[EM] teams

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 06:23 PM 5/16/2006, Antonio Oneala wrote:
>     Asset voting is a way to quickly aggregate the preference of 
> the teams, but it does have flaws.  Because you are assigning your 
> vote to someone who is not yourself, they will often vote differently.

That characteristic of Asset Voting is not necessarily a flaw. On the 
average, candidates (who are functioning like electors under Asset 
Voting, as well as being candidates), will know the other candidates 
much better than I. Unless I'm a candidate! Now, if better 
information has any effect on voter behavior, we can predict that the 
votes will be different. That's the good news, not the bad news!

>And this coming from a furtherment of democracy activist... I 
>actually sometimes have little faith in the system, as all the 
>people seem to want to do is use it to benefit themselves at the 
>expense of others.  Yet, many more democracies are much freer than 
>than the other systems that have been proposed, so I guess there's 
>little alternative.

There is an alternative. Long story. For starters,

http://beyondpolitics.org/wiki
http://metaparty.beyondpolitics.org

These are initiatives that start here and there is a plan that takes 
them there. One step at a time. The first steps are for people to 
simply understand the possibilities. Believe me, that is quite hard 
enough. But it will happen, I'm quite sure, unless some truly major 
catastrophe makes democracy impossible before the change has time to set in.

Let me put it this way. If it does not happen, it will be because 
something better came along. And one of the characteristics of this 
plan is that it sets up a system which is structurally open to new 
ideas, *without* being unstable.