The case for flux full transcript - max kaye

Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq25UXc_ONg

The case for Flux - Max Kaye 2017

Okay so thanks for coming along tonight. I was thinking tonight would be good to basically cover the case for flux and sort of explaining IBDD and things like that because we haven't had a good explainer video since we moved to IBDD from our previous system two years ago; and so that's what this is about. The idea is that we want to essentially cover all the groundwork that we need to in order to understand the philosophy behind our IBDD and why we think that it holds so much potential. So hopefully at the end of this I can convince you that issue based direct democracy is a really really good thing and that it's the future. So tonight is organizing the five main parts; there's a little bit of an intro and then I want to talk through a bit about democracy as it stands now and identify some of the problems as well as to talk through some of the explanations for why those are problems. So the first part is basically the winning strategy at democracy today. The second part is about something called the selectorate theory of political power and that is a way of explaining the behavior of people within politics from first principles that accounts for pretty much all the bad stuff they do and why they do bad things. Then take a quick break for any questions, then we'll look at the idea of fallibilism and consistently improving policy. You can think of this sort of like the way that science continues to improve but we're going to look at it from a far more fundamental level. then if there's any more questions after that we'll have a look at those. And finally the last two sections are an economic primer; very short, just to cover enough to understand issue-based democracy and then we'll get into the meat of IBBD and why it's so great.

So I guess through this journey of flux and a little bit Florida as well, I became convinced that we were going to encounter a new model of democracy very soon. Now it might not be an IBBD, it could be something else but this global democracy would be so I guess prosperous for its people that it would be impossible not to adopt. And these are some of the things, some of the properties I think it will have. So the first is that it will bias truth instead of popularity, something that we don't do today. The second is that minorities won't need permission in order to improve their own lives. So the idea is that basically if we had a system like that then we can scale to populations of any size and we don't have this problem of small groups being oppressed or things like this. And finally that it works so well that we barely even notice it. The philosophy democracy just from I guess this is quite a simplification that basically democracy is a way of making social decisions. And the problem with it or one of the main problems with it is that we haven't designed democracy to bias truth. It you know does this weird thing called ‘the will of the people’ and it's never really well-defined but basically that's what all of our thinking about democracy has been centered around. And that means that democracy wasn't designed to make good decisions and so we shouldn't necessarily expect that it makes good decisions. And I think this basically you know puts forward the - economy. Do you want a democracy that biases the will of the people or do you want a democracy that consistently makes good decisions even if most people disagree with it? And I think these two are you know mutually exclusive, either you make decisions based on the will of the people that have mistakes you could have avoided if you just had you know if we already know how to avoid rather or you make good decisions and you only make the mistakes that we don't know how to avoid. And so I think these two things you've got to choose one of the other or maybe there's a third option but you can't have both. The designers democracy up till now I think that made two very broad mistakes. And those mistakes are disregarding the mechanics of power within a democracy; this is power as it as it works universally and they're disregarding the role of new knowledge in prosperity progress in policy.

These are as you may guess our next two topics but we'll take a bit of a detour just first. So the first thing is how to win at democracy? This is a very simple scenario we've just got three people they all want a particular democracy, they all a particular policy; we're going to look at direct democracy just to keep things simple but you can extrapolate this to any sort of democracy. And our three people in this case are Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice wants all cars to be yellow, Bob doesn't want any cars to be yellow and Charlie just really hates -. Now charlie is a bit of a practical guy; anything if I don't make a deal, if I don't swap my votes with other people then I can't be sure my policy is going to pass. However if I can create a sort of alliance with someone and they vote for my thing and I vote for theirs then I can ensure that my policy passes and because I don't care about cars I may as well go with that. So here's Alice, Bob and Charlie; Charlie says hey does anyone want to trade votes, you vote for my policy not up yours? Alice is quite model in this case and you know just think that's outright wrong but Charlie says yeah okay we'll do it. Now as you may guess, this is how the first ballot goes where two-thirds vote for no cards being yellow and as you may also a guest in this case - in our band which maybe is okay. But the problem here is not the - are band, the problem is that every other decision is also going to be split into two-thirds and one-thirds. And what happened here was that basically Bob and Charlie just invented a political party and they permanently excluded Alice and they now have exclusive power. So notice here that nowhere in any of this have we actually talked about what's right or wrong or good or bad or anything else. All we've talked about is just the dynamics of what does someone who wants something to happen do in a democracy. And what we learn is that basically the biggest strategy, the optimum strategy is to be the biggest group. This isn't that surprising, we work in a majoritarian system now and things like that. You want a majority because you want to pass your policy. The other two point clear is that there's no penalty for corruption at any stage. There's no negative for Bob and Charlie making this alliance and there's no opportunity cost between issues. Neither of them had any loss from the way that they participated with each other. It was in fact they only had gains and so what we've got now is that we've got a system that doesn't penalize bad behavior at all. And we’re gonna come back to the idea of opportunity cost later on when we get into the economic stuff.

So what's the evil here? What's the part of this that was-- what part of this caused the problem that we saw? Because it wasn't you know the people's policy they wanted, it wasn't that money was in politics; you know whatever - happened here it was quite pure and core to our previous ideas of democracy. And so my suspicion is that basically static majoritarianism is the biggest evil in democracy. The idea of having one party or one group have a majority on every issue and we can't do anything until you know say another three or four years when we have another election and things like that. And so that in my opinion is the biggest evil in democracy. Now generally speaking majoritarianism suppresses criticism. It's based around the idea of exclusion and it makes the suggestion of new ideas and exclusive privilege. Now if we're one of the system that selected good ideas these seem like bad things to have. I've included this slide mostly for the liquid democracy part but basically all of representative democracy, direct democracy, liquid democracy; they're all static majoritarianism. Is liquid democracy has a little bit of you know I guess an upper hand because you could redelegate during a period. But basically you end up with a set of voters, they vote the same way the entire time and you can't do anything about it. So if we want to solve this problem we're not going to be able to look at all the old ways of doing democracy. We're going to have to come up with something new because we're not going to find new solutions in old answers.

So what do we do about it? So there are two parts to understanding this; first is power and the second is knowledge. Power because obviously it plays a big role in politics and knowledge because we're concerned with good policy. So part two is about this selectorate theory; there's an excellent summary on YouTube called rules for rules by a guy called CGP Grey; about 20 minutes long, highly recommend it. So what we're going to look at is how power acts on rulers, so opposed to how rulers use power just what effect does having power have on a ruler. So congratulations you are our volunteer you're the new monarch or overlord dictator or all that sort of stuff; and here's...and here's your cake, congratulations. Now your first goal as supreme overlord is to keep being supreme overlord. Because obviously if you don't do that then you will have nothing and you will be able to change nothing and it will be a waste of time. And because you're an overlord and not a prime minister you'll probably end up dead which is bad. So the problems that you have is that in order to keep saying you know supreme overlord you've got to do a lot of stuff but you can't do that alone. You know you need allies and the only advantage that you have there is that you control the treasurer. How much this is, maybe it's oil fields if you're a dictator whatever but the treasurer that's yours to control.

And so the first rule is you need to get the key supporters on your side. No man rules alone and you need someone to build roads and hospitals and oil fields and you know manage the police and the military and things like that. So you need to find key supporters and you probably find them you know where they're waiting for you after they deposed the you know whoever was your predecessor. So without them, without your key supporters or keys; you can't do anything and if you don't satisfy them then they're just going to replace you. So what you need to do then is basically to well maintain the keys, acquire the keys and what you need to do that with is the treasure. So the second rule is controlling the treasure, is only you can raise the treasure through tax or you know theft or whatever else and you need to pay that in part to your keys to keep them loyal. And then you can use your keys to raise more treasure and this cycle continues. But this is basically the if you had a dictatorship based on gold this is basically the structure. Cause you got some of the mined gold; someone to you know wield the guns and that's it and then they you know just keep cycling like that. So the problem here is that if you control the treasure you attract rivals. If you had the idea at this point that okay I've got this big trove of treasure and I want to do something nice with it like build schools or roads or hospitals and things like that; the problem is that you're not spending it on your keys. And the problem with not spending it on your keys is that someone else can come along and basically say I’ll like talking to the key I'll give you more treasure if you swap sides and you support me in you know the upcoming….

And so if we're talking about dictatorships in this sort of position then they are required, it doesn't matter how you know how pure of heart the person is. They are required to spend money in this way in order to stay in power. Because again if they don't stay in power then someone more tyrannical will come and take it from them. And so basically you're forced to do this, there's no way out of it. The other problem is that all of your key supporters have the same problem is that you know you are their income and they have to redistribute their treasure to their supporters and so on; you know all the way down the line peasants are you know off to the side here somewhere they're not really not part of this graph. But because being the key to power is a position of power you've got the same problem that any person in a position of power has and so you're incentivized to raise as much treasure as you can which means you're incentivized to support the leader who's going to pay you as much treasure as they will. And so you can't spend it altruistically, you're still forced into the same thing and we have this all the way down the - graph we have this same phenomenon. Now if you have too many keys then as you might acquire over time the problem is that you're giving less treasure to each key. And if you wanted to maximize loyalty, splitting the treasure up a lot isn't a good plan. So the only option is to eliminate the keys that aren't useful and in...maybe you kill them, maybe a nice and you just exile them or something like that. So rule three is you need to minimize your keys, you need as few key supporters as possible, you need them to be as loyal as possible and that's what makes it as difficult as possible for someone else to come and take power from you.

So just to recap, coups for dummies; is your dictator weak, are you in a position of power then you might be interested in a coup. Step 1: promise all the key supporters more treasure if they support you. Step 2: use their power overthrew the dictator. Step 3: eliminate the useless keys even if they supported you. And this is basically the recipe for every coup, this is why you know revolutionaries who take power end up turning on comrades who supported them and then end up allying themselves with some of the key supporters of the old dictator and so on and so on. You can't get out of this cycle for the reasons we've already talked about. If you try to you know be altruistic and spend it on all nice stuff then someone else is just going to take that back from you. So the moral of the story here is that power requires corruption; is that you cannot have power without being corrupt for all of these reasons. But you might think democracy offers a way out. However democracies are really not that different; so you still need key supporters in the case of you being a leader of a party that would be other MPs, you'll need groups of citizens to get you elected, highly influential people like Rupert Murdoch and definitely you know Rupert Murdoch can you know throw some bones your way. And basically you need to maintain your key supporters in the same fashion. The other things you can do is make it harder for other people's key supporters to vote. You can make it easier to win elections by changing the electoral system; you can gerrymander and draw a favorable electoral boundaries; you can ensure that your - has complex pre-selection protocols so that you're always the candidate things like that. And so you can use the same tactics and the same sorts of rewards in the same way to remain in power.

Now to touch on the idea of the selectorate, the groups that you need to convince to support you they're called the selector. And so it's a combination, it's a smaller part of the selectorate, you can approximate it with swing voters but it might be a bit larger or smaller. And basically if 40% of the people always vote left and 40% always vote right then there's no incentive to offer them anything. And all of the you know treasure that you have access to you can offer to these swing voters to get them to vote for you and continue to win elections and so on. So satisfying keys in a democracy is pretty straightforward although you can't give them bribes or eliminate people; you can give them favorable legislation, you can give them tax loopholes, give them get-out-of-jail-free cards especially if they're a banker and you can give them business contracts. You know you might be creative and come up with other ways as well. The problem here is that if you don't do things, do these things then whoever your competitors are who are willing to do these things will for the same reasons we covered before start winning the selectorates that you and then you won't be able to do anything because you’ll lose your power. And so again even in a democracy we still see that corruption is a tool that's required. So to stay in power use corruption as a tool and your authority is too good of a gift to waste. Basically corruption is enabled by authority. It's the power of decision making and the power of wielding you know I guess the instrument of the state that allows corruption to take place. And the problem with representation is that representation necessarily equals that authority. Is that if you win that election then you have that authority. If you're on the winning team of you know all of the you know out of the factions that try and build policy or wield authority for political parties then you know you can start doing a lot of stuff. And so democracy is by no means immune to any of the things that we've just talked about and as we can see here the problem at the end of the day is the problem of authority; corruption is just the manifestation of authority. So to end corruption you must end authority.

However in a dictatorship treasure come from theft or resources. In a democracy, treasure comes from the voters. So the rulers of a democracy need to keep their society productive unlike the rules of a dictatorship who can go around and you know kill people or steal...stuff. You need to keep your society productive in a democracy and that means that you need hospitals and roads and schools and education and the rest of it. So we do have it definitely we have more of an advantage here. Just to illustrate this - quickly, if we start with productive society that leads to specialization and more keys through either industry or other things like that. That would lead to an unstable dictatorship which then leads to democracy and then leads to higher productivity. But the thing here is that none of this starts with democracy, it starts with productivity. And only through being very productive such that being a dictator would destroy that means of raising treasure can we actually get to a democracy. So it's no use going into a dictatorship killing everyone and putting in a democracy if you haven't solved any of the underlying issues like being productive. So we're getting close to the end of this section; basically this I think labels you know everything as it stands so far. Dictatorships on the left have very few key supporters. They're unstable or sorry when they're far left they're stable then we have this period of instability. And then we have democracy as we know it with many keys and I definitely feel like in the West at least we're heading further and further towards this next unstable period. Satisfaction with democracy is the lowest it's ever been and maybe there's something beyond that. And maybe we're just going through like we went through the previous transition long ago or some people going through now will go through another transition shortly.

So I have a hypothesis here which is mostly because it's pretty cool and it's actually testable. I'm not sure if anyone's done any research on it but the hypothesis is that the political system that eventually dominates is the one that's able to support the most key supporters. And to enable the most specialized society most productive society essentially. Now I think this one's up with a lot of intuition, makes a lot of sense whether it plays out or not we shall see. So first little intermission who wants to grab a drink or anything now's the time but if you have questions on that last section with the selectorate theory yeah.

[question 18:47]

So well I guess we're not aiming to create stability at all, rather that this is more just an explanation about what happens between dictatorships and yeah democracies and how that transition takes place. In terms of the productivity side, I think it's okay to use words like that and I use words like progress and prosperity and good and bad and things like that as well throughout the presentation. The reason that it's okay to use productivity is because basically anything that you can leverage and extract value from falls under that. And so we don't have to explicitly define it in terms of like you know GDP or particularly like production output from manufacturing or anything else like that. It doesn't matter what it is as long as you can tax it.

[question 20:04]

If you were interested in producing democracies then you definitely want to create that space. You'd want to create a like a vast diversity of industries and you want to make sure that they have enough business to sustain themselves. And that's sort of the recipes that allow I guess a stable democracy, maybe not a prosperous democracy but at least a stable democracy to arise.

[question 20:33]

No it's also interesting I think to note it's like there's plenty of examples around the world at the moment of democracies where they're not as industrialized as the West that consistently had problems. So Brazil is not a bad example, Iraq is definitely an easy example and I think that's sort of plays to the point that you're always going to have instability until you reach that level where you have enough key supporters that stability is necessary. And so you sort of have this chicken and egg thing as you build up the case economically.

[question 21:23]


So I guess the reason I use the word corruption here is because it doesn't actually where your concern is not whether a policy is good or bad or not. Your concern is just offering something in exchange for political support and if you quantify that in terms of money then it would definitely be corruption. If you were to pass like outspokenly favorable legislation for them then that would be seen as corruption. Whereas you know when you you know bring in a particular scheme with enough sort of thing it's like ah you know it's a good sideline and we don't talk about you know corruption as much. But it does the same, it has the same function. Now I guess the problem here is that whether it's a good policy or not, doesn't come into it at all. It's more about offering something in exchange for support and I guess that that at a fundamental level is the problem. I mean democracy doesn't work so we can argue that or doesn't work particularly - so we can argue that you know maybe this is just the way that you know progress expresses itself. But I think we're sort of skirting around the issue and if we look at it in terms of corruption then we get a lot more of an insight into the behavior of politicians as well as the nature of the problem.

[question 22:47]

So I mean particularly in the beginning I was basically-- so I'm not saying that any decisions are better or worse than others, just that there are better and worse decisions. Now I also don't claim to know what those decisions are and I do claim that it's impossible to make progress without making mistakes. And so in terms of, I’m actually very anti technocratic because I see that as being basically another form of authoritarianism and you still shut down criticisms, you still make suggesting new ideas and exclusive privilege and everything like that. So I think a lot of the same problems come out. I do you see where you're coming from though but basically that was a shortcut too.

[question 23:40]

Yeah yeah, well I do claim that you can tell good policy from bad policy as you’re about to find out. But you can't tell which out of two good policies is correct without trying them essentially. Is that once you have two good policies there you've already established that they don't conflict with you know available evidence or at least that the amount they conflict is basically on par with one another if you had two options. So--

[question 24:27]

Yes, no no definitely but I think so...the values I basically take the position that everyone's values are wrong in some way and can be improved in some way. If they're not then I mean good luck to you but basically we've always got an improvement and that's one of the key underlying values here. And that because like if we do have conflict then it indicates that there is something wrong with at least one of those things that's in conflict because you know the universe doesn't conflicted itself, it doesn't spontaneously explode. And so fundamentally at a fundamental level if you're ever, I mean we'll get into it. But if what you're suggesting like a...if you make it conjecture and it agrees with reality then you shouldn't see certain types of conflicts essentially. So but anyway let's get into their philosophy side.

So part three is knowledge and policy and most of this is based on ideas put forward in the beginning of infinity by David Deutsch. If you listen to anything else that I've talked about I pretty much always mention that book, so highly recommend it. So democracy has this poisonous question which is, who should rule? And it's poisonous for many reasons but to cut to the chase basically it's asking what is the authoritative source of good policy. This is essentially the same question as what is the authoritative source of knowledge, the problem if that there or the problem with that is that if there was an authoritative source of knowledge they would need to be able to explain why they’re the authoritative source of knowledge and if they did that by just saying because I say so that's not any good. And if they have an actual explanation then it depends on something else outside of them and so they can't be the authoritative source of knowledge. So basically this question is fundamentally flawed at a philosophical level because there cannot be any authoritative source for good policy or good or the you know knowledge or good explanations or things like that. We're always going to have to you know have new ideas coming forward. So yep as I discovered there is no authority on knowledge and in order to understand basically the who should real question and understand it deeply as to why it's flawed then we need to understand the idea of knowledge. And knowledge at least in this case is made up of explanations about reality. Now you might say oh there's knowledge like the sky is blue which is fair that's just you know sort of stand-alone fact. But to actually understand why the sky is blue I need you know the ideas of Rayleigh scattering in the way that light refracts through the atmosphere and things like that. And then you might say and oh well I guess only with that complete explanation behind it and I actually convinced that the sky won't become red tomorrow or that if it does become red it's probably because it's evening and you know the light is going through more atmosphere and things like that. And so what matters here is that fundamentally behind things like that is that there is an explanation that makes a claim about that reality and particularly because it makes a claim about reality, if it's right it lets us manipulate reality. A good example if I have a theory about how to make cars that involves toothpicks and bubblegum then my car is probably going to fall apart or if I have some you know nice material science and understand combustion and things like that then I can actually make something that go somewhere. So explanations can be good or bad.

As a sort of a subtle point here correct explanations are always good but incorrect explanations are not always bad. Now we're going to drill into this idea of good and bad just now because it actually has a rather specific meaning. And when I talk about good policy and bad policy, I'm not talking about what's beneficial to me or what I agree with. I'm actually talking about something far more fundamental. So if we have a look to start with at a bad explanation; this is the Persephone myth it comes from well I guess highly modified from Greek mythology. And the idea is that Persephone is a goddess of spring or something or other. And that when she visits the surface of the earth then it's nice and warm and sunny and we have spring and summer. And then when she goes to the underworld it's cold and it's autumn and winter. And then she just does this on a six-month cycle. Now the thing about this is that this is a testable theory. It makes a real prediction about the world and I mean in fact we know that this theory is just proven by evidence. So this theory is testable and because we have different seasons in the different hemispheres we know that this theory is incorrect. We also know the correct theory and that's a bit more but the problem with just saying oh okay the seasons are different in each hemisphere is that we can easily then extend this to just changing the theory to account for this new evidence. And so we create a second Persephone myth where it's okay Persephone actually travels around the globe. Maybe in a polar fashion taking you know a year to go all the way around and when she's in the northern hemisphere it's warm and sunny and the other hemisphere is cold and - And the thing is this is still testable, it's still explanatory, it matches all the evidence we have but we also know that it's nonsense. And so what we can take away from this is that testable explanatory theories can be nonsense. That's like there's nothing to say that they can’t.

Now if we have a look at the true theory of or well at least the truer theory of seasons then this is the axial tilt theory, probably - encounter that early in high school science. And idea is that the earth is you know tilted off axis and so during the I guess Australia's winter the northern hemisphere is facing the Sun more and so receives more of the sun's light and the southern hemisphere receives less of the sun's light. And therefore the northern hemisphere is warmer and the southern hemisphere is colder. And then as we rotate around to the other side of the Sun our axis tilt is still in the same direction but now the southern hemisphere is pointing towards it. And so we the southern hemisphere hits up, northern hemisphere gets cold. Now the important thing about this theory is that if we changed any of these details then the theory breaks because it is highly integrated with a lot of other theories. It's connected to the theory of gravity, we've got geometry, we've got things like you know spinning spheres in a I guess in a vacuum maintain the point that they're pointed towards against along the axis of rotation, things like that. And so if anything else about the world weren't right or we changed anything about this theory then it would immediately fall apart. And more to the point we can't change anything about this theory without breaking it. So the conclusion here is that good explanations are hard to vary is that for an explanation to be good it has to be hard to vary. And for in any explanation that is bad it means that it's easy to vary like the Persephone myth. So the way that we get to good explanations is that we firstly someone needs to you know provide that explanations conjecture that...to say this might be the way the world works. And we then filter out all the bad explanations of our criticisms. We can also filter out I guess you know a good explanation that disagrees with evidence is it's not that good so we can filter those out by criticism. We can also criticize you know are very sloppy explanations and things like that. And at the end of that if we can conject and criticize in a sort of cycle then we end up with I guess a process for spitting out the good explanations; is it just every every possible idea we stick in we put it through this process of conjecture and criticism and outcomes or if it comes out then it's a good explanation. This is basically the way that science works through a - review cycle and things like that.

The other thing about good explanations is that they're unpredictable. Is because I mean the first point is that if we could predict good explanations then the discovery of that prediction would entail every other explanation within it. And so you could never actually predict anything because it is the discover itself. Good explanations also still need to be tested. Just because they're good explanations, just because they're hard to vary doesn't mean that they're correct. Newton's theory of gravity is an easy example for 300 years we thought it was correct, Einstein came along and was like no, no. So good explanation still need to be tested and they can still disagree with reality. In fact I would argue that every explanation disgrace to reality, disagrees with reality and we just approach or continually approach more and more correct explanations. The other thing is that they're typically unintuitive; the universe doesn't care about human intuition. There's no reason to expect that is somehow arranged in a way that's easiest for us to understand. And additionally if they were intuitive then it'll be easier to predict and suggest some kind of you know other underlying structure to it which itself we would expect to be unintuitive because otherwise you'd have to explain intuition in an intuitive way which sounds counterintuitive. So basically you know the last point here is that unintuitive also means that it's likely to be surprising. Where it's okay it's in fact we should expect to be regularly surprised if we're creating new knowledge. Because if we weren't surprised then we basically would have already known it. So the moral here is don't dismiss an explanation because it's unintuitive, we need to substantially criticize it.

So in the last parts of this chapter I want to touch on a few other topics because while they're not as directly relevant they're very interesting and they give us a very good context for looking at the systems we're going to be creating. And so the first is the principle of optimism and basically the way we construct this is we start with for given you know potential solution to a problem; there's only two possible outcomes or classes of outcomes. And the first is that if it breaks the laws of physics then it's impossible and the second if it doesn't break the laws of physics then it is possible. And so what that means is that if a solution is possible because basically all we're doing is mutating the you know the state of the universe from one state to another. Even if we're talking about a problem like refugees then it's still a matter of the arrangement of atoms at a fundamental level. At least in this case we won't find an explanation at that level but basically what this means is that if there is a solution then it's only a matter of having the right knowledge. Basically knowing how to manipulate the world around you to produce that solution and if that's the case then we have this amazing conclusion that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge. Provided that there's no law of physics that says that humans have to suffer for some reason which seems like an odd law to have. Every political problem you know social problem energy problem everything else like that is basically due to us not knowing how to solve it; not because it's physically impossible. You know none of these problems are...like I said there's no law of physics that means we have to have problems; it's just that we don't know how to solve it. And so if we want our political system to solve problems it therefore has to focus on creating new knowledge because that's the thing the lack of that new knowledge is what's causing the problems in the first place.

Now if we link this back to policy quickly; the policy is essentially an explanation about some phenomena plus the environment that we find ourselves in. And that leads to a behavioral change or an economic change or whatever else. But basically it leads to a change in our situation such that we solve a problem. And what that means is that good policy has to rely on good explanations and so a good policy has to be hard to vary. Because if policy was easy to vary it would indicate that it probably isn't correct it probably doesn't do what it predicts and we shouldn't expect it to actually you know benefit us. And so we this is this criterion of good policy that relies on good explanations I think is quite fundamental and without that without good explanations you know how could we ever construct policy that actually does what we want. So conclusion here is that all political problems are soluble just means they can be solved and that we also need a system designed to create knowledge. Now if we don't have that then we shouldn't expect that we can solve those problems easily; doesn't mean it's impossible but the we can't solve it easily.

And some more conclusions basically the who should rule question should be changed into a form or like how do we best create and implement new knowledge or perhaps the alternative put forward by Karl Popper which is how do we best detect and eliminate errors without violence or how do we best detect and eliminate bad rules without violence. And so basically the who should rule question starts from a point of authority, it invites authoritative answers, invites the idea of violence because if you're not doing you know if it's a grave you know evil not to be doing the the divine way of doing it or whatever else. And so these two questions here, the latter two questions are far more productive in terms of actually producing a political system that we want to live under. So that's the end of the part three. So yeah alright we can just skip…. Yep okay final - economics product sorry market. Markets aren't inherently good or bad they're just a tool like hammers you can use them to do great evil or you can use them to build a house. So markets just redistribute resources that's all they do. They can be bad so in an example where one actor controls knife - supply that generally leads to worse results but they can also be good because you can trade things that you have for things that you want and you know that probably improves - life; so markets they’re a tool. Specialization and trade, so basically this is if you had to you know narrow down three words that explain the prosperity of the world and couldn't talk about new knowledge then specialization and trade is what it is. Trade allows people to specialize in the first case; if you don't have that then you have to live in sort of like a subsistence lifestyle. But once you can trade you can start specializing and start making really good - in the person over - next really good coats and then you trade and now you've got really good coats and really good axes instead of having you know crap coats and crap axes. And so by doing one thing well and letting everyone else do the things we do badly but they do them well; we basically produce prosperity. That's the early stages of prosperity even if the knowledge is still the same then we increase our prosperity via this way. Furthermore specialized individuals have more knowledge and a high capacity to be useful, I think that's fairly obvious.

So the next I think we through the last part opportunity cost; so basically it means that if we do option A then we have the cost of not being able to do option B. And the presence of opportunity cost incentivizes specialization because if you have the opportunity to do or rather if there is a cost for not specializing for you know say spending half your day growing bananas and half your day catching fish; you're probably not going to do as much as if you spent your entire day growing bananas or your entire day catching fish. And so this idea of opportunity cost means that it's worthwhile specializing provided you don't you know specialize in areas that are over specialized already. More specialization means that we end up with more and varied supply of various goods in the market. And this increases the opportunity cost of not specializing because other people do the things you do much better than you when they do specialize. And so we've got this system this opportunity cost of you know - specialization and then specialization and trade - more opportunity cost. There's also a another term called comparative advantage or another economic I guess mechanic called comparative advantage that plays a role but it's not necessary to understand issue based direct democracy which is out next in final part.

So IBDD, basically it's a new system of democracy I invented about 18 months ago. It's been evolving since then and the core element of it is to design in all of its design is - bias knowledge. So there are four key components, specialization and the main reason for this is that knowledge is lumpy in society is that I know how to do tech stuff really well but I know nothing about running hospitals or health policy or education policy. And so if we're going to produce the most from our set of participants we need to specialize. The other three parts so trade that sort of comes in specialization quite a lot or that links quite strongly. And then we have conjecture and criticism which as we've discussed is necessary for the creation of new knowledge. Now it's not that these things don't exist in our existing political systems, they do. We have ministers with various portfolios, various parties especially with - parties in the balance of power will trade power to get various legislation through. People put forward bills all the time, there's plenty of conjecture and if you've ever watched - time there's plenty criticism as well. But what we haven't done is we haven't optimized for these things. We haven't said okay this is what we want and we want to produce a system that does this best right. It's more like these things exist in our previous systems by accident rather than because we've deliberately designed them to. So broad overview of IBDD, so the first thing is that everyone gets an equal footing. And the reason this is important is that the source of new knowledge is unpredictable. And so by excluding anyone then we exclude a possible source of new knowledge and that is ultimately to the detriment of our political system. Anyone can suggest legislation pretty much at any time, it won't be entirely anytime but - regular opportunities like every week. That's our conjecture part, anyone can vote on any legislation which is that criticism part.

So the problem that we have is that like if we look at this everyone...anyone can suggest legislation, anyone can vote on any legislation, direct democracy can do that. So what's the actual thing that we need here and we need to weigh different conjectures and criticisms which is part of specialization, and we need a way that in order to produce the best results. Now the other thing is that we need to do that without authority; if we created someone in a position who just said okay if you get to vote on that you get to vote on that then essentially we we've just moved the problem around and we don't want that. We want to be able to do this without authority. So for any economists you probably guess that the answer is markets. The the core idea behind the construction of IBDD is to use a market to trade votes on different issues. So the other way that this manifests is you can think of it as creating opportunity cost between issues. There was a quote that we came up with during the WI election which I quite like which is basically that flux and IBDD make the back room, the front room and everyone's invited. And so it's not that like the problem with the idea of backroom deals is not that deals being made; it's that everyone else is excluded from that and it becomes an exclusive thing; and that's by keeping people out that's the evil. So what we do as well is all units of distributed as evenly as possible that gives us…. And I hypothesize that IBDD is more consistent for various community groups or politically interested organizations than representative democracy provided that they have good policy.

So the way that we set up the market is there are two types of tokens. There are votes and political capital which I also call the quiddity tokens. As you might guess political capital exists basically only to trade between votes. So all votes can be traded for political capital while the issue is live which might be say once a month. The rate is going to depend on supply and demand it's not one-to-one at all. So there are unpopular issues you won't get much political capital for very popular issues you get a lot of political capital for. And this is where you get elements like opportunity cost in comparative advantage incentivizing many people moving out of popular issues that they don't really care about too much because they can do so much more with that political capital and other issues. So obviously political capital can be traded for votes as well and political capital can be used to suggest new legislation. So there's opportunity cost between suggesting legislation and voting on legislation. And finally anyone can suggest new legislation very regulated. So when an issue is proposed each voter receives one vote by default. If they don't use it then it's put up into the - system. Now the reason for this is basically otherwise we would need to you know do one thing for every every every issue which would basically be as difficult as voting on it which would be silly. But also it means that if you don't participate you actually acquire essentially a stash of political capitol. And so even if you're politically apathetic now, if you become part of this system then you end up with a stash waiting for you as soon as you try to come back which is basically you know your reward for not forgiving everyone else more political power because you didn't involve yourself during that period.

More market details, so political capital is constantly redistributed via basic income style. The way that we do that is so basically we use inflation to create new liquidity tokens and this acts like a sort of universal tax. Because we're redistributing back to everyone, if you started with you know you're like say there was a hundred voters and we started with one percent of the share of political capital you would have one percent at the end as well. But if you were a big you know so you'd hoard it a lot then that will push your stack down. And so it constantly pushes us towards an equilibrium. So by doing this we maintain...terian system; it incentivizes people acting earlier rather than later and that this you know sort of tax hits quarters strongest. And so it consistently pushes us towards this equilibrium. And then as a final detail there's you know an onboarding bonus, so when everyone signs up they get you know X amount of tokens and basically that's to get you started.

So some properties and predictions; so the first property is that any policy can be challenged at any time and because of this also has a cost I predict that good policies will persist and bad policies will be will be challenged. This is because bad policies because they you know either benefit one group above other groups or because they act unpredictably are a target for being challenged. Whereas if a policy doesn't really harm anyone and does its job then there's no reason you'd want to change it. This equilibrium means that the most efficient way to express yourself politically is through the proposal of new policy or voting on good policy. Is if you're going to you know focus on putting forward policy that's bad then when you suggest that or let's look at the next slide, if you do try and put forward bad policy then it's going to be challenged. Because it's either going to harm someone or it's going to act unpredictably or something else like that. In order to push that policy through you need to then spend more political capital to get your required votes to reach a majority to push the policy through and you're gonna have to keep spending that because other people are going to after that policy passes; if you manage to get it passed then other people are going to  like still want to take it down. And so when you put forward bad policy you don't get a free pass like in our government today where if they've put forward a bad policy nothing happens for three years. And then maybe it doesn't happen for another three years because they've won the election again. Whereas under IBDD that consistently is challenged and so if people put forward bad policy that is not just a negative on their you know their political capital then it continues to be a negative for as long as or drawing down on that for as long as they remain you know...their protection of that policy. So basically this cost you the opportunity to produce good and enduring policy.

However if you put forward a good policy then it acts as predicted, it doesn't harm people and it's not going to be a priority to change. This also means it's going to be easier to defend. It also means that no one's going to try and fight you when you're establishing that policy or at least they've if they do then it'll be to a lesser degree. And so you need to expend less political capital to get it passed, you need to spend less political capital to have it maintained. And these things start to even though everyone in the system is on the same footing it means that we can create this divergence between good and bad policy such that we start - that better policy. The way I like to think of this or one of the approximations for thinking about this is the idea of betting on which options are best. If you lose then you just lose all your political capital and or the amount you chose to bet and you don't get anything back. Whereas if you win you still lose your political capital but at least you get the policy passed and so that's sort of the rough I guess the economic way that I like to think about it. So IBDD means there is no permanent government or authority and that changes issue-by-issue, I think that's very important. We add in delegation for efficiency and this basically lets us our communities come together as well. And the end result is that we end up with issue based politics which is very difficult to do otherwise. It's highly autonomous for political communities and it makes it much easier to introduce good policy.

So I wanted to focus a little bit on the idea of specialization in IBDD with communities and causes. So when you have the ability to delegate it means that you can pass some or all maybe in proportion; so 70% of your political capital through to someone who has the like time and energy to really drive a particular policy or a group of policies forward. Many examples here so indigenous leaders, scientists, community leaders whether that's like your school or your church group or anything like that; other political parties even NGOs, industry groups, all that sort of thing. Basically anything you can think of you can delegate in the system and let someone else pick up that work for you. Of course if they end up you know behaving badly in your eyes then you can just undo legate straightaway as well. Because typical communities end up caring about a few issues very deeply they're incentivized to trade away all of their other issues. You know so say they only care about 3% of the issues that come forward and so if they can trade away 97% then that allows them to really maximize that 3% into something that's really substantial. And basically this allows them to have political autonomy and so you know they don't need the permission from the majority in order to institute policy they perceive as good to them and it doesn't affect other people. And so particularly if we're talking about federal politics that I say this is a massive massive advantage.

Political autonomy for communities means that we can satisfy more communities than the existing political systems. It's just that getting getting started is the hardest time, actually getting people elected and getting people on board and using the system in a meaningful way is the hard part. But if we can pull this off that means that we as flux end up attracting more and more key supporters. And so we have all the recipes here for starting to get a snow ball rolling that really can't be stopped provided that IBDD acts as I predict. So summing up with a range of properties and qualities. So it breaks majoritarianism, it's a highly dynamic voting system which changes with every issue. It allows for more key supporters because political autonomy allows them essentially you don't have to team up with someone and because you don't have to team up with someone they're not going to cut you out when you become useless. It removes the idea of static authority; no one ends up with the unilateral say on what can or cannot pass or can or cannot be suggested. And if they are going to defend bad ideas to attempt to you know stop some group participating then it costs them political capitol. And so basically we've made being corrupt in the old way or in some of the old way a very expensive idea and one that is that is self-defeating. So we actually have a really strong negative feedback loop when it comes to that sort of corruption.

We have an opportunity cost for bad behavior quite related to the last point so oppressing a community creates laws that are beneficial or creating laws that are beneficial for yourself reduces your political potential because other people are going to fight you on it. It incentivizes the schedule ization the path to maximizing output is to suggest good policies and to specialize. Incentivizes education something that a lot of other systems of democracy struggle with because voters usually aren't that important. Whereas here because there's actual real potential through creating votes to specialize in one particular issue because there's real potential to actually change legislation that if you want to actually go after an issue then you by educating yourself that's a high yield investment. Is that that really pays off in this case where is in direct democracy or representative democracy it really doesn't pay off 99% of the time. IBDD also produces good policy. So the best strategy for passing policy is to make it as robust as possible against criticism and base it on the best explanations that you can find. It increases prosperity for all and the reason I say for all here is because people are treated equally and can participate on the issues they choose to agree to, they choose to reducing policies that actively reduce you know one groups prosperity is very very very difficult. And a policy that increases prosperity overall obviously gets them and there can be specific ones as well and as long as that hard people then should be easy to pass. It allows for change with minimal effort, and so due to the opportunity cost of fighting against good policy; which I mean basically if you think something is good policy you're throwing money down the drain by fighting it unless you really had it out for the other group.

We have a system where new ideas should be able to bubble up with at least with far less effort than representative democracy or direct democracy and hopefully with minimal effort though we might be able to make more improvements. So to sum up I think IBDD is the first of these sorts of systems; I don't think the only way of doing it but basically systems that bias knowledge and have some sort of way of without making judgments about people or their intentions or things like that to create a system that produces progress is an honorable mention here to quadratic voting which I think took some steps that didn't quite go far enough in terms of the philosophy and other elements of construction. Particularly as well IBDD - requires diverse creative input and if we end up with a system of censorship or judgment based around that then we're naturally going to limit the capacity of issue based direct democracy. And so it's nice that it's I guess compatible with our intuitions about the ways that things should be. And then also it works because it treats policy is an ecosystem not in isolation and that is very different to pretty much every other system of democracy out there which doesn't behave differently if you have one issue on its own or one issue in a big group of other issues. With the exception of political parties and major blocks and things like that, we treat policy as an ecosystem and that's one of the things that allows us to really extract value from it. So thank you for sitting with me through that. If there's any final questions let’s have them now.

[question 56:04]

Okay yeah so issue based direct democracy to start with is just the system of democracy. So you - comparable to the - system or direct democracy or whatever else just a protocol for voting. Flux is the political vehicle to get that protocol into Parliament I guess is the short way the long way being you know change the constitution or do all kinds of this sort of thing. And then the software that we're developing is the way that flux actually interacts with the voters and what implements issue-based direct democracy and takes it from theoretical to practical. And so that sort of trio is here.

[question 56:52]

So for this sort of system because it's highly dynamic, theoretically you could maybe run small small democracies via paper. But realistically it would rapidly grow to be you know untenable especially if we're talking about involving say 20 million people or 200 million people. Whereas as soon as you involve software as long as you can make your software secure then we can scale to hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of people without too much of an issue. I guess that's the other another thing that I didn't quite cover in here is that theoretically if everything acts as I predict then it's not like there's an upper limit on this. It's not like our traditional democracies whereas the population grows you either need to add more representatives or the you know each person's like individual representation is diluted. In this system because you know it would be rational to predict that if the population grows and specialization also grows then we should actually see all of that room open up and fit people in. And so we have a system that doesn't become more stagnant the larger it gets. And I think that's you know one of the other problems with representative democracy and one of the reasons it’s so different difficult to change. Is that when you grow to be you know hundreds of millions of voters large then convincing all of them is a very very difficult proposition and likewise you end up with very very entrenched status quo that really prevents progress. Cool?

[[question 58:20]

A pure direct democracy, so I guess because pure direct democracy shall look at the camera for this one, because pure direct democracy doesn't bias knowledge. It doesn't have a system or a set of system set up to push us forward to create new knowledge to actually solve problems. It's essentially just a codification of populism and populism is not something that we should expect to produce good decisions. So I'm not sure if I can easily go back to way back here where about was it. So back here I talked about the idea of do you want a democracy the biases the will of the people or do you want a democracy that consistently makes good decisions even if most people disagree with it. And I guess what this comes down to is in the second case our system of democracy would avoid mistakes that we knew how to avoid. Whereas when we're talking about the will of the people there's no reason besides it either maybe common sense or that you know the knowledge of the issue is is sufficiently spread throughout society; there's no reason that it would produce a good result. Now particularly there's plenty of examples where the popular answer is maybe not the best answer. And while we can't we can't always - a judgment about whether you know one idea is good or bad; sometimes we definitely can but most of the time we're not going to be able to. What we find is that because we're not biasing knowledge we're going to make mistakes that we knew how to avoid or at least that someone knew how to avoid. And so direct democracy is necessarily suboptimal. It necessarily performs worse in this particular way of measuring it than alternate systems that bias I guess bias better ideas rather than better constructed ideas is maybe the better way to put it rather than direct democracy which it doesn't really link up with the idea of you know well-constructed ideas or badly constructed ideas or anything else. It's just a measure of popularity and so yeah so we weren't satisfied with that. We didn't think that would solve the political problems that we've set out to solve, and so we created the solution we thought would. Cool.

[question 1:00:56]

So well I guess that's I think IBDD deals with that in a much better way than every other system out there. You know there's no protection for minorities in the Westminster system or the Washington system or direct democracy or liquid democracy or anything else. The reason that IBDD can be more beneficial to them is because for other people to oppress them, those other people need to basically accept an opportunity cost. They need to accept they're not going to have more power elsewhere in areas they really care about. And the the minority now has the capacity to put a hundred percent of their political capital towards fighting the oppressors. So if we're talking about a situation where just unilaterally 75% of all people you know want to kill the other 25% then no system of democracy is going to protect you there. That's a far more fundamental moral issue than the democracy. Democracy is sort of like okay we've gotten over you know wanting to just unilaterally murder a quarter of our population. Now we're into actual collective decision-making and figure out how we can do that. So once we get past that step then I think issue-based direct democracy, it's not that it provides explicit protections for minorities better than other democracies; remembering as well that other democracies don't provide any protection. But it at least gives minorities the chance to be sovereign most of the time, to be self deterministic, to actually make their own decisions. And it also gives them the chance to really fight back if someone or another group really tries to hassle them. And so I think that you know in terms of if you were someone in a minority and you were concerned about political oppression then I think a system like IBDD has a lot more to offer than pretty much every other system out there.

[question 1:03:03]

Well they can if they want. It's just that you've got to accept that you know the other the majority might be unhappy about that. They will probably see that as detrimental to them. If they see it as detrimental enough to justify action then they're going to either compete for the votes on the issue when it arises or they will just suggest that we undo that legislation as soon as it passes. So you know say big fat bankers or something say we're going to tax the poor - 50% tax to the poor or something like that. They might be able to push it through once but then if people then suggest to undo that legislation then they have to continue fighting against it and they have to spend all of their political capital trying to keep a group oppressed instead of actually being I guess productive when it comes to their political expression. And additionally those people are oppressing they're not going to stop right. As in the most important thing to them and that in their life right then is solving that issue whereas unless that's true for our fat - bankers in this case, unless that's also true for the fat - bankers then they basically have no choice but to give up the game. They've got to go focus on actually being productive and nice to people for a change. And so you know I don't think minority rule I think is far less of a risk in IBDD than it is in our traditional system. We definitely have what amounts to a minority rule system at the moment which just in terms of the demographics of representatives shows. And so in terms of minority we're liking IBDD deals with it far better than than our existing systems and in terms of majority rule then because we have this idea of specialization we prevent the tyranny of majority as well. Now it's not unilateral, it's not perfect but I think it does a hell of a lot better than our current systems.

[question 1:05:03]

So I talked about this much later on so...so good is yes so it's not a word that I'm just using arbitrarily. I am actually focusing on a very specific aspect and that is that - when I'm talking about explanations or policy that is good; I'm talking about explanations of policy that are hard to very. Now this is for reasons that relate to reality so we have you know a bad a myth about the seasons to do with the god Persephone you know going from the underworld to the overworld and things like that and we realize that would cause the seasons to be the same So the people just change the theory and instead she goes around the planet. And so the the reason that this theory is bad, I mean you know the fact that it invokes a Supreme Being just for the sake of it is not very that. But the thing that makes this theory bad is that we can alter it to fit the evidence regardless of what that evidence is. And so we started from this first theory which there's the claims on the left. We started from his first theory and then we just changed it because the evidence disagreed. And so if you can change things arbitrarily and if they're easy to vary then they cannot correlate with reality. Now being hard to vary doesn't mean that it's correct but it is the biggest hurdle for an explanation to get over. Because being hard to vary means that if anything about reality were different or if you changed anything about the the explanation or the theory then it would break. And so we want our policies to have the same qualities; if we make a policy to address a particular issue then we want to make sure that if evidence disagrees with it there's no way to just quickly patch up that policy and keep going because it's likely that we're just going to find more evidence that disagrees with it. And we can continue this patching process infinitely without getting anywhere. And so if we're looking for a better political system we have to look for a political system that produces policy that's hard to vary and then once we realize it's wrong it's like okay we can move on, we have to come up with a completely new explanation, a completely new policy. And so that's what I mean when I talk about good and bad policy, good and bad explanations; I'm talking about this quality here hard to vary.

[question 1:07:48]

IBDD is a democracy that lets people participate how they want, when they want and to - produces much better policy than usual democracy. It means we have to worry less and we get better results. That's the summary, I can summarize the explanation two sentences a bit deeper but in terms of the the effects that's it. Yeah cool alright, sweet. Thank you for everyone who joined us online and thank you for joining us here. Yeah I guess that wraps us up for tonight so thank you.