
Simple-majority democracy is used by many animals - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/would-twitter-ruin-bee-democracy
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gumby
> We noticed that once three or more of them ganged up together, the entire
> group would often follow suit.

This is quorum signaling, which is used in organisms as simple as biofilms. I
have used it in some distributed systems in the 1980s — nowadays it might more
hiply be considered a form of unsupervised learning.

The author does mention this in passing in the following paragraph but doesn’t
appear to really understand the topic. The only actually “democratic” example
by the author’s own definition would be the fish.

In fact for schooling/swarming creatures this approach is superior as a
majority or even plurality system is both hard to coordinate and is subject to
hill climbing problems.

Pack/herd animals have a harder time as the opportunity cost of splitting the
herd is higher.

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r00fus
The bee scenario seems more like caucusing, and with multiple "voting stages"
for a major decision.

I think caucuses would be a far better solution than our current process, if
a) it were mandatory and b) the day was off and transport provided.

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isostatic
Day off means no electricity to run the place. No transport either.

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teej
The lights do not go off in Australia on election day.

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isostatic
So people don't get a day off then.

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GhostVII
You're being pretty pedantic. People get the "day off" on national holidays,
but there are still a few essential people who are required to go to work.

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isostatic
On uk national holidays it's office workers who get the day off, these are
people who don't have problems with voter franchise.

Even on thanksgiving there's plenty of places like McDonald's that are open,
not to mention people working to set up Black Friday sales. The people who
have to work on national holidays are the ones that struggle to vote normally.

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amriksohata
This feels more like cooperation rather than democracy, bit like game theory?

