[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[Steve Smith]

Well stated Jon, Well pivoted Glen... 

I'd challenge us to go further and reconsider/rethink how "Democracy" in
all it's recognizable forms is only a weak attempt at achieving more
fundamental goals/constraints of ??? (fairness, egalatarianism,
inclusiveness, diversity, liberty, ???).   

We, of course, are a Democratic Republic (modulo electoral college,
gerrymandering, voter suppression, widespread disinformation, direct
voter fraud) rather than a direct Democracy.   Interesting the current
dominant (exclusive duopoly?)

Worst form of governance
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_democracy>

Tyranny of the majority
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority#:~:text=While%20the%20specific%20phrase%20%22tyranny,a%20single%20unicameral%20elected%20body.>

Seems to reference our discussions of the canonical nearly-decomposable
hierarchy, cohesion and coupling between identity-groups or
special-interest-groups, etc.

I cannot put my hands/eyes on the Ben Franklin quote I remember from
reading his Autobiography (inherited from my Grandfather through my
Father who likely never read it) some 20 years ago.

Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
<https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm>

A search yields no use of the term "faction" in the Pr. Gutenberg text
above...  I suspect he used another term which I transmogrified into
"faction", or maybe I made the whole thing up, but I remember him
offering a nice tension around the temporary aligning of factions to
respond to a given challenge followed by a dissolution of those factions
to allow for a re-alignment into new factions to meet new and different
challenges.  

Self-organization galore?

- Seize


On 8/20/20 3:31 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> The only plausible answer to this is the acceptance of a satisficing rule, a tolerance for error/uncertainty. That's what allows us to trust the USPS, which is simultaneously cursed by individuals on a regular basis, yet one of the most trusted institutions in place. All this election integrity hooha centers around quantitative confidence and perfection.
>
> But our first past the post system consistently tightens up our *intolerance* for uncertainty/error. That's the change that needs to be made first. As long as our elections are winner-takes-all and based on 50/50 thresholds, technology can't help us. Technology will simply kick the can down the road, leaving the main problem unaddressed. I.e. your billion dollar projects will largely be a waste of money, perhaps resulting in a Star Wars quality spinoff machine, but not solving the targeted objective.
>
> The first actionable steps are being taken. Ranked choice voting is steadily being adopted. It's also *not* a panacea. But at least it targets the disease, rather than the symptoms.
>
> On 8/19/20 10:06 PM, jon zingale wrote:
>> Eric,
>>
>> Yes, what are the next actionable steps? In an upstream post I wrote:
>>
>> "Maybe a little flippantly and without dragging this entire post into design
>> details, the voting app needs little more than a Facebook like-button, a
>> Redis
>> server, authentication, and a light-weight rest API. If the idea were to be
>> taken
>> seriously, such an app could be written starting now for an election in four
>> years. It could be tested and verified by a trusted agency, like the NSA."
>>
>> While the preceding quote effectively gets at the idea, I will further spill
>> e-ink in the hopes of saying something practical, but first... Given the
>> power
>> to do so, I might try redirecting a hundred billion dollars from next year's
>> military budget towards collaboration between big tech and government. The
>> acceptance criteria would include public access to the code and the platform
>> would be subjected to a week-long national hack-a-thon, complete with
>> outrageous
>> prizes and awards. Since this fantasy risks getting to far-out, let me reel
>> things
>> back a bit.
>>
>> Let me begin with a mission statement: Our goal is to introduce a trusted,
>> reliable and secure digital voting option for U.S. elections. Determining a
>> metric for success will require identifying: the scale of the project (city,
>> state, nation)[1], collaborators with diverse skill sets and talents[2], the
>> strengths and weaknesses of the current voting options[3], the
>> state-of-the-art
>> for digital application design[4].
>>
>> [1] Selecting an appropriate scale for the project will be crucial to the
>> adoption of the application. A full-blown application backed by industry and
>> government organizations (with lobbyists in D.C.) could easily find adoption
>> at
>> the national level. Since the sole collaborators maybe just you and I, we
>> may
>> wish to start small, targeting the city level. Planning for this latter
>> case, let's
>> be prepared to scale if excitement around the program builds. Perhaps
>> borrowing
>> from or explicitly using a crowd-sourcing model would be good, extending to
>> the
>> state or national level manifesting as explicit *stretch goals*. Getting one
>> or
>> a few city contracts for our application may be just profitable enough to
>> bootstrap the process.
>>
>> [2] The program will benefit greatly from the help of a diverse talent pool.
>> We will need to design, build, test, and maintain the application. I
>> advocate
>> for seeking out individuals versed in building scalable critical
>> applications
>> and encouraging a transparent open-source development process. I foresee a
>> role
>> for trolls and white-hat hackers as it will be important to stress test and
>> subject the application to *our worst*. We will need philosophers, critics,
>> and
>> trouble-finders all along the development process. That said, impossibility
>> *proofs* ought to be taken with a grain of salt. We will need to lobby,
>> campaign,
>> and rouse excitement for the adoption of our application. It would be good
>> to
>> inspire competition because another group may just do it better, and
>> ultimately
>> this is what we want. It will be good to attract individuals that have a
>> history
>> with and have succeeded in: affecting policy, building grassroots movements,
>> and
>> selling the moon. It might be good to work with a business incubator or
>> apply for
>> an SBIR grant.
>>
>> [3] You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to
>> run
>> faster than the guy next to you. By studying the integrity of the voting
>> systems
>> presently in use, we can know where to set the bar for success. For
>> instance,
>> that the meaning of the postal service is being over-loaded in the 2020
>> election
>> strikes me as a notable risk and a potential point of failure. Our
>> application
>> should be expected to do *just one thing*, and ideally the projects future
>> funding will be promised independent of political influence.
>>
>> [4] As mentioned in the upstream posts, large scale web-based applications
>> are
>> here: the FBI-Apple encryption dispute, 20M concurrent Steam users, 1-click
>> shopping, etc... Our application doesn't need to be very fancy and it would
>> be
>> good to avoid failing like the Iowa caucus. We don't need a *big reveal* on
>> election night and then to impress the world as it flies along flawlessly.
>> The
>> opposite is needed. By the time the application is in production, it should
>> be
>> road-worn and rugged, the code probed and debated thoroughly on stack
>> overflow
>> and subreddits. This will not be the time or place for proprietary and
>> opaque
>> black boxes. The tech can be as impenetrable as an iPhone, as packet hungry
>> as
>> a Steam server and as intuitive as drunk shopping at 2 am on Amazon. The
>> time
>> period allowed the application should mimic mail-in voting rather than the
>> polls.
>> Votes could be validated slowly if need be. Perhaps, this may be one of the
>> only
>> reasonable applications for a block-chain protocol?
>>
>> Jon
>
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