At 06:56 PM 4/23/2010, Warren Smith wrote:
And, you may not have noticed what I said re humans were designed by
Darwin for smaller group sizes, e.g. tribes of a few 100 members, and
their notions of "rational" are designed for groups of those sizes. I
think a lot of behavior about sizes larger than that (such as a
country-wide election) can be understood roughly, by saying "humans do
stuff that'd be rational if it were size<300. The human inbuilt
pseudo-rationality
device basically can only count up to 200 and all populations>200 are
treated by it as 200."
Mind you, this is just my speculation. Can anybody see a way to prove
it? I can't.
I don't know about proof, but I do think that we are "designed" for
small-group decision-making. And thus my tendency is toward designing
systems that work on a small scale and then arranging structure so
that decisions are amalgamated through a hierarchy of "meetings" of
some kind, with each "meeting" being relatively small scale, the
people participating in it know and directly interact with each
other. And there is a lot of back-and-forth, not just a flow of
decision-making toward the center. That's what delegable proxy should
do, and Asset Voting would probably get there, too. People want
palpable influence and effect. It's what is largely missing on a
large scale that is present in small New England towns that have
direct democracy.
Amherst has a huge Town Meeting that isn't. It's a representative
assembly that is election on a very small district within the town,
several hundred of them. Bad idea. The meeting is famous for highly
contentious and drawn-out process, and it narrowly missed being
abolished in two recent votes. Not the way to do it!
Asset would be beautiful for Amherst, in fact. Elect a manageable
size of assembly, could be thirty, that would provide a great deal of
diversity in representation, and the electors could still vote on
issues if they wanted. (But not address the assembly or enter
motions.) (Elector voting, I'd predict, would only rarely make a
difference, and a roll call would have to be done for it, so that all
votes were specifically recorded.)
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