My once bumper sticker: “Question Authority, But Raise Your Hand First”. In families and small groups, we can usually challenge and question our leaders. When they declare an official policy, we can often ask “why?”, and get a moderately coherent response. If we notice inconsistencies between explanations for related policies, we can point them out, and pressure leaders to reduce them. And to a limited extent, we can challenge such explanations, giving counter arguments to official reasons, and offering reasons for alternate policies.
I take your point that an encyclopedia article about a law is different from a justification of a law.
My concerns are focused more on governance by jury. We currently expect Congress to create nation-wide policy, which is harder than a jury's current task of deciding the fact of a crime or deciding responsibility in a specific court case.
Thus I suspect that governance by juries would do worse than a legislature when faced with, say, a year's worth of policy decisions, even if we improve the juries and the legislature by giving them access to prediction markets' forecasts, as well as nullifying decisions that are likely to be soon overturned.
A specific failure mode I see is that clever arguments by an interest group could convince a jury to enact a policy, while a legislator who often deals with that interest group is less likely to be fooled because of their greater experience. As a somewhat relevant example from the book I'm reading, when cities began adding fluoride to the water supply to reduce dental problems, "cities whose administrators or city councils made the decision without a referendum overwhelmingly adopted fluoridation." But 60% of popular referendums rejected fluoride, since "Crackpots, rogue doctors, and extreme right-wing interest groups all fought fluoridation, and many voters, including a substantial fraction of those with college educations, could not sort out the self-appointed gurus from the competent experts" (Achen & Bartels, p. 54).
Of course, one could argue that the interest group would have more time to convince the legislator to support them. And maybe a jury would do better than a popular referendum, since the jury has to focus on a particular issue. But citizens' assemblies are based on a similar idea, and they have mixed records for actually creating workable policies (see https://politi.co/2OS2MYy). Achen and Bartels also criticize these assemblies, observing that in Canada "a body of ordinary citizens engaged in an elaborately funded year-long process of education, consultation, and deliberation aimed at recommending a new voting rule to be employed in provincial elections. And in each case, their nearly unanimous recommendation was decisively rejected by their fellow citizens in a subsequent referendum" (p. 302).
But I'm mostly arguing from my intuitions. So it would be nice to run an experiment or find strong historical evidence of a similar situation.
My proposal doesn't give elites any extra power to choose language, over what they have now. So no extra harm from that.
Also, even the biggest laws don't have justifications now on Wikipedia. For example, there's an article on prostitution, but it doesn't give a *justification* for making that illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
I've recently started reading Achen and Bartels's book Democracy for Realists. It's made me more skeptical about direct democracy, e.g. interest groups find it easy to manipulate public opinion to get the referendum results they want by changing the language of the referendum question. Prediction markets do address some of this problem, but I'm still not very optimistic about governance by jury.
Also, Wikipedia usually has explanations of the most important laws. But I agree that Wikipedia won't create explanations of every law, so if we think that's necessary, we might have to create a system like you envision.
Question: When a jury picks a justification for a policy what is it deciding? Is it what it thinks best reflects why supporters favor the policy or what is the best argument the policy is a good idea? Either seems to pose difficulties.
So suppose the country passes a death penalty law because supporters believe in a retributive theory of justice on which certain acts *deserve* death. Further suppose those supporters are only 45% of the population while the other 55% are pure utilitarians.
But a jury which has a majority of pure utilitarians on it will reject retribution as a bad justification and replace it with some rickety claim about deterance. Now there is even less respect for the justification because everyone knows no one really finds in convincing.
OTOH if juries decide why the supporters favor the policy you have to identify which supporters (most numerous, most strident, most responsible for it's passage) and this is just asking for people to bring out all their negative stereotypes about why people support policies they dislike.
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This may be a total example but generally speaking its common for people to have differing values against which they evaluate policies.
Not to mention how this would play out if there is some political motive behind challenging the justification. People donate tons of money to pro/anti abortion causes and if this works justifications will come to matter hugely in deciding what rules we use meaning people will be willing to spend huge sums to bring a challenge.
Really? When you get 1% of the policy value in exchange for winning (until next challenge completes) it seems like the incentive is super strong.
In fact suppose the expected time until cycling reaches equilibrium at some number of years y. If we assume all juries reach same conclusions (the more randomness in jury outcomes the worse for your proposal) then you would expect the trial cost born by planting C to be given by C=y*X/100*V if we assume purely profit-motivated chalenges, ie bringing suit is profit neutral (roughly).
Given how large V will often be that suggests either a very small y or a huge cost of trial.
But some policies are worth way more than others but presumably trial costs don't scale that way so either it's prohibitively expensive to challenge some justifications or others should cycle super quickly.
Random jury errors are reduced via the larger juries and betting market options I mentioned. And after they happen nonetheless, challengers expect them to be easily reversed via a new challenge.
Ohh and what the hell do you do when arrow's theorem bites you in the ass and you get a set of justifications in which A > B > C > A in pairwise contests?
Do people keep suing in justification court and go round and round?
Because that means either you need to make juries huge and sampled representatively from across the country or someone intent on changing a justification can keep suing in justification court until they get a location that favors their ideology or random variance in selection for small juries gives them a win.
Imagine debating the justification of a law regulating guns in NYC versus a court in Boise. Or if it's just 12 people continuing to try with different 'smear' justifications until you got a majority who wants to signal they hate the law.
I fear this would only exacerbate our tendency to choose justifications strategically to benefit our tribe, eg, the way the same policy or justification switches valence when it's used by a president or Senate leader of the other party. Indeed, most justifications we see people give in political discussions these days seem obviously pretextual.
Wouldn't you expect the same thing here? The opponents of a law funding planned Parenthood would try to sue to get the justification changed to something like 'to kill more babies'.
Maybe not this precicesly but I see no reason the system would be expected to function correctly in presence for either strategic voting or tribal animosity.
I mean even if all jurors tried their hardest to be fair most people are very bad at passing ideological Turing tests.
Some time back I was wondering what might happen if we1. put expiration dates on all legislation other than Constitutional law and,2. Allowed commonly law challenges, and with sufficient levels, allow the legislation to be overturned where the common law process establishes a legislation that was failing to produce the stated results.
Initially I was thinking that would be best in a regulatory setting.
And clearly I think the answer should be yes to your question. Rules that seem incoherent for those governed by the rules just don't seem like they could produce a stable society in most cases.
I take your point that an encyclopedia article about a law is different from a justification of a law.
My concerns are focused more on governance by jury. We currently expect Congress to create nation-wide policy, which is harder than a jury's current task of deciding the fact of a crime or deciding responsibility in a specific court case.
Thus I suspect that governance by juries would do worse than a legislature when faced with, say, a year's worth of policy decisions, even if we improve the juries and the legislature by giving them access to prediction markets' forecasts, as well as nullifying decisions that are likely to be soon overturned.
A specific failure mode I see is that clever arguments by an interest group could convince a jury to enact a policy, while a legislator who often deals with that interest group is less likely to be fooled because of their greater experience. As a somewhat relevant example from the book I'm reading, when cities began adding fluoride to the water supply to reduce dental problems, "cities whose administrators or city councils made the decision without a referendum overwhelmingly adopted fluoridation." But 60% of popular referendums rejected fluoride, since "Crackpots, rogue doctors, and extreme right-wing interest groups all fought fluoridation, and many voters, including a substantial fraction of those with college educations, could not sort out the self-appointed gurus from the competent experts" (Achen & Bartels, p. 54).
Of course, one could argue that the interest group would have more time to convince the legislator to support them. And maybe a jury would do better than a popular referendum, since the jury has to focus on a particular issue. But citizens' assemblies are based on a similar idea, and they have mixed records for actually creating workable policies (see https://politi.co/2OS2MYy). Achen and Bartels also criticize these assemblies, observing that in Canada "a body of ordinary citizens engaged in an elaborately funded year-long process of education, consultation, and deliberation aimed at recommending a new voting rule to be employed in provincial elections. And in each case, their nearly unanimous recommendation was decisively rejected by their fellow citizens in a subsequent referendum" (p. 302).
But I'm mostly arguing from my intuitions. So it would be nice to run an experiment or find strong historical evidence of a similar situation.
In this post, I proposed a specific way to make laws easier to repeal.
My proposal doesn't give elites any extra power to choose language, over what they have now. So no extra harm from that.
Also, even the biggest laws don't have justifications now on Wikipedia. For example, there's an article on prostitution, but it doesn't give a *justification* for making that illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
I've recently started reading Achen and Bartels's book Democracy for Realists. It's made me more skeptical about direct democracy, e.g. interest groups find it easy to manipulate public opinion to get the referendum results they want by changing the language of the referendum question. Prediction markets do address some of this problem, but I'm still not very optimistic about governance by jury.
Also, Wikipedia usually has explanations of the most important laws. But I agree that Wikipedia won't create explanations of every law, so if we think that's necessary, we might have to create a system like you envision.
Cycling is already a potential problem with ordinary democracy, both direct and representative.
Question: When a jury picks a justification for a policy what is it deciding? Is it what it thinks best reflects why supporters favor the policy or what is the best argument the policy is a good idea? Either seems to pose difficulties.
So suppose the country passes a death penalty law because supporters believe in a retributive theory of justice on which certain acts *deserve* death. Further suppose those supporters are only 45% of the population while the other 55% are pure utilitarians.
But a jury which has a majority of pure utilitarians on it will reject retribution as a bad justification and replace it with some rickety claim about deterance. Now there is even less respect for the justification because everyone knows no one really finds in convincing.
OTOH if juries decide why the supporters favor the policy you have to identify which supporters (most numerous, most strident, most responsible for it's passage) and this is just asking for people to bring out all their negative stereotypes about why people support policies they dislike.
--
This may be a total example but generally speaking its common for people to have differing values against which they evaluate policies.
Not to mention how this would play out if there is some political motive behind challenging the justification. People donate tons of money to pro/anti abortion causes and if this works justifications will come to matter hugely in deciding what rules we use meaning people will be willing to spend huge sums to bring a challenge.
Really? When you get 1% of the policy value in exchange for winning (until next challenge completes) it seems like the incentive is super strong.
In fact suppose the expected time until cycling reaches equilibrium at some number of years y. If we assume all juries reach same conclusions (the more randomness in jury outcomes the worse for your proposal) then you would expect the trial cost born by planting C to be given by C=y*X/100*V if we assume purely profit-motivated chalenges, ie bringing suit is profit neutral (roughly).
Given how large V will often be that suggests either a very small y or a huge cost of trial.
But some policies are worth way more than others but presumably trial costs don't scale that way so either it's prohibitively expensive to challenge some justifications or others should cycle super quickly.
Random jury errors are reduced via the larger juries and betting market options I mentioned. And after they happen nonetheless, challengers expect them to be easily reversed via a new challenge.
Even badly motivated justifications may be better than none at all.
The cost to pay for a jury, and the delay to get its results, would limit such cycling.
Ohh and what the hell do you do when arrow's theorem bites you in the ass and you get a set of justifications in which A > B > C > A in pairwise contests?
Do people keep suing in justification court and go round and round?
Because that means either you need to make juries huge and sampled representatively from across the country or someone intent on changing a justification can keep suing in justification court until they get a location that favors their ideology or random variance in selection for small juries gives them a win.
Imagine debating the justification of a law regulating guns in NYC versus a court in Boise. Or if it's just 12 people continuing to try with different 'smear' justifications until you got a majority who wants to signal they hate the law.
I fear this would only exacerbate our tendency to choose justifications strategically to benefit our tribe, eg, the way the same policy or justification switches valence when it's used by a president or Senate leader of the other party. Indeed, most justifications we see people give in political discussions these days seem obviously pretextual.
Wouldn't you expect the same thing here? The opponents of a law funding planned Parenthood would try to sue to get the justification changed to something like 'to kill more babies'.
Maybe not this precicesly but I see no reason the system would be expected to function correctly in presence for either strategic voting or tribal animosity.
I mean even if all jurors tried their hardest to be fair most people are very bad at passing ideological Turing tests.
Some time back I was wondering what might happen if we1. put expiration dates on all legislation other than Constitutional law and,2. Allowed commonly law challenges, and with sufficient levels, allow the legislation to be overturned where the common law process establishes a legislation that was failing to produce the stated results.
Initially I was thinking that would be best in a regulatory setting.
And clearly I think the answer should be yes to your question. Rules that seem incoherent for those governed by the rules just don't seem like they could produce a stable society in most cases.
This makes legislation more like the judiciary. Wouldn't making the branches of government more similar in their decision process reduce consilience?