you have left. You’re not actually addressing the problems that led to the current crisis. As I said, mitigation and reaction.
>I think it’s generally okay to place the burden of showing that a cause area warrants further investigation on proponents,
And how can any cause area demonstrate this when you just won’t evaluate it anyways because of your limited evaluative capacity, because it’s not a priority cause area for your organization? Let’s imagine I have a proposal or a white paper. How and where can I submit it for evaluation? Take for example Open Philanthropy. Democracy’s not a cause area with any requests for proposals. Is there any organization accepting proposals?
The cause areas are driven from the top down, as far as I’m aware. Causes outside the org priorities are just not considered at all.
I’m not asking EA to focus singularly on democracy. I’m asking EA to give any resources at all to the cause of democracy. Prove my ignorance wrong. Is any organization in EA involved with democracy at this moment? Is any organization bothering to evaluate potential interventions? What work has been done? What papers have been written? Is there some work saying, “Look, we’ve done the work, yes it turns out democracy has a terrible ROI!” How about you guys? Are you making any consideration or analysis on potential pro-democracy interventions? If you have, I’d love to see the analysis. My search for it, I’ve seen nothing. I hear crickets.
Here’s the thing about evidence. You have to look for it. Is EA bothering to look for it? Is your organization bothering to look for it? Otherwise, you have no idea how tractable it is or is not.
These sorts of cuts highlight IMO the incorrect strategy EA has been on. Whereas the EA space deals with the millions of dollars, US government aid deals with the billions of dollars, orders of magnitude greater funding.
Yet EA’s refusal to engage in the political has created a huge blind-spot. As the United States unironically moves towards authoritarian dictatorship, of course the foreign aid is disappearing, and your cost effectiveness calculations are completely out of whack. How the hell are you going to fill the gap on billions with mere millions?
You wanted to settle for the ease of linear thinking. A particular set of interventions was easy to measure and had more linear responses, so that’s where your funding went. Politics is incredibly messy and the response is extremely nonlinear—you can pour money into politics and see no response, until perhaps one day you can have a huge response, or perhaps not. You didn’t want to deal with the nonlinearity.
So you forgot to think about protecting, or even enhancing, democracy. I suppose protecting democracy just wasn’t tractable enough. And we’re going to be suffering the consequences for thinking democracy just isn’t tractable, even though people had been sounding the alarm for years/decades.
All you can be is just reactive. You’ll react to the destruction of democracy. You’re about mitigation, not prevention or enhancement.
Maybe it is time to think about being pro-democracy. The consequences of forgetting about democracy will cause orders of magnitude more suffering than you have ever prevented.
Why do you think improving democracy is intractable? None of the highest priority world problems are tractable.
Risks from artificial intelligence—nobody knows if an AI safety solution is even possible yet that warrants hundreds of millions in funding
Catastrophic pandemics—Preventing/mitigating pandemics is a trillions dollar endeavor. Incredibly costly. How is this tractable?
Nuclear war—Exactly how is this cause area tractable?
Factory farming—Good luck on this cause, especially without the force of an enlightened government to demand change.
Comparing to the toughest problems, how is improving democracy intractable? Of course, tractability needs to be balanced with importance and neglectedness.
Developing strong evidence that some specific reform (ie maybe sortition) could be a real improvement could be done in the millions of dollars range. That could be cheaper than training your LLM. That’s definitely cheaper than fusion power.
What is the value to humanity of learning what kind of governments are best? Even in the short term perspective, the value of an improved government could be trillions of dollars of tax dollars saved. In the long term perspective, every top priority world problem would immensely benefit from enlightened governance.
Sortition as a specific reform might be slightly harder to implement on some political campaign, yet imagine hypothetically sortition yields 10% greater ROI in taxpayer benefits whereas ranked choice or approval voting might yield closer to 0%. Of course we don’t know the numbers, and that’s a huge problem. Ranked choice might be more tractable, yet it also might be mostly useless.
Yet we don’t know, because nobody is doing any testing, there’s no empirics and I bet, there’s no funding.
I’ve written what I think is the most potent possible reform here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HwoSHayLt4zqqeyun/how-to-make-democracy-smarter
Has anyone done a effectiveness comparison between GiveDirectly vs Community oriented giving, such as Sparks Microgrants?
>If it’s about reducing the influence of large donors, what is the incentive for large donors to participate?
Even large donors suffer from the problem of the time cost in evaluating charities. Imagine there are 100 large donors. Imagine a”democratic lottery”, now turned oligarchic lottery, chooses the committee and voter weights based on the amount donated.
The incentive for wealthy individuals to participate is to reduce the huge evaluation costs. The oligarchic lottery can be trusted to on average, statistically represent their personal moral weights, proportionate to the wealth they donate. The small lottocratic committee makes the big decisions, so the large whole doesn’t have to make any decisions.
What incentive is there for wealthy people to donate to a democratic instead of oligarchic lottery? Even some wealthy people might believe in equal consideration of other people’s opinions, that their personal wealth does not make them better at utilitarian or moral calculation. If so, wealthy individuals can still reap the benefits of the lottery and reduce their personal evaluation costs.
In my opinion the way to improve the donor lottery is to convert them into democratic lotteries. The concept is simple. Instead of one person in control, the donor lottery is now controlled by a small committee, and the charities are chosen using a proportionately representative election system such as single transferable vote or party list.
By ruling by committee, you average out the response and make the results representative of the membership. moreover, rule by committee enables deliberation and information transfer, so that persuasion can be used to make decisions and potentially improve accuracy or competence at the loss of independence.
Rule by committee also has superior connection to “democracy” and therefore make the donor lottery more appealing in a marketing perspective. Democracy is potentially more popular than lottery.
The advantage of membership over meritocratic control is the subjectivity of moral weights. Everyone has different moral weights. For example Dustin Moskowitz might not care as much about insect harm prevention, but that doesn’t make his opinion more or less correct than yours.
Donor lotteries, and ultimately any kind of democratic lottery, average out the moral sentiments of its participants and make you more effective than if you acted alone. Rule by committee could increase accurate assessment of member moral sentiment and reduce lottocratic temporal chaos.
I added some sections on counter arguments and cost benefit analysis. I also added data collected from America in One Room experiments to give you a better taste of what deliberation produces.
I also brainstorm on potential programs in global development, and possibilities in randomly controlled trials, to flesh out a feasible action plan towards testing and implementation at least in the small scale.
For example, a possible plan would be to perform RCTs comparing sortition and election with respect to cash handouts in global development. But instead of giving cash to individuals, cash could be given collectively to groups, administered by election, or sortition, or direct democracy , or perhaps a hybrid system combining many different elements.
>Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, you should probably think it more likely than not that reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell are legit.
On what basis? Through thorough and methodical research? Or gut reaction? The research has a significant cost to it. Guts are notoriously unreliable.
Clearly the answer is not to just “Trust Charities”, because Effective Altruism claims that they are more effective than other charities.
>(Unless by “leap of faith” you mean perfectly ordinary sorts of trust that go without saying in every other realm of life.)
In the normal capitalist economy, I go to a restaurant. I pay for the meal. The meal is immediately served to me. There is a clear connection of reciprocity. There is a clear indication that the requested service was provided. There is a clear avenue of evaluation. I just put the food in my mouth. That’s where the trust comes from. You buy, receive, and evaluate the service through normal use and consumption.
In charitable giving, there is no easy feedback. I give the money to a charity and the money essentially goes into a black void. I obtain no immediate feedback on whether the charity rendered is effective or not, because the services are not delivered to me but to somebody else. I cannot directly observe what the money is being used for.
I mean one huge reason is logistics and uncertainty.
First we must come to the knowledge that yes, children actually are dying, and this death can be prevented with $5000. How do we prove that? How does the average person obtain this information? Well, a charitable foundation says so. Or some famous celebrity claims it to be true. Or some study, which the vast majority of humanity has never read or even heard about, claims it to be true.
Then we need to trust the charitable foundation to faithfully execute the plan to save the child. How do we know the plan will be faithfully executed?
An effective altruist is committed to finding and evaluating these answers. The vast majority of humanity is not. So Effective Altruism has made a bunch of claims, but can’t prove these claims in a 5 minute elevator pitch.
In the end then you’re just another charity asking for a leap of faith. Some people jump, others don’t. If you’re not asking for a leap of faith, you’re asking for a huge mental investment to verify all the claims made.
The advantage of “reform” vs “lobby” is a potential permanent change in 10% improvement year-on-year. If the decision making is actually superior, then we can expect repeated improvements in decision making and budgeting for all subsequent years.
>I imagine it would take at least several decades to become widespread
Comparing to the pace of change with regards to any world problems, decades-long timespans, yes ridiculously long, are about on-par with many political battles. How long did it take for example to decriminalize marijuana? After 60 years, the fight is ongoing. How long did it take to eliminate lead from gasoline? Leaded gasolines started being banned in 1925, yet it wasn’t fully banned until the 1970s to 1990s in the US.
The fact that needed reforms have a 60+ year turnaround is an indictment on the incompetence of the status quo in my opinion. If we care about long term planning, we need something more performant.
Let’s imagine a hypothetical new and improved decision making process can reduce the turnaround time from 60 years to only 10 years. What’s the cost-benefit of for example, having unleaded gasoline 50 years sooner?
Your calculator is honestly pretty depressing. You don’t really get any tax benefits unless you are wealthy enough to donate large sums in the ~$20,000 to $100,000 range.
Imagine the median American, about $50K income, takes the 10% rule in an act of extreme generosity and donates $5000.
His tax reduction is $241, a 3% reduction. Pretty insignificant.
At my income level of only around $100K, the optimal donation strategy would be to hold onto your money until you can eventually save to about $60K, then donate it all in a single tax year. The fact that US tax law demands you play these idiotic games makes me roll my eyes.
I take the perspective that the United States is just tending towards the more typical behavior of presidential electoral systems. America will start acting more and more like Latin American presidential regimes, because the of the deadlock that presidential systems create. The checks and balances aren’t protecting us. Instead, the checks and balances are what drive the public to elect “strongmen” who can “get things done”—often through illegal and unconstitutional measures.
Trump for example is celebrated for “getting things done”—things that are often illegal and unconstitutional. That’s the selling point. Therefore I’m not the only one who has suggested that presidential regimes are unstable. Yet as we look across the world, parliamentary systems also have their own problems with authoritarian takeovers.
I write about what I think the solution is here.
In short, I think we can create a smarter democracy using a system called “sortition”. Please take a read of the article I linked for more information.
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Even if sortition might be an interesting policy to you, it’s not particularly clear if implementation is politically feasible. The inertia of the US political system is so vast it’s hard for any money to budge it. Any financial investment will yield highly nonlinear results. Policy might not change for years, or decades, until suddenly one day policy changes. Yet just because the response to investment is extremely nonlinear doesn’t therefore mean it’s unwise to invest. (There’s also the question if America is the wisest place to invest in. Pro-sortition movements also exist in Europe. Could pro-sortition movements be launched more easily in African and South America?)
In terms of what you can impact in terms of an idea such as sortition, your investment can be used to drive “public awareness” and “lobbying”. Money can be used to persuade local governments to adopt pro-sortition policies. Or money could be spent raising public awareness of sortition—public awareness that might lead to movement growth.
Hi Abraham, I have a suggestion on how to improve your democratic process if your membership continues to grow.
I’m a huge fan of lottocratic processes (ie sortition) to make informed and smarter democratic decisions than mere voting. The rationale of lottocratic democracy is simple. Imagine how insane it would be that instead of using juries to decide court cases, we decided innocence or guilt based on voting. What jury duty does is facilitate democratic specialization. It allows a representative sample to perform a complex tax so that the larger whole does not have to. I write a full defense of sortition here (and full disclosure, I am a frequent advocate of the practice).
Although the process you have created is much more democratic than the typical nonprofit, you personally retain enormous powers in setting the agenda and setting the final choices that can be allocated. It is admirable that you are putting in significant work to administer the fund; however that choice is not democratic.
I suggest that the fund be administered by a small council of members (perhaps about 5 councilors) selected by lottery. One of the primary tasks of the small council is to elect an executive of the fund and review the executive’s performance. It is far more efficient to let a small council perform this task; 5 people doing a performance review is vastly more efficient than demanding 20 people (assuming 20 participants) perform a performance review.
If your fund manages to grow, I would suggest adding more and more councilors to the small council up to 25 councilors, to say manage 200 members. Eventually, I would even do away with voting all-together, and instead rely on the small council to make donation choices. With the same justifications as above, a small council would be far more efficient at the task. Moreover, councils are capable of deliberation, assigning roles/tasks, so that the council can make better informed decisions than voters.
In contrast, voters need to make tradeoffs. A voter might devote more time towards working and generating more revenue for the fund, in exchange for less informed voting on what ought to be funded. Sortition mitigates these kinds of tradeoffs by increasing decision making efficiency by several factors.
Sure, I think your proposal is a great idea.
My interest is in improving democracy. I believe things like Trump, or Netanyahou, or Erdogan, or most democratic backsliding is a sign of democratic incompetence.
I think most people have little to no long-term vision for the question, “What would an advanced government of the future actually look like?” How much better could the world become if governments were smarter and more capable and just produced vastly more utility for people?
There is one thing I think is a strong contender for a superior future government. It’s called sortition. The premise is simple. In elections everybody participates. In sortition, a random sample of the public is chosen to participate. The benefit of sortition is scalability. Randomly chosen people, compensated or forced to participate, can engage in politics at enormous timescales compared to the average voter. More time to ask questions. Resources to become informed. The ability to seek and hire expertise. I elaborate about alleged benefits here.
Of course there’s a lot to do. First we need to prove the hypothesis. We have reasons why we think this is good, next we need to actually go out and test it. That takes a lot of money and research. This research will add evidence in its feasibility and capability. After that, if testing determines this thing to actually be good, more money is needed to campaign in favor of it.
Trump assuredly will not be the last authoritarian to arise out of liberal elections. If you value people’s freedom, if you wish to maximize utility, we should be looking for better things out there.
As far as why things like sortition would stop Trump, competent governments that are able to make their citizens feel content and satisfied with government performance, do not tend to appeal to tyrants for aid. Moreover if sortition is actually an effective way to organize people, it also might be an effective way to organize the Democratic Party.
Another powerful feature of sortition is its potential ability to create Democratic Legitimacy without going through the bureaucracy of government. For example, a Citizens’ Assembly can be potentially created through private funding, or through a referendum. A Citizens’ Assembly could be used as a presidential candidate selection system, and could delegitimize Trump or any other un-endorsed candidate.
Even if this is a “long-termist” project, the resources needed to say, test sortition, or launch a Citizens’ Assembly, are only in the millions of dollars. The economic benefits could be immense. Imagine a government that’s only 5% more efficient at increasing utility… that’s hundreds of billions of dollars of value per year. If the will was there, testing could happen immediately and we’d have results out before the end of Trump’s term.
Of course this won’t happen, not because it’s infeasible, but because there’s not yet funding, because sortition is mostly unheard of, because the idea hasn’t reached the ears of funders. Or if it has, the funders have just written it off for unknown reasons. Tractability is a typical excuse I hear, yet I’m not sure how sortition is any less tractable than any other long-termist project out there.