Damn he is correct. Because it seems no one can make the most salient point in my absence. I really need to be gone from this forum.

BitcoinFreak12, although CoinCube's point is correct about the system of direct democracy was already tried and failed in Athens and scaling it up is dubious in spite of new technologies such as the internet (in fact in Athens the democracy ended up being controlled by the wealthy business owners who were relying on implicit subsidies in the system) and although bigtimespaghetti's point about the middle of the bell curve can't keep up with the outliers on the right side of the bell curve, both of them miss the main point as to why direct voting will always devolve back in the IRON LAW of Political Economics (which I clarified further upthread that in collectivized action the self interest incentives are misaligned with the global optimization.).

What BitcoinFreak12 fails to understand is that the examples of decentralized creativity and leadership on for example YouTube are not examples of a collective action and decision, but rather they are examples of the end-to-end principle where YouTube is the dumb intermediary and the smarts are the diverse participation at the edges of the network. In short, BitcoinFreak12 is committing a category error of equating two categories which are not the same. This is the typical mistake of most people, especially those who are not very astute computer scientists. I have a very strong reductionist logic skills which enable me to categorize (reduce to their orthogonal) generative essence of abstractions very precisely.

Pay attention. Direct voting will always to devolve because of the maximum division-of-labor, i.e. not that some are smarter but that all humans have specialized knowledge that other humans don't have. Did you know for example that even the most genius mathematicians that ever existed or will exist in the future could not possibly learn all the math that exists today? The body of knowledge in math has grown too large with far too many intricate details for any one human to digest it all and be expert in all of it.

The same phenomenon exists in all aspects of knowledge. This is for example why I always need to come back to post on the forum. Because there is no other human on earth who understands political economics the way that I do. I have a special insight and knowledge base. I am trying to share it and get others to be able to answer for me, but as of yet, all of you still need to refer back to the expert — myself.

The maximum division-of-labor is why Armstrong is the expert on A.I., cycles, and market analysis, and also why I (not Armstrong) am the expert on political, technological structure. Armstrong needs to pay attention and realize that he can't defy the maximum division-of-labor. I hope he will swallow the red pill.

Pay attention. People simply don't have enough time to be knowledgeable about every issue that comes to a vote. For example, the following example of two very intelligent members of this forum who completely misunderstood the issue of "net neutrality".


And we don't want a world in which every person has to be personally deeply involved in every detail of everything happening in the world. That is like binding each other together in chains (which is exactly what collectivism does, which is why it fails). The only way an economy can be maximized is for people to busy doing orthogonal activities so that expertise is concentrated and maximized. The antithesis of the maximum division-of-labor is economic collapse, debt overload, misallocation, and precisely what we have now in Western society where the majority of the population is expert at doing the same thing  — McFat, McBoobTube, McBlahBlah.

Thus direct voting in spite any amount of technology you throw at it, will always devolve to trust on the experts and trust on the reputation of certain groups and advisers. Eventually we are right back to where we are now, where politics is a personality contest of who has the best haircut. That is a reason only the wealthy were allowed to vote in Athens, but even that devolved because they directed the structure of the economic system to subsidize their businesses.

Pay attention. There are technologies which theoretically do not devolve into centralization.

Proof-of-work solved the Byzantine's Generals Problem — that is the problem of how to trust and communicate a consensus decision without trusting or even knowing the identity of any of the participating parties. Unlike voting, we don't have to know the identity nor trust a party chosen to tally and communicate the decision.

Yes we could vote decentralized using a Proof-of-work block chain, but this would not change the fact that collective decision about centralized actions, requires specialized knowledge that not all the voters will have, thus voting is always centralizing as I explained above.

Whereas, we can use the Proof-of-work block chain to record centralized tallies of decentralized decisions of the participants — a.k.a. the end-to-end principle where the intermediaries (the miners and block chain) are dumb relays of the individualized transactions which only the participants at the edge of the network have knowledge of. You see we thus inverted the problem of direct voting and made it congruent with the maximum division-of-labor.

Open source plays the role of enabling us to build on the knowledge invested in those leading paradigms, and for a paradigm shift to overtake those leading paradigms which are not open and liberating enough, as shown by the chart of Android obliterating the market share of every other smartphone platform.


Edit: another reason that direct voting is centralizing is because there is still a requirement for government bureaucrats and courts to insure that the collective decisions are implemented as enacted. The same corruption with have now with bureaucrats and kangaroo courts can repeat.

There is only one solution which is to eliminate government entirely and replace it with decentralized for-profit competition to serve the people as I have outlined upthread.