Ask HN: How can we solve politics?

Incentives? How do you exploit a fair and well run system for personal gain?

These seem to be the ground rules for a high school debate, not sure if they are adequate to the troubles in these times.

First there is a body of work on political "science" which is not quite physics or chemistry but is closer to "science" than it is to Scientology that is the backdrop of what is possible.

Here are two semesters worth of lectures from Ian Shapiro which for me are a "required curriculum" for those who want to talk about reforming politics at a fundamental level:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6MOA_Y3MKE&list=PL2FD48CE33... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDqvzFY72mg

Have you looked at how Bridgewater runs their company:

Here's an example.

https://qz.com/1071749/bridgewater-associates-ceo-ray-dalio-...

The profit motives have to be taken out of news. 24-hour news networks are cancers on society and have virtually no benefits. Until that is achieved, we'll continue treading different paths that all lead to the same destination. Increasing funding to something like PBS is a good start.

1. Listen to Christopher Hitchens talk about the hate speech law proposed in Canada (particularly his rant about how this is a problem rooted in human nature, not something we can legislate away).

2. Read "Robert's Rules of Order." (Not the whole thing, just the beginning.) The problem of building consensus among diverse and differing parties has been considered at length, and we should be familiar with the historical approaches to the problem rather than starting from scratch.

3. Read "Digital Minimalism" or some other book about the attention economy so that you understand how many businesses (as well as dark money political groups) intentionally engineer their products to produce dramatic emotional responses to information (because they are more addictive and make it easier to sell ads or win votes).

Without appreciating the history of this problem, its roots in human nature, and the business and political incentives to prevent its solution, we aren't going to get anywhere.

1. Figure out what you want to achieve 2. Figure out how to manipulate the system to achieve that end

(In the case of your proposal, this probably means bombarding everybody that might disagree with a viewpoint with long lists of [possibly spurious] 'points' which they are 'forced' to acknowledge and respond to until they are too exhausted to raise any further objections...)

Removing the state actors who pollute discourse on the major platforms by amplifying extremist opinions would be a good start.

Politics provides value and if you don't recognize that you can't begin to try and 'solve' for it.

Sorry to emphasize a problem without providing a solution. While I agree, those are rules of engagement I would likely practice on my own, naturally, as soon as I propose my way (or in this case, you proposing your way) as _the_ way, the nature of the protocol shifts into the political realm, just because it may not envision something important to one of the participants.

As argumate@tumblr says, the solution to politics is to have one planet per person.

There are websites that form trees of different arguments/responses/responses-to-responses. I don’t remember any of their names off the top of my head. I don’t remember the results of such trees being particularly encouraging, though the example I’m remembering on one of those websites was a for/against with a fairly obvious answer, and was a not particularly political topic, more a philosophy debate. The bottom layer was mostly dumb relativist-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness objections.

One idea I’ve heard of, which sounds like it could be useful, is the idea of a “double crux”, a question where both parties agree that if their initial belief about this question was wrong, then so was their initial belief about the bigger question. This potentially allows reducing one question to another, hopefully making it easier to tackle.

But there are multiple things here. One is disagreement about material/positive claims. The other is disagreement about what is to be done. These are, of course, rather connected, but also not entirely the same. It is possible for 2 people to at least be unaware of any relevant positive claims about which they disagree, but still disagree about what to do in light of how things are.

There are mechanisms that should work well for resolving disagreement about material/positive claims, at least provided honest participants, though I think setups can also work which will still work with some level of dishonesty among participants.

But, for disagreements as to what to do given certain positive/material facts, I suspect that these may be more difficult to resolve. That’s not to say that I don’t think they can ever be resolved. People have been convinced by moral argumentation before, are there are valid chains of reasoning about what is right and what is wrong, and people will generally have many moral beliefs in common, and this can provide some shared foundation for the argumentation.

But, unlike with questions of positive/material facts, I’m not convinced that essentially all questions of “what should be done” can be reduced through reasoning to combinations of material/positive facts with principles which both parties agree with.

To be clear, I do believe that there are moral facts.

But possibly some questions of what to do, do not have a single morally obligatory choice, and in such cases, if different people have different preferences, then it is unclear why debate would result in an agreement as to what to do.

(Also, even if there is a moral fact as to which choice would be better in a given topic, it is conceivable that I might be sufficiently wrong about the relevant moral questions that it wouldn’t be feasible to convince me, or at least, not feasible to convince me by the time that the decision has to be made. I mean, hopefully this wouldn’t happen, I don’t want to be in the wrong, but I don’t think it is totally out of the question.)

There is no universal way to aggregate preferences of people. In the end, a system must simply produce a result. Of course, in some restricted cases, there are ways to combine preferences which I think should be considered optimal. For example, if the thing being decided is a single number, and everyone has a single-peaked preference, in that for a pair of numbers on the same side of their most preferred number, they will always prefer the one closer to their most preferred number, having everyone state their most preferred number and then taking the median (or, if there is an even number of people, a random selection between the middlemost 2) is optimal I think, in that everyone is incentivized to give their honest preference, and no other option will be an improvement from the perspective of more people than think it is a dis-improvement.

I keep seeing "both sides". This whole schema seems to be based on the faulty assumption that there are only two sides.

In the last US Presidential election, nearly half of eligible voters didn't vote for either of the 2 major party candidates. This is mainly due to turnout being only 56%.

IMO political discourse would be much improved if "both sides" simply stopped talking altogether, allowing other people and views to have adequate representation for once.

Switching the voting system to approval voting[0] is probably the most effective action for how simple it is. It would greatly help solve the prevalent "only two parties are viable" problem, which should help remove the need to push for extreme viewpoints.

[0] https://ncase.me/ballot/

> it seems simple to solve politics

This is an interestingly naive take on the issue.

I think maybe you need to look into the concept of Realpolitik - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik . Basically, it may be the case that the "points" I offer as justification or rationale for what I am doing have absolutely nothing to do with why I'm really doing something, and you may never get enough information to know why that is.

Your suggestion is basically saying something like a Hegelian dialectic could work to produce consensus given enough time, but it breaks down for a number of reasons:

1. There isn't always necessarily some guarantee of compromise. There are positions which simply cannot overlap or bend - for example, if I think everyone should be allowed to live in some area, and you think only one group should be allowed to live there, it's going to be mighty hard to come to some arrangement that works, even with all the logical responses and open dialogue in the world.

2. There's a requirement of true, academic-grade scientific honesty in your method. Any time that's required, someone can simply game it by being disingenuous in a creative enough manner. It's going to be virtually impossible to know when that's happening, though game theory could give some insights into whether lying is a good strategy or not based on the particular circumstances.

3. What happens when your dialogue starts to get into subjects that are taboo / problematic / etc? You may have people that disagree with the exact history of what has happened with regard to wars and other events in the past, and draw their conclusions and positions from that history. Determining what actually happened isn't always possible, and neither is simply telling people to accept a different version of events from what they've been told even if you do have compelling evidence on your side (or can prove the other side simply doesn't have any evidence for their position).

Still, it is the realpolitik that is the strongest reason why this cannot work. I could spend all day having pleasant dialogue with you about something, but if at the end of the day my personal interests are controlled upstream by someone paying me, blackmailing me, etc. or if I simply have a power lust, there's no reason why my actions will necessarily line up with my purported ideology or public positions on issues.

I don't think this is how it works. You have voters that vote for parties/politicians/programs, it's always a whole package that you want to go for. If you have only 2 parties to choose from, do you really care for every detail? Or rather excuse some details that you don't like?

Speaking of the current crisis in politics in the U.S., I have the strong impression that the person Trump was voted for deliberately. That people wanted someone who didn't follow all the protocols, I think this is also what he advertised and what actually even made him popular towards some conspiracy theorists.

Real-world discussions about polarizing topics are rarely concluded and at best just serve to exchange view points. On the other hand for less controversial topics it might kind of work. In fact, the majority of work in modern politics is AFAIK not done by the politicians you see on TV. There are armies of people that do all the paper work. E.g. in case of financial politics these people do example calculations, to assess how certain proposals would work out.

Still, I think it's also the point of politics, it goes beyond facts and what they mean. But actually choosing which of the possibilities - knowing the consequences - to go for.

There's a really great proposal that I hope Canada will follow that has had incredible results in other countries. https://nationalcitizensassembly.ca/

Citizen Assemblies are a great way to deal with contentious and large political issues. Couple that with a truly representative democracy with proportional representation, you've got a whole new world where policy can be driven by evidence rather than ideology of the season.

For all its flaws, politics is the only tool I know by which people can share real power without - usually without - anyone deciding they need to kill anyone else.

I'm not sure "solve" is the best approach to take to something like that.

The thing about politics is that it never works as the median middle-class programmers think.

Politics involves murder, assasination, bribery, local interest (which sometimes reads as Mafia) and other ugly things and trying to solve these by proposing a "system" is like trying to solve war by asking everyone nicely to sit down and play a war game.

The hard point is that people are wired as animals who fight with their teeth and claws, and political instituition is simply a nice facade because for God's sake we are civilized people so we can't let others see that we fight with our teeth and claws and cheat to death whenever we can.

That said, prepare to get really dirty if you want to play politics.

This idea is rational but politics isn't, due to things like: Decades of long-term deliberate misinformation. An uneducated public with many totally vulnerable to misinfo. Believing what you hear has been a long-term evolutionary survival trait, and we are all affected by what we hear - and repetition can cement a belief almost beyond remedy. Another evolutionary survival trait is to belong to a group. Given these two traits many are convinced of their "truths" whatever they may be. Since these "truths" may or may not be actually factual, I do not see how it can even be agreed upon what "issues" even exist or can be debated upon. Remarkable most of us are pretty rational within the context of our jobs - yet often not in other contexts.

You described how a Congress work.

> How can we solve politics?

Get money out of it.

OP you might be interested in the analytic philosophy of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc. Part of the idea was that if you could reduce statements in philosophy to a type of formal logic, you could solve all these long standing questions just like solving a mathematical expression. Spoiler alert: the whole thing falls apart because of the way language is actually used, and because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.