It would be neat if there were some “test futarchy”, like some online game that simulated it. Prediction markets are neat but they’re always very intertwined with some real world thing so you can’t use them to like, test out some futarchy design principles.
When you say "game teams", you mean the sort of people who would build an online game? Maybe with the rise of AI, soon it won't require anything more than you explaining what you'd like the rules to be, to an AI game designer.
Here's an example of a way that someone (Joe) could easily subvert futarchy unless prevented by a constitution.
Joe offers a bill which states: "Joe receives dictatorial power, which he promises to use wisely. Also, if there are n people in the country, and person i held X_i conditional shares in this bill just before it was passed, that person receives C * (X_i - 1/n ∑j X_j) dollars." (where C is some constant). If this is negative the person is instead taxed that number of dollars, and the sum of taxes and gifts across all people equals 0 so it is theoretically feasible to do this.
Now, what's the value of a share in this bill? Most likely, giving Joe dictatorial power is bad (even if he promises to use it wisely). He might, for example, as his first act abolish futarchy entirely. So, without considering the second clause, the bill would decrease metrics of national welfare. But considering that the second clause directly rewards investors for betting on the bill, all Joe has to do is make C large enough, and it becomes rational to bet on the bill, because the direct reward granted in the bill outweighs your losses from the bet.
The only way to stop this would be to have a constitutional clause preventing bills from having direct rewards that are conditional on how many shares you held in it. A "no-self-reference" clause.
Note that this is different from your regular transfer problem because in this case the transfer actually increases the expected value of voting for the bill! And so, your amendment solution won't work; amendments that eliminate the second clause would rationally have a lower expected value. Amendments that eliminate the *first* clause would have a higher expected value, but then you're still left with a transfer that's harmful to societal welfare even though it's rational to bet on it.
While the peoples of the world will choose power from political parties, the majority will live in poverty, and under the threat of war or genocide. Elections with the participation of parties have nothing in common with democracy, it is a deception. Democracy is when the people choose power from the people, and there can be no participation of parties and organizations. Humanity can live 1000 times better without making any effort, but they do not know how to do it. We must realize that it is necessary to choose power only from the people themselves, and then it will be DEMOCRACY! The leadership of the state must be elected from the people by lot, in much the same way as in the USA the jury has been elected for hundreds of years. And immediately corruption, political parties, 90% taxes, wars, genocides and thousand-year murderous exploitation will disappear. What to do? Boycott elections with the participation of parties and force all your friends to do the same, and friends of their friends. As soon as the number of those boycotting and aware reaches 20% of the total population, the elections will not take place. And then the initiative group of voters must present to the public, certified by the signatures of citizens, a demand for a general referendum on changing the rules for holding elections. Changes - the government chooses the people only from the people themselves, without the participation of parties and organizations. Demonstrations, barricades, revolutions and violence are not needed! Only the confidence of each person is needed, what he MUST do, if he is a Human. The first political parties appeared in history only in the last 5-6 thousand years. Parties were created by ancient bandits after the capture of trading cities, with the purpose of organizing FICTITIOUS democratic elections. Of course, all the parties of the city consisted of bandits and renegade merchants. These were organized groups consisting of professional robbers. Since then, all the dishonest, ambitious, thirsty for glory, power and royal life, inexorably and irresistibly go into politics. It doesn't matter if they are right, left, religious or obsessive, they are 100% ambitious swindlers and crooks. This masochistic feeblemindedness of humanity is unbearable, it cannot be tolerated for a second, and we have been living like this since the advent of civilization. And our laws, norms and morals are from bandits, and we think like bandits! And by the way, even the wretched AI understood and accepted the proposal to elect people by lot and immediately presented its machine opinion on the benefit and rationality of my proposal. Will you understand? I doubt it.
> constitutional limits seem to just prevent futarchy from achieving its desired ends.
There's an elephant in the room. There are two ways to win at futarchy: (1) Bet on policies that, if followed, improve the existing metric or result in transfer of value to you. (2) Bet on policies that, if followed, make rule changes to the futarchy process itself in a way that favors your faction.
We can think of (2) as the "meta transfer problem." It's more serious than the ordinary transfer problem, because it corrupts the futarchy process itself. In its extreme, a faction could bet on a bill that grants that faction dictatorial power over everything, at which point the faction would abolish futarchy and take whatever money and power they wish. If the faction has enough money to drive the market - coupled with, perhaps, enough popular support - then they could manipulate the share price of their bill enough to get it passed. At which point, game over.
Constitutional limits would be an important safeguard against (2).
There are also less extreme types of (2), short of full dictatorial takeover (but a possible prelude to it). For instance, a faction could promote policies that would put faction members in charge of judging the metric. Those faction members could then judge it in a way that favors the faction. Policies like this could be disguised as legitimate improvements to the judging process. The faction would argue that they want X group of people to judge, which they claim is not because X group of people are disproportionately faction members (though they are), but for other more respectable reasons. (We see this a lot in US politics with regard to who gets to vote, how easily they get to vote, and how much their vote counts.)
Not to keep harping on this, but I think my post on futarchy of mutating preferences is even more relevant to this post than the last one. The "to the extent that it would have different goals" is key: If a payment to a futarchy (either in money or in some other currency the futarchy values like near-term goal achievement) is made conditional on a change to the futarchy's own utility function, as long as the change is bounded by the value of the amount transferred, then it seems likely that the futarchy would make the change. This seems like a destabilizing but interesting avenue for carrying out negotiations with the futarchy.
It would be neat if there were some “test futarchy”, like some online game that simulated it. Prediction markets are neat but they’re always very intertwined with some real world thing so you can’t use them to like, test out some futarchy design principles.
So far its been easier to get real orgs to try it than game teams.
When you say "game teams", you mean the sort of people who would build an online game? Maybe with the rise of AI, soon it won't require anything more than you explaining what you'd like the rules to be, to an AI game designer.
People very occasionally host futarchy-controlled play-throughs of simple games on manifold markets, e.g.
https://manifold.markets/CharlesLien/lets-play-tic-tac-toe
For an ongoing similar game, see https://manifold.markets/GastonKessler/manifold-plays-hangman
(although this is not really strictly futarchy, since we are keying off of likelihood of successful letter, not win chance)
where's the best place to start reading up on futarchy?
Robin, can you write about forms of global governance sometime?
Here's an example of a way that someone (Joe) could easily subvert futarchy unless prevented by a constitution.
Joe offers a bill which states: "Joe receives dictatorial power, which he promises to use wisely. Also, if there are n people in the country, and person i held X_i conditional shares in this bill just before it was passed, that person receives C * (X_i - 1/n ∑j X_j) dollars." (where C is some constant). If this is negative the person is instead taxed that number of dollars, and the sum of taxes and gifts across all people equals 0 so it is theoretically feasible to do this.
Now, what's the value of a share in this bill? Most likely, giving Joe dictatorial power is bad (even if he promises to use it wisely). He might, for example, as his first act abolish futarchy entirely. So, without considering the second clause, the bill would decrease metrics of national welfare. But considering that the second clause directly rewards investors for betting on the bill, all Joe has to do is make C large enough, and it becomes rational to bet on the bill, because the direct reward granted in the bill outweighs your losses from the bet.
The only way to stop this would be to have a constitutional clause preventing bills from having direct rewards that are conditional on how many shares you held in it. A "no-self-reference" clause.
Note that this is different from your regular transfer problem because in this case the transfer actually increases the expected value of voting for the bill! And so, your amendment solution won't work; amendments that eliminate the second clause would rationally have a lower expected value. Amendments that eliminate the *first* clause would have a higher expected value, but then you're still left with a transfer that's harmful to societal welfare even though it's rational to bet on it.
I agree you don't want futarchy bills to be allowed to change the value of futarchy assets, nor other holdings of those who hole such assets.
While the peoples of the world will choose power from political parties, the majority will live in poverty, and under the threat of war or genocide. Elections with the participation of parties have nothing in common with democracy, it is a deception. Democracy is when the people choose power from the people, and there can be no participation of parties and organizations. Humanity can live 1000 times better without making any effort, but they do not know how to do it. We must realize that it is necessary to choose power only from the people themselves, and then it will be DEMOCRACY! The leadership of the state must be elected from the people by lot, in much the same way as in the USA the jury has been elected for hundreds of years. And immediately corruption, political parties, 90% taxes, wars, genocides and thousand-year murderous exploitation will disappear. What to do? Boycott elections with the participation of parties and force all your friends to do the same, and friends of their friends. As soon as the number of those boycotting and aware reaches 20% of the total population, the elections will not take place. And then the initiative group of voters must present to the public, certified by the signatures of citizens, a demand for a general referendum on changing the rules for holding elections. Changes - the government chooses the people only from the people themselves, without the participation of parties and organizations. Demonstrations, barricades, revolutions and violence are not needed! Only the confidence of each person is needed, what he MUST do, if he is a Human. The first political parties appeared in history only in the last 5-6 thousand years. Parties were created by ancient bandits after the capture of trading cities, with the purpose of organizing FICTITIOUS democratic elections. Of course, all the parties of the city consisted of bandits and renegade merchants. These were organized groups consisting of professional robbers. Since then, all the dishonest, ambitious, thirsty for glory, power and royal life, inexorably and irresistibly go into politics. It doesn't matter if they are right, left, religious or obsessive, they are 100% ambitious swindlers and crooks. This masochistic feeblemindedness of humanity is unbearable, it cannot be tolerated for a second, and we have been living like this since the advent of civilization. And our laws, norms and morals are from bandits, and we think like bandits! And by the way, even the wretched AI understood and accepted the proposal to elect people by lot and immediately presented its machine opinion on the benefit and rationality of my proposal. Will you understand? I doubt it.
> constitutional limits seem to just prevent futarchy from achieving its desired ends.
There's an elephant in the room. There are two ways to win at futarchy: (1) Bet on policies that, if followed, improve the existing metric or result in transfer of value to you. (2) Bet on policies that, if followed, make rule changes to the futarchy process itself in a way that favors your faction.
We can think of (2) as the "meta transfer problem." It's more serious than the ordinary transfer problem, because it corrupts the futarchy process itself. In its extreme, a faction could bet on a bill that grants that faction dictatorial power over everything, at which point the faction would abolish futarchy and take whatever money and power they wish. If the faction has enough money to drive the market - coupled with, perhaps, enough popular support - then they could manipulate the share price of their bill enough to get it passed. At which point, game over.
Constitutional limits would be an important safeguard against (2).
There are also less extreme types of (2), short of full dictatorial takeover (but a possible prelude to it). For instance, a faction could promote policies that would put faction members in charge of judging the metric. Those faction members could then judge it in a way that favors the faction. Policies like this could be disguised as legitimate improvements to the judging process. The faction would argue that they want X group of people to judge, which they claim is not because X group of people are disproportionately faction members (though they are), but for other more respectable reasons. (We see this a lot in US politics with regard to who gets to vote, how easily they get to vote, and how much their vote counts.)
Not to keep harping on this, but I think my post on futarchy of mutating preferences is even more relevant to this post than the last one. The "to the extent that it would have different goals" is key: If a payment to a futarchy (either in money or in some other currency the futarchy values like near-term goal achievement) is made conditional on a change to the futarchy's own utility function, as long as the change is bounded by the value of the amount transferred, then it seems likely that the futarchy would make the change. This seems like a destabilizing but interesting avenue for carrying out negotiations with the futarchy.