notes-hypotheticalConstitution-hypotheticalConstitutionNotes4

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in the wake of Britain's decision to exit the EU, a bunch of comments on HackerNews? allege that Swiss referendums work out better than referenda elsewhere:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11969269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11967633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11970790

some reasons given in these threads are:

" I've read Rousseau (who was Swiss) and was fascinated by his assessment that representative democracies lead to parties which lead to factions which leads to self-destruction; that the only viable form of Democracy was direct plebiscite, as often as possible. CH still operates this way. "

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so we want (near?)-absolute freedom of speech so that the future forces of evil can't use exceptions to consolidate their power.. but we also want to get the mafia in trouble when they threaten to burn someone's house down, or to get a bully in trouble when he threatens to beat you.

in another context (campaign finance) i said, mb make a distinction between speech content and speech advertising payment and/or audience size, so as to regulate money spent advertising politicians to the public without preventing anyone from posting any political views to youtube.

so maybe here we could regulate speech which is targeted/addressed to a particular person without regulating general speech; eg the mafia can say to the public 'everyone better pay us or we'll burn your house down' but they can't say that to any particular person (now what about the idea that they could attach so many conditions that only a few people are selected; eg 'everyone who lives within 10 feet of this particular house better pay us...' or 'everyone over 6" who was born in the year 1950 with red hair who has a sister who is over 6 feet who was born in 1940 and who has a degree in archeology...'? i suppose you could have some standard where you must select at least 10k ppl, etc, but what if only one of those ppl knows you already so they know you're talking about them? i guess the court could say, subjectively it's clear you were trying to make less than 10k ppl feel targeted, etc.

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regulations are only allowed to prevent negative externalities. Examples:

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corruption detection notes (good only for research about governance, not governance, because if they were part of governance they could be gamed):

https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6059

blueintegral 2 days ago

I thought this would just be an application of Benford's law, but they note in the beginning that using Benford's law doesn't work for elections (citing this paper: http://www.vote.caltech.edu/sites/default/files/benford_pdf_...)

Does anyone know why Benford's law doesn't work here but does work for other made up numbers in applications like accounting?

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ethan_g 2 days ago

Benford's law applies when the underlying distribution is approximately exponential. Because candidates with an exponentially small chance to win are not likely to run, it wouldn't make much sense for elections to have an exponential distribution. Much more plausible distributions are (truncated) normal or uniform, neither of which satisfies Benford's law.

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Terr_ 5 hours ago

I like to visualize it as throwing random darts at graph-paper that has logarithmic marks on both axes.

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sampo 2 days ago

For Benford's law to apply, the numbers (the non-fabricated numbers) need to be coming from a source/distribution covering several orders of magnitude. The fabricated voting percentages are limited to between 0 and 100.

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" I take this same thinking to how a president should fill Supreme Court openings. For maximum credibility, we should have eight justices instead of nine, equally divided by liberal versus conservative credentials. That way nothing gets through the Supreme Court unless one of the liberals or one of the conservatives switches sides. That’s how you get credibility. Compare that to a 5-4 court that always votes conservative or always votes liberal. With a biased court, every decision will lack credibility with half of the citizens. That’s a problem. "

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/147045002381/the-fbi-credibility-and-government

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i thought about the 'coinlock' proposal (a governance proposal for Ethereum where your vote is weighted by the amount of Ether you have 'locked' for some amount of time) and i don't like it, because i'm afraid that it will empower large holders and possibly special interests over the majority: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4rtpmm/on_coinlock_voting_futarchy_and_optimal/d555psp

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pjc50 3 days ago [-]

The social and racial divide becomes a problem in itself, which makes it much easier for the police to rationalise the use of excessive force.

The UK had this problem with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and more generally the policing of Northern Ireland with troops. The only way out of it was the restructuring, renaming, and re-populating with affirmative action of the force as the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Another key part of the solution is a willingness to actually prosecute unlawful shootings. The key case here is Lee Clegg, a paratrooper on a roadside checkpoint who shot at a car driven by teenage joyriders that failed to stop. It was ruled that shooting after the car had passed was no longer justified.

The US has got to this point because it is not willing to effectively prosecute the use of lethal force against black men where it is not absolutely required. The US also has a very flexible and expansive idea of "required".

(PSNI are routinely armed, unlike most of the rest of the UK, except anti-terrorist patrols at airports and high security locations.)

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Joe8Bit 3 days ago [-]

Fantastic point, I'd never thought to put this into the context of NI before.

To emphasise what you've said, the root and brach reform that has happened in the RUC/policing in NI over the last decade (or more) can't be underestimated. Among the biggest factors, as I perceive them are both top down and bottom up:

It's been a LONG and painful journey interlinked that isn't finished, but it really could serve as a great lesson to improving minority/police relationships in the US.

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this scifi author imagines a group of allies in a war in a loose organiation called the Concordat, with membership defined by some rules called the Concord:

" Nice: Members should not initiate force against each other or defect from deals. Forgiving: do not hold past behavior against another agent indefinitely. Provocable: Respond to aggression in order to make it unprofitable. Clear: make your actions easily interpretable to other members in order to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Identifiable: use secure authentification in order to guarantee identity. Web of trust: ensure secure and reliable communications with other members of the Concordat. If someone joins or breaks the Concord, let others know. Tolerance: tolerate the views of other Concordat members as long as they do not contradict the Concord. Self-Preservation: do not endanger the Concordat by your actions. Limitation: Do not hurt people not involved in the InfoWar? with your actions. "

in this scifi "Originally there were several competing versions of the Concord, but in the end one won out and became the standard used today (longtime members still remember the "game theory wars").

-- http://www.aleph.se/Nada/InfoWar/concordat.html

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Hanson highlights some flaws in Merkle's Futarchy proposal:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/07/merkles-futarchy.html

summary:

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i guess the main problem with non absolute freedom of speech is that any mechanism used to enforce speech limits could be used by a corrupt administration to suppress. so we have to weigh the benefits of these laws against the cost of more frequent dictatorship. since in the 20th century most deaths seemed to result from slides into dictatorship the cost is probably very large. so this probably rules out my idea to have exceptions for 'paid speech to a large audience', because it would be relatively easy for the wanna be dictator to make it impossible for rebels to reach a large audience without paying. so i guess back to absolute freedom of speech. todo, state this argument somewhere.

but arg can't we even regulate commercial speech eg spam?

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anti-corruption: providing special access to others in exchange for (including in recognition of or as gratitude for) money or favors is prohibited

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hmm i guess at least you can still have anticorruption laws even if absolute free speech by blocking accepting money from others or doing anything in exchange for favors, even providing access

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Arendt notes that many revolutions lead to a similar political structure, what she calls a "council system", where small groups (~10) meet in councils (and presumably govern local affairs?), and then send one representative up to the next highest council. The blog post consists of a quote from her book:

http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2007/09/after-nation-state-council-system.html

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For someone to be convinced of a felony, >2/3s of citizens must know that the thing is a felony (as demonstrated by periodic polling in a manner whose context/wording gives bias in the direction of thinking it's NOT a felony).

Similarly, to be convicted of a misdemeanor, >0.5 of citizens (out of those who work on related things, if the misdemeanor only applies to a certain industry) must know that the thing is illegal

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"reasonable, considerate, prudent, and deliberate" -- http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/afterlife

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officers of the Organization may not intentionally lie in the course of their duties without a prior, written, Court-approved exemption for a good reason

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If more than half of the population break the rules, then breaking this rule cannot incur negative punishment (although it can incur loss of privilege).

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Any system for assessing guilt will necessarily produce false positives and punish innocents as well. The Organization's systems' false positive rates for innocents shall never be calibrated such that the expected number of innocents punished is greater than 0.1 * the expected number of guilties punished ('expected' here means after taking base rates into account as per Bayes' rule; this implies that since the base rate of guilties is smaller than the base rate of innocents, then the false positive rate of the measuring instrument will be required to be even less than 10%).

This rule applies not just to the 'punishment' of judicial proceedings but also to other inconveniences introduced by enforcement activities, such as profiling.

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two or more parties contracting should have a:

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cannot contract away your right to free speech

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There shall be no fees or other disincentivizes impeding the casting of votes by the holders of exercise of voting shares (? but this could prevent block chain txn costs, postage costs? Mb not counting commercially reasonable third party fees for the communication/delivery of the ballot)

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any official authorized to use force shall clearly be identified at all times so authorized by a large, readable badge giving their department and individual identifier, except when undercover. Undercover operations must be authorized each time by a judge and cannot be authorized unless specifically targeted against a party (of possibly unknown identity) against whom there is a preponderance of evidence and absolutely necessary.

when faced with an official authorized to use force, an individual is permitted to assume that they may be criminals impersonating officals and defend themselves accordingly while ascertaining confirmation of the authorization of the official

multiple charges may be simultaneously tried relating to a single action/event, but if an individual is found guilty, they may be punished for only one charge per action/event. After an individual has been tried for an action/event, they may not be retried again for different charges pertaining to that action/event (unless further evidence comes to light that could not have come to light earlier)

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