Can 'Dumb' Voters Destroy Constitutional Direct Democracy?
Addressing another criticism
I think one of the greatest and most common ‘retorts’ I see to Constitutional Direct Democracy (CDD) is that it will be flooded with ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’ voters.
Now, I’m a realist. I believe any system should be able to survive, to the best of ability, any adversarial attacks. This includes the classic ‘dumb’ voter.
Let us be frank here: there is no system of government operated by ‘idiots’ that can survive the ‘idiots’ themselves.
A representative democracy will elect people from the ‘idiot pool’. A meritocracy system will be gamed, modified and manipulated by ‘idiots’ where the things of ‘merit’ will be how many idiot points you score on your virtue signalling session (assuming they don’t just burn it down with violence first). A dictatorship will be staffed with ‘idiots’ (leading to the classic cry ‘Imbeciles! All of you are imbeciles!’ as the dictator shakes his fist angrily).
The Feedback Model
At first it seems hopeless, every system is doomed to this horrible, spiralling-the-drain idiocracy. We can turn our attention to how AI and neural network systems learn in order to find the answer.
Rather than see the public as one, specific individual, see them as one giant brain, and each person an individual neuron that fires either ‘true’ or ‘false’ based on their own weighted threshold.
Neural networks (NN) - a sort of crude model of the human brain in mathematical formulas - when they first start out on any task, are usually laughably dumb. NN-Controlled Mario will keep jumping into the pit in a video game, even though a 4-year old child can navigate over it with relative ease in comparison.
Eventually, through enough mistakes (and this is the crucial part of the analogy), the AI, the neural net learns from their mistakes. They don’t stay stupid; they eventually learn. And when they do, the AI not only completes the game, but eventually goes on to achieve superhuman feats because it tries such absurd and ridiculous ideas that turn out to work.
In my mind there are two ways a person can learn: they can either think very carefully about a problem, imagine countless scenarios on how it could go wrong (like we’re doing here) and try to formulate a decent conclusion and solution, or they can ignore all evidence, bash heads with reality until reality wins and they either learn or they kill themselves in the process.
Self-Selection
One of the algorithms more basic AI use is evolutionary networks, which, to save time and avoid jargon, involves the elimination of any AI that does not achieve goals successfully.
If a group of people are so incredibly dumb that they vote in a CDD policy that results in their destruction… that’s actually CDD working correctly. They, for all intents and purposes, died by their own hand. No-one forced it on them, they chose that path.
This means, CDD locales operated by smarter people will naturally survive and thrive, as dumber ones collapse and implode. Each CDD collective is essentially a ‘neural network’ that learns by trial and error, which each person acting as a ‘neural node’.
‘Idiots’ driving a CDD collective into the ground is a feature, not a bug. The problem with having even a “benevolent dictatorship” that tries to ‘save the stupid people from themselves’ is either the stupid people will find a way to destroy themselves anyway (a waste of state resources), or their survival will be such they overwhelm and destroy the system.
The job of a government isn’t to protect stupid (and evil) people from screwing up. The job of a government is to provide people with the means to operate their society as freely and morally as possible. It is like a gun. Any idiot can wield a gun, and kill themselves with it. This does not mean a general ban on guns, as it deprives others. Imagine if you banned all pretzels because an idiot choked to death on one once. Absurd!
The True Hurdle: Writing Bills
The worst-case scenario sounds horrifying, but you’d agree it is the natural conclusion of idiotic policies in any government, and it is a thought experiment. In truth, CDD actually has a number of hurdles for even a suicidal ‘idiotic’ public to clear before it can even do that.
The first is the most difficult to achieve if you are technically and mentally challenged: writing foolproof, ironclad, technically detailed bills that don’t contain any loopholes or flaws that can be litigated against later or overridden.
I imagine you’d agree ‘idiots’ don’t have a strong grasp of how bill writing works, or how even reality itself functions. Which means any proposals they suggest will generally speaking, be impossible or impractical to implement, or outright uninterpretable nonsense. The dumb bills eliminate themselves.
Learning Opportunities
This even includes if they pass it. So let us say they pass the ‘Give Me Free Money act’. They would need to acquire the resources to make the notes, set up the printing system, the distribution network, deal with all the other idiots who declare they did not acquire their fair share, put someone in charge of this system.
I doubt they’d even get past the logistics stage, even if they somehow managed to work out how to use a money printer. But let us say by sheer brute force they did: they have to reap the consequences.
Hyperinflation, money becoming worthless, being unable to afford anything on their wages. They’re forced to spend time trying to work out how to rectify their own mistakes. They will be too busy setting themselves on fire to bother about anyone else.
Eventually, even the dullest of brains should comprehend what they did was a huge mistake. They may even eventually attempt to correct the ‘Give Me Free Money act’, or the system, by imploding, rectifies itself (no system, no free money).
Even In A Majority Idiot System, Smart People Can Still Succeed
One of the great aspects about this is smart people can succeed - arguably even more so - in CDD. Smart people will have the thoroughness and insight enough to draft detailed, complex bills that can actually work. Some smart people may even gain a reputation under this system for having good ideas.
You don’t have to play shallow ‘charm politics’ to succeed in CDD. Often, smart people lack the shallow, vapid charm of the unindebted psychopath and will not succeed in a representative model, after all, who better to represent idiots than another idiot?
However in a CDD, the thing up for consideration are the ideas, which is where smart people will succeed. So long as stupid people are unable to write and pass bills, and so long as smart people contribute new, insightful bills, even if the public were majority ‘idiots’, the system can still function.
The other advantage here is the system of merit is determined by how successful your bills actually are, and not how many IQ points you score on an arbitrary system. It is perfectly possible to be smart in a physics and engineering sense, but have zero idea how to run an economy. People’s sour experience of academia should be evidence of that.
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