
Bees are doing democracy right - forloop
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing-democracy-wrong-bees-are-doing-it-right/
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kleer001
Ah, Quadratic Voting, very cool stuff. Forget all the stuff about the bees,
that's just stuff and nonsense. Democracy, I think, really only matter when
each individual is heterogeneous.

Here's some more on QV (ugh, such a horrible name):

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/01/collusion-in-
quadratic...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/01/collusion-in-quadratic-
voting.html)

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/my-...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/my-
thoughts-on-quadratic-voting-and-politics-as-education.html)

and finally an academic paper:

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531)

Random thought, what about exponential voting blocks? Everyone gets 100 votes,
but you have to spend them in smaller and smaller chunks namely: 50, 25, 12,
6, 3, 2, 1, & 1.

~~~
notahacker
Call me old fashioned, but I'm not persuaded democracy is improved either by
requiring that votes are either paid for or so complicated for the voter they
require an instruction manual to avoid inadvertently spoiling their ballot
paper.

~~~
kleer001
That's okay. I'm old fashioned too. I think all voting should be done with pen
and paper. Electronic voting is a straight up scam.

This complicated stuff , I think, is more about the science of voting rather
than the real-world engineering of voting.

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formulaT
_Of course, every bee wants credit for their own find. So there needs to be a
countervailing costly mechanism to prevent bees from simply over-promoting any
pollen source they know._

Two problems with this. Most importantly, if bees have the same genetic
interests (it's a bit complicated but see The Selfish Gene for Dawkin's
explanation of why bees are genetically programmed not to have different
interests than their hives) then there is no reason for a bee to want credit.
Second, has any reward for the scouts ever been observed?

~~~
rusanu
Is also note worthy that the bees in the hive are in effect _slaves_ of the
queen, acting in the queen interest and not on their own. See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_mandibular_pheromone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_mandibular_pheromone).
As such the bees may evolve behavior that would not appear in a colony of
truly independent "voters".

~~~
gus_massa
The (female) workers bees are more related to their sisters than to their own
daughter and sons (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_ratio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_ratios_in_haplodiploidy)
). So it's better to kidnap^H^H^H help her mother than to have their own
children. The ratio of drones vs new queens is difficult to measure, because a
new queen means that the colony splits, so the theoretical 3/4 is difficult to
be corroborated.

So, in spite of the hormonal details, it's more like the workers enslaved the
queen than that the queen enslaved the workers.

[The hormone is probably there only to signal that there is a queen, and it's
not necessary to pass to the emergency mode and try to make a new queen.]

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jkot
> _Of course, every bee wants credit for their own find. So there needs to be
> a countervailing costly mechanism to prevent bees from simply over-promoting
> any pollen source they know. Bees must spend a lot of energy to bring their
> fellows around._

That is wrong. Bee spends lot of energy with promotion, but what really
decides is snow-ball effects. When other bees try that source, they will start
dancing as well.

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DocOcassi
This period there was a monumental shift from a moralistic view of human
relations as passions which were largely detested to a view that self-
interest, read avarice, could be used to tame the other passions, the problem
with the bees is the bees are not human with all the vices and wants that go
with our being, so attempting to apply simplistic ideas like that to human
governance you will undoubtedly lose resolution.

Regarding a complex system of governance that is required for modern society,
voting pre-dates the above shift in conception, but it's use was spurred on by
the idea that our self-interest can be used to the keep more dangerous vices
in check, the problem with this is that avarice is a vice and if you promote
it throughout society as being the main force for taming of humanity, you will
inevitably fall under it's wheels, this will probably be seen in rising
inequality, where virtues, patience, kindness... are marginalised, for the
benefit of this one vice.

I'm sorry I don't have an answer, I do think we have gone a long way down a
dead end, I can only hope we have not done exactly the same to pride.

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gaius
On the contrary, the cost of expressing an opinion on social media can be very
high. Sometimes rightly of course, but sometimes not.

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jbuzbee
Doing Democracy right? I recall that worker bees will kill a co-worker if the
co-worker doesn't do a good enough dance that tells where pollen can be found.

I'd hate to think what would have happened to some of my co-workers based on
the code they checked in. Or maybe the guy has a point...

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platz
Who decides what topics the voters get to spend their points on?

How could voters choose between candidates with such a structure?

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platz
[https://www.uservoice.com](https://www.uservoice.com)

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pluma
Governance is so much easier if all citizens are insects that happen to be
nearly perfect clones of each other.

~~~
higherpurpose
China is working on that. But I'm not so sure it's _democracy_ that will come
out of it.

