Friday, June 1, 2012

Our Declining Representation Ratio - "Reality Democracy"?


People have harped on our declining representation ratio for over 2 centuries, ever since our 1st Congress "fixed" the # of people one Representative could acceptably represent. The fix began soon after, and has been fixed repeatedly, through a process of fixed dilution.

In many other systems - from neural networks to engineering to ecology to cellular biology - it’s clear that inter-dependency-management has to scale FASTER than the # of components to be organized. Competition dictates that we cut every corner imaginable & use every hack available, even though that creates a messy string of over-adapted hacks.

So how do impossibly complex systems continuously re-tune themselves to changing situations?

It’s called sexual recombination.

We periodically re-connect everything to everything, and then relax into a state of hacks & shortcuts that best maps to that brief situation. When things change, we can’t undo ourselves, so we die & spawn kids to re-connect & do it all over again.

So how do we stay agile enough to periodically re-connect all cultural perspectives? That requires statistical definitions of: 
adequate, real-time sampling;
adequate, real-time cross-talk;
adequate, real-time testing & verification.

We need formal methods for accomplishing those steps, just to continuously remap Public Purpose to changing circumstances.

Do we need more top-down, or bottom-up agility?   I'd argue for the latter.  

US democracy doesn’t require 250 states, as 1st pass thinking suggests.

Comically, the closest we come to dynamic democracy is district gerrymandering! 

We should re-purpose that tactic, and just keep subdividing existing districts into population-segments, and then DISTRIBUTE responsibility for policy decisions to distributed decision-making.  Then our task would map-reduce to constant polling on selectively-vetted issues-of-actual-importance, user-generated & user-vetted.  We could do that now, using cell phones.

What level of division & tiered representation would recapture meaningful responsibility for distributed decision-making, at all policy levels?   You tell me.

Congress should be replaced with an Android app supporting real-time decision-making by our ~150million eligible voters.

We have to do something to re-distribute decision-making.  Otherwise, we’re mathematically condemned to group-policy remaining dumber than our available group-intelligence. That, as a policy choice, is assisted suicide, which – ironically – is already illegal.

Is it always technically illegal to do what we're already doing? No wonder we had to repeal Prohibition along with the rusty Gold Standard. Can we repeal a few other prohibitions too?

Do you know of any "mutant" town, city, county or state in our country testing those waters?  If someone doesn't explore & report on our emerging options, we'll never evaluate them in time to use 'em.

Heck, I'd even settle on a reality YouTube Channel.  "Reality Democracy."

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