Debugging Politics

I participated in this hackathon, even though I don՚t really believe in hackathons – good software is not something you can create in a rushed weekend, in my experience. Nonetheless, I and the rest of the participants were animated by the feeling that we really need to be doing something to try to fix things. Many somethings were done.

Our team (me and a product person) managed to throw together an Alexa skill to help in contacting your congressperson – not exactly revolutionary, but it was a chance to do a voice app, which was novel. A larger group of young people (they were almost all painfully young) put together a slick looking mobile app to do much the same thing. Other projects were aimed at visualizing or transforming bias in news articles (through browser plugins), or providing sites for organizing opposition activities, or encouraging communication between different factions. One guy wrote something that filters out all the adjectives from Trump's tweets, which was supposed to improve political discourse somehow.

These efforts, most definitely including my own, strike me as kind of lame. They aren՚t going to fix anything, although it felt good to make an effort with other people. Democracy in its current parlous state needs a lot stronger medicine than can be cooked up in a weekend. And while there is a good chance that medicine will be technological, it won՚t be yet another mobile app. [Note: there were also people from ongoing projects like http://www.wevoteusa.org/, which are harder to dismiss.]

What could this stronger medicine be? Well, there are some more radical schemes in the air, like Liquid Democracy (similar to an idea I aired here called netarchy). or blockchain-based voting. It՚s hard to see these having a short-term impact on anything, but they offer promising longer-term visions of how the democratic process can get past its 18th-century origins.

And that՚s really the heart of it. Our system of representative democracy was designed for an era without electronic communication or modern transport. If it was working well, this wouldn՚t be a problem, it would just be one of those weird sets of archaic practices common to venerable and beloved institutions (like churches and universities).

But in fact our democracy is in the throes of an enormous and possibly catastrophic failure. It's delivered massive power into the hands of a con man, a sociopathic narcissist, an unread and clearly unserious person who in the best case is going to be corrupt and incomptent and int he worst case unleash destructive political forces and fatally delegitimize the institutions of governance. The consequences are potentially lethal. (And it wasn՚t working all that well even before Trump came along).

It՚s unclear to me whether the existing machinery of government can be fixed at all, or whether it is going to require wholesale replacement. And in the latter case, I have no idea how it happens. It won't be a weekend project, that's for sure.

[Addendum: What Fred Turner said:

I don’t envy engineers or executives at tech firms. They’ve been put in the position of being legislators for our public debates. America’s architecture for such debates — Congress, the courts, the executive branch, and to some degree, the press — was built in the 18th century. But the conditions of public discourse have changed, and the speed at which those conditions are changing has accelerated too. 

This makes engineers reluctant, but necessary, brokers of public discourse.

]

How to avoid the singularity

I have somewhat unaccountably been asked to be on a conference panel on the topic "Inconsistency Robustness and the Singularity". What do I know about the singularity? It is unknowable by definition. So almost anything said about it is guaranteed to be nonsense.

Yet nattering on about the unknowable is long human tradition. It is increasingly obvious to me that Singulatarianism has the form of a religion, specifically, a religion of the monotheistic, transcendent, and eschatological sort. God is the original singularity, and the technological singularity that is so longed for is just the rapture for nerds.



This is not exactly a criticism -- there's nothing inherently wrong with religion in my view, but there is something wrong in practicing religion while failing to acknowledge it, and instead pretending to "rationalism" (at least when rationalism was young, this was explicit).

Monotheism is the source of much that is good and even more bad in our thinking. Whatever good it may be responsible for (science!) it's pretty clear that it died in the modern era and we are in the midst of its death throes. Singulitarianism is just one of the spasms, a church for shallow thinkers, people who thought they'd gotten rid of a theistic mythology only to replace it with a near-replicate. It is not radical enough, because it presumes that while enormous technical changes will happen, we (the nerds) will still be pretty much the same. Consider eg the obsession with cryonics, which is nothing more or less than the effort to sustain the atomic, isolated indvidual past the point of death.

The cure for singulatarianism lies is in the direction of sociology and network thinking in general. Monotheism wants to collapse the universe's locus of control into a single transcendent point; whereas the reality of human life has it distributed all over the place. The real radical changes will come not from hyper-empowered individuals but from the networks that are in the process of being woven, of which the current most visible (Facebook etc) are just a shadow, a hint. The world runs on networks and will be determined by them. Perhaps a different theology is required.

What's this have to do with inconsistency robustness? Well, the implications for computational systems is that they too need to deal with distributed control, divergence of beliefs, goals, plans. Traditional logic is to monotheism as distributed, inconsistentent, argument-based logics are to a network-based metaphysics. In a distributed world, inconsistency is the norm and consistency the exception. The social world has evolved techniques for producing consistency and cooperation; computation needs to learn to do the same.

Hm, well, I have no idea how much of this I can or should shoehorn into a presentation at a technical conference.

[update: my slides]

Philosophy of Conspiracy

Philosopher fight! So Barbara Forrest published an article in a special issue on evolution of the journal Synthese where she said nasty things about Francis Beckwith, a rightist creationist/ID supporter. The journal editors, apparently under pressure from the ID crowed, inserted a disclaimer, and this has caused a minor outrage in the philosoblogosphere, with calls to boycott the journal, everyone in high dudgeon.

My first-order reaction: get over yourselves. This is a perfect example of academics getting their panties in a twist over the exceedingly trivial (in this case, the propriety of the disclaimer). Second-order: the underlying dispute (theism v. atheism) is really, really boring, but even so, there must be better ways to argue about it than to take offense at editor's notes.

But in poking around in this mess, I noticed something more interesting -- one of the guest editors of the journal issue is James Fetzer, whose name I was vaguely familiar with from the old days because he worked in philiosphy of AI for awhile. But now he seems to have become a full-blown conspiracy theorist, in the most literal sense -- he's published an academic paper on it (Reasoning about Assassinations), which looked interesting at first glance. The issue of how one properly evaluates evidence in such cases is pretty interesting from an epistemological viewpoint, especially to someone like me who likes to dabble with fringe beliefs without losing my mind over them.

But on second glance it looks like he's just become sucked into a rather standard hole, and is now an unquestioning supporter of various Kennedy assassination theories, 9/11 conspiracies, climate change denialism and the like, as well as even kookier-sounding ones like a conspiracy by Johnson & Johnson to murder someone over a dental floss-related invention. He's founded a site called Assassination Science, which might qualify for my Academic Units with Amusing Names series, although it doesn't look recognized by any institution, or likely to be. The paper above doesn't seem like it's meta to conspiratorial thinking as its name suggested; it's just an example of it.

But the really interesting thing is that the initial offense of the original paper was exactly the sort of conspiracy-flavored thinking that Fetzer seems to be promoting, although in a much milder form. Here's an extract:

In addition to the ideological congruences between Dembski'™s views and those of declared dominionists, there are more direct connections between ID and CR [Christian Reconstructionism --mt]. The CSC has received major funding from Howard Ahmanson, a former board member of the Reconstructionist Chalcedon Foundation... In 1999, speaking at Christian Reconstructionist D. James Kennedy's "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference, Phillip Johnson urged attendees to reclaim the intellectual world "œwhile we're recapturing America ... Kennedy, a staunch ID supporter, produced a 2006 anti-evolution documentary featuring CSC fellows Michael Behe, Richard Weikart, and Jonathan Wells as experts. CSC fellow Charles Thaxton was among the "conference faculty" at a May 2006 CR conference held by American Vision (AV), one of the most extreme CR groups. Journalist John Sugg describes AV leaders Gary North and Herbert Titus:  œTheir imposition of a theocratic state would not, by their standards, be tyranny. Public schools to them are tyrannical. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labels AV a hate group because of its virulent anti-gay attitudes. Similarly, Beckwith is listed among the conference faculty of Summit Ministries, which SPLC reports "œgraduates more than 1,300 students a year--”all steeped in "¦Christian dominionism and anti-gay politics" ... [references omitted --mt]

Now, I don't see anything particularly wrong with this. Weaving strong networks of ideas, people, and evidence while attacking your opponent's corresponding networks is just how argumentation works. But it does seem to stray a bit from the academic norm into something more journalistic, polemical, personal, and mildly conspiratorial. Doesn't bother me but I can see how it might bother someone with more devotion to the academic ideal. I've argued before that ad hominem is a perfectly valid form of reasoning, or at least close to one. Apparently Charles Taylor and Paul Feyerabend have also defended ad hominem in their own ways, so I'm not alone in this. The passage above is not even all that ad hominem, although that seems to be the basis for why it has offended its target.

Oh well I'm rambling. The interesting thing here I think is the paper Fetzer didn't write, on how to think productively about conspiracies and conflict, how to account for the reliability or bias of sources, how to do ad hominem right. How do we factor in to our world models the revelations of Climategate or Wikileaks, or the fact that intellectuals we might admire or not are bankrolled by the Koch brothers? How do you think about the hugely important role of networks of power and influence without becoming a kook? These are actually useful, indeed crucial questions that professional epistemologists ought to be applying themselves to.

Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters

Here's a really excellent post by Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist whose work is new to me, about the emergence of hierarchy and leaders in groups that start out acephalous, with particular applications towards the ongoing revolutions in the Mideast. She cites the iron law of oligarchy, and the underlying dynamic of preferential attachment that generates it. Also the related tendency of movements to coaselse around charismatic authority.

Both of these processes are so widespread in human history that it would be foolish to ever discount them. But to discount them by hoping that social media, as it stands, can provide a strong-counter force would be naïve.

Preferential attachment generates the power-law distribution of connectivity that network theorists have noticed for some time. Social media does not flatten these emergent hierarchies, in fact it makes them much worse:

In fact, if anything, it is quite likely that preferential-attachment processes are part of the reason for the rise of oligarchies and charismatic authorities. Ironically, this effect is likely exacerbated in peer-to-peer media where everything is accessible to everybody.... Thus, networks which start out as diffuse can and likely will quickly evolve into hierarchies not in spite but because of their open and flat nature.

She also mentions The Dispossessed, which treats the question in fiction, showing an anarchist society consciously battling back the emergence of power relations (like me, she had a youthful attachment to the book).

The reality of charismatic leaders is an annoying pheonomenon that I've noticed both in academia and in industry. The people who acheive major success have a certain personal magnetism that verges on magical. The clustering around charismatic leaders is somewhat hidden in academia, but frankly acknowledged business, here for example:

People with a real vision can communicate ideas with almost a spiritual charisma that energizes people around them to go a step beyond normal boundaries, to solve a technical problem, sign on as a team member, or invest resources, when conventional wisdom would suggest otherwise.

I'll admit to being jealous, because (to put it mildly) that's always been a quality I've lacked. So despite being pretty good at some aspects of "the vision thing", I've been frustrated by an inability to sell my visions. I find both leading and following to be highly problematic, but the flat society of The Dispossesed looks like it's going to be a long time coming.

Clinton is not qualified to be president, and assorted political links

Not that that has stopped others in the past, but every week I am convinced she doesn't have the required character for the job. By continuing to pander to the worst elements of American culture, she is far more patronizing than anything Obama has ever said. Kleiman's site has a number of other relevant comments nearby.

Speaking of Obama, Arthur Silber has a stirring defence of Jeremiah Wright, along with some personal history and some pointers to a long history of medical abuse of African Americans, which I was mostly unfamiliar with. Open Left explains how Jeremiah's relation to Obama is not symmetrical to the relationship between rightwingers and right-wing preachers.

And speaking of rightwingers, The American Conservative has a common-sensical defense of Wright, or at least Obama's connection to him.

And speaking of Open Left, they have a nice series on the relationship of the resurgent progressive movement and the Internet. I think they are overplaying their argument -- the Internet empowers right-wing haters just as much as it does left-wing groups. As one of the commenters states, mass movements are quite distinct from electoral politics and are not always progressive in nature.

Still, I think it is true that the internet has the potential to reshape politics, and it is progressives who are best positioned to take advantage of it.

And to anyone who found their way here from Odessa Syndicate: welcome, make yourselves at home, try not to smash the furniture.

Theory and Practice of Netarchy

[warning -- way too long]

Netarchy is a word I came up with to describe an imaginaged system of governance that relies, not on top-down hierarchies of power, nor on the supposedly bottom-up collective decision-making of markets, but on power distributed, transmitted, and exercised through social networks.

There are two different versions of netarchy. There's the purely descriptive version, which is just taking note of the very common observation that in the real existing world, individuals exercise influence by means of their social networks. Having spent some small time with high-powered business types, I have observed that their Rolodex is their most important asset and tool. The same is true in government, journalism, academia, and just about any other field of human endeavor. It's not a particularly original observation, of course. Everybody and there brother is trying to get social networks online or otherwise cash in on them. However, nobody seems to have quite nailed down in words the fact that these networks rule the world. So, perhaps the word netarchy can be of some service in foregrounding that fact.

The second version of netarchy is more interesting -- it's the idea that we can craft systems of governance that make these networks explicit and bring more people into them, and replace traditional party structures with something more dynamic and flexible.

A political party or organization is essentially a network or coalition that connects the leadership with the rank-and-file, along with various middlemen (organizers, consultants, etc). Parties interface with various interest groups (businesses, labor, lobbying groups like the AARP) via contributions and socia connections. The goal of a party is to build a coalition that can take and hold power.

A party or coalition should ideally express the common values and goals of its members. The US 2-party system is rather poor at this, since it requires widely disparate groups and values to be lumped together. The Republican party, for example, has to hold together religious fundamentalists, business interests, quasi-libertarian anti-government types, and hawkish neoconservatives. There is no particular reason that all these factions should be pulling in the same direction.

Parliamentary systems have greater latitude for forming coherent coalitions. Typically countries with such systems have a 2-4 major parties and a host of smaller ones. The parties themselves come together in coalitions to form governments, but the existence of the separate parties serves to coalesce group values in a way the US system doesn't.

Direct democracy

All the parliamentary systems were designed for eras before electronic communication and certainly before the internet. In that era, it was necessary for elections to be infrequent, for representatives to debate and decide things on behalf of the larger populace. While that might still be desireable, it is no longer necessary. It would be perfectly possible nowadays to have direct democracy, where debate and voting is handled over the web. The web has in fact evolved numerous debating societies, but has no real power. It's slowly replacing journalism, but not actual government.

Of course, most people don't have the time or inclination to participate directly in government. Nor should they have to. On the other hand, pretty much everybody hates the political system and the very few choices it presents. So, can we design a system that works better? Let's not worry about the fact that changing the fundamental political system, or even modifying it slightly, is next to impossible. Maybe the coming global-warming-induced collapse of society will create an opportunity for new systems to arise.

Ultraparlamentarianism

Here's my loose proposal for how a fully networked governance should work.

Anybody anywhere can start an interest group, with roughly the same effort it takes to start a blog.

Interest groups can have members, and this process is recursive -- that is, an interest group can join another, larger interest group. This is the coalition/party forming mechanism.

Groups can form their own internal governance mechanisms to make decisions (like which larger groups to join). There will be standardized models available.

Groups that are big enough get to be part of the government. "Big enough" is defined by some threshold of membership, or by taking the biggest n, or something like that.

Assume there's an issue to be voted on. The vote is called, and all the organizations that are part of the government get to express their vote. Every group has a certain amount of voting power. How is this power determined?

Here's where it gets a little bit interesting. This general structure can support a number of different schemes, separately or together. In the simplest model, ever person is allowed to join a single group, and a group's voting power is determined by the (recursive) sum of their membership. The vote of a group is determined in a winner-take-all vote. Issues that come up for a vote flow down the tree, and votes travel back up.

If we let all votes flow up the tree without a winner-take-all step, the result is equivalent to direct democracy, with one imporant difference, which is that belonging to a group absolves individuals of the need to actually vote on every issue. That is, if you belong to a group (say, the equivalent in this new world of Planned Parenthood), and a vote comes up on an antiabortion measure, you have the option of transmitting your vote through the organization, or you can just trust them to exercise a vote for you.

Group membership could be changed at any time, although some groups might try to get longer-term commitments from their members, which would increase their barganing strength. Presumably the large-scale groups would have to engage in the kind of poltical bargaining that goes on now, where one faction trades votes with another -- this is hard to do if the coalitions are too dynamic, so it might be desireable to build some friction into the system.

Complicating things

The above assumes that each individual is a member of exactly one low-level group, which is then bundled up into coalitions. But in reality, people might want to join multiple groups that express their values in different areas. For instance, say I'm an anti-choice environmentalist. Under the current system I'm stuck, since my values don't place me solidly in either party. In netarchy 1.0, above, I'm also stuck. But suppose you can join multiple groups and somehow split your individual voting power between them?

There's a number of different ways this could work. One obvious way is to split your single vote up into fractional powers that get distributed to different groups, but that's not very satisfactory, since it means the more things you care about the less pull you have with each. A more elaborate scheme would be to create a series of rules or filters, that basically assigns a different group to each vote depending on the content of the bill (if bill contains "abortion", count me with The Catholic League, if it contains "environment", count me with the Sierra Club, otherwise, count me with the Libertarian Party).

The computational and network mechanisms to accompish all this remain to be designed. They may not be practical -- after all, designing systems to support our ordinary, simpleminded voting system has many nontrivial security issues to deal with.

What this looks like

Changing the focus to user experience -- what does this mean in terms of web media? I think the idea is that we transform the current sprawl of online forums, blogs, and chatter into a network of debating societies, but debating societies that can actually make decisions and send their collective wisdom upstream. Like any group, there will be more and less active members, leaders and followers -- groups might have internal governance structures with elected officers -- but anybody is free at any time to start their own group. It's still pretty hierarchical, but that's basically a requirement of any system that collects votes and funnels them up to a decision point. If it's a hierarchy, it's at least one that can be dynamically reconfigured at any time, on any level, if the participants feel like it.

Essentially we are replacing the legislature with a more dynamic networked structure for collecting and conveying people's opinions and votes.

Well, this will never happen, barring a major revolution. Still, it's interesting to imagine what could happen if our 225-year old structures of governance could be given a modern technological makeover.

Hm, on reflection, what I think is more likely to happen is the government devolving and getting slowly replaced by networked organizations that are more efficient and responsive. Maybe they'll work as described above. Maybe, as they start small and grow and interconnect to form something bigger that can actually manage the planet, or what's left of it.

Netarchy

For some reason, the term "netarchy" is not being used to describe the social/governmental structures that are going to subverty nasty old hierarchical structures we are saddled with. It is not a totally unknown term but does not appear in google blog search (until now). I'm not even sure what exactly netarchy means, although it sounds attractive. It seems as if it would be a good title for a book by some high-powered internet pundit, which I am not, although I suppose I must have some aspirations in that direction or I wouldn't be blogging stuff like this.

So what the hell is netarchy? Rule by social networks, I guess. It could encompass a wide swath of social network theory, but it's emphasizing that these networks aren't just for chatting, but for coordinating goals, actions, and power. This is the interesting part of SNA (to me) but often seems lost with the emphasis on dating services like friendster or job-finding services like linkedin or marketing tools like visible path. The important social networks are outside of such simple-minded mapping schemes, I'm pretty sure. Something like theyrule.net is a little closer to the mark, but too conspiracy-minded, as is the ridiculous Discover the Network site, beautifully parodied here. Netarchy acknowledges such traditional power-networks, but instead of reacting in horror accepts them as a given and tries to work with them. One way to do this is simply by mapping and talking about the power networks, as the above sites do. Another is by encouraging the formation of counter-networks.

There's a paper by Valdis Krebs called "It's the Conversations, Stupid!" where he points out that ordinary social networks are a strong determinant of voting behavior. A somewhat obvious point, except that most analyses of voting behavior are in terms of individuals, demographic groups, or interest groups. These are not the same as networks, and the network approach provides some interesting strategic insight. Networks already are a big, unacknowledged part of democracy, even if they are not yet acknowledged by changing the name to netarchy. Netarchy encompasses not only the crony networks that are the obsession of conspiracy theorists, but the more bottom-up networks of a functioning democracy.

Netarchy can be used to describe existing political phenomena but may also be used as a guide, or at least a slogan, for generating some new ideas about how to run a society. Maybe it's time to revisit the lovely but rather old-fashioned models of democracy we have inherited. Direct democracy doesn't scale and lacks the damping factors of a separate political class; representative democracy has some of the opposite problems -- elites lead to self-serving corruption. The old science-fiction model of an electronic plebescite voting on issues directly might not be so great, if the model of California's ridiculous ballot propositions is anything to go by. But why not some sort of more flexible network based representation system? How about a website where I can pick new political representatives for myself at any time, rather than at artificial 2, 4, or 6 year intervals? How about if I can pick specific ones for particular issues? I don't have time to study every environmental question in detail, but I'd be happy to be able to designate the Sierra Club or the Viridian Underground as my representative on such questions, with an option to override on specific bills. When it's time to draw up the new constitutions for the Devolved Former States of America, let's try and be open to these and other netarchy-inspired ideas.