Ok we all know that "Democracy is the worst form of government except for the ones that have been tried before." My brother and I had a long and hard argument over whether democracy is better than dictatorship. We were unable to reach a conclusion. My political system may perhaps be considered great.
Unlike the previous blogs, I will go straight to the point here! I propose a new form of democracy that gives more weight to the votes people more involved and more intelligent in politics compared to ignorant or common people. How? The way google aggregates the votes of webpages gives the answer! The algorithm is called page rank!
Here is a wiki link on page rank. You can check the page rank of any webpage using the enhanced features of google toolbar. How does it work? A website X "votes" another website Y if X links to Y. But instead of giving 1 vote (a vote of weight 1), it gives a weighted vote, i.e a vote of weight w, or in layman terms w votes. The weight of the vote to Y is equal to the influence (page rank) of X divided by the number of votes. Thus influential people can give more votes than non-influential people. Also, a candidate for election trying to gain votes by canvassing the emotions of non-influential people will not succeed. They are better off using intelligent arguments to convince the influential people why they are good. This saves a lot of campaign money and will also result in getting more intelligent and more capable people to power! The reason is, non-influential people don't have enough votes. The system is in fact more fair than the current system because it allows people involved actively in politics and having more influence to give more votes! Ok now you will ask me how to compute influence. Simple! The influence of a person is equal to the number of votes he receives! Allow people to give (1/n) votes each to n other people. Then weight these votes by the current rank of the person voting. Keep iterating this procedure until convergence! By google's pagerank paper, convergence holds! Now look at the best option for Obama vs McCain. Both Obama and McCain are brilliant and highly influential people. So what's the best option? The best and cheapest option for Obama is to convince McCain to vote for him. And the best for McCain is to convince Obama to vote for him. In the battle, the votes of intelligent/influential people are the ones that matter. So as selfish power seeking candidates, they are better off makign intelligent speeches rather than canvas the emotions of a huge public of mostly ignorant people who are not actively involved in politics! The result: I need not tell you, right?
Ok you will not believe me, but if you use google and you like its search results, it is proof that my system is very very good. Of course there are faults associated with it, like with any other system, but it is so good that it allows google to rule the search engine world! It will remove the drawback of politics!
Implementing this initially will require breaking the conservativeness of people and showing them that it will work. I want to implement a prototype election, say Stanford general elections using this technique. That will help me convince people the system works. Then it can be tried at a larger level! When equilibrium is established, the most intelligent people should be elected by democracy as we all seek!!! One can also try using online MMORPGs like warcraft and secondlife to test the system and convince skeptical people that it actually works! Perhaps, I will change the statement that all other systems tried so far are false! Lets see if I am able to actually convince people!
You all know what I want? Everyone wants to be famous and considered intelligent by the people. I am different! I only want the second most intelligent person in the world to acknowledge that I am the most intelligent person in the world! The rest of the people are useless. My system counts the votes of intelligent influential people more than that of ignorant disconnected people.
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Ours is a liberal democracy (based on universal suffrage). Right to equality is our first fundamental right. The fact that everyone gets equal rights to vote is one of the most basic features(and infact thats the beauty of it). Imagine, even if you are illiterate, poor and backward , you still have an equal opportunity to vote.
ReplyDeleteSolution of democracy lies in equality be it social, economic or political. Once it is there, its an ideal platform for democracy as every one is on equal footing and there are no ignorant people as you say.
For example compare US elections to India. In US there is so much consciousness in public on most of the issues. In India, all these don't matter for millions as they are busy just surviving.
Apart from all this if we talk about your solution, pagerank I think is too long a procedure for elections especially in India with over a billion population. Some of the obvious questions i think are, who decides this pagerank system? what if the ruling power hacks the system? what if the ruling power pays to vote for their candidate? what if 2 major powers collaborate so one votes for other? all the small players will lose just like that. Also, what if a thousand contestants stand in a constituency? how many hours do you want to spend voting?
Moreover, as in pagerank, if you get to vote only if you have link to the person, then your vote is absolutely biased!! Basic idea of voting is that it should be impartial.
There are so many more things i can write but i am hungry now and want to eat something :P
Ok then, tata
Muski
What muski said..he covers the heart of the matter....
ReplyDeleteany system with an inherent bias towards a group of people in its very foundations is very much likely to fail (In fact I will go as far as saying it WILL FAIL)
"Solution of democracy lies in equality be it social, economic or political. Once it is there, its an ideal platform for democracy as every one is on equal footing and there are no ignorant people as you say. "
This is the core of this thinking. Restricting the choice to "influential people" (and influence can be used in wrong ways and to consolidate position anyway) It's like you have no provision whatsoever to listen to the demands of a significant number of people just because they aren't "intelligent".
Just to break the bubble..this article pretty much proves that even standford graduates are no better than others when it comes to being good administrators or feeling the "pulse" of the nation..as it is called... :D ..
democracy may not be the best system as it exists today in this world...but clearly you can't argue over EVERY PERSON'S RIGHT to have an EQUAL say in the running of his/her own country. If you ask me..NON-NEGOTIABLE :)
@Ishan: Why do you use google if you believe in your concepts? Google obviously weights the votes of web pages. Why dont you search following the recommendations of stupid websites? Please stop using google.
ReplyDelete@Ishan: I understand your concern that influential people (people with large number of votes) should not rule.
ReplyDeleteIn page rank however, a person is influential if he has the support of influential people. Remember that the weight of ordinary people is small, so getting a large number of fools to support him wont make him influential.
Regarding equality: I once again say that every one gets an equal opportunity to become influential.
Regarding power corrupts: You are right about history. Power corrupts because the persons in power have to be corrupt in order to convince ordinary people to let them be in power. If people in power only have to convince other people in power that they should be in power, they have to be really good, so this might change. "Power Corrupts!" The goal of my proposal is to remove that statement from history.
How many people have you heard in history who tried weighted page rank?
dude chill out please! :)
ReplyDeletewhen I was writing my response..I knew there was always a chance it would be taken in an offending way (my bad..should be careful with language) although I never intended it to be that... :/
"Regarding equality: I once again say that every one gets an equal opportunity to become influential."
NOT when "influentials" are already in power..think about it....you are creating a "power-group" which once you have created...you lose the power to bring it down....
forget influential people who gained influence through the right way...India is a prime example..of how difficult it can get to remove these bad influential people once they capture power...Lalu yadav was a KNOWN offender (and an "influential" person I might add)..how many years it took before his stranglehold on power was broken?
And this when your theory is not in practice atm :)
So you need a system which is self sustaining in this regard.
btw websites are not humans...you can always find a person you considered good and influential walking hand in hand with a person who you consider bad (but still influential) just because their interests in some lucrative matters coincide. You won't find BBC linking to a piracy or porn site. So I use google and still understand that these concepts can't be applied on humans in the form they are. You can leave out the demands of a small website when taking broad decision...but to leave out the genuine voice of even a single person is not acceptable to me.
"In page rank however, a person is influential if he has the support of influential people. Remember that the weight of ordinary people is small, so getting a large number of fools to support him wont make him influential. "
and how can you stop a cartel of "good" influential people from supporting a "bad" influential guy just because it serves their interests. If you observe closely you will run into the same problems that a democracy faces today. Tenets of democracy are sometimes taken as to be discovered in American and French revolutions when they merely formalised them. If you sit down and try to think of the system which is most justified and equal with respect to an individual's rights you will arrive at "democracy" (one vote for one person..all equal in status). You won't arrive at the term "influential people". No way! :)
Probably people here feel more offended than I do, lol.
ReplyDeletePerhaps my term "influential" is misleading.
Phew, I don't have to do the hard work of convincing people that my system is great. Its just too much of my time and energy and I don't seem to benefit from it. I just proposed an idea which I feel excited about. Now it is up to you people to decide if you want to be foolish or intelligent.
"By Google PageRank paper, convergence holds!"
ReplyDeleteWow! I wish it were this easy to prove something in my research. :-)
And yet, you are surprised when people require some "hardwork" to be convinced about the greatness of your idea.
If you are passionate, and you do seem so, I suggest you write it up formally, circulate it among people you think competent, get their feedback and have a civil and peer-reviewed discussion. More people might be interested and convinced that way.
If you think this is too much effort, then I am afraid, in your own words, you are not dreaming big enough. The sky is not your limit, but rather something far far less.
@Anonymous: I realized what you said myself. Thanks for pointing it out anyway. This blog post is definitely an error caused by uncontrollable excitement. Yes I love to let my excitement flow uncontrolled, since that will help me in research, but the blog is not the right place to release that excitement. In the modern world, there are indeed proper channels to propagate new ideas. A blog is not such a channel. If enough experts agree on an idea, it will eventually be considered by others as well.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of one of my friend's joke: "Proof by reference" :P .... Its such an easy and effective proof which has been shown to work at (not so) big conferences.
By the way I like to point out that this blog is not a total failure. I read Muski's response in his own blog and found some great insights which will help me formalize my model. My new model is somewhat different from what is posted here and will address issues pointed out so far. Will do that as soon as I get done with my finals. Spring break fun problem ready! Yay! Countdown: 8 days!
Munnu is right btw, fountainhead is a bit overrated. If people are really reluctant to new ideas, by Ayn Rand's own argument, her book should not be the most widely read. The fact that people love fountainhead implies that people are receptive to new ideas. More so today than 50 years ago. Of course, who knows the context in which she wrote those arguments? Fountainhead is a great read though.
By the way, the sentence "By google page rank paper, convergence holds" means, the proof of convergence is similar to how google proved convergence of page rank. I didn't write the proof because I thought it was trivial. I mentioned before that this blog is my initial excitement, and so I didn't bother to mention those formalities in detail. In my formal write-up I will mention them all.
ReplyDeleteI feel that the arguments and criticism should continue because that really helped me come up with new fixes to improve the original model and to know what all should be mentioned. It also tells me how to present the idea.
"By google page rank paper, convergence holds" means, the proof of convergence is similar to how google proved convergence of page rank.
ReplyDeleteOK, obviously this is the semantics of that statement. No one is opposing that. Rather, I am trying to point out that the statement is meaningless unless you show, at least a little rigorously how your model is analogous to the Google model, and whether or not any assumptions in the Google model is inherently true if applied to people. (I am sure most criticisms, such as rationality of people etc., all stem from this one key point). And also, you must keep an eye out on parameters (in the sense, assignments to free variables if any so that the system comes as close to real-life as possible).
If you can posit these assumptions, and params in a clear and concise manner, then the greatness of your idea will become more apparent (if it is truly so).
Ciao!
Thanks for your feedback. I will address those issues.
ReplyDeleteIf I had not read fountainhead, I will have found it surprising how people are no longer interested in commenting on the post!
ReplyDeleteCare to elaborate? Pardon my tone, but you seem too enamored by Ayn Rand. You realize a lot of her work was as a result of a very oppressive upbringing, and many scholars agree that her principles aren't ground (at least rigorously) in philosophy.
ReplyDelete@ZB: Haha, I know what you mean. Did you read Ayn Rand btw? She accuses people of saying "Scholars say this. So it must be true!" In other words, people don't have thoughts of their own.
ReplyDeleteA person who read and accepted Ayn Rand is his own judge and is unaffected by what people think.
You can say that Ayn Rand is mad and can consider me even madder than Ayn Rand if that will please you.
I too think Ayn Rand's novel is a bit exaggerated, but alas, I only think, I don't feel that way. And I pointed out in my previous blog posts that feelings are more powerful than logic.
Yes, if you use logic, Ayn Rand is a fool. But if you feel, which you must if you want to be great, Ayn Rand is indeed great. The oppressions against her made her feel. Her words convey her feelings. That's the reason most people like her and she is the most widely read.
It is surprising how well she understood people. The reactions I see in this blog are exactly as she predicted. Isn't that fun? Yes, scholars say Ayn Rand is over-rated, but being a scholar myself I know many scholars use logic for reasoning. They don't feel. To see Ayn Rand requires a sense that they don't have.
P.S If the above comments don't make sense to you, please refer to one of my favorite blog posts: Dullest blog
ReplyDeleteI also fear that a lot of scholars are afraid of independent thoughts. If they feel something illogical, they are afraid other scholars will look down upon them. They rarely say what they really think. If you have been to conferences you will know what I mean. Scholars give a measured response, calculated to fit the tastes of the audience. How else will they be considered scholars by the audience? Not many of them are daring and innovative. Those that are really innovative become afraid of losing their power once they become scholars. Its more like the story "The Emperor's new clothes." Of course I probably missed some logic here, but then, its something to be considered.
ReplyDeleteSo let me ask you this: Think you are the only scholar in the world. Read Ayn Rand. Then tell 1. What do you think? 2. What do you feel? 3. Do you want logic to win, or do you want feelings to win? This exercise will answer what you need to know, i.e Why I am enamored by Ayn Rand.
Also look at this course Machine Learning. The Artificial Intelligence today copies the brain structure of human beings. One basic tenet of AI and machine learning is something called a reward, which the machine tries to maximize. The reward is essentially a feeling that we numerically quantify. A machine thus becomes intelligent only because it feels, not because it thinks!
ReplyDeleteYour next question might be: Ok feelings are more powerful, but that doesn't mean I am feeling right. I may be feeling the wrong things. Well, the basic answer I have is weak: From my experience, feelings are so powerful, u have no perfect control over them. Just as a surfer learns to balance himself in the powerful tides of the ocean, you must learn to balance yourself with your feelings. Trying to suppress feelings is like fighting tides and wont work well. Even if u succeed it costs a lot of energy. You are better off finding a balance. That is the art of meditation and the basis of all lies people tell themselves to protect their identity. If you think deeper, you will root out all these lies and will find that u dont have an identity! You dont know who you are!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Ayn Rand has created powerful feelings in me, feelings that drive out all other feelings that a normal person has. So it has created a new equilibrium in me. That's the power of a great writer and a great human. It can modify your patterns of thoughts and feelings, rendering them unrecognizable.
Please note: Many people say that u must control your feelings to succeed. I say that "U must control ur feelings to succeed in the short run, but to succeed in the long run, u must let your competing feelings flow around you unfettered and find the perfect balance that maximizes your satisfaction." The more you suppress your feelings the more you limit your creativity and the more you are an adult rather than a child. And why do they say children are the most creative?
ReplyDeleteI am interested in debating these, and other points you might raise, btu this seems to be the wrong forum. The 4096 char. limit doesn't help either. :-) Any suggestions?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your interest!
ReplyDeleteHere's my position:
I definitely love debates so that it will throw more light on what I want to know.
I must admit one thing though: I read the wikipedia article on Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism and concluded that they are somewhat the opposite of my philosophy described above! When I read fountainhead though I never found any mention of objectivism directly or indirectly. I need to therefore only mention my current position: Fountainhead is very good at predicting the behaviour of people and in influencing their thoughts.
I am in finals week at Stanford and will be busy for the next week! We can have as much fun later!
Also the description I have written for my blog is based on my knowledge of Turing machines: That there are an uncountable number of paradoxes while there are only a countable number of statements that have a definite property of being true or false. Thus any statement chosen at random is almost surely a paradox, thereby rendering useless any debate that allows only logic. My advisor Thomas Cover however pointed out recently that if the kolmogorov complexity of the statements are bounded, this result may change. So I am now confused whether or not debates will help me and am unable to decide the course of action. I can try though! My feelings are that we spend a lot of time thinking in circles, while not doing any useful actions. That was supposed to be the meaning when I said "I find philosophy boring!" I am still interested in debating though.
Do you want to debate by email? I am available at gowtham followed by r (at) Stanford dot edu (This description avoids bots spamming me, lol. Hope you can decode it.) We can discuss by phone or in person, but that may not allow us enough time to process our thoughts and we may end up wasting time on non-sense.