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Why "We The People" Should Use Random Sample Voting
With a little boost from 4chan, a petition for the U.S. government to build a working Death Star has reached 30,000 signatures and counting, over on the White House's Department Of Let's See How Fast We Can Get 75,000 Signatures To Legalize Pot (or as it's officially known, "We The People"). This is the website where any of the member of the public can create a petition that other users can sign, and if the petition receives 25,000 signatures in 30 days, the White House will issue an official response. (Alan Boyle is taking suggestions on how the White House should respond to the Death Star request. How about: "4chan. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.")
Cynics will say that the whole process was already a joke anyway. Even looking at the most popular non-Death-Star related petitions on We The People, most of them express standard left- or right-wing positions on hot-button topics in a manner that's extremely unlikely to convert anyone who doesn't already agree. Since everyone already knows that those some large segment of the population holds those positions, nobody would be surprised that any one of those petitions would be able to gather 25,000 signatures, and so there would be no pressure on the White House to change any of their official positions as a result.
On the other hand, I don't think this means that online petitioning can't work. Rather, I think a sligthly different algorithm could greatly improve the quality of the suggestions that get filtered to the top and trigger a response from the White House. At least one algorithm exists that (a) would prevent the system from being "gamed" by any large, organized group (whether 4chan or the NRA); and (b) would reward the petitions that were supported by the highest percentage of the general user population (or, if you prefer, the petitions that were supported by the highest percentage of credentialed experts in a given field).
The algorithm is the same one that I've advocated for preventing cheating on digg, or identifying the best "hidden gems" among newly released songs (and political arguments), or adjudicating Facebook abuse complaints -- have each petition voted on by a random subset of users registered on the We The People site. Based on this random sampling method, the petitions that have the highest percentage of "yes" votes, are assumed to be the ones with the broadest level of support among registered users, and the ones most deserving of a response from the White House.
Example: Suppose there are 250,000 registered users on the We The People site. A user creates a new petition, and somehow manages to pass some "threshold" that is implemented to screen out blatant time-wasters. (Perhaps you have to gain 100 signatures to pass the first threshold. I'd prefer it if you could clear the first hurdle just by paying $5 with a credit card, but this might anger purists who say that petitioning the government should always be free.) Your petition then gets emailed out to 100 randomly selected other users on the site, who vote to either Agree or Disagree. (In practice, in order to get 100 votes cast, you'd have to email more than 100 people, taking into account their response rate. So if only 50% of users respond to an email request for votes, email it to 200 randomly selected users to ensure you get about 100 votes cast.) Then petitions are sorted according to the percentage of users in their sample who voted to Agree. Petitions that got a high percentage of yes-votes, could be forwarded out to a wider audience (say, 1,000 users), to ensure that the initial high percentages of yes-votes wasn't just a fluke. Users in each random sample could also include comments about why they were voting a particular proposal up or down.
This sounds deceptively simple, but it makes it much harder for an organized online movement to hack the system. Say that 4chan manages to get 25,000 registered users in an attempt to push their favored petition to the top. This still means that, on average, their voters will comprise only about 10% of the randomly selected voters in any online poll - possibly enough to give an extra boost to a petition that already had broad support from regular users, but not enough to achieve a coup all by themselves.
Perhaps you'd object that even if such a system could not be manipulated by organized mobs, it would still leave the approval rating in the hands of non-expert ordinary citizens (even if citizens registered on We The People are slightly more informed than average). Whether you think this is a good thing, depends on whether you think the purpose of the site is to reflect the will of the people, or to provide informed advice to the President.
But if you want to get a random sampling of expert opinions, that's pretty easy as well. For petitions on, say, economic matters, just have a subset of users consisting of economics professors from accredited universities across the country. (These credentials would have to be confirmed manually by White House staff, but it's not that hard to verify that someone owns an .edu address and that their university webpage identifies them as an econ professor.) Then any petition on an economic matter could be submitted to a random sample of economics professors to be rated by them. If a petition gets a rating from economics experts that is wildly different from the rating it gets from the general user population, that suggests something interesting is going on (either econ professors are out of touch, or the general public is misinformed). But if a petition gets high levels of support from the public and the relevant expert group, that would seem to justify a response from the White House, much more so than some of the idiotic petitions currently pulling 65,000+ votes on We The People.
Something almost like this has actually been done by the IGM Economic Experts Panel in Chicago, which surveyed a group of 41 economists that the IGM believed to be among the best in the world, representative of the political left, right, and center. The survey found a high degree of consensus on questions that the general public is divided on, such as the fact that 40 out of 41 experts agreed with the statement:
All else equal, permanently raising the federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income by 1 percentage point for those in the top (i.e., currently 35%) tax bracket would increase federal tax revenue over the next 10 years.
To people who have heard celebrity conservative economists claiming that raising marginal tax rates lowers tax revenue, it might come as a surprise that virtually all expert economists in the IGM's sample, including a representative number of self-described conservatives, agreed that it does not. But don't just soak the rich and call it a day; most economists in the IGM's sample also disagreed that:
The cumulative budget shortfalls in the US over the next 10 years can be reduced by half (or more) purely by increasing the federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income for those in the top tax bracket.
Of course those were questions of fact (what economists call positive economics), while petitions address questions of what should be done (what economists call normative economics, and which varies according to your values and goals). But even economists with diverse political leanings often advocate similar policies; NPR interviewed 5 economists spanning the spectrum from left to right, and found across-the-board consensus in favor of 6 proposals, which you can read here. And hey, one of them is legalizing pot!
If We The People implements a system for polling a random sample of economics experts, I think their first order of business should be to have them rate the ideas in that 6-point platform. The five-person panel claimed that all of these ideas have broad support from economists across the political spectrum, but it would be good to know for sure. And for any of those six points that has broad consensus support from experts, it should be incumbent on the White House to declare whether they agree, and if not, why not.
More generally, random-sample voting will always reveal more useful information -- whether about the opinion of the public, or about the opinions of experts -- than a petition site that lets passionate users self-organize into signature mobs. As I've been saying ever since my first story advocating this algorithm, the only site I'm aware of that currently implements random-sample voting correctly, is HotOrNot, which shows users a random series of pictures and lets users rate the picture's hotness on a scale of 1 to 10. Can we not make at least that much effort to design a working system, when it comes to deciding which petitions get a response from the White House?
We should make bribery illegal (instead of necessary).
That way, rich assholes wouldn't sell out the rest of us in a shortsighted attempt at protecting or enlarging their giant piles of money.
Of course the Republican party would oppose it, but at this point they also oppose hurricane aid so I think we should just stop taking those people seriously.
This makes the erroneous assumption that only those things are worthy of attention of government that a large percentage of the public agrees with. That is a disturbing view of how government should work.
If 25000 people bother to petition the White House about some issue, the president's staff should damned well pay attention and consider it. It doesn't matter whether any of the other 330 million people in the country approve or not. And if the president needs to make economic decisions by conducting unbiased polls of academic economists, he is obviously not up to his job and should resign.
Far from fringe ideas are being ignored already. Anything that does not agree with the current political line gets a BS answer. They had the guy who runs the TSA reply to a petition asking for it to be disbanded or scaled back. I think that pretty much says it all.
No matter how you count votes or check for support they will ignore it.
I've only voted on a very few of these, and mainly they come through my twitter feed. So the ones I am seeing is already selected by a peer group. I have no interest in visiting the WtP site just to get the chance to vote on something I am not personally invested in. Hell I leave half the mod points I get here on /. unused simply because if something is interesting enough I'll usually comment on it instead of mod. Anyone who is interested in hanging around on WtP just to vote on random topics is NOT someone I want deciding what the White House comments on. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
The novelty of joke petitions will wane over time. Until then, the White House staff can just answer them with: "We reviewed the proposal, but the President will not be pursuing the construction of a Death Star this term. Thank you for your interest."
If you acknowledge the clowns, tell them they are moderately cute, but neither clever nor disruptive, they will get bored and go away.
...an unbiased WTP population? Given two major political factions, couldn't the better-funded one hold massive "Sign up for WTP!" drives among its adherents and pack the vote? Random sampling won't get an unbiased sample from a biased population.
As I've been saying ever since my first story [in 2008] advocating this algorithm, the only site I'm aware of that currently implements random-sample voting correctly, is HotOrNot
It's understandable why you may have failed to consider this notion, but perhaps the reason that, in 4 years, the only group to take you seriously has been an idiotic vanity website is because it's a stupid fucking idea.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It's as if a million porkbarrels cried out and were suddenly silenced.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We can improve it even more by allowing the points to be positive or negative, and classifying these into categories, like "informative" "insightful" or "flame" or "troll".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Nothing says democratic process and representation like randomly having your vote count.
As opposed to it being worth less and less in both absolute and relative terms as the voting population increases?
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
The death star petition is the absolute most serious petition of them all!
Right! What was it that Bush said? Something like,
"We must take this fight to Alderaan, before they bring the fight to us!"
Damn bun-heads, always jealous of our Earthican awesomeness....
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Even besides that, a good idea could be killed off if the initial small sample of voters happens to be uninterested. With small sample sizes comes the potential to gather a highly homogenous group by accident. Post gun control proposal, happens to hit a group with 51 or more NRA members in it, proposal never had a chance at life.
Instead it would be better to allow a larger group in the initial vote, to reduce this chance. The diversity of the group would ideally be maximized by including everyone...oh wait.
If you want to refine the Online Polite Fuck-Off Letter Dispensary then maybe increase the threshold required for a response, or associate some cost (in some virtual point system which all users are given equally) with voting and creating polls so that people won't waste it on bullshit.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Remember the joke Judge Dredd poll a while ago? Happened just as the new Dredd movie came out...odd coincidence.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Nothing is better at showing the absurdity of something than using it to be absurd. That's the point of the Death Star petition. It's absurd because the whole concept of an online democratic petition is absurd. Our Founding Fathers who were far, far, far more intelligent, well-read, and thoughtful than 99.9% of US citizens now alive knew the absurdity of direct democracy which is why we have a Representative Republic.
We the People is a system to:
(1) provide a low-cost venue with increased public visibility for individual citizen requests to the White House which might otherwise come in the form of individual email, individual paper mail, etc., and
(2) reduce the cost of reading, reviewing, and issuing even boilerplate acknowledgements to those requests by creating a simple significance threshold that must be reached before that occurs.
WTP is a good deal for both citizens and the government, because serious ideas presented through it can have more impact (because of the public visibility), whether or not they result in short-term positive responses (or even serious consideration) by the White House, and because the increased value of WTP as a platform for making requests encourages its use -- which is cheaper for the White House to address than if the concerns came individually.
Random sample voting of the type Haselton proposes, leaving aside problems with bias in the population of registered-for-WTP-voters vs. the general population/electorate and other implementation problems, might seem on the surface to increase the value on point (2), considered in isolation, but it would, even in the best case, undermine the attractiveness of the platform as a venue for citizen requests in point (1), which would reduce the perceived value of using the platform in the first place, which would thereby undermine point (2). And, frankly, even if it didn't undermine point (2), which is the direct value to government efficiency, its arguable that the bigger benefit of WTP to the public is actually (1) -- creation of a high-visibility platform for public requests to the federal government.
The vanity petitions aren't that big of a cost -- a single minimal response to each is cheap -- and will decline as WTP is less of a novelty. Its not worth undermining the whole value proposition of the system to try to fight them.
We the People isn't a joke because of all the stupid petitions. It is a joke because the petition creators think the White House/Congress actually listens to the people.
The way you have your voice heard is to vote someone out of office, cross your fingers and tell yourself "This time things will be different. We won't get fooled again."
People have been able to petition the govt. for a redress of grievances since the founding of the republic (See: First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution).
I third this motion.
As skeptical as I am about the effectiveness of the US government, I do think the White House staffers who set up We the People understand the democratic process a hell of a lot better than Bennett does.
The presence of a silly Death Star petition doesn't worry me. What worries me is the ability of well-organized groups to introduce severe sampling bias to the system Bennett proposes.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
This is an issue only because Congress does not increase the number of Representatives, which is within its power.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Sounds like we need to start a petition to get this algorithm implemented.
Just allow people to downvote them in addition to upvoting them. Then even controversial proposals will not show up with a ton of upvotes and 0 downvotes.
God spoke to me
A petition and a vote are two different things and the only one confused over the difference is the author of this pointless tirade. Words have meaning.
The proposed methodology for petitions is flawed. You can't improve the reliability of a petition, and any attempt at using them for anything other than "Is their interest in said topic" is delusional. A petition should convince someone to do a broader, more scientifically accurate, and valid Poll. It's not that 4Chan and the NRA are manipulating your petitions. It's that you're using your petition for something it can never do, and deluding yourselves into believing you can fix it will not end well.
One could only hope. The pork attached to this cliff-avoider, as well as the Sandy relief fund which wasn't even voted on, is purely disgusting.
Bush's $700 billion bank bailout was $810 billion, the additional $110 billion being pork to purchase votes.
It's time to end "Whining meme rationalization" and just get a balanced budget amendment. Then let the bastards fight it out.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...but why does this matter?
It's been shown that this whole petition-the-white-house nonsese site is simply a pastiche to make people 'feel' they're doing something important.
AFAIK, not a SINGLE issue has ever received a serious, considered answer (other than "we've thought about it, thanks, but we'll do it our way"), much less actually changed policy.
Really, I'm amazed how gullible people who believe in "hope" and "change" are to respond so much to very, very simple manipulation.
-Styopa
The point of petitions is to allow an organized group to make a point. Finding out what the statistical majority of people want is not the goal. We already have a process for doing that, it's call an election. These petitions are there so people that may not be a majority can still organize and make their collective viewpoint on a topic known.
4chan did have a point with this petition. It was not meaningless. It's sad that people can't see that. They were showing the intrinsic weakness in this type of system. You can always get a lot of people together and get them to sign a petition. Petitions are meaningless in that regard and should be taken with a grain of salt. Especially when the topic is highly partisan. Also, it was funny. And if there's anything our political system could use, it's a little humor and humility.
If anything the president can hire 1 extra PR guy to make funny replies to these funny fake petitions.
"We're sorry but the estimated cost of a Death-star is 894 trillion dollars. At this time, even with the help of all other countries on earth, we would not have the economic or material resources to begin production. Furthermore we do not have any device capable of destroying a planet, nor any idea how to build one. We are also very short on planets in this system and destroying one wouldn't be in our best interest. Lastly, it's been calculated that accelerating a death-star to a simple 1 meter per second would consume all of the fissile material on earth, at which point we'd have no way of stopping it and it would likely fall into our gravity well killing us all and substantially speeding up the current global warming trend as all the cities on earth would burn. We recommend that you re-submit your petition in approximately 250 years when technological advancements would make it more feasible. Keep in mind however that we did not address diplomatic concerns in this reply and they may very well prevent such a project irrelevant of its cost or feasibility.
Thank you,
The White House"
It will be interesting to see how experts on gun issues could be allocated. In my experience, those who are experts tend to have a bias towards the right to keep and bear arms, towards the option of personal ownership. Those who are against guns and personal ownership are often quite uneducated on the subject, so anti-gun gun experts will be fairly rare.
For example, a petition to stop restricting possession of sound suppressors (a.k.a., "silencers"), and remove suppressor barrel threading from any definition of a restricted weapon. Any unbiased expert can tell you the facts: Suppressor attachments for today's common firearms take something that is so loud it can cause instant hearing damage, and bring it down to just pretty damn loud, but at least below the threshold of instant damage. To avoid hearing damage from repeated shots, you would still require other hearing protection.
They will tell you that the the more suppressed you want the sound, you have to use less and less lethal rounds. This would go down to a very good suppressor for a well-designed .22 gun, which can get less loud (maybe like a loud clap) when used with subsonic rounds. Less lethality, less power, not exactly the weapon of choice for criminals, especially since with a suppressor the pistol would be less concealable.
They will tell you that the quiet "pfft" sound in the movies and video games that nobody around can hear is completely fake. So with them criminals will not be able to sneak around killing people silently. Their main use is for legal shooters to save their ears and not piss off the neighbors (wouldn't it be nice if pistol ranges were quieter?).
So if the petition is posed to the experts in general, it would be approved. The anti-gun experts would most likely disapprove because they just don't like suppressors, but they're in the minority.
So here comes the big question: who picks the experts? A pro-gun administration would likely pick its expert pool from among general experts. An anti-gun administration would likely pick its expert pool from among sources known to be anti-gun, and any such petition will not be considered on it merits.
That perfectly lines up with my comment about guns. Except in that case, the facts have a conservative slant. So while you could count a Bush administration to cherry pick climate change experts from skeptic organizations, you could also count on Obama to cherry pick gun experts from anti-gun organizations.
I should be particularly interested in what he has to say because of his thoroughly-demonstrated grasp of cause and effect, and the law of unintended consequences, right? ... Nevermind.
I know theoretically the "this person's ideas have been really awful so far" argument is not a persuasive rebuttal, but it sure does save a lot of time.
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You don't even have to be in the US to vote its great! Personally I am going to start a petition for the US to give all of its military technology to Iran* ;)
Disclaimer: I didn't actually vote or anything I just went far enough to see if it was possible, all you need is to make up a zip code.
null
This is an issue only because Congress does not increase the number of Representatives, which is within its power.
It'd be a fake improvement. 'N' people would elect one representative, but then that representative own vote would be worth less and less in both absolute and relative terms as the representative population increases following the increase in the general voting population.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Without debating the accuracy of either GP's described purpose of government or parent's described action of government, I would note that restraining large groups of people and limiting what they can do to include only those set of actions which involve giving substantial sums of money to a small group of people is perfectly consistent with both, so the idea that those two things are mutually inconsistent is misguided.
I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem for a while, but when a single representative's vote is deemed to be worth too little, then maybe the representatives could instead vote for a smaller number of super-representatives to represent them.
Which is what happens with the European Union, with the end result of the secondarily (tertiarily?) represented don't actually feeling that much represented, if at all.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
But we have been doing just that for a very long time – their called juries – randomly selected citizens executing policy. Mind you – there in the judicial branch not the executive branch, but.
So here is one idea that I have been kicking around. We have the direct democracy in action with California’s petition system. Currently, anyone with sufficient motivation can get one onto the ballot. This can lead to a long confusing, and contradictory to vote on. I would like to see a citizen jury rationalize and condense what goes onto the ballot. In a world of wide choices and subtleties, sometimes you need to narrow it to a up/down vote.
The entire premise of the longwinded submission is moot anyway, since the site very obviously exists as a honeypot of public opinion solely for the benefit of the Obama administration. If you haven't noticed all the overflowing petitions that got simply " poo-pooed" with condescension rather than a serious answer, consideration or action, you really haven't taken a look at the thing or it's legitimacy. I would even suggest that names of people are added to databases, categorized by their concerns for future harassment and suspicion. Folly, pure folly.
Sure they took care of a handful of petitions for appearances, but, by and large it's just more Obama fraud.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
When I first heard about Haselton about fifteen years ago, I had a lot of respect for him-- he provided a lot of useful information about the state of censorware, which was a serious bugbear at the time. These days it's embarrassing, because it's obvious that he only has the vaguest idea of the things he expounds upon.
It is not about the representative's power, it is about the voter's power. When your vote counts for only one 700,000th, as it does today, then the representative does not care about you. When your vote is, say, one 30,000th, then the representative cares very much about you. A district of only 30,000 means that anyone can run and win, even without any party support. It places all of the power in the voter's hands, and removes it from the special interests. A large body of representatives, who are loyal to the voters, are extremely difficult to corrupt.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
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