Cognitive Democracy 认知民主

Wow. You’re going to make me read and think this summer, aren’t you? First thought for additional reading: Steve Weber, The Success of Open Source (2004), which talks about open-source development as a method of collective problem-solving.

A few quick thoughts.

In your critique of the market’s ability to communicate information effectively I thought I would find you bringing up distinctions between real and effective demand. It would seem to fit nicely and to highlight these types of problems e.g. by communicating demand for medication through prices we end up with many cures for ED and not enough for TB.

In your discussion of democratic systems of decision making, I was expecting you to talk more about voting. Most of what you talk about seems to focus on institutions like internet discussion forums or within party debates, where heterodox perspectives can be voiced in an egalitarian manner. But this is only evidence of a democratic problem-solving advantage if the best solution is picked by the majority once its produced in this setting. In other words, we need voting as the decision mechanism that causes the institution to “solve” the complex problem by picking the optimal solution. Does voting do this? As you point out in the paper, in some situations people prefer socially suboptimal but privately optimal solutions. In other words, people will not have uniform preferences on any one issue. In addition, in democratic systems people vote across bundles of issues, where on each issue people will be varyingly for or against the socially optimal proposal. When I vote for Obama, in some sense this sends a signal that I approve of his policy on Guantanamo, although of course I don’t, but because issues are bundled and voting is a binary signal I can’t be more articulate in a democratic system. Obviously I can mouth off on the internet, but is that something intrinsic to democratic systems or intrinsic to egalitarian social networks like the internet? Maybe I’m hopelessly confused, but I feel as though the degree to which the advantageous problem-solving system your describing is democratic needs to be more rigorously defended, or else it feels more like an argument for egalitarian networks of communication than for democracy as such.

Also, Shalizi has put his up. It is much easier to read on his site’s formatting, and the footnote links actually work there.

Is there some unholy reason why Crookedtimber.org is limited to a fixed width, anyway? Was it cursed to remain so forever back in the forgotten eras of 2003?

But what if the actors are not trying to solve the same problem? Politician A is trying to reduce global warming and politician B is trying to get reelected, for example. The experiments seem to have clear objectives and methods of validating solutions, and Page’s model assumes that participants can all agree that a particular solution is better than others if they can see it. There must some limit where the discord in the objectives between participants makes hierarchy or markets more effective than democracy, despite the lower diversity of solutions.

“In other words, is democracy actually good or is it just better than anything else we’ve tried so far?”

We have an answer to that question from 1947, Churchill natch.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time

That doesn’t, however, mean that it is consistently good…

At the first reading, here are three faults:

1. When it comes to problem solving, the piece suffers from _talk fetishism_. Apparently, all social problems can be solved if we just talk a lot about them.

Meanwhile, in the real world, knowledge is advanced by actual experimentation, with real resources. This means that in a highly complex, nonlinear world, we need distributed resources so that both the genius and the fool can try out their ideas, in the actual social context, with actual resources — sometimes it even proves that the fool was right, and the theoretical emperor had no clothes.

We do have a name for the system with distributed and independently controlled resources, where the results of experimentation are usually available so that the experiment can be imitated or avoided — it’s called the market.

There are hints in the piece about experimentation in democracy, but no clear description of how this would work, who pays for failures, who controls the resources for experimentation etc.

2. Related to the first point, the piece implicitly overrates the solidity of expert knowledge when it comes to social problems. Economists still argue about the causes of the Great Depression, the data is never as good as you want it etc. — we don’t see the emergence of a clear consensus on important issues. Why would a democratic system have better results in finding theoretical truth than academic discussion?

3. You don’t seem to be talking about democracy in the sense of an actual voting mechanism, where neglecting minority views is at the core of the mechanism. I’ll have to read the research about discussions being beneficial even with the presence of biases. In the meantime, a discussion is not a voting procedure, and you need to analyze how large scale voting works before you make comparative claims about different systems. There is little to no such discussion in the piece.

A true post-industrial politics, one which might be flexible enough to restructure even its most dominant, and most resistant institutions in the face of impending calamity, cannot rely on the benevolence or expertise of a managerial class, be it capitalist, socialist, or teetotalitarian. We must invent new technologies of decentralization, and rediscover the benefits we once understood to be exclusive to democracy — its openness to the contributions of all, and in the collective, its clear-eyed view of the world as it is, unencumbered by the baggage of either privilege or ideology.

I wrote this a couple of years ago, in a fit of romantic despair that seems a bit unbecoming in the present context. I certainly didn’t know it at the time, but it appears that I’ve been waiting all along for folks like you and Cosma to come and help me get my head straight. You’ve certainly done that, as have others here and there — I won’t name names, since a number of them appear in the CT comments threads on a regular basis, and I wouldn’t want to accuse them of being even unwilling partners in my crimes of excess.

To be brief, thank you. It’s interesting, in the midst of our current political squabbles, that the principles you’ve laid out here are equally relevant to all forms of governance — what we think of as management as well as what we think of as government. Maybe we could try them out on the Tea-Partiers and see if they can actually help tame the savage beast.

One last observation: Am I right in thinking that the problem of power gets addressed later? (All good things in time, I know. I just want to see it up on the marquee somewhere.)

Addenda to 17 above;

1) I meant, of course crimes of rhetorical excess. I hardly have the chops for any other kind.

2) People who use administrative convenience as a justification for their decisions should be forced to ride in a tumbril through the streets at least once a year.

I shall make multiple comments as I read. First section:

Democracy can do this better than either markets and hierarchies, because it brings these diverse perceptions into direct contact with each other, allowing forms of learning that are unlikely either through the price mechanism of markets or the hierarchical arrangements of bureaucracy.

I think you mean “than either markets or hierarchies”.

I’m already confused, because first you contrast market & democracy with hierarchy, then you contrast them with bureaucracy.

Hierarchy =/= bureaucracy. The salient feature of “bureaucracy” is organization around a set of rules (regulations, laws). “Hierarchy” is organized around dominance relations. Bureaucracies are usually quite hierarchical, but vice versa is by no means always true. One of the things Fukuyama does quite well is bring out how patrimonial relationships always work against bureaucratic efficiency, even though bureaucracies and patrimonies are both strongly hierarchical.

At this point in the essay I don’t know whether you’re going to be talking about hierarchies or bureaucracies, which is worrying and confusing.

For someone so keen on innovation you have an amazing ability to return to the same point again and again.

In case you weren’t paying attention, the Internet is the news that stays new.

bq. For someone so keen on innovation you have an amazing ability to return to the same point again and again.

I’m re-reading Felix Gilman’s _The Half-Made World_, so that I can fully appreciate his forthcoming _The Rise of Ransom City_ (yay!), and this bit on a victim of one of the Line’s mind-fragmenting noisebombs seems apropos.

bq. She returns again and again to those songs. Based on my observations to date, this is typical of the victims of the bombs. Most of them have one or two fragments of conversation or knowledge remaining, quite arbitrarily; rather like the way in which (so the _Child’s History_ tells me) when the Line bombards an ancient city with explosive rockets, whole districts may be flattened, but sometimes a single fine old church wil be left standing.

I think we have a hypothesis …

On more serious comments – again thanks – this is all very helpful – I will try to write some proper responses tomorrow.

Okay, my thoughts…

First and foremost. Metis is hard won. The good stuff? Hard won, with injuries, embarrassment, social isolation, the works. Not everyone really wants to do that, perhaps not even the majority. In a sense, the human history since the Paleolithic Revolution is dominated by a drive to embed coercion that forces *other people* to obtain metis, and use it for the state.

Now…

Democracy, in my opinion, is not truly possible without a plenipotentiary and authoritarian substrate. Hopefully constrained. The main reason is that people do not have an unlimited capacity to see others as equals. What’s more, at the beginning of every democratic process is an argument about standing (as any study of African conflicts could attest to). Out of a state of anarchy, democracy works because the participants are self-selecting and who only decided to participate and allow others to participate because extenuating circumstances had dictated that they *must*. Embedded in an overall society, outside constraints, what participants in a democracy generally wishes to do is vote other people off the island, so as to enjoy the benefits of those people’s labor, and admire their own, higher, status.

It’s very hard to stop things like that from happening, within a democratic context because, first and foremost, democracy is labor. The more people in the decision process, the more diverse people in that decision process, the harder it is to come to mutual agreements, and the smaller the rewards are for that labor. What’s more, the slowness of this decision process is vulnerable to smaller, faster voting organs, and subgroups can hijack the overall process. If there are a plentiful supply of morons, authoritarians can hijack the process as well. What’s more, issue salience about standing (say, in regular meetings of G.R.O.S.S.) tend to matter more than anything else in a democratic process, and ignoring that means that some smaller, crazier, minority will go to the mattresses and terrorize everyone else until they are eliminated or co-opted. If those people could be eliminated or contained by their adversaries, then they participate only to make bargains with one of the big groups in which the bigger group allows hostile laws and administrative policies against the deemed out group in exchange for factional support for the large alliance’s policies.

I think that in the end, we will develop some other consensus based politics as a ruling guide rather than democracies. Those are only good while embedded in authoritarian structures, like corps or mafias, where there is someone who stomps down on silliness and forces democratic organs to focus on solving problems rather than creating more of them.

————————————-

One other thing. In one type of problem, where goods are sorted by preference match, both democracy and markets underperform authoritarian-type expert activities. Charles Stross was talking about this, obliquely, in terms of the publishing market, where market leaders with good taste are necessary for proper market/democratic functions. It’s also a big part of why armies (or any other large coordination quotient group) are authoritarian. The range of choices are too Andes-dense, and dissipation of effort (choosing aims and means) is a real issue.

Stomping down on silliness sounds like a better idea than it actually is. No, absolutely we can’t dance at the committee meeting — in our benighted age, we seem to have been born knowing this — but maybe if we could….

Lots of interesting stuff to reply to in both the essay and the comments, but one big point stands out: Your argument doesn’t argue for democracy in any normal use of the word, but for social formations that don’t use power relations or exchange as primary constitutive elements.

Happily there are such formations and you give examples. Sometimes democracy (in the normal sense of the term) facilitates them, sometimes it is a captive of power relations and/or exchange relations and facilitates those much more.

I agree with the basic points and I’ll restate some that I think are central and add a few observations.

Exchange relations don’t encourage the integration of diverse perspectives nearly as well as some other types of relations (like the arguments on Wikipedia or in a really open open-source project, or one hopes, the comment section of a fertile blog).

You mention that as markets become more efficient in exchange terms, less integration of perspective occurs because (you don’t quite explicitly say) interaction becomes as thin as possible, since thickness generates overhead. You don’t mention that extending exchange relationships to “intellectual property” actually generates strong incentives to avoid integration of perspectives in many cases.

An interesting sort of “market democracy” is generated by institutions that aggregate reviews, which used to exist even in the pre-internet days, but are now pervasive. Are these examples of exchange relations or (your sense of) democracy? Yes. But the ways they deviate from both are important to your thesis.

How does “information processing” by market entities fit into your picture? Newspapers used to be organs of democracy, perhaps we’d want to argue that some other for-profits are now. Also while market interaction between purchasers and producers may be driven to become thinner, interaction between businesses often involves integration of perspectives.

Another of your central points: The power relations that make a bureaucracy or hierarchy work (I agree with some commentors they are not the same animal) also inhibit integration of perspectives, especially from “further down”. This is not specific to hierarchies or bureaucracies, but can arise in any system with a relatively stable monopoly on power in a given domain, for whatever reason. Academic disciplines from time to time ossify in just this way without any clear centralized authority or explicit rules.

Summary: I agree with all the major strokes of your argument, and am happy with most of the supporting evidence. But I think you should free your three alternatives from the somewhat stereotyped definitions you’ve chosen, and focus on their essential structural characteristics — the attributes that generate the dynamics you describe.

It seems to me that a limitation of the argument that democracy is “on average” the best form of decision-making is that that doesn’t provide a guide to which problems are best suited for democratic decision-making and which are better served by markets or hierarchy. In the context of your discussion of the internet, for instance, you mention the achievements of collective and open-source projects, but it’s also the case that Google and Facebook, creatures of the market that crushed their competitors, have set forth solutions to problems of informational organization and communication that have been of great value to society. How do those achievements fit into this discussion? Or, rather, how do we satisfy ourselves that Google and Facebook are “good enough” and that there is no need to pursue a collectively-developed search engine or social network?

As for hierarchy, consider education. Certainly, the problem of how best to educate children and adults is complex and of great societal importance. But is it really the case that education would benefit from more democratic decision-making and a smaller role for “choice architects”? And if not, then on what basis do we recognize it as an exception?

it’s also the case that Google and Facebook, creatures of the market that crushed their competitors, have set forth solutions to problems of informational organization and communication that have been of great value to society.

Speaking of overstatements, I think this is one. Google’s “solution” to the problem of “informational organization” is a search engine of some usefulness but also one that contains quirks, oddities, bizarre tics and various annoying features and that vests a lot of power in algorithm-writers accountable to no one or nothing in particular except their own company’s bottom line. I’ve never used Facebook so I can’t comment on it with much knowledge, but to say it’s been of “great value to society” strikes me as a bit of a stretch. I did see a recent piece in the Atlantic, a bit exaggerated perhaps, criticizing FB, claiming it helps contribute (or at least doesn’t diminish) social atomization, etc. The piece has apparently generated a lot of pushback. (Anyway, it’s OT.)

shah 8 @ 34

Many, many. (I’m impossibly old.) Nothing you say is untrue, and yes, what you describe is invariably what takes place when the pool of committee participants available is a) small, and b) drawn from a society already impoverished by our present regrettable circumstances. We’re very short on imagination these days, and even shorter on the sense that we don’t need anyone’s permission to engage all our faculties.

Some of us refuse to see these circumstances as permanent. You need to keep an eye on us.

Edit War!

It’s smells like>>>big breath intake<<<Cheetos…

Jed Harris@33 seems to capture the key point most clearly: this isn’t an argument for democracy as actually practiced anywhere, but for a form of anarchism.

I also have a concern which I am struggling to put into words effectively: in the currently-existing world say a firm’s decision-making process about its strategy and many parts of its operation will often be fairly ‘democratic’ in the sense implied here a (admittedly select) group of the firm’s employees will come together in a context of relative equality to discuss options and reach consensus. Certainly this process is as ‘democratic’ in your sense (in most firms) as any actual political process in any actual democracy I can think of. Power inequalities have one big effect (which employees are invited to the table) and many subtle effects, of course.

Then a hierarchical/bureaucratic process is used to implement the strategy or operations. In the course of this, there will again be many meetings where groups of relative equals discuss and compromise.

Then the firm competes in the market place against other firms. But the firm will do everything it can to avoid ‘faceless’ market competition and to form ongoing relationships with clients.

So the issue of which of these approaches is ‘better’ seems less relevant than the ways in which they interact unless you are seeking to make the case (which I don’t think you are, given that you defend political parties and are explicitly critical of utopianism) that markets and bureaucracies should be entirely replaced by direct democracy.

Andrew, it’s precisely the conflict between good management principles, and the bad consequences which often flow from them — from the point of view of those outside the circle of management, anyway — that’s at issue here. We’ve long suspected that the disconnect between the two is threatening to become unbridgeable, and the last four years have provided all the evidence anyone should need that our suspicions have some basis in fact.

This speaks to shah8’s point as well: Imagine the President, the National Security Advisor, the Joint Chiefs, the Director of the CIA, etc. sitting around a White House conference table discussing what to do about Iran. If someone were to say, Hey, why don’t we just stop threatening them, and talk to them as equals about our true concerns, one would expect that someone to be sent out to fetch a briefing paper, and to find the door locked when he returned. Perhaps the next day, the President’s Chief of Staff would ask him to consider spending a little more time with his family, beginning ASAP.

In shah8’s terms, his outburst in the context of an NSC meeting would be silliness, and his getting stomped would be perfectly appropriate. In the broader context, especially when the electorate is asked only in very indirect terms if it approves of the decisions taken in the meeting, and in fact has no way of knowing what exactly it’s being asked to approve, this might very well lead to disaster for everybody.

It isn’t the competence of the people involved that we need to question, or their sincerity, it’s the forms which they express, the narrowing of the context which those forms impose upon them. The management principles involved are unimpeachable, but the outcome sucks.

Everyone hates the jerk who stands up in a PTA meeting and rambles on forever about some irrelevant drama in which he fancies himself to be the star, but if his opinion is irrelevant in the context of the meeting, it isn’t necessarily irrelevant to the process as a whole, or to the best outcome for everyone. As things stand, we might do better to value order a little less, and confusion a little more, and alter the design our institutions accordingly.

However, [communicative] contact is largely incidental—- people engage in market activities to buy or to sell to best advantage, not to learn. As markets become purer, in both the Hayekian and neo-classical senses, they produce ever less of the contact between different modes of life that Mill regards as salutary.

This is very weak. It fails the “just look outside the window” test.

Market actors need to learn technology, need to learn what the customer wants, need to communicate with their business partners, need to learn best known practices etc. If they develop a new technology as a product, they have every interest to make people learn and use that technology.

The appeal to “pure” neo-classical or Hayekian models is misguided: the market is under no obligation to follow the textbook — it’s the other way around.

A thoughtful article.

Please consider some thoughts from a person who has spent a life in capital markets rather than academia.

The great investor Benjamin Graham comments that in the short run markets are voting machines, in the long run they are weighing machines. Your argument focuses on its role as a voting machine – i.e. the price of tomatos, the cost of fertilizer etc. indeed in this role, markets do a poor job at societal tasks.

As a weighing machine, over time (as another commentator noted), markets deliver societal benefits that are hard to directly quantify, but easy to observe. To give an easily understood example – it was a long-term pattern of markets “voting” in favor of fiber optic that replaced copper wires and then voting for wireless over fibre optic and then voting for cloud computing over desk top computing that advanced telecomunications to where it is today – democracy and hirearchy had little to do with this revolutionary advance in communications and indeed, to the extent it played a role probably hindered more than helped…global communication infrastructure is undoubtedly a valuable societal benefit, facilitated by markets – as a weighing machine, not a voting machine.

The second thing I would note is that the interactions between markets/hirearchies and democracy can very valuable tools in creating desired societal outcomes. A hirearcy regulating outcomes would only succeed in raising the cost of power for everyone, a democracy might impose laws that favor a ‘green’ or ‘pro-business’ view, but which creates winners/losers and unevenly shared costs. A market alone, wouldn’t regulate itself and would simply pollute until told not to…..the interaction of regulation, trading the ‘right’ to pollute and the democratic view of cost/benefit of cheap power vs. environmental hazard produces the most equitable outcome…..wise men can debate where the lines get drawn, but the collective power of these structures moves society towards the lines.

Thanks for a thoughtful piece.

Footnote 3 looks very much like ‘I, pencil’ rhetoric. As if in a planned economy, every move had to be worked out from first principles. Which bits of the information that go into setting prices (the relevant info that is, not all the extra stuff involved in capitalist organisation, such as adversarial games with suppliers, competitors, consumers etc) would be less available to the central planner?

I think the key idea would have to lie not in market prices but in market incentives: aligning self-interest with accurate information-gathering, or at least removing the motivation for false reporting. How good this type of anti-planning argument really is, I’m not sure – AFAICT, it hasn’t received a great deal of attention.

I substantially agree with everything you’re saying, and I think it’s important to say that before getting to the parts that bother me.

My biggest issue is this: What do you mean by “democracy”? Really, that seems to me to be the key issue that ought to sit front and centre here. Most people see democracy in very vague and ill-defined terms. At its most restrictive, it’s a system of voting from time to time. You cannot mean what you say without meaning something much larger, and the lack of clarity on that point bothers me. We could define democracy as “anything that keeps institutions responding stably to feedback”, which strikes me as a very good definition but makes your claims rather tautological. So you must mean something else, but I can’t quite see what it is.

That brings me to a second point: Some of these ideas have appeared before under the label “cybernetics”, but I’m pretty sure you both know that. Stafford Beer, IIRC, somewhere points out that price mechanisms simply can’t provide enough bandwidth for stable control of economic machinery. The same analysis could be made for democracy, in a “ha-ha, only serious” kind of way. The US Federal government has an election every two years. One of two parties always does better than the other. Therefore, the total information content of American Federal democracy as a feedback mechanism is one bit every two years, or 0.000000016 bps. This is clearly inadequate as a feedback mechanism even for the smallest drownable-in-a-bathtub government. The main semi-respectable anti-government of the last few decades fits exactly into that outlook: Government cannot possibly know what to do, so it should do nothing. That argument is not made in cybernetic terms because, well, information theory is hard and cybernetics is all, like, communist. But it’s still a coherent argument.

The counter-argument – that 0.000000016 bps is infinitely more than 0 bps – is still the right retort. A significant share of the evil of dictatorship and oligarchy is not the ill-will of the dictator or the cravenness of the oligarchy, but the lack of feedback and the lack of institutions to force the powerful to respond to feedback.

But you *must* mean some larger notion of democracy than regular elections to make this credible, and even without some kind of detailed ten-point manifesto, something more than generally waving towards new media and the value of agent diversity is needed here. Calling things “cognitive” is like calling things “cyber” – trendy enough, but not meaningful enough by itself to make any points. You need some suggestion of democratic institutions that really can provide enough feedback to manage action.

Alex K. @15 “We do have a name for the system with distributed and independently controlled resources, where the results of experimentation are usually available so that the experiment can be imitated or avoided—it’s called the market.”

Competitive markets work well that way but non-competitive ones produce consistently poor results.

philofra @54: As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. put it “Democracy is impossible without private ownership because private property – resources beyond the arbitrary reach of the state – provide the only secure basis for political opposition and intellectual freedom. … Private property can not be sustained without markets.”

This is a standard and apparently plausible formulation. But it’s not the last word. In any large economy, individual private property — resources of subsistence, and therefore the basis of resistance — cannot be sustained beyond the reach of those who control the means of production. This is what Marx meant by proletarianization: that more and more of us — nearly all, eventually — become wage-slaves over time. This form of unfreedom is not only compatible with markets — ie, capital markets; markets in goods and services are no problem — it is arguably a necessary consequence of such markets. (If you think that wage workers are just as free, and just as able to influence the state, as owners of the means of production, then I don’t know what to say to you. Alas, the current Supreme Court agrees with you.)

The solution is to vest control of the means of production in society as a whole –that is, in a robust and responsive democratic state, which will guarantee (constitutionally) economic independence and therefore the basis of political resistance to all citizens. The standard libertarian answer to this is: what the state can give, the state can take away. But the only way a state can arise that’s strong enough to victimize one class of citizens is through another class owning the means of production and making use of the state for its own ends — precisely the situation in every capitalist society, including the state-capitalist, Party-owned, Soviet-style societies.

In any society and economy beyond a certain size and level of complexity, the only alternatives are oligarchy (perhaps with a democratic facade, as at present in the US) or substantive democracy.

So far the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has outlived most other organizations and I assume that e.g. the crude oil markets will not be replaced with some form of direct democracy any time soon.

So I think it would be interesting to see (historical) examples of market vs. democracy or hierarchy vs. democracy
as concrete case studies of democracy being better than the alternatives.

This is an interesting concept but, too late. We are already in a post-democratic age except for Iceland, Equador, and a few others that hardly count except as examples. The structure of the courts is the tipping point. Of course gov’ts are highly political, but since the courts have left the law behind to join the ranks of the politicians, and the pols welcome this, democracy is a sham.. Greece almost took a run at returning to democracy, but the referendum planned to deal with the current financial problems was cancelled by the banks via the politicians. The referendum would have at least offered the Greeks a made in Greece policy and that sounds just like democracy. If real democracy is unacceptable to the sham democracies, we have our priorities wrong.

Bruce Wilder @ 30

Minor point not affecting main argument: you say “bureaucracy … like constitutional monarchy, is a child of democracy.”

There may be a reasonable interpretation of history that says bureaucracy is at latest a child of 17th century monarchies (Pepys, Colbert et al) Hard to interpret these as democracies.

Likewise constitutional monarchy has in some ways roots in middle ages, and developed (in Britain at least) in late 17th and in 18th centuries: surely oligarchies not democracies.

I recommend re-reading Fareed Zakaria’s, The Future of Freedom, since it does a nice job working with the notion of illiberal democracy. This richer understanding of democracy is missing from your text. Though I might quibble with minor aspects of your premise, I am willing to accept your characterizations of market solutions and libertarian paternalist solutions. However, as many of the other comments have pointed out, your notion of democracy, and the mechanisms by which it is able to come up with better solutions than either the market or hierarchy, is incredibly vague. I think this is why many of the comments have had a hard time coming up with a clear response, even though intuitively they disagree. Some things to consider,

1. Experts – your notion that more viewpoint diversity produces better solutions is sub-optimal. The process of excluding viewpoints, for the sake of adding more weight to expert viewpoints (I’m unclear on an argument against experts), would require an entirely other democratic process on how to best exclude viewpoints, which itself requires more experts. Your entire system of democratizing solutions leads to a recursive nesting of “how best to solve the problem of determining how best to solve this problem.”
2. Freeloader – I recommend taking a look the Valve company handbook, as it it actually a really good model for your diverse viewpoint ideal. http://dl.pcgamer.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
One takeaway though is the inability for the system to support freeloading. I don’t mean freeloading in the “mooch of the system monetarily” sense, I mean lack of political engagement. A major problem for a well functioning democracy is that it requires engagement to solve complex problems. In your linear node model for having groups of diverse viewpoints cluster around solutions, you are assuming that each group is putting an equal amount of effort into the problem. Part of the appeal of libertarian paternalism is that it is very freeloader tolerant.

Non-rationality – I am confused on how your system deals with non-rational acting. The prevalence of non-rational actors is part of what gave way to behavioral economics, which in turn is the foundation of libertarian paternalism. I direct you to Neal Stephenson’s, amazing essay on the development of rocket technology. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/02/space_stasis.html

Novel ideas – The history of innovate solutions is littered with inventions or developments that in their time were deemed, “useless,” or a “waste of time.” It is not clear to me how your model for democratic approaches would produce as much novel research.

Stephen @63 Britain may not have been considered a constitutional monarchy til then, but aspects of the unwritten constitution date back to time immemorial and the days of other courts, and then the Magna Carter etc.
The Kings and Queens of England then Britain were never absolute monarchs, to my knowledge – it’s my understanding that the Law Lords are the ones who have the authority to deliberate and proclaim whether something is constitutional?.
Intrigue and corruption is another matter altogether however.
I’m still reading the post at the moment…

If some of the terms I used didn’t make sense:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_gradient_descent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

I think we can take as given that markets are inherently stochastic. For example look at the EMH discussions, where the argument is largely between people who think that stock prices are truly random and others who think that they’re just impossible to predict.

But the process you describe for democracies is one of argumentative reasoning. These strike me as rational, logical and deterministic. Which is pretty much the opposite of a stochastic process. In references like Page and Hong, they’re looking at people coming together to solve a new problem, but not really at the adaptability of the group. In fact, their model explicitly excludes learning. Are groups more effective at recognizing that the solution they selected previously is ineffective and select a new one?

There may be an “annealing” process that occurs initially in cognitive democracy. But I think that the analogy falls apart when the solution needs to change after the system has annealed In an annealing simulation, the temperature variable of the simulation would be increased and the system would find its way to the new solution. In a market, there would be an inevitable crash and the system would have to anneal again. Where does impetus to knock the system out of the existing solution and into a new one come in a cognitive democracy?

Agreed that for a highly plastic democratic system, it would not matter. When circumstances change, our solutions would change. But if changing solutions didn’t have costs, the selection of system would be a non-issue, we could just try all solutions and see what works best.

Jonathan Murphy @65: I’m not sure about the notion of “illiberal democracy.” The idea would seem to be that there are some rights that majorities must not, but sometimes do, violate. But why do those rights, or any rights, deserve to be respected in any particular community? Because you or I or Thomas Jefferson consider them essential to human flourishing? Because there is some foundational way to decide whether they are or are not rights, from the universe’s point of view, apart from the say-so of a democratic majority? This seems to be the assumption underlying the word “liberal.” But the universe does not have a point of view. Rights are rights in any community because a majority of that community has committed itself to them, as the American community has committed itself to the Bill of Rights. If the First Amendment were repealed, with all due constitutional process, then free political speech would no longer be a right in the United States. If one wanted to argue then that the country was less democratic because free political speech is a practical requirement of democracy, then fine; I’d agree. If this is all that “illiberal democracy” means, then I suppose it’s a harmless expression, even if a useless one. I suspect, though, that Zakaria and others who employ it have a less innocent purpose: ie, to disparage populist challenges to elite control of political and other institutions.

Shakespeare is a better representative of democracy than Shaw.

I’m at a loss to understand this. Shakespeare simply took the political ideas of his day as he found them: basically, the divine right of kings. He had no more idea of democracy than Henry VIII or Elizabeth I.

Our previous go-round here at CT on the subject of Shaw and Shakespeare had nothing to do, by the way, with democracy or political morality. I simply quoted Shaw to the effect that Bunyan had a far deeper and truer idea of heroism than Shakespeare, while acknowledging Shakespeare’s superior dramaturgy and prosody.

Something’s eating you, Oswald. Out with it.

But these [business] conversations are not really about complex collective problems facing society as a whole – they are about ‘how can I, as a company, innovate so as to sell you things that you want?’

I would say that coordinating millions of people in order to produce and distribute all the goods desired by millions of people is a pretty complex collective problem. In fact, it is probably _the_ most complex social problem there is.
Those business discussions are about solving some local aspect of that problem (more than just discussion goes into solving it of course) .

So I think this is another weakness of the paper: you don’t define clearly what you mean by “complex collective problem.” When you say:

First, they are all social problems. That is, they are problems which involve the interaction of large numbers of human beings, with different interests, desires, needs and perspectives. Second, as a result, they are complex problems, in the sense that scholars of complexity understand the term. To borrow Scott Page’s (2011, p.25) definition, they involve “diverse entities that interact in a network or contact structure.“2 They are a result of behavior that is difficult to predict, so that consequences to changing behavior are extremely hard to map out in advance.

The above does not exclude production and distribution of goods — yet you seem to want to exclude them in your answers to criticisms. Whatever second-order decisions mean, you need to define them better.

bq. I would say that coordinating millions of people in order to produce and distribute all the goods desired by millions of people is a pretty complex collective problem.

Definitely complex, but not actually collective, in the sense that we mean it. See Hayek, _passim._ Also, Cosma’s piece on _Red Plenty_, due next week.

Henry @52: One of the claims we specifically disagree with is that we can, or should, try to aspire to something like Habermasian deliberation in politics – not happening.

“Not happening” isn’t an argument, it’s a putdown. Viz.: 1840: “Abolitionism? Not happening.” 1880: “Votes for women? Not happening.” 1950: “Homosexual marriage? Not happening.” Is Habermasian deliberation hopelessly impractical? If so, why?

By the way, what is Habermasian deliberation? If it just means a societal commitment to continuous discussion — not, obviously, everyone talking politics during every waking hour, but everyone having easy access to discussions about most live political issues, discussions whose results can be widely communicated to interested others and which can be aggregated to put pressure on political representatives — then it seems like a no-brainer. What else is democracy?

As an exercise in ideal types this is good. But ideal types never (or very rarely) exist in the real world. Markets are dominated by bureaucratic, hierarchical (sometimes patronal) corporations on the larger scales, or by all sorts of gift or other non-price dominated behaviour at smaller scales. Bureaucracies incorporate a good deal of collective discussion and dissensus and so on. Whether they are good or bad at solving problems depends very much on whether they get the mix right.

So it might be helpful to spend some time on what sort of problems democracy is better at, and on what scales in time and breadth. There’s a good deal of historical evidence that open discussion is good at getting to and enforcing reasonable solutions to complex small scale environmental or social problems (juries, vestries, panchayats, town hall meetings and so on – on environmental issues one good book is Joachim Radkau – Nature and Power). Markets are good at large-scale single issues, but tend to over-ride local complexities (jed harris’ point about interaction becoming as thin as possible), and large-scale hierarchies are often too inflexible on large scales.

Global warming is a case in point. The small-scale democracy of climate scientists has dealt with the issue very well. The large scale democracies have not – and it is hard to conceive of any global democratic organisation that could – the requirements of action on that scale defeat democratic processes.

Henry @83: No – it means discussions where people leave their interests at the door. I don’t think that this is a plausible – or even particularly attractive – account of what democratic debate ought to involve. Partisanship, in both the broader and narrower sense is inescapable, and that is probably no bad thing imo.

Sorry, Henry, I think this is a bit glib. Obviously people ought to stand up for their own interests, and equally obviously people ought at the same time to take proper account of other people’s interests. I don’t see how your formulation goes beyond these truisms, nor do I see how Habermas’s ideal falls foul of them. Simply recommending that one try to see other people’s point of view is hardly the same as urging that one forget one’s own interests or identity, even if that were possible.

As I understand Habermas on communicative ethics, he is making the urgently important point that, to the extent democracy involves discussion, those who don’t know where the discussion is being held, or don’t have any way to get to it, or can’t afford the materials which are being discussed, or are inhibited by artificially-induced feelings of social inferiority from speaking their piece, or for any other reason, social or economic, are unable to participate in the discussion as fully as they would like to, are not being accorded their full democratic rights. This seems to me a supremely relevant and practical observation for a society that professes to be a democracy but makes virtually no collective effort to sponsor the continuing collective communication in which democracy essentially consists.

A dictatorship could attempt to acquire the cognitive power of a democracy by sampling the opinions and views of its population. Statistical sampling theory suggests that a large dictatorship could get a pretty accurate idea of what a democracy might come up with by checking only a few thousand opinions, at a negligible fraction of its social science research budget, let alone its internal security intelligence budget. Every now and again I here stories that China is putting money into various sorts of social science research, and that they are strongly motivated to not let the Chinese Communist party go the way of its Soviet comrades.

In the long term dictatorships seem to have a succession problem amongst the elite. In a generation or two, the number of people who have become sufficiently connected by marriage or descent to claim consideration for preferred treatment/corrupt favours increases the obvious cost to the country of the elite. Simultaneously, regression to the mean – and perhaps cynicism – means that this generation is neither so talented or perhaps so ruthless as the original elite. Rags to riches in three generations means that capitalist democracies (or even oligarchies) don’t have this problem.

A really great piece Henry. NB Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2011) seems to be missing from your reference list?

Patrick, I would argue that there is plenty on intrinsic stocasticity in democratic methods. Debates are never carried out on a totally level playing field, often a single charismatic individual can carry his side to victory regardless of whether his side has the better solution. Humans are not very good arbitrators individually or collectively, and significant and largely stocastic events do influence perceptions to a surprising degree. These perturbing events can be both internal -or external.

Quoting John Dunn as relayed by Paul Sagar:

“Against the morality of those for whom changing the world is such a pressing necessity that the consequences of attempts to change it, however forlorn the efforts or ghastly their results, become wholly trivial, there must be set the morality of those whose moral interpretation of the world is restricted by an accurate sense of the limited possibilities for changing it. The exploration of the moral potentialities of authentically possible social change cannot be assimilated to the reactionary claim that social improvement is impossible. What matters is whether the change commended is derived from the exploration in fantasy of what is desirable but only logically possible or the investigation of what is desirable and sociologically possible.”

To which of the two is this thread (or indeed CT in general) directed?

Stephen @95: You don’t think Dunn rhetorically stacks the deck ever so slightly in that passage?

As I read this paper I think, these people are just a bunch of academics that haven’t got their hands dirty. Democracy is a dirty business but they are making it out to be just a cognitive exercise. There is a naiveté about this paper.

What I have observed and found is that democracy has emerged, and is maintained, through perverse means. However, the writers of this paper think that democracy comes about through rational and logical means, by just sitting at a table and discussing it. Nothing could be further from the truth. If that is the case democracy should have been easy to establish in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Again I emphasis that the ‘market’ is one aspect of the democratic process and not opposed to it. The market has given individuals freedoms that no amount of cognitive democracy can or has. It shows individuals, as consumers and property owners, instant recognition and respect, unlike cognitive democracy. As an example, take communism, where economic markets didn’t exist and hence neither did democracy.

I am surprised this paper didn’t bring up the Arab Spring in relationship to cognitive democracy. It is a good example of cognitive and deliberative democracy at work. It is a good start. But for it to continue and materialize into lasting democracy people have to be given something tangible, like the rights and freedom to determine their own economic lives. After all, most of the sociopolitical upheaval that has occurred there is about the lack such economic rights and freedom. In a way cognitive democracy is more a handmaiden, about helping get and entrenching those rights and freedom.

Litigation is what creates civilization and lasting democracy. But you have to have something tangible to litigate in order to develop civility. The market place and the consumerism and property rights it cultivated affords us that tangibility. It is difficult or impossible to litigate abstractions like cognitive democracy.

There is probably no human construct more complex that the ‘market’. It has developed into globalization. Internationally the markets have spread democracy in material ways rather than in the idealistic ways cognitive democracy has tried. (In a sense cognitive democracy reinforces the democracy that materialism introduces.) There is no better example of democracy’s taking hold materially than countries like Taiwan and South Korea. Their modernity stated with authoritarian regimes. But as people grew more affluent and knowledgeable they demanded representation and more say in the running of their communities, hence the development of democracy.

geo@97

Is Dunn stacking the deck ever so slightly? Quite possibly. Most people writing on anything to do with politics often tend to do so: even the esteemed Henry in the original and very interesting post. (I’m still waiting for his reply to the question whether, there being faults in markets and hierarchies as he so eloquently stated, there might be faults in his concept of democracy also. So is Jameson Quinn @88.)

But as for Dunn’s basic distinction between policies that are desirable but only logically possible, and those that are both desirable and sociologically possible, I think that would come out of any reasonably random deck. There is of course a temptation to argue that desirable policies ought to be sociologically possible, if only we could transform society; which moves us into the realm of meta-possibilities where I do not feel at home.

Starting with “shoulds” without explaining the foundation of why things “should be” always make me caustic. So I will focus exclusively on the foundation.

Social stability is a relative term and can only be measured via the point of reference of instability, which is to say that stability, as presented here, is only the lack of instability, and not the other way around.

This is an important distinction because if instability is the lack of stability, then one promotes stability directly (Policies that promote uptime and QoS), whereas if stability is the lack of instability, then one tries to prevent instability. (Policies that deny access or monitor gateways)

These factors can affect each other, but they are totally different concepts.

Promoting stability requires a keen understanding of human nature. (Total technical audit to measure capabilities. Expensive. Hard.)

Preventing instability requires a keen understanding of butterfly effects cased by policy. (How firewall rules affect APIs. Easy to tweak and roll back.)

This is where most people stop. However, things get complicated later on, as conspirators see the benefits of mandates being applied to the general welfare in the name of stability. (That new network policy has centralized all the data I’m interested in!)

So they then work to intrinsically bind to the general welfare to their own agenda. Once bound, social stability no longer exists in accordance to the initial analysis BUT because the IMAGE of general welfare is what most people believe social stability to be, as long as the conspirators play within the SYNTAX of the IMAGE, the general public will never complain. (Similar to how DNS poisoning works.)

Once the context of stability is monopolized to the conspirators, the toolsets that provide social stability work against it, as promoting justice, efficiency, and other mandates creates hostility as it becomes obvious these actions are really manifestations of favoritism, nepotism, and cronyism. (Why did my ISP block port 25 and not tell me?)

Eventually, the only stable way to prevent instability once stability has been monopolized is to preemptively destroy potential challenges before they manifest. After all, the SYNTAX of the IMAGE of the general welfare automatically implies certain demographics are the cause of all problems to the general welfare. (We must stop the cyber terrorists for our own benefit!)

All of the aforementioned is part of human nature, which is a requirement to understand social stability, which is a requirement to implementing social stability, and thus, why social stability is actually a paradox and a poor foundation to base network diagnostics off of because system stability, when viewed this way, is completely susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack.

In the US, I wouldn’t know for certain. You need to distinguish between desirable, in the sense that I think the goal is desirable, and desirable in the sense that the people pursuing it thought it was desirable. Weathermen? Confederates?

Elsewhere: the Irish troubles, gli anni di piombi, Algeria (from most points of view), the Angry Brigade, the USSR …

Dunn did write, you may remember, quite a complex book on revolutions.

This is a great post but at this point feels more like a really intriguing conversation than a completed thesis. To me the biggest element that’s missing is a consideration of voting and aggregation methods as the core institutions of ‘democracy’. The paper seems to be about egalitarian communal deliberation or conversation — a somewhat idealized take on the civil society dimension of democracy — rather than democracy as a formal process that requires picking a particular voting or decisionmaking procedure. Small differences in those procedures have big impacts on democratic outcomes and success in ‘problem-solving’ however defined. A couple of comments above (Shah8@29, Jed@33, Jameson Quinn@88 and probably more) get at this point and related ones perhaps better than I have.

Excellent article. But I think you are forgetting our biggest two problems. With Citizens United still the law of the land, we at least are very far from a true democracy. Secondly, a working democracy requires an educated, or at least literate populace. We are failing in both places. Furthermore, look at who votes and who doesn’t. So called “pro-life” people never miss a vote. Religious zealots rarely miss voting either.

The problem is “how to get sensible people organized to vote?” The only ray of hope I have seen lately is the OWS crowd, but they are still missing the “organized” part of the equation. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney served their full 8 year terms. That killed my enthusiasm for the institution. I’d prefer to have something like a Parliamentarian System, with multiple parties. Or even a benign dictatorship, so long as Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman or Brad DeLong were in charge. Joking of course, but a dictatorship with strong voting removal powers may be better than the Citizens United controlled system we have now.

= = = MQ 05.25.12 at 10:06 pm
.
This is a great post but at this point feels more like a really intriguing conversation than a completed thesis. To me the biggest element that’s missing is a consideration of voting and aggregation methods as the core institutions of ‘democracy’. The paper seems to be about egalitarian communal deliberation or conversation—a somewhat idealized take on the civil society dimension of democracy—rather than democracy as a formal process that requires picking a particular voting or decisionmaking procedure. = = =

Interesting. To me the fundamental question is whether group decisionmaking is actually better, in some definable or measurable sense, than capable individual or small group decisionmaking. I’ll have to apologize in advance as I haven’t had time to track down and read the Nemeth and Ormiston papers referenced above; if they aren’t too expensive I’ll try to get some of them this weekend. But just off the top of my head I can think of three people who as near-dictatorial chief architects achieved more and did more to set the direction of their industries and even the course of history than hundreds of thousands of ordinary contributors in their fields: Kelly Johnson of Lockheed Corporation, Seymour Cray of CDC and Cray Research, and Robert Moses of the NYC Planning Authority. 100,000 brainstorming sessions would never accomplish what those three did in their lifetimes (since it feels as if I have sat through 100,000 such sessions myself I feel qualified to state that). And that’s just three counterexamples.

Yes, I understand that having 100,000 people guess the weight of steer works better than asking 2 or 3 steer-buying experts. I haven’t seen any evidence though that method would work better for, say, the design of Melbourne than having one set of Mr. & Mrs. Griffen work it out as a coherent whole [1].

Cranky

[1] Noting that when it comes to the lifecycle of ordinary cities I strongly adhere to Jane Jacobs and Stewart Brand. In the case of Melbourne though the task was to build it from scratch in a reasonable amount of time, make it nice, and make it work. Brasilia shows how badly that effort can go wrong when the planning is bad. Maybe Australia and the Griffiths were lucky. However, maybe the Griffiths were good.

= = = Cranky Observer upthread:
… he design of Melbourne …
= = =
Sorry, that should be Canberra not Melbourne. Brain fade on my part.

Cranky

The paragraph on conspiracy theories made me pause a bit. The problem with conspiracy theories is that some of them are true. It’s easy enough to tell that some simply lunatics, but others are exactly the kind of alternative theories of what is going on that are needed to make up the cognitive diversity that you are calling for, and the boundary between these two categories is hard to define.

Or in other words, it’s pretty hard, perhaps impossible, to get exactly the level of cognitive diversity that you want, which I guess means inclusive of all valuable and rational points of view and exclusive of the lunatic (and of the poisionously hateful, I suppose). Because who makes the determination? There is no objective place to stand, and if you have filtering institutions you risk losing your diversity.

I guess one answer is that multiple parties provide instiutional support for a diversity of views, but also moderate against insanity (by being respectable parts of society’s cognitive machinery). Well, I would say that if not for the example of the current Republican party, which is a wonderful case study of a formerly-respectible political organ being rapidly falling into a black hole of suck, or Weimar Germany, which of course had numerous ideological parties, but did not quite manage to cognitively integrate them into an optimal solution, to put it mildly.

Cognitive democracy requires cognitive hygiene. This is how I propose to accomplish both: xTopia

This is the kind of article that keeps me awake, wondering what it means and what I can add to it. I have been studying democracy for twenty years and it’s a complex subject, contingent on many, many things.

Cognitive democracy is knowledge based democracy. What other kind is there? But for it to work and be successful there has to be a sufficient number of people sharing the same knowledge and thinking the same way. It has to transcend the great obstacles of culture and ethnic differences for it to be effective. But I don’t think education is enough. One has to go out there and experience things before one acquires the knowledge that makes the difference. Interaction between people gains and solidifies the most knowledge. That is why the ‘market’ should not be thought of as opposing cognitive democracy but as being a contingent, necessary factor of it.

I am thinking of Larry Diamond who teaches democracy at Stanford. He was anxious to get to Iraq and help establish democracy there in the early years of of the American occupation. He soon realized it would be a futile endeavor. He learned something there, that without a stable society democracy is impossible. Iraq was very unstable and any attempts at democratization soon unravelled. He went home disappointed.

I thought that if anything was going to change Africa for the better it would be AIDS. How perverse. AIDS has brought a knowledge to Africa like nothing else. It has transcended and been a bases for commonality. The networking it has established in medicine in order to treat and contain its spread offers a great source of knowledge and the kind of platform on which democracy is built. The networking and cooperation that has occurred in medicine in order to fight AIDS has led to other means of networking, in politics and finance.

Networking is essential to democracy. The more networking the better. One of the best sources of networking is the market.

mtraven @ 112

This is the heart of the matter, I think. If, for reasons of administrative convenience, you conceal the sources of your information, and the mechanisms of your decision-making from all those who haven’t the need to know, you create a pervasive paranoia which replaces reasoning with more congenial, if less accurate conspiracy theories. I don’t think that the government planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, but clearly it lied about a lot of inconvenient facts surrounding that attack — such as the toxic contents of the air around ground zero. This gives even sweetly reasonable people every incentive to mistrust anything said by officialdom about the event.

Trustworthy feedback mechanisms, which respect the people, could have prevented most of this. Once people have no compelling reason to trust anything you have to say, just how effective is your expertise anyway? (Without tear gas, billy clubs, preventive detention, etc.)

I should add that while it may be unreasonable to expect that everyone affected will be consulted/involved before a decision is taken, it is certainly not unreasonable to expect the deciding parties to consider seriously, and honestly, whether or not their decision is likely to be ratified afterwards by those it affects. Both are elements of responsible governance.

Power relationships are unavoidable, but abuse of them will, over time, destabilize any system of governance.

Decision making by inclusion of all affected perspectives & stakeholders:

http://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k

Cranky

@ 117 : “I don’t think that the government planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, but clearly it lied about a lot of inconvenient facts surrounding that attack—such as the toxic contents of the air around ground zero. This gives even sweetly reasonable people every incentive to mistrust anything said by officialdom about the event.”

I think this is taking a narrow view. Eventually the truth came out about the toxic content of the air at ground zero, and not that long after. And this speaks to the systematics that the authors of this paper are talking about, where a cognitive system exists in which the truth will emerge and thus democracy prevails. Under an authoritarian regime the truth would have taken decades to come out.

Today, because of the numerous communication methods, it is extremely difficult to cover things as once was the case. Nevertheless, there are those who will always try.

William Timberman 05.26.12 at 2:59 pm: ” Cranky, clever as that video is, it doesn’t make Steve Jobs a philosopher king. ” = = =

William,
I agree – it was meant as a more lighthearted version of my 05.26.12 at 12:10 am for a Saturday morning (here in UTC-5). And I very much agree with philofra

philofra 05.26.12 at 1:33 pm: ” This is the kind of article that keeps me awake, wondering what it means and what I can add to it. I have been studying democracy for twenty years and it’s a complex subject, contingent on many, many things.” = = =

in that earlier this week I was thinking that there had been some fun threads here on CT recently but I sorta wished for more of the deeper academic analysis and discussion posts that my path in life has taken me away from.

Generally I try to hold myself back from commenting in those academic threads as my input is not up the standard of scholarship and citation that this post of Henry’s, for example, deserves. And the plural of anecdote is not data, etc. Yet at the same time there seems to a great reluctance to accept input from the world of implementation (“anecdata”) as counterexample sufficient to at least cast serious doubt on the validity or universality of a theory.

As an semi-OT example I’ve studied formalized microeconomics through the graduate level including a fair amount of pricing in the firm [1] and those theories are interesting, useful, and occasionally valuable. At the same time I’ve also worked for three actual firms large/influential enough to have pricing power in their markets (two North American, one global) and I can report that the theories laid down in Micro 501 had very little to do with how price-setting occurs. I’ve also been responsible for providing the data used in pricing decisions at several firms and I can tell you with 100% certainty that the data that would be needed as input to Micro-style pricing decisions is of uncertain quality at best and often simply does not exist at all within a firm (you’d be shocked…). Yet such reports from the field [2] are generally not seen as meaningful counterexamples to a theory.

Hence my somewhat irreverent attempts to point out that there are other viewpoints and some serious questions about the wisdom-of-crowds theories, as well as some substantial examples where driven and brilliant individuals have effected change that thousands of brainstorming meetings would never have accomplished. Steve Jobs was not a philosopher-king (thank Gaia, at least on the ‘king’ part) but IMHO the iPhone has changed global society in substantial ways which neither competition nor design-by-committee managed to accomplish – and they were trying. But if the iPhone example is unpersuasive there is still that of Robert Moses [3].

Cranky

[1] At least, as it stood what we’ll call a “few” years ago.

[2] Which admittedly are very hard to document unless one is a HBS case study development team, as those of us in industry have generally signed confidentiality agreements and in any case like to keep our jobs and the roofs over our heads (hence my anonymity). And even there I have watched a highly capable academic team attempt to document the culture and processes of an area within a cohesive corporation with the full blessing of the CEO and been totally buffaloed by the ground troops from the day they walked in the front door. So academics may be right to disregard such anecdata, especially from anonymous contributors.

[3] On net a negative force for NYC and city design as a whole, in my opinion, but his actions and whatever guiding principles were behind them irrevocably changed the US urban fabric and ultimately enabled the creation of today’s exurban megalopolis.

Thank you, Stephen @118, for the explanation. I still think it would be helpful if you got a bit more specific and said what it is about Henry’s conception of democracy you found impracticable and/or why you thought it might lead to unfortunate consequences. Just intoning the phrase “political radicalism,” and giving a few examples that don’t seem to have much to do with anything Henry is proposing, doesn’t quite clear it up for me.

Cranky Observer @ 125

I look forward to it.

If anyone here runs out of things to do while waiting for Henry to return from his holiday, I strongly recommend reading geo at The New Inquiry on How Bad Is It?

Shorter of tomslee’s link: democracy would be great if it wasn’t for all those stupid people.

Hard to disagree with that, except it goes against the democratic hopes of the present paper, and is more in line with the libertarian Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter, company which I’m sure nobody wants to find themselves in (my comments). The thesis of that book was that democracy was bad because voters are ill-informed and irrational. It viewed voting as a purely individual act, and ignored the social network effects and conversations that underlie a functioning democracy.

So are citizens stupid, atomized sheep, existing only to be manipulated by mass media, or are they engaged actors in a cognitive network? Mostly the former, but it may be that the small fraction who are in the latter category are enough.

This is my third comment (first two censored), so I’ll blithely respond to mtraven to say the evidence for the small fraction of the latter category making a difference is non-existent. America has been saddled with mediocre leaders since its founding. The truth is the common man is not able to evaluate the qualities of a good leader, and the truth known to a potentially good leader, when shared with the masses, makes him un-electable. It’s why so many of us, who have the means and abilities, lack the motivation to try. As evidence, >50% of Americans claim they would never vote for a non-believer. …that the non-believer would have some moral deficit. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Anyway, I would say anyone who thinks democracy has much to contribute to solving complex problems needs only look at the fact that just about every industrialized democracy has run up unsustainable levels of debt, that will immorally pass on to future generations, and that have left the global economy at a level of distress that few can imagine today.

“Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy—a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose.”

“The theory behind representative government is that superior men—or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity—are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts.”

“Who are A’s betters? They are all persons whom he envies, and with whom he would willingly change places. The essence of the superior man is that he is free of such envy. Conscious of his capacity to survive and prosper within his own field, he has no desire to change places with anyone else, and hence he is incapable of envying anyone else. Thus he is inevitably a bad democrat, for democracy as a practical matter is based mainly and perhaps almost wholly on envy.” -HL Mencken

[Just a note to a person currently languishing in the moderation queue: the software autodetects if you’ve never posted here before and we approve your post manually. Thereafter, your comments should be approved automatically unless they are enormously long or contain hotlinks or certain keywords. But if you start by conduction yourself in an assholish manner and then screaming “censorship” because of something the software did, you’re comments are unlikely to see the light of day.]

The thesis of that book was that democracy was bad because voters are ill-informed and irrational.

Bad compared to what? Philosopher-kings? Voters may be ill-informed and irrational, but at least it’s hard for them to have interests divergent from the rest of society (unless of course you have a disenfranchised permanent underclass, which some nominally democratic countries do in fact have). Most of the historical alternatives have pretty quickly fallen into “these policies are good for the people who matter, and the rest don’t matter” equilibria.

On the other hand, I think it is a valid criticism of democracy that it relies in some sense on the majority of people being able to tell truth from lies; if you can fool 51% of the people once every few years, then democracy becomes pseudocracy — rule by the most convincing liars. What, if anything, can be done about this?

Democracy and markets are both often lauded for creating a sort of competition of ideas (for votes and dollars respectively) that is supposed to weed out useless, impractical or just plain wrong ideas and allow the most effective to rise to the top. (Sagan analogized democracy to science on this basis.) But as long as human beings are refereeing the arena of ideas, ideas and their backers can cheat, either with deliberate fraud or with appeals to human emotional and cognitive biases. (Just repeating something over and over again is enough to convince some people. And if you don’t believe that, I’ll keep saying it until you do.) The best idea doesn’t always, or even usually, win in many areas of market or democratic competition. (I’ll leave the history of science equivalent to another thread, but suffice it to say, Newton also nods.)

Modern markets are often regulated to (attempt to) keep out the lemons, quacks and Ponzis that the history of less-regulated markets demonstrated consumers are often unable to spot and reject for themselves; but who can do the same for the ballot, and how?

chris, most of what governments do is done because it is popular with the voters.

I can’t talk about all governments, but according to my observations, in the US this is not true at all. What is or isn’t popular with the voters is irrelevant. Or, rather, it’s either an advantage to use, or an obstacle to overcome.

Parties that do not connect with the media[n?] voter do not get re-elected.

This is correct, but, in an environment where the voters are atomized individuals who spend the bulk of their time watching TV, connecting with voters requires nothing more than a media campaign. And media campaigns are expensive. Therefore: parties that don’t have money do not get re-elected. Parties that don’t have rich sponsors do not get re-elected. Rich people and businesses don’t need media campaigns to know what’s good for them. Therefore: parties that don’t look after the interests of their rich backers, in a real, no bullshit way, don’t get re-elected.

Consider the ’93-94 health care reform story. At the beginning, IIRC, about 70% of the voters favored a universal healthcare system. Then, insurance companies ran TV ads, the infamous ‘Harry and Louise’ ads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_and_Louise), and the support for universal healthcare dropped below 50%. It’s that simple.

geo@131
If I had introduced the phrase “political radicalism” as a bugbear of my own, and gone on about it with no relevance to the main topic, you would be quite right to complain.

But actually it was introduced by Henry himself, in a sentence which I find saddening in its implications. “A genuine commitment to democracy”, he wrote,” is a commitment to political radicalism”.

Surely one has the right to comment on declarations by the original poster?

As for why I find it saddening: as well as the other objections made against Henry’s (very well argued, very interesting) post by other readers, I would advance this. If Henry is right in his definition of a genuine commitment to democracy, we must conclude that the great majority of the electorate in the US, and most other countries, who are not in fact committed to political radicalism to judge by the way they freely vote, have no genuine commitment to democracy. I find that patronising, to say the least. But if that is so, the chances of Henry’s proposed actions being sociologically possible are not good.

Fair enough, geo. Henry is I hope enjoying his holiday.

This is a thought provoking post, for which I am thankful.

It seems to me that a comparison of democracy to “market economy” to hierarchy, is comparing apples to oranges to grapes.

For a global audience it is not helpful to assume that democracy has only one form (the one a particular reader is familiar with) or that it is made manifest in a (particular) State. But, for the purpose of the paper, one needs an understanding of what is meant by democracy. I like what Paul Woodruff teased out in his classic “First Democracy”. With him, I would understand democracy to be a goal constrained by values boundaries: that we might live without tyranny and without being a tyrant, that we might live in harmony, enjoying the rule of law, and that, in order for this to happen, citizen wisdom has to be employed so that there might be wisdom without knowledge applied to future (uncertain circumstances), for which public education is imperative. Whether Canada or the U.S. or any other country has attained the goal, there might be widespread agreement about the goal and perhaps even widespread agreement about the value boundaries.

As well, a democracy is a body politic, not a body corporate, and this has profound impact on the deliberative, decision-making, and implementing process of a democracy, setting it quite apart from a body corporate. Particularly, ‘the public’ is inherent in a democracy. A democracy has no being independent of its citizens. A corporation is a ‘person’ independent of its shareholders and its employees: it has a life of its own, and it has a right (and obligation) to defend its own life against contentious shareholders or employees. We who are democrats (citizens or governments) don’t accord the Government of Syria the right to defend its own life against the citizens of Syria (although the Assad family is making a mighty effort.)

A hierarchy, being an organizational model, but not a resource allocation model or a political representation of ‘the public’ may be the preferred way in which a democracy or a market chooses to organize its deliberative process, or its decision-making process, or its implementation process.

For the sake of (perhaps) enriching the dialogue, I would suggest that “market economy” is not a goal and does not contain value boundaries. The market economy is simply one resource allocation process. As such it is (1) a sub-system of any society — democratic or otherwise, and (2) impossible to compare to a democracy.

There is, I believe, an additional problem. The market economy has evolved to throw off a shoot that has become so large as to threaten the original trunk. There is no doubt that Adam Smith’s original “market” was one of face-to-face and recurring human contact. It was relational and, at the time of Adam Smith, essentially not corporate. It was value laden because the law had not yet given corporations ‘natural person powers’ and had not yet mandated that corporations should operate without “a soul to be seared or a body to be imprisoned’. Smith’ relational market economy continues to exist, more or less, on main street in the U.S. and in many other nations. But the capitalist market economy that is now so dominant is not at all the same thing as the market economy described by Smith. The capitalist economy is a-relational and its meeting place is the casino (or the server farm), not the agora. Plumbers and flower store owners are fooling themselves if they believe they must defend J.P. Morgan because the bank is on the front lines of the plumbers’ economy.

And then, it appears to me that hierarchy is an organizational model that is independent of the resource allocation model and independent again of the citizenry and the constituent assembly.

To start from another point, good collective problem-solving depends not only on diversity but also — more important — on trust, which results from on-going peer-to-peer (in the democratic sense) relationships. The dominant and trending market (the capital market) is not relational. It is deliberately a-relational. Hierarchies are not peer-based.

The social test (not the resource allocation test) of a deliberative and decision-making process is three-fold. (1) Does it provide freedom from tyranny and lead toward justice? (2) Is it useful in helping us solve complex (wicked) problems, characterized by contention about values? and, (3) Does it tend to preserve social cohesion through stressful circumstances (such as the war against Syracuse or the Viet Nam war)?

The long-term stability of large organizations, depends upon morale and that, in turn, depends upon participants having a sense of being producers of something, not always consumers. Both in the capitalized ‘market’ and in the lower reaches of the hierarchy, the majority of people are consumers, not producers. In the model of the organization (the mirror in which they see themselves) they are parasites, not symbiots.

Market based forms of organization do a poor job of organizing information about future prospects (such as environmental degradation) for many reasons (treating knowledge as proprietary and confidential; collecting information exclusively rather than inclusively, etc.). This may explain why very bright people got the Facebook IPO wrong, or why JP Morgan lost $2 – 5 billion on recent trades.

Libertarian paternalism is a happier label for the Roman Catholic concept of subsidiarity. Yes, “decisions should be made as close as possible to the people who will live with the consequences, but the man at the very top should make the decisions about where all the decisions should be made, and the man at the top can move the decision from one level to another whenever he chooses, without explanation.”

Power is a critical concept. Both the market and hierarchies operate with a zero sum game power formulation. Democracy operates with a positive sum game formulation of power.

My thanks again, to the authors. They have given me miles to go before I sleep.

While I agree with most everything in the paper, it seems to me that a discussion of the cognitive potential of these kinds of network structures should include the characteristics of the network structures themselves, particularly if you invoke a von Misesian account of the market, which is concerned with knowledge that emerges from the structure itself, not just from the exchange of data, i.e., there are things the system can discover that no individual participant knows or could (otherwise) know because of the relationships among the parts.

Consider the simplest possible form of representative democracy. An electorate selects a governor, who governs until the next election. This is a network with a spoke structure. There are lines of control running in both directions, which is good for information flow, but as a structure to generate cognition: very unpromising. The structure does not require any of the voters to evaluate or respond to information from any others, so it does not lead to information being processed. Voters will so respond, of course, to the extent and in the manner they are inclined, but the structure itself does not impose nor particularly encourage it. Although this model is very simple, our elections do have something of this character. Obama and Romney appeal to voters, who then vote for Romney or Obama (leaving aside the undemocratic aberration of the electoral college). Parliamentary systems are more indirect, but, even so, there is a sense in which Margaret Thatcher asked the populace to vote for her and most who voted did. As one might expect from such a structure, the current election like most others looks to be mind-numbingly stupid, turning largely on trivial, vapid, and/or dishonest rhetoric and superficial impressions. This despite the fact that the stakes are very high, and very capable people are involved in the process.

The simplest form of hierarchy is worse. One dictator, more than one subject: also, a spoke structure, but with the lines of control in only one direction, inhibiting information flow. The dictator version is even less scalable than the democratic one. A society of several hundred people might do alright with the simple democracy above, but in any dictatorship larger than, say, the Manson Family, there will need to be lieutenants. Domination is expensive.

But hierarchy has this advantage: it can recurse – to arbitrary levels of nesting and without losing the advantages of hierarchy, such as simplified decision-making. Hierarchy of hierarchies of hierarchies is the ordinary form of large organizations worldwide. Information flows up and down, though more efficiently down. It flows through nodes, each of which processes it. It is filtered and summarized as it moves up the tree, and expounded as it moves down. Every node in the hierarchy has to react to information from above, and should also to information from below, as “below” is the source of your power and a likely source of threats to that power (at a minimum, you must decide whether to ignore a particular piece of information from subordinates). Hence, each item of information is touched by many minds.

Still, there are problems. If the hierarchy is strict, there is only one path upwards or downwards to a given destination for information, and, if there is interference in that path, the information will not reach there. The unequal power relations create conflict among the nodes, not determined by and often destructive to the function of the structure. Hierarchies are famous for palace intrigue, military coups, office politics. Sequestering information, or, better, information sources, is frequently a good power strategy, so people have to bargain with you for the information. This inhibits information-flow in the organization. Finally, the structure is stiff. Because reconfigurations affect power and status, they are contested and fraught, and because people must generally have only one boss, many possible connections are arbitrarily ruled out. Impairment at making new connections is a serious cognitive limitation.

Finally, the market. Buyers find new sellers and vice versa all the time, so the fluidity of connection that hierarchies lack is present and is the primary generator of competition. But, as Coase argued, the fact that hierarchies – firms – exist within markets must mean that some of the economic functions of production, distribution, etc, are more efficiently handled by authority than by bargaining (I think that a soft “must”, but the conclusion correct nonetheless). He famously attributed this to the transaction costs associated with bargaining, but that is not the whole story. The market is like the world’s most eloquent Magic 8 Ball: it will respond to anything, but can only say a few things. In the OP example, a price on carbon can abstract out tremendous detailed knowledge of production and distribution if you simply want to quantify carbon load, but the people actually involved in the production and distribution need the detailed knowledge, at least their slice of it. Price signals don’t have the bandwidth for all the information needed to produce things.

So we have democracy, where players generally have an incentive to promote information, because securing broad agreement is the way to be effective, but where the structure requires no responsiveness to others, other than by candidates to the majority. In a pure form, the connections are fairly fluid because one can switch candidates every election, and there are no other necessary connections. We have hierarchy, where players have an incentive to be selective with information, but where they must react to their neighbors in the network, and where the structure will cause information to be evaluated by multiple parties as it traverses the network. Reconfiguration of connections is costly because it is almost always contrary to the interests of someone, and the entire structure is conflict-ridden by nature. We have the market, where there is rich signaling through price, which eliminates great amounts of information, but also eliminates the need for it for some purposes, those being the purposes for which the market is suited. Reconfiguration is usually easy, and when it is not – because of monopoly or lock-in, for example – the efficiency of the market is compromised. In markets, too, players frequently have an incentive to sequester information. Thus, cognitively, each structure has advantages and disadvantages.

An important advantage of hierarchy is recursion. Can democracy recurse? Well, it does. Voters vote for a party, who selects MPs, who select a PM. The problem is that, while recursion does not make hierarchies less hierarchical, it does make democracies less democratic, at least as practiced. The advantage of democracy is accountability to the broad electorate, which, among other things, helps ensure that all ideas are at least considered. Layers of indirection undermine this, in favor of some of the advantage of hierarchy, which is that ideas are processed and synthesized, rather than just selected among.

As for democracy and markets, in a sense a vote is even lower bandwidth than a price, as a vote is binary (you get it or you don’t), whereas a price is scalar. But votes are secured with information, and are meant to transmit complex information, while prices are informationally self-sufficient. All you need to know about the seller (assuming a basic level of trust) is the price, whereas a candidate has to at least know why she got the votes she did, and is best off understanding this as well as possible.

Is there a form of democracy that could have some of the cognitive advantages of hierarchy and markets without losing its own advantages? I have some ideas along this line, but before I go on further, I’ll see if anyone is still listening.

“Of course, this then falls victim to the usual problems of preference aggregation – but we aren’t arguing for first-best schemes of allocation, simply for better (while still imperfect) methods of discovery.” … I’d be happy with that if you actually spent any time at all arguing for anything better. As it is, your jaded invocation of the “usual problems” makes me think you’ve made the usual mistake: thinking that, since Arrow proved there’s no perfect voting method, it doesn’t really matter if most of the world is using the worst one known.

Henry: many thanks for your manifold and lucid series of replies, much appreciated.

Since you brought the Supreme Court into it, I started wondering if your theory of improved democracy was really restricted to the legislative, but not the judicial and executive, branches of government. When you say you want to “see the US reverse a series of obviously wrongheaded Supreme Court decisions”, well, is that through a series of democratic, hierarchical or market actions?

If democratic, I can see any worthwhile SC (or junior court) ruling that democracy does not involve the right for Henry or anyone else to decide that some or any of our judicial decisions are obviously wrongheaded. “A law inflexible to praise or blame, to bribe or threat …”

If hierarchical, surely the SC would state that yes, there damn well is a judicial hierarchy, the law cannot function without one, and who do you think is by rights at the top of that hierarchy?

If the market: well yes, money can buy a great deal in courts, in some benighted states it can probably buy the whole Supreme Court or equivalent, but I didn’t think that was your ideal for the US.

As for the civil service, police, armed forces and what not: they’re part of the government, they should be responsive to the legislature, there are obvious disadvantages in having them directly controlled by a miscellaneously-informed and motivated populace. There are of course greater disadvantages in not having them controlled at all, but who argues for that?

I disagree with most of what Brian Donnelly says, but I would defend to the death the right of anyone to say such things with extreme attitude who is at the same giving 100 percent of the profits from a derivatives trading company to public causes. Only the super-rich can save us!

Henry and company:

I came across this newly published article in the journal Studies in Emergent Order on
Hayek and Science that might be of particular relevance to this discussion. If it has been mentioned prior, my apologies.

http://docs.sieo.org/SIEO_5_2012_HardwickMarsh.pdf

Thanks for the feedback Henry. Is your contention that HL Mencken is not the subject of much “serious” research? Perhaps you should check that again. …and who is the definer of an “intellectual” argument? Is an intuitive perspective held by an individual perfectly capable of communicating his reality simply, lacking in intellectual rigor? …by who’s definition?

Yes, my communication is simple. For I too believe if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough (Einstein). My truth is quite simple. There is little evidence in history for the contention that democracy solves simple problems let alone complex ones. Would my truth be more believable if I could point to all of the complex problems it hasn’t solved? Just turn on the news. And where are its victories? When fear was the motivator, as in a great war, society galvanizes behind a cause, and democracy becomes irrelevant. Was Hitler less effective because Germany wasn’t a democracy?

The fact that I continually reference Mencken is because he was an artist with the English language, and it would take me months to communicate my ideas as effectively as he did. As you can surmise, I happen to agree with him.

“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” -HL Mencken (July 26, 1920)

Had he said this in 2009, when George Bush was leaving office, there would have been a lot of head nodding.

“If you provide a link to “much serious research” on the political thought of Mencken you might make your case.”

It’s funny a group of academics can have a debate on democracy and not have read “Notes On Democracy”. No, we need someone “intelligent” to do research on Mencken for there to be credibility. Of course, academics were notoriously hostile to him.

In any case, if you could qualify “serious” it would be helpful. I have no idea who this group would respect. …great thinkers or published professors? Alistair Cooke? While scholarships to Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale didn’t yield a PhD to establish his credibility, he qualifies as a great thinker in my estimation. His research and writings on Mencken are well documented:

http://www.amazon.com/Six-Men-Alistair-Cooke/dp/0141036079/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338503934&sr=1-9

http://www.amazon.com/Vintage-Mencken-Alistair-Cooke/dp/1443725609/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338504030&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/MENCKEN-ALISTAIR-COOKE/dp/1149438835/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338504059&sr=1-4

http://www.amazon.com/Mencken-gathered-Alistair-Cooke/dp/B001FBOFM2/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338504059&sr=1-9

How about historian, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers:

http://www.amazon.com/Mencken-Iconoclast-Marion-Elizabeth-Rodgers/dp/019533129X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338504559&sr=1-1

http://books.google.ca/books?id=7XQ7AQAAIAAJ&q=Marion+Elizabeth+Rodgers&dq=Marion+Elizabeth+Rodgers&hl=en&sa=X&ei=L_XHT5m-NejJ0QHKmJW1Dw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAg

…or Terry Teachout:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Skeptic-Life-H-Mencken/dp/0060505281

…or check-out Charles A. Fecher’s, “HL Mencken, Prejudices”

The list goes on. Almost as much scholarly work was written about Mencken as the prolific writer wrote himself.

Jameson,

thanks for the interest. It would be a another long, complex comment, which I don’t have time for at the moment and may not get to before the thread closes. I expect this thread to close any time, so, even if I made the comment, there would not be much time for discussion of it.

piglet,

In 153, I did an analysis of the structural features for cognitive purposes of hierarchies, democracies, and markets in their pure form. Perhaps that would interest you. In 166, I gave an example of how hierarchy vs. democracy might play out in the real world analysis of a problem. Henry didn’t respond to the specifics of these, but hinted that the further development of this research project would address the sort of things I brought up.