The Democratic Game (draft)

In this website, we refer to as game any system where different parties (humans and fictitious entities) can participate. Goals are given to each party (potentially different), and each party can act within a predefined set of rules.

Our analysis makes the assumption that all decisions should be grounded in facts and science—which may seem obvious, but

Values vs. Ideologies

A person's values are what they care about and to a large degree, equate with their own happiness. In a way, it's a description of the ideal life the person would like to have. It can be described from an individual perspective, though it can involve others. Example:

In my ideal life, all my basic material needs are met. I am allowed to express myself freely but peacefully, to marry the adult I want, and will not be discriminated against.

A person's ideology is their idea of how to structure society in order to achieve these values. It's more of a concrete plan, and can be though of as a set of policies to empower those values.

To achieve this dream, the ideal country needs a taxation system which redistributes wealth to poorer people, laws that defend free speech and prohibit violent behavior, recognition of LGBT+ marriages, a governance system that prohibits power abuse and corruption.

TL;DR Value is what, ideology/policy is how.

The Ideal Democracy

In the democratic game, the candidate who maximizes the voters' preferences is chosen during presidential elections. Which means, people get to decide for themselves which candidate is best for the country, in terms of their own needs (emotional need and values) as well.

For a well-working democracy, voters need some pre-requisites:

Value self-awareness. The most important thing is for voters to know what they need and want. That is, what their values are. If it's unclear to them what they stand for, they might be easily influenced to believe they need or don't need certain things.
Accurate information. Voters need to know where to find accurate information, who to trust, how to check facts and be critical of the sources. This is nontrivial, especially on social media where it's harder to check facts, and where many forces are trying to influence the masses.
Logical thinking. Voters need to be trained for rigorous and logical thinking–they must know how to reason rationally about the different issues and avoid the many <a =ref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies">logical fallacies that can sound convincing without closer inspection. Perhaps one of the most famous ones are syllogisms.
Policy training. Even with accurate information and good logical thinking skills, voters need some basic policy training. Some subjects are very complex, and a retrospective analysis of past policies will give a better understanding of the impacts of new policies on society. Implementing universal basic income is quite controversial even among academics (who have accurate information and can do logical thinking)—the only way to know if it's really a good solution for wealth redistribution is to gather more policy experience in the form of tests and smaller-scale experiments.

When Voters don't have all the pre-requisites.

When the voter does not have all pre-requisites, they may take suboptimal voting decisions with respect to empowering their own values–the democracy might not function optimally.

If voters don't know what their values are, they can hardly know what ideology they stand for. If you don't know what you want, why would you know how to get it?
If voters aren't sure what their values are, they might be easier influenced to make voting decisions which are actually detrimental to their very own values.
If voters don't have factually accurate information and/or don't know how to fact check, they will not be able to make the best voting decisions.
If voters lack logical reasoning training/skills they will tend to believe rhetorical fallacies and empty speeches (it sounds true so it must be true, I can't know for sure anyways). They may take counter-productive voting decisions.
Even if voters know their values, their facts, and possess logical reasoning abilities, societies and states are such complex systems that it's easy to wrongly estimate the effect of policies, and fall for suboptimal policies/ideologies (with respect to the voter's values). A basic training in policy analysis, which is the field that studies the effects of various policies, could help voters better align their voting decisions with their values.

Now, what happens if voters don't want to, or cannot fullfill those prerequisites? Maybe they didn't go to school, or many they "don't care about politics", or maybe they think "all politicians are liars", or they think science and rational thinking are just one ideology like any other?

They will probably either 1. follow their raw intuition and their guts, or 2. "give" their vote to someone they trust.

Notes

So, instead of the democratic ideal of everyone making the best rational choice for themselves, it's a mix between that and picking the most popular candidate. Therefore the election results can become more a matter of who uses logical thinking vs. pure raw intuition, and then winning the second group over. Is it a good idea to have a "policy-analysis coach"/"vote educator" available? Or would that be too much potential for hacking?

The president is supposed to be the candidate which satisfies the maximum amount of citizens -> so the opinions of the minorities are purely discarded. -> so it's only for the citizens (exluding completely non-citizens).

Actually, the media can make it better for the minorities by amplifying their needs through (social) media. -> so the majority of people hear more about those issues, creating awareness, and hopefully, rational thinking about that issue, leading to a small adjustment of voting preferences for the future. -> but there again, it becomes a popularity contest of winning (media) attention.

Campaigns that trigger strong emotions (nationalism is perfectly on point), will tend to be more viral. -> nationalists are more at risk because anything that touches on the national pride (looking at you China) creates stronger emotional reaction. -> that tended to backfire with anti-Japanese sentiment in China, when protestors started vandalizing japanese cars and companies. eventually the troops were sent

So anyways, you have your solution for fixing democracies. -> Educate people in the most critical thinking way possible, no "doublespeak" (1984) or gut feeling decisions, but rational reflexes and instincts in the simplest way, one after another, in a way that they can better tell if anyone is lying to them or just very likable but without a program that actually benefits them. -> Sufficiently educated people must keep the government accountable and in check, with actual separation of powers. Their actions must be aligned with the democratic intent. -> Develop people's empathy, so that people across the political spectrum can at least understand each other at an intellectual and intuitive level (instead of misunderstanding, fear, and anger). But more importantly, this ensures people's values remain sufficiently aligned with "the greater good". -> Having quality news media with adequate funding to prevent them from disappearing under capitalism.

Journalism in australia.

listen more to each other with an open mind instead of feeling anger and fear (looking at you, the Internet! you destabilized democracy as we know it.) And then, you'll try to work out a solution that satisfies the most people.

Could we have a form of cyber-democracy? Or would it make it even worse? If people could write or modify new law propositions, and people could comment, upvote or downvote them. The question is, would the government be like stackoverflow (good and usefulf) or reddit (a mix of good and useful with just random stuff to waste your time) ?

You know what else makes people more angry than average? Driving in traffic.

Social media is so much worse -> instead of reaching everyone, ideas only reach those with similar ideologies, creating a dynamic of ideological clusters (echo chambers), which will tend to gravitate towards stronger beliefs, since stronger emotions gather more sentiment. This is not usually a problem at the scale of a country, when there's only one cluster.

With a populist approach, they grab your attention on issues of:

unfairness
fear of losing something (craving), aversion

Not all populist candidates are bad. I think given the current implementation of democracy, it's only fair game to get the other half of intuitive voters.

Don't you think it's crazy citizens tend to treat each other decently, but when it comes to other countries, especially non-allies, geopolitics is played much like a chess game? Like, sure, be nicer to your "allies". But when it comes to "ennemies". The geopolitical game is brutal. It's pretty much – "there's no rules!". Make up your own, only if you will. That means wars is on the table, potentially with mass-scale violence and killings.But now, if you have that inside a nation-state, then you pretty much have a civil war.

Why can't the world just be a giant state? And then there would be no wars. The problem is that all these people and territories can't agree on a common ideology. If they could, wouldn't they just?

Question: If your citizens don't pay you taxes, can you still consider yourself a (federal) government? Are their alternative modes of governance (digital?)

HOW TO DEFINE TRUTH? Can truth we defined mathematically? Science needs to be a value. Anything science is one that can either be proved to be true, or a least a good model by showing that many predictions can be true. -> Don't pick a tiny test set though! That's what anecdotes are no? Cherry-picked example individuals or individual examples to serve an alternative rhetoric. Essentially adversarial example.

For pure facts, the answer is easy, and it is science. But for values, it seems extremely hard to define values (or is it?). What we have to be careful is not to let the leaders only define value, otherwise this top-down approach will lead to a totalitarian communist-style regime. Democracies at least create checks and balances (feedback loop) so that citizens have contorls over their leaders. Divide an conquer. Ensure fair competition between candidates, but also among the electorate.

Explore list of personal core values: https://scottjeffrey.com/core-values-list/

Company core values. https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-core-values.html

How to define the truth? Logical truth is when things follow the laws of logic, based on facts. Good journalism should verify facts and present them in context using the laws of logic. How biased can the context better?

An interesting exercise would be to try to guess which values each media article tries to promote.

Example values:

Loyalty Spirituality Humility Compassion Honesty Kindness Integrity Selflessness Determination Generosity Courage Tolerance Trustworthiness Equanimity Altruism Appreciation Empathy Toughness Self-Reliance Attentiveness

https://www.nirandfar.com/addiction/ about addiction What mattered more than how the patients felt physically was their level of what the researchers call “distress intolerance,” a measure of how much “fear and anxiety at the prospect of physical or emotional distress” the patients felt. Their inability to handle their fear of pain was a greater factor correlating with drug addiction than the pain they actually experienced.

https://www.nirandfar.com/your-new-years-resolution-is-bound-to/

Minimum Enjoyable Action: example: floss one tooth. "duh test"

Capitalism: trust the consumer. But that doesn't work. The consumer doesn;'t know always what's best for themselves, starting from ...

Who should decide the values?

What are the checks and balances of companies? Only money. But consumers allocate their money (thus, power and resources by proxy) after being influenced by marketing. That's why limiting marketing is a necessary step for a fair environment, otherwise companies which value profit the most, with little to no core values,

I top-down approach would be catastrophic!

A well-functioning state should promote: -> important values of compassion and love to its candidates [the only right intrinsic meta-ideology. does that make sens or there's no mathematical description of the best values and ideology???] -> rational thinking skills and ability to explain that logic in simple terms -> populism training. Or maybe not. Maybe it should have the most boring candidates? Nah! Nobody would care about politics then. Candidates need to take a mandatory "explain to me like I'm 5" training, and should be held as accountable of their actions as possible.

Can one compute the optimal ideology for the world? -> Crazy idea. If right now, we made up a system where every person in the world could explain their needs to an algorithm, vote and choose to repartition the earth

Egoisme? My way is the best way? Individualistic humanist? You let your it drift. Feels nice. But will it go somewhere "good"? -> and again, can we define "good" mathematically? of course not. but is there a minimal set of values, from which one can reconstruct the optimal strategy for this world? probably?

The Humanist Ideology: -> every life (what's dead, euthanasia issues?) of a human (pretty hard to negociate, unless you're a hardcore racist nowadays) is worth the same (how do you define these–abortion issues?) ? -> the opinion of everyone is the optimal rational choice for themselves (true only to various degrees).

Democracy shortcomings: -> Promotes selfishness. everyone can just vote in their self-interest. that tends to be the natural reaction if acting as a selfish economical agent, which is typically what the economists assume. if the US fixed their values of selfishness maybe things would be better?

We need to promote more love and empathy. Drugs are a debatable way of doing that, preferably through a legal route. Imagine medecine that would increase your sense of empathy, like by boosting your serotonine levels, but without any detrimental side-effects and without addiction potential. Otherwise, there are many: culture (and I mean real culture, living with people and understanding their values at the most intuitive level, not the bullshit you experience on vacation)

Promote the correct gut-feeling about what's true and what's untrue. Just like this author (ask JP again about him) is trying to convey intuition on the scale of changes to climate,

For a second, I had the thought that a "fact translator/checker" would only appeal the the already reational people, whether it will appeal to the intuitive voters boils down again to a question of marketing.

Are states just literally geographical and ideological clusters? When the two partinionings overlap or disagree, that might lead to interesting movements of division or merging.

Why couldn't it just be a let's be good neighbors game instead?

Things like "White Lives Matter" which catalyze on the sentiment that one is left out in their own country, creates a sense of unfairness and a strong emotional reaction. Videos of the movement become viral. And there you go, you have your electorate for the next elections.

Who has self-interests in mass-manipulation of opinions, values, worldviews and ideologies?

candidates, for more votes in order to win the election
private companies, for more profit

Is it wrong to do some marketing with a rational candidate? Why does it always feel like the right wing is against the poorest people?

The problem is that less educated are worse at making an educated guess

Good values must use the same tools as the evil. Marketing. Led by money.

which has the core value that the maximum amount of citizens (problems?) must be satisfied (see already the problem here, minorities will be fucked), the candidates must play a popularity (problem?) contest (problem or good?).

School: pure ego training. Work: pure ego use. Family: id, ego, superego.

Superego = the dad?

Published on 2022-02-24 by Gabriel Huang