I'm intrigued by Jim Rutt's formulation of Liquid Democracy.

· Bits and Bobs 8/25/25
  • I'm intrigued by Jim Rutt's formulation of Liquid Democracy.
    • The observation is that most voters in practice are "noise voters".
    • They don't pay that much attention, so they attend to some meaningless thing like how good the candidate's hair looks.
    • In Liquid Democratic systems, every participant still has one vote.
    • But for a given topic domain, they can hand it to someone else.
    • That person can also hand it to some else.
    • At any time the person can reclaim their vote, or override the vote of their delegate.
    • But as long as the gradient tends towards people who are more informed on that particular topic, then this system could lead to radically higher-quality debates and outcomes instead of turf wars over emergent us-vs-them wars.
      • All that is necessary is that this gradient tends to flow in the direction of people who have more context on a given domain.
    • LLMs, with their qualitative nuance at quantitative scale, would plausibly help people both delegate their votes and also figure out when to override their delegates.
    • This could be a system to get coherent pluralism.
    • Of course, this would just create a new meta-game, and it's possible that the emergent outcomes would be even worse than before.

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