_Drafts

What is Digital Democracy?

“Democracy is a technology. Like any technology, it gets better when more people strive to improve it.”
– Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister

There is increasing momentum in the world of “digital democracy”. But I don’t think the general public understands what digital democracy is, nor its potential to make the world a better place.

In a very general sense, digital democracy just means the use of digital technology in the democratic process. But digital democracy is more than just a government I.T. department. Its potential is not limited to making existing democratic processes more efficient and modern. Rather, it promises a new paradigm for democracy that is more fundamentally democratic, because citizens more directly and effectively control government. New technology not only makes more direct participation possible; it can make democratic processes more fair, transparent, and resistant to manipulation and concentration of power; it can help people make decisions that are more informed and intelligent; and it can help groups overcome the dilemmas of collective action that prevent us from coordinating to solve some of humanities biggest problems.

Views of Human Equality

What is Equality?

I often don’t know what people really mean when they talk about “equality”. Let alone “equity”.

People talk about “equality of opportunity” vs “equality of outcome”. But both are impossible.

Equality of opportunity is impossible. The accidents of our birth influence the opportunities we will have in life. There will always be rich and poor, and we can’t prevent the rich from giving their children greater opportunities. We can try to reduce the gaps, but achieving complete equality of opportunity is impossible.

An Incentive-Compatible Protocol for Public Conversation

I am working on applying mechanism design to social media algorithms to incentivize good-faith conversation. I am getting close to a complete mechanism. Here is a summary of my thinking so far.

Good-faith conversation implies not only expressing honest opinions, but also updating opinions honestly when presented with new information and arguments.

So the goal is a mechanism with an equilibrium at which participants express honest opinions given the arguments that have been presented to them.