Contextually Weighted Voting
Intelligent Voting within the Ten-Tier System
Elevator Pitch:
In a digital democracy, the influence of an individual vote could be weighted according to how relevant their understanding is or how deeply they are involved with a specific voting topic. If someone is considered an expert in a subject, they have a stronger or larger vote than someone who has little understanding or experience.
In this way, a person may have a lot of say in one vote but very little influence in another — all relative to one’s relevant experience, qualifications, and personal investment. This helps to proof against corruption, allowing power and influence to be contextual, and helps to empower those who are most likely to cast an intelligent, thoughtful vote on a subject that has personal significance.
When or if democratic input is expanded to all areas of society, it is likely important to ensure one’s knowledge and experience is relevant to the subject being voted on, factoring in one’s personal affiliations also. If the People hold the ultimate authority in society, it is critical that we empower and facilitate intelligent voting. We can make it statistically probable that we will arrive at the optimal outcome in a way that is both fair and efficient.
Discussion:
The proposed Digital Democracy suggests use of a political social media so citizens can engage with citizen-initiated discussions. With the help of well-designed software and AI, we can curate information from across the Internet and global activity, making full use of human experience and expertise yet ultimately leaving the executive decision-making power with the public.
But if we’re to consider everyone’s vote, how do we reconcile expert opinion with un-expert public opinion?
The reigning concept of government is to stay static, keeping a consistent board of decision-makers regardless of what subject. It’s the same old people who are empowered on our behalf to make these decisions for us, yet predictably with half the population getting frustrated at the results. To keep things fresh, we switch out some of the players every three or four years, with the intent of the dominating votership to either keep things going more or less the way they were, or hope for change.
But should one group of people make all the decisions regardless of their expertise in the matter? A party voted into government is a package deal. All their ideology, all their policies, good and bad, are voted in with them — the baby and the bathwater, rose and thorn.
In essence, and almost by definition, we are voting in a biased and politically charged ideology as the basis for decision-making for the next term of government. On top of that, we are getting a small group of opinionated individuals (political types, you know) who are limited in personal experience and qualification. That part is not their fault, as it is simply the nature of having a small group of people managing a large operation. Still, this is the way things are.
In broadening the act of governing to include the whole of the population — at least those who wish to contribute — the coordination and decisions of society benefit from having a larger pool of experience, knowledge, specialties, creative thought, and societal observation. At the same time, if everyone is technically invited to the party, the bar is set low for how qualified one needs to be to cast a vote.
To find a practical and fair compromise and create an effective democratic ‘government’ (of a different kind), we might find a way to acknowledge or incorporate everyone’s opinion, good or bad, but from those opinions find a way to judge the validity of that input. If someone’s input is considered to be valuable on a specific subject (i.e. more likely to be ‘correct’), it could make sense for that valuation to be incorporated into the voting system. After all, we should be making use of the expertise and esoteric knowledge of our citizens, shouldn’t we?
A typical democracy tends to weight each person’s vote as equal, which sounds fair on face value, but when we are broadening the democratic process to immediately actionable tasks in society, accountability ultimately lies with the People. We are the authority, and we are the bottom line. So it would be in our best interest to arrive at a decision that is most likely to work for us. Who and what can best help us get there?
When we consider this idea of fairness, you might say the only way to be fair is for everyone to be equal in their say. But let me riddle you this: for a matter of, say, a pandemic, is it ‘fair’ for a virologist with 20+ years of experience, multiple degrees in epidemiology and public health, to have their vote nullified by someone who has no medical training, no expert knowledge, little understanding of science, and perhaps little interest in the matter at hand? Is it either fair or smart to weight those votes the same? To value their opinions equally? In most situations, I would say not.
We could have a system like the Rotten Tomatoes website, where movies are rated twice: one rating by film critics, and one audience score. This means the professional opinion is considered and counted, even broadcasted with substantial reason for their opinions and votes — but that doesn’t mean the audience (the public) has to agree, and it doesn’t mean they should necessarily, either. By default, a professional analysis holds more weight per person, as their individual input is typically much more thoughtful, nuanced, experience-based, theory-based, with their ultimate decision factoring in many more variables. It would make sense for people qualified in a subject to be at the forefront of each discussion. But that doesn’t mean they’re always right… With a long evolution of learning, where science, technology, engineering, medicine and professional practices have since refined or corrected themselves, we can look back at the past and shake our heads. Certainly this will continue as such, where the opinions of experts should always be listened to, yet these people should not be set lawfully as the arbiters of truth and the all-knowing, all-seeing gods of democracy.
Still, their input, being more qualified than the layman’s in so many ways, is much more likely to be read and considered by the layman who may hope to either challenge or be affirmed by ‘the expert’. It is at least a point of interest if not a point of learning for the layman. But ultimately, an audience will do what they feel is best, and are likely side with the audience, who they consider is the majority. After all, films are made for audiences, and not for critics.
If you have followed the analogy, you might agree that a society exists for the citizenry, and not for the elite. It’s quite possible that experts will be outvoted from time to time, although it is guaranteed that experts will disagree with each other. We already see this on a daily basis in science. But right or wrong, both technologically and culturally, this kind of democracy will be self-refining. If we find that distrusting experts leads to disaster, it’s likely that people will listen more.
There is also likely to be a cultural shift in how people respond to experts, given our recent history with so-called ‘experts’ being propaganda puppets, used to control public perspective rather than offering legitimate and balanced insight from a body of professionals. Once corruption in society is quashed and trust re-established, an expert opinion is likely to hold more weight in the public eye.
So how specifically would votes be weighted?
In the present design, the main three factors that comprise one’s voting weight are:
Experience
Qualification
Personal investment
The suggestion for making the most of humanity’s skills and knowledge is to have a personal digital profile that is integrated with the democratic system. This means we can connect problem identification with qualified input, qualified and weighted voting, and ultimately problem resolution in the physical world.
I’m cynical in my wording here, as democracy doesn’t necessarily have to be an act of ‘fixing problems’. It can also be used for project management, innovations, and tweaking and changing systems already in existence. The opportunities are endless in how this technology could be applied, contributing to the building, management and refining of society. Imagine if your million-dollar business idea could more easily find its way into society with much less effort on your part?
Regardless of how the democratic system is used, it could make some sense to quantify how relevant or reliable the input is from an individual. In a digitalised, algorithmic system, how would we calculate such a thing?
We can think of this numerically, finding ways to literally measure the significance and relevance of one’s qualifications relative to a subject of discussion. Given there is such a vast and perhaps subjective array of experience that is hard to box into set algorithms, we could use AI to consider one’s life and work experience, and from it calculate a relevance score. This relevance score would be produced for a specific vote or ‘forum’, so that one’s expertise in a specific matter is quantified and duly applied to the weighting of their vote.
Another matter is one’s personal relevance, their personal investment, and to calculate this, the system may require further information about an individual — perhaps even their personal preferences and behaviour. This starts to creep towards privacy scares, where people surely don’t want an omniscient AI construct knowing everything about you, let alone having full access to all of humanity’s information simultaneously, in real time. But let us put aside AI world domination for a second and look purely at the applications. When considering privacy, it should be a principle of societal design that people have to opt in, or can easily opt out, when it comes to tracking and profile-building. Of course this is already being done to a terrifying degree, but much of the problem, in my opinion, lies in the fact that this information is collected, stored, sold and used by huge capitalist conglomerates and increasingly authoritarian governments. But if we can fully and wholly trust whichever system we give our personal information to, knowing that it won’t be used against us or as part of a manipulation scheme, the picture begins to transform from an Orwellian nightmare to a harmonious utopia.
For refining systems, I feel AI is already well equipped to self-refine, although it’s likely that we don’t want to surrender complete control to a faceless robot. In using specific metrics for how this relevance score is calculated, democratic input does make some sense. This might mean a slight trial-and-error approach, but it means that we the people have some input into who gets what voting power, which is surely important when designing the ultimate democracy.
Like with a proposed democratic economy (to be explained/explored in another post), the calibration of society can be democratic in so many ways. Voting for such things does not have to be the result of discussion, and could even be an everyday activity. You could wake up, log in to the platform, see the ‘stocks’ for teacher wages, the price of apples, or whatever you might consider interesting or important, and vote for an increase or decrease in something you feel should be tweaked.
A further idea for this system is to consider how often and how well a person is voting through this system. An active voter who has proven themselves as a good decision-maker (somehow) could be rewarded for their contributions. If this counts as contributing to society, it could feed into your Contribution Score (explained in another post) which may slightly increase (the equivalent of) your salary. Regular voting or a history of siding with the majority are not necessarily markers of an intelligent or wise voter, so perhaps we have to take care when not creating a feedback loop where power systematically shifts into the hands of those seeking it, or where corruption finds a nice little loophole.
At the same time, it’s an attractive premise to have an attentive and enthusiastic votership, and when voting is a direct contribution to how society is run, we may consider some kind of compensation or benefit from one’s contributions. What makes most sense to me is a kind of investment game, where you can receive an outright reward for participation, but can also get a long-term or scalable return for your efforts to guide and govern society.
This ties into the investor idea-based economy we will explore in a different section, which, in short, would allow for a capitalism-like market that upholds and even empowers innovation better than capitalism itself.
Why is investment important? It’s important because we don’t want people throwing their opinions around if they have no skin in the game. The best decision-making often happens when you are invested in the outcome. If you truly care about the after-effects and implications of a change made, you might be more careful with your considerations, more inclined to research and understand the subject at hand, and act in its best interest.
Weighted votes or multiple votes?
For further ideas and discussion on how to reform democracy, I recommend further reading in my post on Nevil Shute’s seven-vote system.
In brief, Shute designed a democratic system within his novel In The Wet, where people get additional votes for certain qualifications or roles of responsibility.
Such an idea could be incorporated into a digital democracy, where additional voting power is earned through further education, societal contribution, or proving oneself as a capable and responsible thinker in matters of decision-making.
A far-reaching democracy does not necessarily need to weight votes contextually, as explored above, but could empower individuals as is more traditionally done. This means people have universal and often permanent power, and would carry the implication that these people would have to be trusted with their influence. This is really the premise of the idea — that societal influence corresponds with the level of trust a person has rightly earned through their societal contribution, education or training, or uptake of responsibility. Instead of empowering someone through an official vote into parliament, we could retain this idea of citizen governance by empowering the individual and even reserving privileges like this for those who seek to better themselves and/or society.
Read the Seven-Vote post here.