My futarchy paper, Shall We Vote on Values But Bet on Beliefs?, made public in 2000 but officially “published” in 2013, has gotten more attention lately as some folks talk about using it to govern blockchain organizations. In particular, Ralph Merkle (co-inventor of public key cryptography) has
Sometimes people will vote for things that are better than their values, though. I bet if you scanned the brained of the US congress that passed the Civil Rights act, the majority of them would have values that made racism make sense- but many of those same people voted for the Civil Rights act all the same.
It seems to me the way to test futarchy is to implement it in some organization. Right now, a handful of armchair theorists are speculating about how it might work. Much better is to put hundreds or thousands of people under its sway and set them to work using, exploiting, and finding loopholes in it.
Personally, if we are talking about getting futarchy actually implemented on political scales, I would be more comfortable with systems that approach futarchy itself incrementally, rather than trying their best to implement a form of futarchy that we think is safe right from the start (the DAO itself being a good example of why this is a good idea). So proposals that I would favor include things like making a constitutional amendment that says that a referendum needs 67% to pass instead of 50% if the markets say that major economic indicators will go down if the referendum goes through, and go from there. This way the markets themselves cannot fail in some unexpected spectacular way as the older systems still exist as a backstop.
Is the role of voting simply to make the content of our values evident, or is it a sort of politically sacred ritual whose value goes beyond its information-revealing power? I have no doubt that in the Athens of Pericles, you couldn't beat voting as a mechanism for revealing hoi polloi preferences. But we now know just how much votes and genuine preferences can diverge. Imagine (plausibly) that we develop a way of gauging the strength and direction of people's values, and that it was demonstrably more accurate than simple voting. In addition to voting, we constantly say and do things that reveal our values, so if we want our actual values to guide policy, it's irresponsible to just discard all this extra information about what we value, and simply count votes.
Imagine our democracy were such that we could vote for values at our leisure, even on topics that don't appear on ballots. One way to do so would be by simply making a post about what we value on Facebook or Reddit. Of course, there would be much more to the value-signal than just such posts, All of our value-revealings would count as mini-votes, and some algorithm would find the true value-signal in the noisy data we generate. It would make a best overall guess what we want, distinguishing that from what we're merely signaling we want, what we're only devils-advocating, what we're blurting out when hot-headed, and what we want to want but don't actually want. Messages sent directly to the value-estimating system that explicitly describe our values - if we choose to send these - would probably be an important part of the signal, but not the entirety. But the point is that everyone would be participating in the democracy, even those who don't explicitly take deliberate action to shape policy..
If this kind of "voting" were coupled with prediction-market policy generation, the whole sphere of politics would become so transparent it would effectively disappear. When I first imagined this I thought this would be a gross dystopia, but now i'm only 80% confident of that. Any thoughts on why this wouldn't be the logical upgrade to futarchy?
Thanks, it should be fixed now.
That link seems broken.
I have hopes to try and implement one in practice, just need to develop a webapp to do it (will be open source if I find the time).
Sometimes people will vote for things that are better than their values, though. I bet if you scanned the brained of the US congress that passed the Civil Rights act, the majority of them would have values that made racism make sense- but many of those same people voted for the Civil Rights act all the same.
Yes of course, but such volunteers have yet to be found.
Yes of course, incremental implementation usually works best.
It seems to me the way to test futarchy is to implement it in some organization. Right now, a handful of armchair theorists are speculating about how it might work. Much better is to put hundreds or thousands of people under its sway and set them to work using, exploiting, and finding loopholes in it.
Personally, if we are talking about getting futarchy actually implemented on political scales, I would be more comfortable with systems that approach futarchy itself incrementally, rather than trying their best to implement a form of futarchy that we think is safe right from the start (the DAO itself being a good example of why this is a good idea). So proposals that I would favor include things like making a constitutional amendment that says that a referendum needs 67% to pass instead of 50% if the markets say that major economic indicators will go down if the referendum goes through, and go from there. This way the markets themselves cannot fail in some unexpected spectacular way as the older systems still exist as a backstop.
Is the role of voting simply to make the content of our values evident, or is it a sort of politically sacred ritual whose value goes beyond its information-revealing power? I have no doubt that in the Athens of Pericles, you couldn't beat voting as a mechanism for revealing hoi polloi preferences. But we now know just how much votes and genuine preferences can diverge. Imagine (plausibly) that we develop a way of gauging the strength and direction of people's values, and that it was demonstrably more accurate than simple voting. In addition to voting, we constantly say and do things that reveal our values, so if we want our actual values to guide policy, it's irresponsible to just discard all this extra information about what we value, and simply count votes.
Imagine our democracy were such that we could vote for values at our leisure, even on topics that don't appear on ballots. One way to do so would be by simply making a post about what we value on Facebook or Reddit. Of course, there would be much more to the value-signal than just such posts, All of our value-revealings would count as mini-votes, and some algorithm would find the true value-signal in the noisy data we generate. It would make a best overall guess what we want, distinguishing that from what we're merely signaling we want, what we're only devils-advocating, what we're blurting out when hot-headed, and what we want to want but don't actually want. Messages sent directly to the value-estimating system that explicitly describe our values - if we choose to send these - would probably be an important part of the signal, but not the entirety. But the point is that everyone would be participating in the democracy, even those who don't explicitly take deliberate action to shape policy..
If this kind of "voting" were coupled with prediction-market policy generation, the whole sphere of politics would become so transparent it would effectively disappear. When I first imagined this I thought this would be a gross dystopia, but now i'm only 80% confident of that. Any thoughts on why this wouldn't be the logical upgrade to futarchy?
Retroactively evaluating the goodness of a year and its policies sounds a bit like predictocracy.