John Huang
Bio
I am an advocate of democracy through sortition. I am also employed as a structural dynamic finite element analyst.
Posts 4
Comments21
In my opinion by limiting your question to "defending liberal democracy" you are also vastly limiting potential remedies. The current resurgence of authoritarianism takes advantages of weaknesses of liberal democracy. "Defense" of democracy necessitates making the system smarter and more resilient to these authoritarian takeovers.
"Defense" may necessitate a transformation of the status quo.
Exactly what makes liberal democracy weak? One reason is poor collective decision making. Examples of bad collective decision making include:
- Democratically controlled states inability to grow. Anti-growth and high cost-of-living policies of California, New York, and other blue states have encouraged millions of their residents to move to Red states. This foot-voting is a clear indicator of the incompetence of Blue-state policies, and simultaneously hands authoritarians like Trump more power.
- Obviously the election of authoritarian Donald Trump who hopes to end democracy as we know it.
- Incompetent internal party decision making systems that elected Joe Biden to be the presidential candidate in 2020, whose utter unpopularity, inability to engage in modern-style social-media driven policies, and senility was a large contributing factor to Democratic Party losses in 2024.
Whereas EA has funded some pro-approval voting initiatives in the past, it has not:
- Engaged in any small scall randomly controlled trials to validate claims made.
- Evaluate other voting reform alternatives such as Condorcet methods, multi-member districts with Single Transferable Vote, evaluate the possibility of proportionately representative systems, etc
- Evaluate the potential for "Deliberative Democracy"
- Evaluate the potential of Citizens' Assemblies as used throughout the world in Ireland, France, UK, Canada, etc.
- Evaluate the possibility of more direct democratic alternatives such as sortition where decisions are chosen by lottery.
As far as bothering to test and validate potential reforms:
- Lobby labor unions to implement improved decision-making reforms.
- Lobby political parties and organizations to implement improved decision-making reforms.
- Lobby HOA's to implement improved decision-making reforms.
- Fund research into modeling and simulation of improved decision making with respect to mechanism design, economics, and social choice theory.
Lobbying smaller organizations may be more effective than attempting to run a full city or state referendum campaign for change, and build evidence whether interventions are actually effective or not.
In my opinion pure voting system reforms (such as approval and ranked choice voting) have low probability of success because they don't tackle the core decision making problems of liberal democracy. Voting system reforms might improve aggregation, but if a majority of voters simply have incorrect information, they will still arrive at incorrect decisions. The only reform I've found that tackles the problem of voter ignorance is sortition, which I've linked above. In short, you can improve the decision making capacity of voters by paying them, and giving them enormous resources to arrive at better decisions. And the only way to scale such a process is by reducing the number of participants through a fair democratic lottery. As far as organizations advocating for this, it includes: Ofbyfor, Democracy Without Elections, INSA, Assemble America, BANR, etc. Full disclosure, because I believe sortition has the greatest likelihood of success, I volunteer in some of these organizations.
Ultimately we need a system that its own citizens believe in. People like Donald Trump succeed because citizens believe that the status quo is so bad, Trump is a valid alternative. Authoritarians succeed when liberal democracy fails its citizens. A successful defense of democracy demands improvement of democracy.
No, I'm requesting EA actually take the importance of improving democratic decision making seriously. Even if no action was able to stop these 2025 cuts, do you actually think "it's over"? What about 2026? What about 2028? What about 2050? America is going to continue to make just stupid decisions until enough people get together and change the dumb way the system makes its decisions.
Moreover the second article isn't about approval voting, I'm not sure how the only thing you got out of deliberation was approval voting.
If people in America were serious enough about improving democratic decision making, is it conceivable a reform could have stopped Trump? Imagine a new and improved Democratic Party was able to clearly demonstrate its ability to govern. Imagine a California government that was actually sufficiently competent to build high speed rail and more and more residential to attract more people into its borders. Instead Californians are fleeing because of rising costs.
Imagine an improved Democratic Party primary system that could elect a younger candidate that wouldn't have grown senile by 2024.
Are these things *possible* within a small time frame? They certainly are. Trump himself demonstrates how quickly norms can be changed.
What's wrong with US democracy isn't just Trump, it's an incompetent opposition party that people hate so much they'd rather trust something like Trump.
Finally yes, you mentioned approval voting. Would that ever be enough? Why are you putting all your eggs in just this one basket? IMO it's a clear sign of EA's myopia and lack of engagement with election theory, to ignore what is out there such as Single Transferable Vote, condorcet methods, and STAR voting. Even in this small niche of election reform in my opinion EA is far behind the theory.
>If you're not proposing electioneering, what exactly is the program that you are suggesting could have prevented these USAID cuts?
"When should you have planted the seeds to grow a tree"? Just last year is a bit too late to grow a strong and capable democracy able to resist a tyranny.
A better year might have been 2016, when we were better understanding what the stakes were. That gives you 10 years. Or people have been complaining about the downfall of democracy since Occupy Wall Street. That's 17 years (And people have obviously been complaining about democracy for far longer than that). But the next best thing might be now.
Throwing money at Biden/Harris 2025 is a method of last resort, particularly when it seems that money is highly ineffective in high-profile, money-saturated presidential campaigns.
Now let's imagine that Trump actually does succeed in turning America into a dictatorship. Does that mean all hope is lost? No, there's plenty of other countries where democracy can be strengthened.
>This forum might not be a bad place to start?
Plenty of ideas have been posted and ignored. I posted something for example on sortition which I'm a big fan of. Crickets. Neil Dullaghan made a great post about deliberative democracy here. What came of that?
Now maybe my idea is utter shit. OK sure, strikes and gutters. The silence is much more annoying.
In my opinion, attempting to electioneer in 2024 by pumping money towards your preferred candidate, has little to do with democracy. It's kind of the opposite. You're engaging in oligarchy, trying to buy power with money, to attempt to save what democracy you have left. You're not actually addressing the problems that led to the current crisis. As I said, mitigation and reaction.
>I think it's generally okay to place the burden of showing that a cause area warrants further investigation on proponents,
And how can any cause area demonstrate this when you just won't evaluate it anyways because of your limited evaluative capacity, because it's not a priority cause area for your organization? Let's imagine I have a proposal or a white paper. How and where can I submit it for evaluation? Take for example Open Philanthropy. Democracy's not a cause area with any requests for proposals. Is there any organization accepting proposals?
The cause areas are driven from the top down, as far as I'm aware. Causes outside the org priorities are just not considered at all.
I'm not asking EA to focus singularly on democracy. I'm asking EA to give any resources at all to the cause of democracy. Prove my ignorance wrong. Is any organization in EA involved with democracy at this moment? Is any organization bothering to evaluate potential interventions? What work has been done? What papers have been written? Is there some work saying, "Look, we've done the work, yes it turns out democracy has a terrible ROI!" How about you guys? Are you making any consideration or analysis on potential pro-democracy interventions? If you have, I'd love to see the analysis. My search for it, I've seen nothing. I hear crickets.
Here's the thing about evidence. You have to look for it. Is EA bothering to look for it? Is your organization bothering to look for it? Otherwise, you have no idea how tractable it is or is not.
These sorts of cuts highlight IMO the incorrect strategy EA has been on. Whereas the EA space deals with the millions of dollars, US government aid deals with the billions of dollars, orders of magnitude greater funding.
Yet EA's refusal to engage in the political has created a huge blind-spot. As the United States unironically moves towards authoritarian dictatorship, of course the foreign aid is disappearing, and your cost effectiveness calculations are completely out of whack. How the hell are you going to fill the gap on billions with mere millions?
You wanted to settle for the ease of linear thinking. A particular set of interventions was easy to measure and had more linear responses, so that's where your funding went. Politics is incredibly messy and the response is extremely nonlinear - you can pour money into politics and see no response, until perhaps one day you can have a huge response, or perhaps not. You didn't want to deal with the nonlinearity.
So you forgot to think about protecting, or even enhancing, democracy. I suppose protecting democracy just wasn't tractable enough. And we're going to be suffering the consequences for thinking democracy just isn't tractable, even though people had been sounding the alarm for years/decades.
All you can be is just reactive. You'll react to the destruction of democracy. You're about mitigation, not prevention or enhancement.
Maybe it is time to think about being pro-democracy. The consequences of forgetting about democracy will cause orders of magnitude more suffering than you have ever prevented.
Why do you think improving democracy is intractable? None of the highest priority world problems are tractable.
- Risks from artificial intelligence - nobody knows if an AI safety solution is even possible yet that warrants hundreds of millions in funding
- Catastrophic pandemics - Preventing/mitigating pandemics is a trillions dollar endeavor. Incredibly costly. How is this tractable?
- Nuclear war - Exactly how is this cause area tractable?
- Factory farming - Good luck on this cause, especially without the force of an enlightened government to demand change.
Comparing to the toughest problems, how is improving democracy intractable? Of course, tractability needs to be balanced with importance and neglectedness.
Developing strong evidence that some specific reform (ie maybe sortition) could be a real improvement could be done in the millions of dollars range. That could be cheaper than training your LLM. That's definitely cheaper than fusion power.
What is the value to humanity of learning what kind of governments are best? Even in the short term perspective, the value of an improved government could be trillions of dollars of tax dollars saved. In the long term perspective, every top priority world problem would immensely benefit from enlightened governance.
Sortition as a specific reform might be slightly harder to implement on some political campaign, yet imagine hypothetically sortition yields 10% greater ROI in taxpayer benefits whereas ranked choice or approval voting might yield closer to 0%. Of course we don't know the numbers, and that's a huge problem. Ranked choice might be more tractable, yet it also might be mostly useless.
Yet we don't know, because nobody is doing any testing, there's no empirics and I bet, there's no funding.
My interest is in improving democracy. I believe things like Trump, or Netanyahou, or Erdogan, or most democratic backsliding is a sign of democratic incompetence.
I think most people have little to no long-term vision for the question, "What would an advanced government of the future actually look like?" How much better could the world become if governments were smarter and more capable and just produced vastly more utility for people?
There is one thing I think is a strong contender for a superior future government. It's called sortition. The premise is simple. In elections everybody participates. In sortition, a random sample of the public is chosen to participate. The benefit of sortition is scalability. Randomly chosen people, compensated or forced to participate, can engage in politics at enormous timescales compared to the average voter. More time to ask questions. Resources to become informed. The ability to seek and hire expertise. I elaborate about alleged benefits here.
Of course there's a lot to do. First we need to prove the hypothesis. We have reasons why we think this is good, next we need to actually go out and test it. That takes a lot of money and research. This research will add evidence in its feasibility and capability. After that, if testing determines this thing to actually be good, more money is needed to campaign in favor of it.
Trump assuredly will not be the last authoritarian to arise out of liberal elections. If you value people's freedom, if you wish to maximize utility, we should be looking for better things out there.
As far as why things like sortition would stop Trump, competent governments that are able to make their citizens feel content and satisfied with government performance, do not tend to appeal to tyrants for aid. Moreover if sortition is actually an effective way to organize people, it also might be an effective way to organize the Democratic Party.
Another powerful feature of sortition is its potential ability to create Democratic Legitimacy without going through the bureaucracy of government. For example, a Citizens' Assembly can be potentially created through private funding, or through a referendum. A Citizens' Assembly could be used as a presidential candidate selection system, and could delegitimize Trump or any other un-endorsed candidate.
Even if this is a "long-termist" project, the resources needed to say, test sortition, or launch a Citizens' Assembly, are only in the millions of dollars. The economic benefits could be immense. Imagine a government that's only 5% more efficient at increasing utility... that's hundreds of billions of dollars of value per year. If the will was there, testing could happen immediately and we'd have results out before the end of Trump's term.
Of course this won't happen, not because it's infeasible, but because there's not yet funding, because sortition is mostly unheard of, because the idea hasn't reached the ears of funders. Or if it has, the funders have just written it off for unknown reasons. Tractability is a typical excuse I hear, yet I'm not sure how sortition is any less tractable than any other long-termist project out there.