So I've been working on my novel again.
I think it's reached a point whereby I can keep fiddling with it, but it either needs a complete re-write, or I just need to publish it.
I think I'll do something I've been thinking of for a while and setup a new blog to publish it but do it one section at a time. Then what should I call the blog?
You see the problem is that I have written it for myself as something I think I'd like to read. Which means it's quite geeky, full of exposition and suffers poor character development. But then whenever I read it to try and improve it, I enjoy re-reading it, to the point that it's beginning to feel like masturbation.
So I just need to finish this part about how to commit crime in in crime free society and then I think I should do something about it. The working title is "Sonnets from a proton" if that gives you some idea of how embarrassing this could be...
Tuesday 1 March 2011
A new form of government
After my last post I thought I'd post this.
A while ago I came up with an idea for the full devolution of democracy, using online voting to the n'th degree. Based as much as possible on various voting/communal online systems. I'm not saying it's without flaws, but I present it here for comment and improvement.
The basic idea goes that everyone has the vote on every single subject.
But i hear you cry, this would be crazy, for a start there'd be too many decisions every person to make.
Correct. That's why you can appoint proxies.
For example if the subject to be voted upon concerned agricultural policy, and your mate Hugh nicely summed up your views on the subject, or at least summed them up enough that you trusted his views then you'd let him vote on your behalf for all fishing related things.
Let's say you met this guy Jeremy down the pub and you liked his ideas on the transport system, you could delegate your transport related votes to him.
So a bill gets proposed in true online democratic fashion (how this happens I'll get back to) and people tag it with tags in order to categorise it according to the various categories. Agriculture, Transport, Education, etc. Obviously most things would have several tags and therefore there would be conflict. This would therefore need you to have an arbiter in case of conflict. Depending on how important the subject was (determined by the amount of acticity on that topic) you would then either delegate it again (perhaps to the equivalent of your MP) or make the resolution yourself.
Ah, but how would the bill get proposed. Simple people could vote bills up or down. If your delegate chose to vote a bill up or down that was within his delegation remit then he would vote it up with the force of all the votes he had control over.
Now there are a number of issues with this system, not least the common problem of people voting for more public spending and lower taxes. There'd be so many on the dole voting for more taxes on the rich that the economy would probably collapse. Given every bill would have an economic impact and assessing the impact of this would be none trivial then how do you even assess the cost of each proposal never mind balance the budget.
My idea, (although it too is flawed) the personal tax allocation. You buy into government services. For example you can vote up or vote down the spending on military, but the cost is shared equally between all taxpayers. You can vote for more or less money spent on roads or whatever but you must pay your appropriate share. Two problems with this, how do you decide what is fair and how do you prevent the race for the bottom.
Simple, when it comes to tax we formalise the agreement that already exists through lobbyists and bribes, he who pays the piper calls the tune - sort of: on a logarithmic scale the more tax you pay the more say you have in financial matters. That is when it comes to tax policy it costs you (at least) four times as much to buy twice the votes. If you as a rich man vote for yourself to pay less tax, you then have fewer votes with which to maintain your position.
As I say it's far from perfect, but it's certainly different from our current scheme.
A while ago I came up with an idea for the full devolution of democracy, using online voting to the n'th degree. Based as much as possible on various voting/communal online systems. I'm not saying it's without flaws, but I present it here for comment and improvement.
The basic idea goes that everyone has the vote on every single subject.
But i hear you cry, this would be crazy, for a start there'd be too many decisions every person to make.
Correct. That's why you can appoint proxies.
For example if the subject to be voted upon concerned agricultural policy, and your mate Hugh nicely summed up your views on the subject, or at least summed them up enough that you trusted his views then you'd let him vote on your behalf for all fishing related things.
Let's say you met this guy Jeremy down the pub and you liked his ideas on the transport system, you could delegate your transport related votes to him.
So a bill gets proposed in true online democratic fashion (how this happens I'll get back to) and people tag it with tags in order to categorise it according to the various categories. Agriculture, Transport, Education, etc. Obviously most things would have several tags and therefore there would be conflict. This would therefore need you to have an arbiter in case of conflict. Depending on how important the subject was (determined by the amount of acticity on that topic) you would then either delegate it again (perhaps to the equivalent of your MP) or make the resolution yourself.
Ah, but how would the bill get proposed. Simple people could vote bills up or down. If your delegate chose to vote a bill up or down that was within his delegation remit then he would vote it up with the force of all the votes he had control over.
Now there are a number of issues with this system, not least the common problem of people voting for more public spending and lower taxes. There'd be so many on the dole voting for more taxes on the rich that the economy would probably collapse. Given every bill would have an economic impact and assessing the impact of this would be none trivial then how do you even assess the cost of each proposal never mind balance the budget.
My idea, (although it too is flawed) the personal tax allocation. You buy into government services. For example you can vote up or vote down the spending on military, but the cost is shared equally between all taxpayers. You can vote for more or less money spent on roads or whatever but you must pay your appropriate share. Two problems with this, how do you decide what is fair and how do you prevent the race for the bottom.
Simple, when it comes to tax we formalise the agreement that already exists through lobbyists and bribes, he who pays the piper calls the tune - sort of: on a logarithmic scale the more tax you pay the more say you have in financial matters. That is when it comes to tax policy it costs you (at least) four times as much to buy twice the votes. If you as a rich man vote for yourself to pay less tax, you then have fewer votes with which to maintain your position.
As I say it's far from perfect, but it's certainly different from our current scheme.
Who writes the rules
This may be an old theory, but it certainly isn't mine, can't remember where I came across it and it was fairly recently; but it was new to me, so I'll run with it.
The idea goes that in the old days it was the religious leaders who made the rules. It was all about absolute authority and follow these arbitrary rules or else. From there you got kings and the divine right and all that stuff.
Then the lawyers came along with ideas like "No, man has to make the laws for himself" and so you got things like the republic. The idea coming down to anyone who had the right education and connections could make the rules. Yes you had democracies and yes the population had a vote on who made the rules, (to prevent absolute abuse of power) but the general population was not viewed as overtly competent; more-so that like a legal system there were checks and balances placed in the system itself.
Now you've had Wikileaks and the proposal is that this is an attempt to apply scientific/engineering principles to the field of law. This was the new idea to me, so bear with me here. What science and engineering fundamentally say is that it doesn't matter who you are or what your education is, it doesn't matter as long as you are right.* Now this then leads to the concept that as long as information is freely available and debate open and free then the correct way to do things will be found. In fact the best thing people can do is collect data and publish it. It will occasionally cause upsets and disturb the status quo, but it all advances the state of the art.
To me this is an interesting thought, will you have a society that is ruled not by dogma, or a collection of rules debated by a subset of society but an honest effort to find the optimal behaviour for the species. I'm a big fan of Ian M Banks' writing particularly his Culture works and the anarchic society that is the culture. Not that I am an anarchist, I really don't believe that would ever work unless you have the post scarcity society that is the Culture and the benevolent god like puppet masters that are the Minds, but then at that point it's not really a human society anymore is it?
This is a concept that I've tried to explore in my own writings but it's really hard because I also have to first explore a society that is transitioning to a post scarcity society.
now all this is very tempting to try and work into my writings too, but they already becoming a tangled mess of complexity. I really should start publishing them and getting feedback...
Back to the point this is all about the evolution of the memes that that form society, potentially there are a set of memes and laws that form a society that is better than our own, but what are they. One or two very powerful men set out to give their opinion on that and you got religion. Then a greater mass of learned men tried to reason it out. Is the next step to open it up to public debate and iterative improvement?
No idea.
* "While the church knows no argument but force we know no force but argument" springs to mind. Fine there is definitely a hierarchy of respect within the scientific community, but at the end of the day if the lowliest school child came up with a demonstrable proof of anti-gravity, or some way to unify quantum mechanics and relativity then their status (hopefully) wouldn't matter, only the results.
The idea goes that in the old days it was the religious leaders who made the rules. It was all about absolute authority and follow these arbitrary rules or else. From there you got kings and the divine right and all that stuff.
Then the lawyers came along with ideas like "No, man has to make the laws for himself" and so you got things like the republic. The idea coming down to anyone who had the right education and connections could make the rules. Yes you had democracies and yes the population had a vote on who made the rules, (to prevent absolute abuse of power) but the general population was not viewed as overtly competent; more-so that like a legal system there were checks and balances placed in the system itself.
Now you've had Wikileaks and the proposal is that this is an attempt to apply scientific/engineering principles to the field of law. This was the new idea to me, so bear with me here. What science and engineering fundamentally say is that it doesn't matter who you are or what your education is, it doesn't matter as long as you are right.* Now this then leads to the concept that as long as information is freely available and debate open and free then the correct way to do things will be found. In fact the best thing people can do is collect data and publish it. It will occasionally cause upsets and disturb the status quo, but it all advances the state of the art.
To me this is an interesting thought, will you have a society that is ruled not by dogma, or a collection of rules debated by a subset of society but an honest effort to find the optimal behaviour for the species. I'm a big fan of Ian M Banks' writing particularly his Culture works and the anarchic society that is the culture. Not that I am an anarchist, I really don't believe that would ever work unless you have the post scarcity society that is the Culture and the benevolent god like puppet masters that are the Minds, but then at that point it's not really a human society anymore is it?
This is a concept that I've tried to explore in my own writings but it's really hard because I also have to first explore a society that is transitioning to a post scarcity society.
now all this is very tempting to try and work into my writings too, but they already becoming a tangled mess of complexity. I really should start publishing them and getting feedback...
Back to the point this is all about the evolution of the memes that that form society, potentially there are a set of memes and laws that form a society that is better than our own, but what are they. One or two very powerful men set out to give their opinion on that and you got religion. Then a greater mass of learned men tried to reason it out. Is the next step to open it up to public debate and iterative improvement?
No idea.
* "While the church knows no argument but force we know no force but argument" springs to mind. Fine there is definitely a hierarchy of respect within the scientific community, but at the end of the day if the lowliest school child came up with a demonstrable proof of anti-gravity, or some way to unify quantum mechanics and relativity then their status (hopefully) wouldn't matter, only the results.
Moving? Buying a House
I've been thinking about the process of moving house (which I've just completed recently).
To sum it up a few things I've noticed:
All in all a positive experience. I'm not looking forward to doing it again though.
To sum it up a few things I've noticed:
- You have to love the property when you are considering buying, you have to want it and feel it is perfect for you. That way by the time you get it, you'll merely tolerate it.
- It doesn't matter what budgets you make, it's more expensive than you think
- It doesn't matter ho careful you are, there's more wrong with it than you thought.
- Fixing things takes a lot longer than you thought.
- It takes a lot longer to get stuff done once you've moved in
- Ever wonder how old married couples get that way? I have stopped doing so.
- It soon becomes clear the work you need to do on it will never end. This is good, and this is bad.
- You'll always grow to fill the available space in the house, try and make sure you have room for expansion one way or another
- You have more stuff to pack than you thought.
- Rental agencies have become worse in the last couple of years at moving out inspections, but that's another story.
All in all a positive experience. I'm not looking forward to doing it again though.
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