What would draw people to Co-Co and what would keep them there?
How are the preferences of LOCALS users aggregated?
LOCALS sounds a lot like a political party. Political parties have been disastrous. I’d love for one of the big two to be replaced. Is LOCALS a temporary measure to get voting reform (eg ranked choice) or a long-term thing?
I want more community cohesion when it comes to having more cookouts. More community cohesion in politics makes less sense. A teacher in Texas has more in common with a teacher in NY than the cattle rancher down the road. Unfortunately, the US political system is by design required to be location based.
Is LOCALS a political party with “increase local community connection” as its party platform? If the party has some actionable plans, then its ideas can get picked up by the big parties if LOCALS shows that its ideas are popular. This might not be a bad idea and could solve the lack-of-community problem without overthrowing the big parties.
LOCALS is absolutely NOT a political party. I am very anti political party because I consider political parties to be anti-democratic. I suppose this is the danger in giving a sloppy synopsis. I was hoping to convey that it wasn’t a political party via a context clue by saying LOCALS candidates will run in the democrat and republican primaries. In other words, they would run as democrats and republicans because 1. They are not a political party and 2. The system is rigged to permanently codify the democrat and republican parties as the only 2 viable parties. It is a bad strategy to try to change the system from the outside. It has to be changed from the inside to be successful. There is no way LOCALS could compete with the two major parties, so instead of competing it aims to join both and become an integral part of both while making both irrelevant in the long run.
Another reason LOCALS shouldn’t be considered a political party is that one of the aims is to be as non political as possible. This would be accomplished by prioritizing democracy (really stakeholder democracy, but that’s another long conversation) over every issue. For example, suppose a LOCALS candidate were to be asked “what is your opinion on abortion”, they would give a standard LOCALS answer such as “I am completely supportive of whatever the will of the majority of the constituents from my district want according to the data collected from the Township Talks portion of the Community-Cohesion application. I want to work for you, so I’m more interested in what you think. What’s your opinion on abortion?” Similar answers would be given for gun control and other controversial issues. I could write a whole essay on this idea alone and how it solves a number of political problems, but my time is limited.
Co-Co would deal with a lot more than politics and would indeed help your cookouts, and I also think that is very important, but I think focusing on national politics is both a strategical and ethical mistake when it comes to a majority of domestic policies. Education is one of those. I don’t like the prospect of a teacher in Texas identifying politically more with a teacher in New York than his own community. It reminds me of teacher’s unions which I am also against. While that may be good for the individual teachers, it comes at the expense of the community that the teachers serve. Ideally, teachers should be trying to figure out how to best serve their community rather than themselves. Realistically, we know that most will act selfishly due to human nature, but the fact of the matter is that students and parents in Texas have different needs and priorities than students and parents in New York. When the teachers from New York and Texas collaborate to enforce their own will over the will of the communities they serve, that is something which I consider to be akin to an economic externality like when companies pollute to save costs and increase market competitiveness. Furthermore, by collaborating on such endeavors, they make pedagogy more centralized and uniform in the process which means less innovation and more fat tail risk because vastly more students are affected when they get it wrong.
Next, why should people in New York have any say in how people in Texas choose to educate their students or vice versa? I strongly believe in every community’s right to political self-determination within certain moral boundaries and see a national teacher’s union as a violation of that right. The only counterargument to this is expertocracy where we discount parents and students in the decision making process in favor of the teachers who are supposed to serve them because they know less than teachers about pedagogy. I see that as an information problem to be solved in more ethical ways. While that sounds very daunting to most people, as a naturally creative thinker and problem solver, it sounds less daunting to me although I will admit that my solution in this case involves rethinking the whole entire education system because I find the entire system to be inherently unsatisfactory in ways that can’t be internally reformed. I wish I could say otherwise, but I believe public school is actually damaging to a majority of children, especially compared to possible unrealized alternatives that would take me more time than I have to explain. Suffice it to say it would be part of Co-Co if I am successful. Perhaps that will give you an idea of how broad the proposed app is. It is definitely the most daunting part of my plan. I remain optimistic though because recent advances in computer science make me believe it is possible to accomplish the things I want to do with it.
As far as how Co-Co would attract and keep users, I could sum that up by saying that if it works and gets off the ground then it would become absolutely indispensable for daily life and everyone would have it and use it to do all kinds of things ranging from determining how their local elected officials create and vote on policies to making money directly through the app, finding jobs, buying and selling on the private market, buying and selling with local businesses, looking at product reviews, browsing and searching the internet, finding friends or dates, and much more. I am in the process of getting a complete description on paper. Even just that is a lot of work, and I am still developing ideas for it as well. Before I even do any of that here, I am thinking I will first post about my epistemology and ethical philosophies as well as what challenges I believe the US faces to try to get people on the same wavelength before I go posting really long discourses on how to solve them. Unfortunately, I am not a fast writer. I frequently rewrite and edit everything heavily before I post something that I am serious about because I know how important a first impression is about a subject. I’m actually being quite lazy in this discussion which is why you got some wrong impressions from my previous post.
Fusion parties choose one of the main two candidates as their candidate. This gets around the spoiler effect. Eg the Populist Party would list whichever of the big candidates supported Free Silver.
A problem with that is that fusion parties are illegal in 48 states(?!) because the major parties don’t want to face a coalition against them.
LOCALS would try to get the democrat and the republican candidate to use Co-Co to choose their policies (offering the candidate support in form of donations or personnel), and if they do then they get an endorsement. I’m still a bit iffy on the difference between an interest group and a political party, so maybe you are in the clear.
I love your vision of how a politician should answer the abortion question. Separating the three questions “who do voters think is qualified” “what do voters want” and “what is true” would be great for democracy. Similar to:
https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
When it comes to local vs not local, if 1⁄100 people is an X, and they are spread out, then their voice doesn’t mean much and the other 99⁄100 people in their district can push through policies that harm them. If the Xes are in the same district, then they get a say about what happens to them. I used teachers as an example of an X, but it is more general than that. (Though I’m thinking about the persecution of Jews in particular.)
Fusion parties choose one of the main two candidates as their candidate. This gets around the spoiler effect. Eg the Populist Party would list whichever of the big candidates supported Free Silver.
A problem with that is that fusion parties are illegal in 48 states(?!) because the major parties don’t want to face a coalition against them.
LOCALS would try to get the democrat and the republican candidate to use Co-Co to choose their policies (offering the candidate support in form of donations or personnel), and if they do then they get an endorsement. I’m still a bit iffy on the difference between an interest group and a political party, so maybe you are in the clear.
Thank you for that information. I did not know anything about fusion parties, so you had me worried for a minute. I then looked up what “cross-endorsement” is and this in not remotely like anything I had in mind. Consider the name “Liaisons for Organizing Community Action and Leadership Strategies”. Besides being a clever acronym, it is very descriptive of the intended purpose of the organization. The group will have three main missions: 1. Developing leadership through an in house program (This is where future candidates sworn to uphold democracy will come from), 2. Organizing community actions such as referendums, planning and fundraising various local charity projects, organizing voting initiatives, lobbying local government and local businesses for various reasons, planning other various political strategies for the community, etc. 3. Maintaining the Township-Talks portion of Co-Co for their political district chapter. Other than #3, I plan to keep locals and Co-Co as completely separate organizations with separate agendas. LOCALS will be a nonprofit organization (Probably) while Co-Co will be a for profit corporation (Most Likely). As I mentioned before, I am not yet solid on structural organization, but I do know that they will be separate organizations. This is important because if they were the same organization, LOCALS might very ambiguously be considered a political party which I not only don’t want but absolutely can’t have for the plan to work.
To explain this, I will need to explain how part of the Township-Talks (the political section) portion of Co-Co will work which will be the main part that the LOCALS chapter manages. There will be a page/section for each current representative for each office within the LOCALS chapter political district. A person, bot, or combo will be assigned to each representative to collect information and post it there. Upcoming/past votes and voting records will be collected and posted there along with an AI generated synopsis of what the issue they are voting on is about. There will be tools that the representatives can use to talk to the public and hold town hall meetings online if they so wish. The representatives can also submit to make corrections for information about them, but they won’t directly be in charge of this information. The LOCALS chapter will research and populate this information into Co-Co will then take the information collected by LOCALS, compare it to the data collected from users via surveys and other sources, and then use an algorithm to score every single office holder/representative with a “democracy score” that indicates how well they are doing the will of the people. This way, LOCALS will simply be doing the nonprofit work of researching all of the available officeholders and merely using Co-Co as a tool to upload their research to for the public to view. Co-Co will then do the rest of the data collection and algorithmic sorting and figuring on its own to rate how the officeholders are doing and get the information to the constituents of the political district. There will also be a section for candidates during elections as well which will somewhat overlap with the officeholders because we expect incumbents to run for office again.
All this said, LOCALS will not be directly putting up any candidates. The only thing LOCALS will be doing is training candidates, getting them to swear oaths to uphold democracy according to a specific set of rules enshrined within the open source Co-Co algorithm that calculates the will of the people, and optionally putting up one or more assets with the LOCALS trust as collateral in case they violate their oath.
Now this next part is where I worry things might get somewhat sticky legally, but I am more certain that it is legal than not. There will be a monetization feature as well for any officeholder or candidate willing to swear the oath to uphold democracy via township talks data that can be where in exchange for a standardized low monthly user fee (like $10), a township talks user can answer special additional polls related to upcoming votes, propose legislative changes, and get more interactive time with the officeholder they are subscribed to. Besides those extra privileges, the algorithm that calculates what the officeholder should do according to the will of the people in Co-Co will be weighted heavier for the subscribers of the officeholder. Co-Co will receive a small portion of the funds, the rest will go directly to the officeholder as income. Importantly, this won’t be the only way to get beneficially weighted by the algorithm. There will be civics and local politics education courses that once completed have that effect, uploading proof of local charity work or donations will have that effect, and participating in online town halls and debates will also have that effect. I will likely add other ways to get further weighted as well (all of this in general rather than officeholder specific). In this way, users will build capital towards having more of a democratic influence in their community thus we have “stakeholder democracy” as I call it. The problem with plain democracy is that the fentanyl junkie gets the same vote as Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein. The most competent and virtuous people are the ones who ought to be in charge of decisions, so I had the idea to weakly integrate meritocracy and virtue ethics into the process while also getting the officeholders decentrally paid by their active constituents for their work so that the results are skewed towards good faith individuals and competent decision makers. I also figure that most politicians live off bribes these days, so rather than expecting the bribing to stop, why not have the option for the constituents to very weakly and decentrally bribe the officeholders to do what they want? It is not much different than campaign funding except it happens while in office, and the officeholder just gets to keep the money and use it however he or she wishes. As part of this process, the officeholder would sign a multi-lateral contract that incurs strong financial penalties if they don’t do what they promised and would be forced to pay back the fees to the subscribers.
Finally, besides for officeholders, as I mentioned before, candidates will get similar pages and they will be able to raise campaign funds via Township Talks also so long as they are sworn to uphold stakeholder democracy. It would work the same way as with the officeholder subscriptions. Subscribe to your candidate, and if they win, you get further weighted in the algorithm for any issues they vote on. I would make this a significant weighting because it is riskier considering the candidate might lose.
Anyway, LOCALS will neither directly run nor fund candidates. Instead, they will train leaders who will then run independently from LOCALS as candidates who will be certified by LOCALS under the democrat and primary tickets. What you are calling a fusion party involves a literal political party running a candidate say, the Libertarian party, under both the Libertarian ticket and the Republican ticket at the same time. So, for instance, if the Libertarian party nominated Donald Trump, then Donald Trump would be both the Libertarian and Republican party candidate. Absolutely nothing like that is even happening here. LOCALS doesn’t even have a ticket, doesn’t seek ballot access, or technically even field candidates. LOCALS merely trains and certifies candidates who they hand pick for their leadership program and who swear to uphold democracy according to a specific set of rules, agree to campaign in a certain fashion, and may optionally choose to put one or more assets up for collateral with the LOCALS trust that would be lost if they break their oath. This would make 2 types of LOCALS certified candidates: 1. a LOCALS certified candidate, and 2. a LOCALS certified Trust candidate. In this manner, rather than running candidates (which I improperly said for simplicity sake in the earlier response), all they will be doing is hand picking and training leaders and helping them enforce self-imposed rules. The self-imposed part is important. If the problem were officeholders didn’t have enough freedom in how they vote and run their campaigns and offices, we would have a problem. Because the problem is that they have too much, we can create candidates that work based on self-imposed rules without breaking/changing any laws or rewriting any constitutions. That realization is what got the gears turning for this whole idea. There is also a precedent in both major parties for hijacking them. With the GOP we had/have “the Tea Party wing” and “the MAGA wing”, and for the Dems we have “The Squad” (originally known as “Justice Democrats”). Upon seeing these in party rebels take over from the primaries, I said to myself “why not both parties?” If LOCALS can get LOCALS certified candidates to win both primaries for a single office, that office is guaranteed to go to a LOCALS certified candidate. It’s also easier and cheaper to win in the primaries because there is less turnout and less funding, and if Co-Co takes off, Co-Co can organize voter turnout for the LOCALS certified candidates.
//I love your vision of how a politician should answer the abortion question. Separating the three questions “who do voters think is qualified” “what do voters want” and “what is true” would be great for democracy. Similar to: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html//
I love how you were able to grok that from the few context clues that I gave you. That’s exactly what I was thinking. American elections are not democratic because they are too ambiguous to functionally achieve democracy in quite a few ways. The voter has to somehow figure out which candidate is trustworthy (won’t back stab or sell out later or is just lying to begin with), competent, supports their values and interests, and has a reasonable chance of winning all at the same time (assuming such a candidate exists, which usually isn’t the case). I harp on people confusing elections with democracy all the time. Sure, an election happens in that situation, but nothing remotely close to the will of a majority of people is happening because of the election. I liken it to voting on who gets to punch you in the face. Logically, the democracy part can only happen after the election. The election should only be about who is competent and trustworthy and the issues sorted out later by the constituents via data science. It doesn’t even make sense for the candidate to promise what they will do ahead of time because circumstances change and decisions should change with them. All this seems obvious to me, but most other people don’t generally seem to understand what democracy actually is. They think democracy is elections. I always like to point out that we could have democracy entirely without elections if we switched to sortition instead. I am not saying we should, though I doubt it could be worse than what we have now, but the point is that democracy doesn’t even require elections. I also don’t want to do the stupid form of democracy like the article you linked referenced which is why I designed a system as a stakeholder democracy to weight the process towards merit, virtue, and participation.
//When it comes to local vs not local, if 1⁄100 people is an X, and they are spread out, then their voice doesn’t mean much and the other 99⁄100 people in their district can push through policies that harm them. If the Xes are in the same district, then they get a say about what happens to them. I used teachers as an example of an X, but it is more general than that. (Though I’m thinking about the persecution of Jews in particular.)//
Yes, Claude chided me often about protecting political minorities as well. As I told him, this is less of a concern in a local community sovereignty setup in modern times where mobility is cheap and easy because of the ability to vote with one’s feet than it would be in literally any other known system. I am actually hoping that people do just that and move wherever they like the politics. I am a big fan of intentional communities, and if people move based on political preferences, then they will naturally self sort into intentional communities. The gain in social capital from living in a community of people who share your beliefs and policy preferences is enormous! Regarding Jews, I think they are protected under federal law anyway. However, for political rather than racial/ethnic minorities which is I believe what we are discussing now, voting with one’s feet still applies. Suppose you hate gun control and 95% of the community is for it, you can just move to another community that loves guns. People already do it now. Are you a wing nut and your community hates private airplanes? Just move one community over where they either like them or don’t care. Problem solved. That’s why I am very serious about making sovereignty as localized as possible. If literally every neighborhood were sovereign, you wouldn’t have to go very far to escape a bad policy. I have also toyed with the idea of creating a way to use Co-Co and/or LOCALS to grease mobility even further for people.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what type of government is chosen, the risk of becoming a disgruntled political minority is always a possibility. That being the case, the only real insurance against this is, in fact, radical decentralization of political districts coupled with local sovereignty. This actually fits well with social contract theory which is the main theory that political science is based on. Social contracts are implicitly agreed to by staying within the jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction is too difficult to escape, then the implicit contract is violated. Perhaps most importantly, it would be very beneficial to have lots of different communities trying lots of different things. That’s how we could really advance the social sciences. We need the data, but we don’t want to do anything too widespread because of the risk profile involved. Single community testing is perfect. If it works one place, others will likely try it too. If it fails miserably, that’s unfortunate, but at least others will avoid it like a hot stove. The risk profile for localism makes a lot more sense for empirically testing, implementing, and improving social policies in an iterative manner.
Speaking of empiricism, I also think that lack of empiricism in politics is one reason why the U.S. and western civilizations appear to be having a political mental health crisis. Being passionate about abstractions reported in the news regarding far off places is not good for mental health. People in California should be a lot more worried about the homeless guys shooting fentanyl in camps on the streets than what is happening in Ukraine or Gaza. We can’t even know if the information regarding that stuff is accurate. It could be almost 100% BS. Being spoon fed your worldview by provably dishonest media organizations that are probably at least partially controlled by various intel agencies and special interests both foreign and domestic isn’t conducive to a stable, healthy worldview. Furthermore, when you are trying to politically control the entire nation, the stakes are too high and we get strong political hatred like we see now. That’s why I want to stop people from focusing on and controlling what happens in Ukraine or Gaza (which is absurd!) or even across the nation in other states and start worrying about controlling the literal streets they live on instead. We’re experiencing a megalomania crisis where everyone thinks that modern tech coupled with sham democracy allows them to control not only the entire country, but the entire world! Control your own neighborhood people! Then you can start worrying about the neighboring communities. Don’t even try to control the world. You can’t and shouldn’t anyway. It would be unethical even if you could. However, if the people can organize to be sovereign at the community level, the federal government will automatically get weaker and have fewer teeth. They can’t control every individual neighborhood. We do the feds a huge favor by not caring enough about our neighborhoods and focusing on national/international politics instead. It’s much easier to control a power vacuum caused by a confusopoly.
That said, I realize what a logistical nightmare that many districts with strong sovereignty might be, but we have AI and other software now. Coordinating communities to collaborate and trade is part of what Co-Co will be programmed to do. I think we are set for solving logistics problems. I don’t have all the answers yet, but I know that people could figure out a way to seamlessly integrate things with modern tech, and figuring out how to do so should create jobs anyway.
You’d probably want to be a 501(c)(4) or a Political Action Committees (PAC).
How would LOCALS find a politician to be in violation of their oath?
That would be a powerful position to have. “Decentralization” is a property of a system, not a description of how a system would work.
Futarchy
I’d love to hear your criticisms of futarchy. That could make a good post.
Mobility
Political mobility is good, but there are limitations. People are sticky. Are you going to make your kid move schools and separate them from their friends because you don’t like the city’s private airplane policy? Probably not.
Experimental Politics
I want more experimental politics so that we can find out which policies actually work! Unfortunately, that’s an unpopular opinion. People don’t like being in experiments, even when the alternative is they suffer in ignorance.
End
I feel that you are exhausting my ability to help you refine your ideas. Edit these comments into a post (with proper headings and formatting and a clear line of argument) and see what kinds of responses you get! I’d be especially interested in what lawyers and campaigners think of your ideas.
I’m not sure if certifying a candidate as a leader and optionally holding them to an oath by holding collateral would count as an endorsement, but you never know with legal issues. It is definitely something to look into, so thanks for that information. It would be better for LOCALS to qualify as a tax exempt organization and charity that accepts donations. However, I am not assuming this is legally possible. I would need to find legal expertise to figure out whether it is or isn’t.
Regarding experimental politics being unpopular, I agree that it would be unpopular if I frame it as an experiment. Framing is very important. The better way to frame strong local self-determination for communities is that it gives the community freedom to make their own rules how they see fit with less interference from external actors who have no skin in the game with the local community, and the fact that it provides us opportunities to get more data on the effectiveness of social policies is a coincidental side benefit for doing the right thing in the first place.
I haven’t done or found any studies on whether kids having to make new friends is a common sticking point for mobility, but in my experience, it isn’t. My parents moved a couple times for jobs they didn’t particularly need because they already had good jobs with little to no concern for that. I also had lots of friends as a child whose families moved away for trivial reasons. I am not assuming my experience is representative of the mean, but I wouldn’t assume it isn’t either.
I agree I should make an official post. I will when I am less busy. Thank you for the help.
I’m expecting Co-co and LOCALS to fail (nothing against you. These kinds of clever ideas usually fail), and have identified the following possible reasons:
You don’t follow through on your idea.
People get mad at you for trying to meddle with the ‘democratic’ system we have and don’t hear you out as you try to explain “no, this is better democracy.”
—Especially the monetization system you described would get justified backlash for its pay-for-representation system.
You never reach the critical mass needed to make the system useful.
Some political group had previously tried something similar and therefore it got banned by the big parties.
You can’t stop Co-co and LOCALS from being partisan.
A competitor makes your thing but entrenched and worse
That’s actually good feedback. It’s better to think of the barriers to success ahead of time while I am still in the development phase. I agree that convincing people to do anything is always the hardest part. I did consider that it would be difficult to stop a competitor who is better funded and more well connected from just taking my ideas and creating a less benevolent product with them, and it is a concern that have no answer for.
I don’t think $10 a month to subscribe to a local official in exchange for extra influence is a big deal because $10 isn’t a lot of money, but I can see how other people might ignore the scale and think it’s a big deal. I’m not married to the idea though. The main reason I wanted to include that feature is to thwart the control of special interests. I’ve considered that special interests are inevitable to some degree, so if we could decentralize them and make the same influence available to the general public at a nominal cost, that would be an improvement. The other reason I liked the idea is because I don’t think weighting every vote identically creates the smartest system. If someone is willing to participate, pay attention, and pay a small amount of money, that should work like a filter that weeds out apathy, and I don’t see how reducing apathy within the voting system wouldn’t increase the quality of the decision making process rather than decrease it. I agree it would be a hard sell to the public though because it sounds bad described in the abstract, general sense like “paying for representation” when the entire concept isn’t considered with proper detail and context. That said, we already have a system like that except you have to have a lot more than $10 to buy representation, so what the idea actually does in theory is democratize the system we already have.
As far as following through, I plan to try my best even if it fails because I will feel better having tried my best and failed than to have never tried at all and let things spiral down the drain.
Regarding being non-partisan, I have decided the only way to do that is to be explicitly apolitical other than supporting democracy. I could put that right in the charter for both organizations and create incentives for keeping to it and disincentives for abandoning it. If both organizations can’t take sides on any issues, then I don’t see how they can be partisan. Personally, I don’t have strong feelings either way on most issues other than I don’t want an expansive, homogeneous government that is so large that it is very difficult to escape from. We only have such a government because of the advantages of a centralized military power which is rife with abuse.
Regarding moving being bad for children, just a quick skim shows me that those studies aren’t necessarily telling you what you think they are. For instance, one portion cites 3 studies that show “ High rates of residential mobility have been associated with social disadvantage including poverty [1, 2, 4]” yet they didn’t appear to control for these variables in the studies I skimmed. Even for the children in those conditions, moving might actually be beneficial. I would assume it depends on what alternative we are comparing it to. In the many cases, moving may be less harmful than staying such as when they are moving from a bad neighborhood with bad schools to a good neighborhood with good schools. I think the same thing applies to complaints about democracy not protecting minorities well enough which was the trigger for this conversation. Compared to what? I am open to suggestions. Which system of governance protects minorities better than democracy? If the answer is none, then that is an argument for democracy, not against it.
Ultimately, I probably should have waited to post about this on here until I had a very detailed outline to put everything in context with all of the supporting arguments and proper citations. Either way though, even if not a single person here likes the ideas, I would still write the book and attempt to carry the plan out, but I would use the criticisms to modify the plan. Like l’ve said before, I love it when people shoot holes in my arguments. I don’t want to cling to bad arguments or bad ideas and I value both positive and negative feedback as long as it is honest.
What would draw people to Co-Co and what would keep them there?
How are the preferences of LOCALS users aggregated?
LOCALS sounds a lot like a political party. Political parties have been disastrous. I’d love for one of the big two to be replaced. Is LOCALS a temporary measure to get voting reform (eg ranked choice) or a long-term thing?
I want more community cohesion when it comes to having more cookouts. More community cohesion in politics makes less sense. A teacher in Texas has more in common with a teacher in NY than the cattle rancher down the road. Unfortunately, the US political system is by design required to be location based.
Is LOCALS a political party with “increase local community connection” as its party platform? If the party has some actionable plans, then its ideas can get picked up by the big parties if LOCALS shows that its ideas are popular. This might not be a bad idea and could solve the lack-of-community problem without overthrowing the big parties.
LOCALS is absolutely NOT a political party. I am very anti political party because I consider political parties to be anti-democratic. I suppose this is the danger in giving a sloppy synopsis. I was hoping to convey that it wasn’t a political party via a context clue by saying LOCALS candidates will run in the democrat and republican primaries. In other words, they would run as democrats and republicans because 1. They are not a political party and 2. The system is rigged to permanently codify the democrat and republican parties as the only 2 viable parties. It is a bad strategy to try to change the system from the outside. It has to be changed from the inside to be successful. There is no way LOCALS could compete with the two major parties, so instead of competing it aims to join both and become an integral part of both while making both irrelevant in the long run.
Another reason LOCALS shouldn’t be considered a political party is that one of the aims is to be as non political as possible. This would be accomplished by prioritizing democracy (really stakeholder democracy, but that’s another long conversation) over every issue. For example, suppose a LOCALS candidate were to be asked “what is your opinion on abortion”, they would give a standard LOCALS answer such as “I am completely supportive of whatever the will of the majority of the constituents from my district want according to the data collected from the Township Talks portion of the Community-Cohesion application. I want to work for you, so I’m more interested in what you think. What’s your opinion on abortion?” Similar answers would be given for gun control and other controversial issues. I could write a whole essay on this idea alone and how it solves a number of political problems, but my time is limited.
Co-Co would deal with a lot more than politics and would indeed help your cookouts, and I also think that is very important, but I think focusing on national politics is both a strategical and ethical mistake when it comes to a majority of domestic policies. Education is one of those. I don’t like the prospect of a teacher in Texas identifying politically more with a teacher in New York than his own community. It reminds me of teacher’s unions which I am also against. While that may be good for the individual teachers, it comes at the expense of the community that the teachers serve. Ideally, teachers should be trying to figure out how to best serve their community rather than themselves. Realistically, we know that most will act selfishly due to human nature, but the fact of the matter is that students and parents in Texas have different needs and priorities than students and parents in New York. When the teachers from New York and Texas collaborate to enforce their own will over the will of the communities they serve, that is something which I consider to be akin to an economic externality like when companies pollute to save costs and increase market competitiveness. Furthermore, by collaborating on such endeavors, they make pedagogy more centralized and uniform in the process which means less innovation and more fat tail risk because vastly more students are affected when they get it wrong.
Next, why should people in New York have any say in how people in Texas choose to educate their students or vice versa? I strongly believe in every community’s right to political self-determination within certain moral boundaries and see a national teacher’s union as a violation of that right. The only counterargument to this is expertocracy where we discount parents and students in the decision making process in favor of the teachers who are supposed to serve them because they know less than teachers about pedagogy. I see that as an information problem to be solved in more ethical ways. While that sounds very daunting to most people, as a naturally creative thinker and problem solver, it sounds less daunting to me although I will admit that my solution in this case involves rethinking the whole entire education system because I find the entire system to be inherently unsatisfactory in ways that can’t be internally reformed. I wish I could say otherwise, but I believe public school is actually damaging to a majority of children, especially compared to possible unrealized alternatives that would take me more time than I have to explain. Suffice it to say it would be part of Co-Co if I am successful. Perhaps that will give you an idea of how broad the proposed app is. It is definitely the most daunting part of my plan. I remain optimistic though because recent advances in computer science make me believe it is possible to accomplish the things I want to do with it.
As far as how Co-Co would attract and keep users, I could sum that up by saying that if it works and gets off the ground then it would become absolutely indispensable for daily life and everyone would have it and use it to do all kinds of things ranging from determining how their local elected officials create and vote on policies to making money directly through the app, finding jobs, buying and selling on the private market, buying and selling with local businesses, looking at product reviews, browsing and searching the internet, finding friends or dates, and much more. I am in the process of getting a complete description on paper. Even just that is a lot of work, and I am still developing ideas for it as well. Before I even do any of that here, I am thinking I will first post about my epistemology and ethical philosophies as well as what challenges I believe the US faces to try to get people on the same wavelength before I go posting really long discourses on how to solve them. Unfortunately, I am not a fast writer. I frequently rewrite and edit everything heavily before I post something that I am serious about because I know how important a first impression is about a subject. I’m actually being quite lazy in this discussion which is why you got some wrong impressions from my previous post.
There are different kinds of political parties. LOCALS sounds like a single-issue fusion party as described here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-6-minor-parties/
Fusion parties choose one of the main two candidates as their candidate. This gets around the spoiler effect. Eg the Populist Party would list whichever of the big candidates supported Free Silver.
A problem with that is that fusion parties are illegal in 48 states(?!) because the major parties don’t want to face a coalition against them.
LOCALS would try to get the democrat and the republican candidate to use Co-Co to choose their policies (offering the candidate support in form of donations or personnel), and if they do then they get an endorsement. I’m still a bit iffy on the difference between an interest group and a political party, so maybe you are in the clear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fusion_in_the_United_States
I love your vision of how a politician should answer the abortion question. Separating the three questions “who do voters think is qualified” “what do voters want” and “what is true” would be great for democracy. Similar to: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
When it comes to local vs not local, if 1⁄100 people is an X, and they are spread out, then their voice doesn’t mean much and the other 99⁄100 people in their district can push through policies that harm them. If the Xes are in the same district, then they get a say about what happens to them. I used teachers as an example of an X, but it is more general than that. (Though I’m thinking about the persecution of Jews in particular.)
//There are different kinds of political parties. LOCALS sounds like a single-issue fusion party as described here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-6-minor-parties/
Fusion parties choose one of the main two candidates as their candidate. This gets around the spoiler effect. Eg the Populist Party would list whichever of the big candidates supported Free Silver.
A problem with that is that fusion parties are illegal in 48 states(?!) because the major parties don’t want to face a coalition against them.
LOCALS would try to get the democrat and the republican candidate to use Co-Co to choose their policies (offering the candidate support in form of donations or personnel), and if they do then they get an endorsement. I’m still a bit iffy on the difference between an interest group and a political party, so maybe you are in the clear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fusion_in_the_United_States //
Thank you for that information. I did not know anything about fusion parties, so you had me worried for a minute. I then looked up what “cross-endorsement” is and this in not remotely like anything I had in mind. Consider the name “Liaisons for Organizing Community Action and Leadership Strategies”. Besides being a clever acronym, it is very descriptive of the intended purpose of the organization. The group will have three main missions: 1. Developing leadership through an in house program (This is where future candidates sworn to uphold democracy will come from), 2. Organizing community actions such as referendums, planning and fundraising various local charity projects, organizing voting initiatives, lobbying local government and local businesses for various reasons, planning other various political strategies for the community, etc. 3. Maintaining the Township-Talks portion of Co-Co for their political district chapter. Other than #3, I plan to keep locals and Co-Co as completely separate organizations with separate agendas. LOCALS will be a nonprofit organization (Probably) while Co-Co will be a for profit corporation (Most Likely). As I mentioned before, I am not yet solid on structural organization, but I do know that they will be separate organizations. This is important because if they were the same organization, LOCALS might very ambiguously be considered a political party which I not only don’t want but absolutely can’t have for the plan to work.
To explain this, I will need to explain how part of the Township-Talks (the political section) portion of Co-Co will work which will be the main part that the LOCALS chapter manages. There will be a page/section for each current representative for each office within the LOCALS chapter political district. A person, bot, or combo will be assigned to each representative to collect information and post it there. Upcoming/past votes and voting records will be collected and posted there along with an AI generated synopsis of what the issue they are voting on is about. There will be tools that the representatives can use to talk to the public and hold town hall meetings online if they so wish. The representatives can also submit to make corrections for information about them, but they won’t directly be in charge of this information. The LOCALS chapter will research and populate this information into Co-Co will then take the information collected by LOCALS, compare it to the data collected from users via surveys and other sources, and then use an algorithm to score every single office holder/representative with a “democracy score” that indicates how well they are doing the will of the people. This way, LOCALS will simply be doing the nonprofit work of researching all of the available officeholders and merely using Co-Co as a tool to upload their research to for the public to view. Co-Co will then do the rest of the data collection and algorithmic sorting and figuring on its own to rate how the officeholders are doing and get the information to the constituents of the political district. There will also be a section for candidates during elections as well which will somewhat overlap with the officeholders because we expect incumbents to run for office again.
All this said, LOCALS will not be directly putting up any candidates. The only thing LOCALS will be doing is training candidates, getting them to swear oaths to uphold democracy according to a specific set of rules enshrined within the open source Co-Co algorithm that calculates the will of the people, and optionally putting up one or more assets with the LOCALS trust as collateral in case they violate their oath.
Now this next part is where I worry things might get somewhat sticky legally, but I am more certain that it is legal than not. There will be a monetization feature as well for any officeholder or candidate willing to swear the oath to uphold democracy via township talks data that can be where in exchange for a standardized low monthly user fee (like $10), a township talks user can answer special additional polls related to upcoming votes, propose legislative changes, and get more interactive time with the officeholder they are subscribed to. Besides those extra privileges, the algorithm that calculates what the officeholder should do according to the will of the people in Co-Co will be weighted heavier for the subscribers of the officeholder. Co-Co will receive a small portion of the funds, the rest will go directly to the officeholder as income. Importantly, this won’t be the only way to get beneficially weighted by the algorithm. There will be civics and local politics education courses that once completed have that effect, uploading proof of local charity work or donations will have that effect, and participating in online town halls and debates will also have that effect. I will likely add other ways to get further weighted as well (all of this in general rather than officeholder specific). In this way, users will build capital towards having more of a democratic influence in their community thus we have “stakeholder democracy” as I call it. The problem with plain democracy is that the fentanyl junkie gets the same vote as Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein. The most competent and virtuous people are the ones who ought to be in charge of decisions, so I had the idea to weakly integrate meritocracy and virtue ethics into the process while also getting the officeholders decentrally paid by their active constituents for their work so that the results are skewed towards good faith individuals and competent decision makers. I also figure that most politicians live off bribes these days, so rather than expecting the bribing to stop, why not have the option for the constituents to very weakly and decentrally bribe the officeholders to do what they want? It is not much different than campaign funding except it happens while in office, and the officeholder just gets to keep the money and use it however he or she wishes. As part of this process, the officeholder would sign a multi-lateral contract that incurs strong financial penalties if they don’t do what they promised and would be forced to pay back the fees to the subscribers.
Finally, besides for officeholders, as I mentioned before, candidates will get similar pages and they will be able to raise campaign funds via Township Talks also so long as they are sworn to uphold stakeholder democracy. It would work the same way as with the officeholder subscriptions. Subscribe to your candidate, and if they win, you get further weighted in the algorithm for any issues they vote on. I would make this a significant weighting because it is riskier considering the candidate might lose.
Anyway, LOCALS will neither directly run nor fund candidates. Instead, they will train leaders who will then run independently from LOCALS as candidates who will be certified by LOCALS under the democrat and primary tickets. What you are calling a fusion party involves a literal political party running a candidate say, the Libertarian party, under both the Libertarian ticket and the Republican ticket at the same time. So, for instance, if the Libertarian party nominated Donald Trump, then Donald Trump would be both the Libertarian and Republican party candidate. Absolutely nothing like that is even happening here. LOCALS doesn’t even have a ticket, doesn’t seek ballot access, or technically even field candidates. LOCALS merely trains and certifies candidates who they hand pick for their leadership program and who swear to uphold democracy according to a specific set of rules, agree to campaign in a certain fashion, and may optionally choose to put one or more assets up for collateral with the LOCALS trust that would be lost if they break their oath. This would make 2 types of LOCALS certified candidates: 1. a LOCALS certified candidate, and 2. a LOCALS certified Trust candidate. In this manner, rather than running candidates (which I improperly said for simplicity sake in the earlier response), all they will be doing is hand picking and training leaders and helping them enforce self-imposed rules. The self-imposed part is important. If the problem were officeholders didn’t have enough freedom in how they vote and run their campaigns and offices, we would have a problem. Because the problem is that they have too much, we can create candidates that work based on self-imposed rules without breaking/changing any laws or rewriting any constitutions. That realization is what got the gears turning for this whole idea. There is also a precedent in both major parties for hijacking them. With the GOP we had/have “the Tea Party wing” and “the MAGA wing”, and for the Dems we have “The Squad” (originally known as “Justice Democrats”). Upon seeing these in party rebels take over from the primaries, I said to myself “why not both parties?” If LOCALS can get LOCALS certified candidates to win both primaries for a single office, that office is guaranteed to go to a LOCALS certified candidate. It’s also easier and cheaper to win in the primaries because there is less turnout and less funding, and if Co-Co takes off, Co-Co can organize voter turnout for the LOCALS certified candidates.
//I love your vision of how a politician should answer the abortion question. Separating the three questions “who do voters think is qualified” “what do voters want” and “what is true” would be great for democracy. Similar to: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html//
I love how you were able to grok that from the few context clues that I gave you. That’s exactly what I was thinking. American elections are not democratic because they are too ambiguous to functionally achieve democracy in quite a few ways. The voter has to somehow figure out which candidate is trustworthy (won’t back stab or sell out later or is just lying to begin with), competent, supports their values and interests, and has a reasonable chance of winning all at the same time (assuming such a candidate exists, which usually isn’t the case). I harp on people confusing elections with democracy all the time. Sure, an election happens in that situation, but nothing remotely close to the will of a majority of people is happening because of the election. I liken it to voting on who gets to punch you in the face. Logically, the democracy part can only happen after the election. The election should only be about who is competent and trustworthy and the issues sorted out later by the constituents via data science. It doesn’t even make sense for the candidate to promise what they will do ahead of time because circumstances change and decisions should change with them. All this seems obvious to me, but most other people don’t generally seem to understand what democracy actually is. They think democracy is elections. I always like to point out that we could have democracy entirely without elections if we switched to sortition instead. I am not saying we should, though I doubt it could be worse than what we have now, but the point is that democracy doesn’t even require elections. I also don’t want to do the stupid form of democracy like the article you linked referenced which is why I designed a system as a stakeholder democracy to weight the process towards merit, virtue, and participation.
//When it comes to local vs not local, if 1⁄100 people is an X, and they are spread out, then their voice doesn’t mean much and the other 99⁄100 people in their district can push through policies that harm them. If the Xes are in the same district, then they get a say about what happens to them. I used teachers as an example of an X, but it is more general than that. (Though I’m thinking about the persecution of Jews in particular.)//
Yes, Claude chided me often about protecting political minorities as well. As I told him, this is less of a concern in a local community sovereignty setup in modern times where mobility is cheap and easy because of the ability to vote with one’s feet than it would be in literally any other known system. I am actually hoping that people do just that and move wherever they like the politics. I am a big fan of intentional communities, and if people move based on political preferences, then they will naturally self sort into intentional communities. The gain in social capital from living in a community of people who share your beliefs and policy preferences is enormous! Regarding Jews, I think they are protected under federal law anyway. However, for political rather than racial/ethnic minorities which is I believe what we are discussing now, voting with one’s feet still applies. Suppose you hate gun control and 95% of the community is for it, you can just move to another community that loves guns. People already do it now. Are you a wing nut and your community hates private airplanes? Just move one community over where they either like them or don’t care. Problem solved. That’s why I am very serious about making sovereignty as localized as possible. If literally every neighborhood were sovereign, you wouldn’t have to go very far to escape a bad policy. I have also toyed with the idea of creating a way to use Co-Co and/or LOCALS to grease mobility even further for people.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what type of government is chosen, the risk of becoming a disgruntled political minority is always a possibility. That being the case, the only real insurance against this is, in fact, radical decentralization of political districts coupled with local sovereignty. This actually fits well with social contract theory which is the main theory that political science is based on. Social contracts are implicitly agreed to by staying within the jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction is too difficult to escape, then the implicit contract is violated. Perhaps most importantly, it would be very beneficial to have lots of different communities trying lots of different things. That’s how we could really advance the social sciences. We need the data, but we don’t want to do anything too widespread because of the risk profile involved. Single community testing is perfect. If it works one place, others will likely try it too. If it fails miserably, that’s unfortunate, but at least others will avoid it like a hot stove. The risk profile for localism makes a lot more sense for empirically testing, implementing, and improving social policies in an iterative manner.
Speaking of empiricism, I also think that lack of empiricism in politics is one reason why the U.S. and western civilizations appear to be having a political mental health crisis. Being passionate about abstractions reported in the news regarding far off places is not good for mental health. People in California should be a lot more worried about the homeless guys shooting fentanyl in camps on the streets than what is happening in Ukraine or Gaza. We can’t even know if the information regarding that stuff is accurate. It could be almost 100% BS. Being spoon fed your worldview by provably dishonest media organizations that are probably at least partially controlled by various intel agencies and special interests both foreign and domestic isn’t conducive to a stable, healthy worldview. Furthermore, when you are trying to politically control the entire nation, the stakes are too high and we get strong political hatred like we see now. That’s why I want to stop people from focusing on and controlling what happens in Ukraine or Gaza (which is absurd!) or even across the nation in other states and start worrying about controlling the literal streets they live on instead. We’re experiencing a megalomania crisis where everyone thinks that modern tech coupled with sham democracy allows them to control not only the entire country, but the entire world! Control your own neighborhood people! Then you can start worrying about the neighboring communities. Don’t even try to control the world. You can’t and shouldn’t anyway. It would be unethical even if you could. However, if the people can organize to be sovereign at the community level, the federal government will automatically get weaker and have fewer teeth. They can’t control every individual neighborhood. We do the feds a huge favor by not caring enough about our neighborhoods and focusing on national/international politics instead. It’s much easier to control a power vacuum caused by a confusopoly.
That said, I realize what a logistical nightmare that many districts with strong sovereignty might be, but we have AI and other software now. Coordinating communities to collaborate and trade is part of what Co-Co will be programmed to do. I think we are set for solving logistics problems. I don’t have all the answers yet, but I know that people could figure out a way to seamlessly integrate things with modern tech, and figuring out how to do so should create jobs anyway.
More bad news:
“a section 501(c)(3) organization may not publish or distribute printed statements or make oral statements on behalf of, or in opposition to, a candidate for public office”
You’d probably want to be a 501(c)(4) or a Political Action Committees (PAC).
How would LOCALS find a politician to be in violation of their oath?
That would be a powerful position to have. “Decentralization” is a property of a system, not a description of how a system would work.
Futarchy
I’d love to hear your criticisms of futarchy. That could make a good post.
Mobility
Political mobility is good, but there are limitations. People are sticky. Are you going to make your kid move schools and separate them from their friends because you don’t like the city’s private airplane policy? Probably not.
Experimental Politics
I want more experimental politics so that we can find out which policies actually work! Unfortunately, that’s an unpopular opinion. People don’t like being in experiments, even when the alternative is they suffer in ignorance.
End
I feel that you are exhausting my ability to help you refine your ideas. Edit these comments into a post (with proper headings and formatting and a clear line of argument) and see what kinds of responses you get! I’d be especially interested in what lawyers and campaigners think of your ideas.
I’m not sure if certifying a candidate as a leader and optionally holding them to an oath by holding collateral would count as an endorsement, but you never know with legal issues. It is definitely something to look into, so thanks for that information. It would be better for LOCALS to qualify as a tax exempt organization and charity that accepts donations. However, I am not assuming this is legally possible. I would need to find legal expertise to figure out whether it is or isn’t.
Regarding experimental politics being unpopular, I agree that it would be unpopular if I frame it as an experiment. Framing is very important. The better way to frame strong local self-determination for communities is that it gives the community freedom to make their own rules how they see fit with less interference from external actors who have no skin in the game with the local community, and the fact that it provides us opportunities to get more data on the effectiveness of social policies is a coincidental side benefit for doing the right thing in the first place.
I haven’t done or found any studies on whether kids having to make new friends is a common sticking point for mobility, but in my experience, it isn’t. My parents moved a couple times for jobs they didn’t particularly need because they already had good jobs with little to no concern for that. I also had lots of friends as a child whose families moved away for trivial reasons. I am not assuming my experience is representative of the mean, but I wouldn’t assume it isn’t either.
I agree I should make an official post. I will when I am less busy. Thank you for the help.
I just skimmed this, but it seems like a bunch of studies have found that moving causes harm to children. https://achieveconcierge.com/how-does-frequently-moving-affect-children/
I’m expecting Co-co and LOCALS to fail (nothing against you. These kinds of clever ideas usually fail), and have identified the following possible reasons:
You don’t follow through on your idea.
People get mad at you for trying to meddle with the ‘democratic’ system we have and don’t hear you out as you try to explain “no, this is better democracy.” —Especially the monetization system you described would get justified backlash for its pay-for-representation system.
You never reach the critical mass needed to make the system useful.
Some political group had previously tried something similar and therefore it got banned by the big parties.
You can’t stop Co-co and LOCALS from being partisan.
A competitor makes your thing but entrenched and worse
That’s actually good feedback. It’s better to think of the barriers to success ahead of time while I am still in the development phase. I agree that convincing people to do anything is always the hardest part. I did consider that it would be difficult to stop a competitor who is better funded and more well connected from just taking my ideas and creating a less benevolent product with them, and it is a concern that have no answer for.
I don’t think $10 a month to subscribe to a local official in exchange for extra influence is a big deal because $10 isn’t a lot of money, but I can see how other people might ignore the scale and think it’s a big deal. I’m not married to the idea though. The main reason I wanted to include that feature is to thwart the control of special interests. I’ve considered that special interests are inevitable to some degree, so if we could decentralize them and make the same influence available to the general public at a nominal cost, that would be an improvement. The other reason I liked the idea is because I don’t think weighting every vote identically creates the smartest system. If someone is willing to participate, pay attention, and pay a small amount of money, that should work like a filter that weeds out apathy, and I don’t see how reducing apathy within the voting system wouldn’t increase the quality of the decision making process rather than decrease it. I agree it would be a hard sell to the public though because it sounds bad described in the abstract, general sense like “paying for representation” when the entire concept isn’t considered with proper detail and context. That said, we already have a system like that except you have to have a lot more than $10 to buy representation, so what the idea actually does in theory is democratize the system we already have.
As far as following through, I plan to try my best even if it fails because I will feel better having tried my best and failed than to have never tried at all and let things spiral down the drain.
Regarding being non-partisan, I have decided the only way to do that is to be explicitly apolitical other than supporting democracy. I could put that right in the charter for both organizations and create incentives for keeping to it and disincentives for abandoning it. If both organizations can’t take sides on any issues, then I don’t see how they can be partisan. Personally, I don’t have strong feelings either way on most issues other than I don’t want an expansive, homogeneous government that is so large that it is very difficult to escape from. We only have such a government because of the advantages of a centralized military power which is rife with abuse.
Regarding moving being bad for children, just a quick skim shows me that those studies aren’t necessarily telling you what you think they are. For instance, one portion cites 3 studies that show “ High rates of residential mobility have been associated with social disadvantage including poverty [1, 2, 4]” yet they didn’t appear to control for these variables in the studies I skimmed. Even for the children in those conditions, moving might actually be beneficial. I would assume it depends on what alternative we are comparing it to. In the many cases, moving may be less harmful than staying such as when they are moving from a bad neighborhood with bad schools to a good neighborhood with good schools. I think the same thing applies to complaints about democracy not protecting minorities well enough which was the trigger for this conversation. Compared to what? I am open to suggestions. Which system of governance protects minorities better than democracy? If the answer is none, then that is an argument for democracy, not against it.
Ultimately, I probably should have waited to post about this on here until I had a very detailed outline to put everything in context with all of the supporting arguments and proper citations. Either way though, even if not a single person here likes the ideas, I would still write the book and attempt to carry the plan out, but I would use the criticisms to modify the plan. Like l’ve said before, I love it when people shoot holes in my arguments. I don’t want to cling to bad arguments or bad ideas and I value both positive and negative feedback as long as it is honest.