Imprecise Destinations: The Continual Redefining of Democracy PART 2

Everyone. Welcome to Non Trivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, we take a look at part two of imprecise destinations, the continual redefining of democracy. We will take a look at a number of topics through part two to kind of wrap the whole thing up.

This idea of the end of history where, you know, democracy supposedly has it all figured out, you know, imperialism, nationalism, communism, you know, doesn't democracy kind of punch through all that and basically provide an answer for everybody going forward. So we'll challenge that narrative a little bit. Take a look at democracy becoming democratized, the fact that it got tested on all four corners of the planet at this point. So how is that? How is that going?

You know, we'll take a look at the so called age of monetary democracy, which you could argue is the age that we are in. Currently. This notion of putting watchdogs in place to make sure democracy goes as it is supposed to, that opens up all kinds of challenges and pitfalls simply because whose democracy is it, you know, who gets to decide how democracy goes?

We'll, you know, wrap this whole thing up by coming to terms with what democracy is, you know, what is the right definition considering that it seems to work in different ways for different people across the planet. We'll see that there's no real solid evidence for the true universality of democracy. So what the heck does that mean going forward? And finally, we'll take a look at democracy as a process, right?

So even though it appears very hypocritical throughout its history, and currently we have to remember that democracy is a process, it thrives on imperfection. The fact that it allows, you know, dissent and changes and constant reinvention is actually a good thing. And so we have to realize that democracy is not a mechanism that comes to rest, it's always evolving.

So it's important to recognize that I will end off this episode with the mathematical modeling of democracy really just taking a look at how something like democracy can be modeled mathematically, we'll see how you can capture the social opinions and the candidate opinions and how those come together with these vectors and how we use this kind of vector matrix notation to mash those together and really come up with these indices of representativeness.

So don't worry, I'll keep it high level, I'll keep it conceptual. But I think it's important that people understand how something like democracy and democratic processes in general can be modeled mathematically. Of course, we'll take that math, we will put it on the computer and run it so we can see different situations and kind of play out different combinations to make some comments about democracy going forward.

Of course, that will happen in the non trivial playground that I have put together. So let's go ahead and get part two of imprecise destinations started. Let's go. OK. So we ended part one with the end of history, right? Fukuyama's essay really just saying that things have kind of been figured out, right?

Um You know, that, that that trend towards liberal democracy was confirmed by the collapse of all these military Dictatorships that you know, imperialism, nationalism, communism, fascism, realism, military Dictatorships have all been pushed to the wayside democracy is here, it's not perfect. But hey, this obviously is the way to get society to work. And so, you know, we talked about democracy also kind of losing its meaning. I mean, and had been tried on all four corners of the earth.

And that kind of original single minded a priority definition of democracy started to kind of lose its meaning because now we have these these many different forms of democracy, right? It doesn't belong to any one region, any one culture, any specific religion or way of life. And John Key said that, you know, essentially perhaps anthropologists are actually better equipped than political scientists to really grasp the true meaning of democracy.

Anthropologists of course, study aspects of humans within past and present societies Um I got an excerpt from the book that I actually want to read with respect to this as well. More than at any other moment in its long and fascinating history. The meaning and practice of democracy became implicated in local everyday sentiments, languages, institutions and shifting in contested forms of power. The consequence consequence was that single minded a priority.

Definitions of democracy lost their meaning. It was as if democracy itself had finally begun to be democratized. To the point where anthropologists rather than political scientists were better equipped to grasp its ways. Democracy became multivalent.

People began to recognize it as a way of viewing power from many different angles, a deeply contingent way of life that stood permanently on the edge of disjunction, a way of governing and behaving that had opened borders, not a single condition that a people or a country had or did not have. So democra democracy becoming democratized, right? You get your own version of it, anybody can tap into it.

And so we've kind of arrived at this at this stage and that ushers in what you might call the age of mon toy democracy, something John Key talks about. So we have this kind of original Athenian and surrounding area democracy, which is this pure or direct democracy where you are essentially choosing the the kind of representation by law or sortition, right? So at least a random sample from the population other than specific leaders like military and those in charge of water.

Uh And then you have representative democracy where you have elections and you specifically elect representatives to represent the general public, you have parties and all the stuff we talked about that. And then you have this kind of third version which is monetary democracy and that really takes advantage of these extra parliamentary mechanisms.

So they kind of go beyond just, you know, the the representatives that are elected and the institutions like parliaments that are put in place those representative institutions and they have these extra parliamentary mechanisms that are essentially acting as watchdogs to monitor democracy, right? Because you've got all these different forms, you, you've still got these, this possibility for collusion and, and uh and, and people subverting the process.

And so how do you kind of just ensure that democracy is doing what it's supposed to do? And uh and how do you usher in the ability to say the have the right to say no to representatives, right? We don't just want this kind of system, this this mechanism in place that takes off on its own. You know, the the we we wanna be able to have checks and balances in place.

We want to be able to say no to the representatives, even though they, we we or or people like us may have elected them into power and we want the ability and right of representatives to reconsider and reverse decisions that have already been taken. So I wanna give a Canadian example of this monetary democracy, this extra parliamentary mechanism that can be uh put in place to help guarantee some of the stuff I just talked about.

So something called the uh Citizens Assembly on electoral reform that was created by the government of British Columbia Canada to investigate changes to the provincial electoral system in 2004. This was uh an, an independent nonpartisan assembly. The purpose was to cast a critical eye on the province's electoral system. The member representatives were not elected but drawn by a lot. OK. Like we talked about uh you know, in Athens, Greece, right?

By sort, they were drawn randomly using a computer from a pool that was supposed to reflect the true makeup of the population. So based on age, gender, et cetera, it was designed to operate outside the system of political parties and to keep its distance from the legislature, organized lobby groups and journalists. They had open public hearings. The question put forward was, should British Columbia retain its existing first past the post method or adopt a brand new electoral system.

Uh So the the the first pass the post method is to become a member of parliament, a candidate had to win more votes than any other rival within their constituency and not a majority of votes cast. So some of uh assembly members believe this encouraged a strong government by ensuring the party with a majority of seats would be able to get on with the job of governing without having to constantly compromise its uh compromise with its opponents.

But critics within the assembly saw this as its central weakness in their view. The first pass, the post method or system promoted the formation of governments that had a majority of seats, but a minority of the popular vote. This makes many more, you know, many voters feel as, as though their votes are wasted and they end up being stuck with a government that they had never, you know, voted for in the first place. So these objections, right.

So you got these kind of two forms of government, you got the existing one and then you got this new electoral system that's being proposed by the assembly. And uh and you got some objections right about whether the the the existing one is good or not. So the objections proved decisive. Following months of deliberation, the Citizens Assembly recommended in 2004 that British Columbia should switch to a new electoral system called BC STV.

It's a form of proportional representation with transferable votes. And it was actually already used in other countries like Australia copies of the recommendation were posted on a user friendly website. Hard copies were distributed to every household in the province. And uh amidst intense media coverage, the recommendation was put to the vote. Now, uh 60% of all eligible voters had to approve the proposed new system in a referendum.

The question again, should BC change to the new BC STV system as recommended by the Citizens Assembly? Yes or no. And it turned out the proposal was narrowly defeated since 57.7% of the voters approved it. Remember you had to get 60% in order for that to pass. And so what this showed was that in a monetary democracy, which is what this is an example of the right to say no to representatives remained an important entitlement of citizens.

Also, the government of BC announced a little bit later that a follow up referendum would be held in a few years time. Thus proving that in a monetary democracy, the right of representatives to reconsider and reverse decisions already taken is equally fundamental.

OK. So that's a bit of an example there of what we would call a monetary democracy, it's extra parliamentary, it's stepping away from um you know, the legislature, the other usual uh you know, kind of bodies and institutions of representation and being an independent body.

It's, it's getting a perhaps a better representation for the people that will be helping make decisions because it's doing AAA true, you know, drawing random drawing right from the population doing things by sortition by law and it's actually using a computer and it's, you know, implementing the pseudo atom number generation to get that random sample made.

Um Of course, it's doing it from a pool that's been kind of preselected, but that preselection is, is specific to trying to get the right makeup of the population. So, giving, you know, weight to minorities and other people that need to be represented. So it's, it's, it's doing things randomly the way it's, you know, uh arguably supposed to, it's an independent body.

Uh, and, and not only is it formed that way and then putting, you know, decisions for those get, you know, essentially decided by referendum and uh you know, they can, they can come back up again and, and whatever gets passed. I mean, you can go against what the representatives are suggesting, or the representatives themselves can kind of restart the issue a year or two later, you know, and put it up for a referendum again.

So it's got these mechanisms in place that don't just kind of lock in democracy as is whatever definition you happen to be using of it, it looks over democracy.

It's um it's, it's put mechanisms in place to help, uh you know, not just locking decisions have those decisions come back be uh you know, be able to even if you did elect the representatives or, or not elect the representatives because, you know, because it was by so you can challenge those representatives, those representatives can again, in turn kind of challenge the public if they think something is the best and you've got this back and forth.

So it's beyond the usual kind of parliamentary mechanisms that you would see in democracies. So I think that's kind of a good example. It's got a lot of the things that you would expect the properties of, you know, something that looks over a process, right? Um This, this, this this random sampling, these uh you know mechanisms that go back and forth and really try to get to a point where whatever you end up with which one isn't going to be permanent.

But two is hopefully as representative as possible, almost almost a kind of mathematically defined representative uh representation if you will. So, so we get into this uh stage of, of democracy really becoming democratized and uh you know, so we've got this, this monetary democracy that looks over the process and help us kind of get it closer to the ideals like you, you, you might say of democracy by, you know, look again, looking over the process to have those mechanisms in place.

Another important topic here is the marriage of democracy and human rights. And uh you know, because human rights is kind of for the most of demo uh democracy's history was kind of left out, right? I mean, Athens had slaves and uh you know, women didn't have a right to vote forever.

And uh a lot of those are just recent changes and then, you know, uh human rights were still not necessarily part of a lot of, of what was going on you need India to come in and put a lot of their changes into what was going on with democracy.

You know, worldwide growth of organizations, networks and campaigns committed to the defense of human rights ended up really becoming, uh, uh, you know, a mainstay or something that was the focus of democracy, kind of like the, the big missing piece, right? You've got the end of history, Fukuyama's essay and you got all these, you know, good things. You know, the wealth of nations can help increase, people can be lifted out of poverty.

But you know, there's a lot seems to be this big gap here and a lot of that was related to human rights. So you've got the United Nations Charter in 1945 you've got the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. And as these things are being put together, you know, they're really indebted to more historical things like the Code of Arabi and the Babylonians, the Justinian code, Greeks and Romans, right?

Magna Carta from England, uh the Bill of Rights in England, Napoleonic code in France and the Declaration of Independence, of course, from the United States, you know, especially after witnessing the horror of World War two, right?

I mean, the unprecedented cataclysms of the first half of the 20th century really had this uh necessitated for the first time on a global stocktaking of how uh you know, a real global stocktaking, if you will of how to secure the rights of human beings on a global scale, right?

He's looking at what was going on in the wars and, and you know, yeah, you got the, the spread of democracy kind of mixed in with that and, and, and you're real, you know, we talked about the civilian deaths before that, you know, human rights needs to play a major role here if we're gonna be, you know, using a narrative that that democracy is the way to go.

And so now we have organizations dedicated to this thinking like the human rights watch uh the Aga Khan Development Network and, and Amnesty International, of course, right. Um I do have an uh an excerpt here on human rights. I thought it was a bit interesting from uh the, the, the, the life and death uh life and Death of Democracy by John Key and an excerpt from his book. It was in effect a call for civil societies everywhere to speak and act as if human rights mattered.

Its practical effect was to redefine democracy as monetary democracy. The tens of thousands of non-governmental human rights organizations that subsequently sprang up around the world deal with a wide range of rights matters including torture, child, uh soldiers, the abuse of women and religious, academic and literary freedom. The job is the advocacy of human rights through well researched, skillfully publicized campaigns.

They see themselves as gos to the conscience of governments and then citizens and they solve the basic problem that consistently dogged representative democracy, which is of course, who decides who the people are? Remember we talked about that before, right? Who are the people? Many human rights organizations and networks? Uh answer is this right? Every human being is entitled to exercise their right to have rights in the age of monetary democracy.

That conviction motivates human rights organizations to blow the whistle on rights violations. It leads them to pressure governments to do something about rights violations, not only by building up public interest in particular cases, but also by raising awareness of the vital place of human rights in the process of globalization. Ok. So again, it's kind of this big gap, this big missing piece in democracy throughout its entire history.

And again, you've got, you know, the cataclysms that were witnessed after World War two and then just everyone coming to this realization or, or a number of people come to the realization that, you know, human rights really needs to be addressed here. And so you're putting, and this is really the the the you know why this falls under monetary democracy is you're putting institutions in place as kind of watchdogs right to human rights. We gave some examples there. Well, so that sounds good.

It seems like it's a move in the right direction, especially if you're talking about human rights. But there's also surprise, surprise, right? Some pitfalls to monetary democracy itself and it kind of comes into this idea of who's democracy mean, we're talking about who, who's for it, who's democracy? So you, you know, you can say like ever since 1989 followed the Berlin Wall, the US became essentially the major world superpower.

The US quote unquote, decided that democracy should be spread everywhere, you know, but the word democracy was easy to abuse whose democracy, democracy needs to grow in a unique, a unique way depending on the region.

Um You know, he's talking all about the Indian democracies, you know, that, that sometimes gets called Banyon democracy because the Banyan tree is a tree grows in the area and it's got all these inter roots and you can see them in different parts of the world, especially India and uh and, and so banning democracy is this idea that democracy is formed by all these uh you know, different sources, different contributions, different ways of life.

It doesn't just have this strictly Western definition to it. Um And so it really needs to grow in a unique way. I've got a picture on the right for um Patreon subscribers, you can see it says missile coming down with the word democracy on it. So this idea that, you know, says, you know, coming soon to a neighborhood near you. So it's this idea that, you know, again, democracy often gets forced down people's throats and that can lead to a lot of friction.

Obviously, it can lead to, you know, interventions and wars and, and things that are not great. So it needs to grow in a unique way depending uh on the region. And monetary democracy is not necessarily free of this because when you put institutions in place that are essentially watchdogs, well, what it, what, you know, you know, watching your, your, what are you watching and how are you watching it? I guess it's a little question, right.

In other words, who, who comes up with the rules to say when democracy is going correctly and when it's not, and that's going to be the problem with monetary democracy. And I think there's a lot like surveillance. I mean, John Keane distinguishes it from surveillance in his book. But I think it's a really good analogy. I mean, you think about crime and you think what, you know, if we just surveilled everybody, right?

If we just had cameras everywhere, you were always on the uh you know, always on camera. I know there's a privacy but if you, if you were to give up that privacy and people were just being tracked constantly, wouldn't crime go away. Well, of course not. Right. It wouldn't. I mean, it's, it's naive to think that you can just put something in place and it's gonna somehow guarantee the outcome and of course, that just never happens. It's naive. It usually fragile realizes systems.

You kind of interject too much, you put too much structure on something and, and no matter, you know, again, no matter what the mechanism is, you are presenting new levers that will get subverted for, you know, wrong reasons, right. So, so monetary democracy has those pitfalls as well.

And, and so we need to really come to terms and this is where I really wanna, you know, kind of wrap up a lot of the message about democracy here is we need to come to terms with the fact that there's no solid evidence for the, you know, the true universality of democracy doesn't mean it's wrong, could still be the best or the worst. But there's no solid evidence for its true universality. You've got, you know, the fact that it needs to take off in many different ways.

You've got any of India's example, the banning democracy, you know, so many different sources and roots and, and uh you know, peoples and, and, and backgrounds and experiences and, you know, it can take off in Asia, it can take off in the west and can take off in, in all four corners of the planet. There is no evidence that democracies consistently outperform Dictatorships in achieving economic growth.

And this is something that John Key says in his book, there's no evidence that democracies consistently right, outperform Dictatorships in achieving economic growth. I guess the word consistency has to be kind of, you know, the caveat there is what's the time window, right?

But um you know, and, and actually when we look at the mathematical models, which I said previously, um, a little bit earlier, we're gonna show that there, there, there could be some instances where actually dictatorship is a little bit more favorable, that's obviously, um, quite debatable. But, uh, you know, we shouldn't take it at face value that democracy and even, even monetary democracy is, is really correct. In fact, you know, monetary democracy could even make it worse, right?

Because again, when you step outside and say now we're going to monitor, you know, democracy. Now you're saying, you know how it's supposed to go, right? And then, and then you get into this, who, you know, whose village whose democracy issue? You know, there's, there's just too many questions left unanswered about the future of human development quote unquote or the uh the desirability of economic growth, quote unquote, right? In other words, what is human development? Who's human development?

Right? You know, what is the desirability of, of economic growth? How do you measure, you know, is it the usual, you know, GDP of economic growth or what does that mean?

And you've got, what is it, the competition and you've got the market, you've got, you know, however you define that might not be someone else's version of good economic growth or maybe they don't want the economic version of growth, maybe there's a spiritual growth, maybe there's some other kind of growth that people want to have and not lose because of, you know, the watchdogs of monetary democracy saying it's supposed to go a certain way if it takes root.

So again, it doesn't mean you're not supposed to get democracy, but maybe you need to make your own version of it. And so we can say the age of innocent beli here's what we can say, right? The age of innocent belief in democracy has come to an end. I think that, I think that's the true version of the end of history in the sense, you know, as per Fukuyama, not the way he was talking about it as though democracy had, you know, has, has kind of figured everything out, right?

Going through that list of imperialism, nationalism, communism, fascism, realism, military dictatorship, you know, it's all been pushed to the wayside. We figured that out democracy is here. I don't, I don't think that's the right version of the end of history. I mean, we can kind of all pretty much agree on that.

Now, we've seen that hopefully, especially if you've been listening throughout this episode, but we can say it is the end of something and that would be the innocent belief in democracy has really come to an end. It does have no, it, it doesn't have any easy answers and uh and it has to take off in a lot of different ways. And so that is something that we need to come to terms with.

Uh and and I just want to reiterate this one point too that secular democracy and John Key kind of talks about this towards the end of his book, you know, secular, secular democracy doesn't work. And that's something I have to think about because as, as a lot of society moves towards, you know, secularism and, and kind of a way from religions, uh in, in some sense, in other sense, there's no but in, in, in, you know, in some sense, we, we become more secular over time, particularly in the West.

And um another thing we have to come to terms with is well, historically, secular democracy doesn't work. So what does that mean? Right. Um In the history of democracy, fully secular or non-religious governing institutions and customs are a rarity. It turns out that democracy demands, people think in terms of a higher transcendent moral or metaphysical order in whatever form.

Again, it doesn't mean like it necessarily has to be, you know, a specific religion or maybe there's a different type of spirituality or mystery or I, I don't know, I don't have the answer to that. I don't think anybody does, but we still have to contend with this fact that secular democracy through history has not worked, maybe it still could. But, but if, but if that's so what needs to change and maybe it can't. And if that's the case, what does that mean?

Again, we call my episode on a return to magic, right? We often see, you know, whether you like it or not, right?

We see this in scientific progress, you see this in, in sociopolitical economic progress is, I mean, you, you, the, the, the belief in a higher power of some form, some, some higher transcendent, you know, kind of moral fabric seems to have always been a pretty good thing for society, not only good, I mean, there's obviously bad things that can happen when you, again, you think you have the moral high ground, we talked about that.

But this belief in something bigger than what you are seems to be a powerful thing and, and certain things just don't seem to work without it. And democracy being in that uh on that list.

So democracy also implies there is no straightforward homology between these two otherwise connected worlds, these two worlds being, you know, that of uh secular world and, and uh and that of the religious world, um you know, or, or the world of democracy more more specifically, I, I guess the world of democracy and the world of, you know, the gods, right? Um They, they, they, they have, they, they seem like they're connected in one sense and disconnected to another.

There's some kind of homology between them. So anyways, it's, it's a whole conversation around that and uh just to end off the whole kind of historical piece that I've been doing before we get into the mathematical modeling. Um you know, the the, you know, the ultimate kind of final take home message here is that democracy is a process, right? I call this episode, imprecise destinations, the continual redefining of democracy, right?

And that's really what this is is we don't, nobody really knows what to or how to define democracy. We have a sense that there's something really good about it. I mean, even on its face when you say equal representation, I mean, there's nothing obviously bad about that. That seems like a good thing, you know, but uh when you really get into the nitty gritty of it and you try to work it out, you try to put mechanisms in place to try to force that.

Uh you're gonna run into trouble, not all trouble. There are some good things but they're, you know, you're gonna get into this whack a mole. You, you're gonna have people who try to subvert the process and on and on all the things that we talked about in this episode. So democracy is not a thing. It's not a well-defined concept or idea. It's, it's a process, a rather ill defined and yet still somehow really valuable process. It's a process that matters.

It's a process that we need to talk about. We need to try to figure out and not because we're ever gonna figure it out completely. I think the reach should always exceed your grasp. You know, you, you, I tweeted before that. Um you know, goals are something along the lines of goals are not meant to be achieved, right? I mean, goals are there to be high level targets that you don't quite, you kind of almost approach them asymptotically, right?

You get really, really close and, and, and you, and you never really reach it. So democracy is most alive when it senses its weakness. As John Key says, democracy thrives on imperfection. Democracy is not hypocritical.

It's a process, it's always on the move, you know, it's really easy to, to, to, to, to say things like democracy has these ideals and then you go look at how it works and then, you know, you're, you're forcing it down people's throats and it's, you know, you're at war all the time and, and, you know, who's democracy, it, it seems to be kind of hypocritical and, and not to mention, you know, having slaves and, you know, taking so long for, to, to, to, to make progress on that front and, and uh women's suffrage and on and on and you can easily just say democracy is just so hypocritical, but it's not really the best way to look at it.

It's got a lot of good things about it and it's always growing and it's, it's hopefully most of us are really trying to, to, trying to at least move it in a, in a good direction. And so it is a process, you know, um at the end of the day. Democracy is not a mechanism that comes to rest. Uh, you know, English novelist, Em Forster 18 79 to 1970. You know, he probably put it best when he said quote unquote. Right. So two cheers for Democracy.

One because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough. There is no occasion to give it three. And so I think that's the perfect quote right there. It's, you know, out of the total that you could give it, which is three, we'll give it two, right? Two cheers for democracy. One, it does admit variety. It's part of a process, you know, we talk about it all the time, right?

Put things forward, destroy them, go through iteration, you know, the power of variation, right? Two because it permits criticism, you know, kind of like the true meanings of Ockham's razor, put something simple forward, but then allow it to be killed, allow it to be destroyed, you know, but two cheers are quite enough. There is no occasion to give it three. It is not perfect.

I think uh forrest just quote is a is an excellent kind of way to sum sum up this episode, at least the historical part of it. OK. So let's go over some of the mathematical modeling of democracy. So again, I like to just add a little bit of math towards some of the end of these episodes to add some rigor to the mechanisms that we talk about.

So when it comes to democracy, it's really the, the way that you approach this uh it has been approached mathematically is uh kind of in an interdisciplinary fashion. It's really you could say the mathematical theory of democracy is an interdisciplinary branch of public choice theory. So social choice theory and game theory. And so um just at a high level, mathematical theory of democracy is based on the candidates and the electorate's positions on topical political questions.

And essentially attempts to find the representatives like the president or the representative bodies like parliament committee and cabinet that best represent the public opinion, right? So just, you know, essentially the way that we think about democracy specifically in a representative fashion.

Um you know, how would you, you know, put a mathematical framework in place that, that is able to, you know, find representativeness whether that's an individual or a parliament committee cabinet that takes public opinion and represents it. How does that play out? How does the representation happen? How can you conceptualize that into a framework?

And so for the, for that purpose, you know, typically several quantitative indices uh are, are created that essentially assess and compare the representative capabilities that are introduced. So it's been proven that representative candidates and bodies can always be found even if there is no perfect solution in terms of social choice theory. So if you think about the stuff that we've been talking about, you know, the ups and downs of democracy, different ways it can play out.

You essentially try to capture that symbolically in a mathematical framework. And by doing that, of course, it's a model. So it's got naivete is baked in. But by doing that, you can prove because mathematics has proofs in it that you know, representative candidates and bodies can always be found even if there is no perfect solution in terms of social choice theory.

Um So public choice theory, if you will is essentially the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science. Its content includes a study of political behavior. Um Social choice theory is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests or welfare to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense.

And then game theory is really the really the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. Originally, it was addressed as you know, two person zero sum games in which each participant's gains or losses are exactly balanced by those of the other participants. So if you ever heard the expression, it's a zero sum game, right? Uh That's where this comes from. Poker is an example of a zero sum game.

If you ignore the possibility of the host taking a cut, uh because one wins exactly the amount that one's opponents lose, right? Other zero sum games are, you know, most classical board games like go and chess. So game theory as a mathematical approach to understanding these kinds of situations uh has been around for a while. A lot of this was um you know, kind of emerged after world war two, right?

Or you were in game theoretic type situations as you wanted a mathematical framework to essentially help explain that maybe even predict some outcomes. Uh when it comes to the mathematical theory of democracy. A lot of this was conceptualized by uh Andra Tangent. And uh he's got this book, a Mathematical Theory of Democracy, he released in 2014. Um Go ahead and check that out and, and that's what I'll use as the basis of some of the models that I'll be talking about here.

Um But it really comes down to these indices of representativeness. How can we kind of mathematically capture this idea of representation? And so, and uh in his approach takes uh he, he creates these three indices, one is popularity, two is universality and three is goodness.

And it's basically a way of uh you know, taking a look at what the candidates, these these representatives think about certain questions and then taking a look at what society thinks about these questions and basically matching those out. And we'll, we'll show how we do that mathematically. But let's just take a, a slightly deeper look into these represent representational indices.

OK. So this is a quantitative approach to analyzing single representatives and representative bodies under direct democracy. So when we come in and we do this mathematically uh where, where we really start with that baseline foundation of direct democracy. So again, you know, throughout this episode, we've talked about essentially three types of democracy, right? We've got the Athenian democracy, that's the direct democracy.

That means you don't elect representatives, but you get your representation by a random sampling from the population, which is called sortition. So you take, you know, maybe a couple 100 or even a few 1000 depending on the size of your population, individuals randomly selected. And, and again, that pool might be preset to make sure you've got good representation among minorities and things like that. But other than that, it's essentially a random sample of those individuals.

Those become uh the representatives of society that help make decisions, that's direct democracy. You've got representative democracy where you're electing individuals to be those representatives. And then you've got uh what we call Monet toy democracy, right? Which kind of sits on top of that and tries to put watchdogs in place to make sure everything is going the way it supposedly should. So direct democracy is the purest form really the only true form of democracy.

Uh representative democracy you would say is not really technically, at least mathematically speaking of democracy, it's actually a type of representative government, right? So direct democracy is what we use as our true democracy. It makes sense to mathematically use the purest form first and then you can kind of add in um assumptions on top of that and do different things. So the indices of measurements of representativeness are essentially averaged over a set of questions.

So the questions would be like, you know, is abortion, should it be legalized or not? Uh you know, gun control, should there be red flag laws or not? Things like this? Right? You you'd put the questions for it. Um Popularity is is so again, we have the three indices, popularity universality and goodness popularity is is you can kind of think of as the spatial aspect of representativeness and that's the average size of groups represented represented, right?

So, so how how many people are being represented is is by a given candidate is the popularity of that candidate universality would be the temporal aspect dealing with time. And that's the frequency of cases where the majority is represented and then goodness is the average of group represented to majority ratio. So basically, you're taking a look at the breakdown between how many people are in the majority and how many people are in the minority.

And then using that to to get a sense of how you know what the quote unquote goodness of representation is for that candidate. OK. So that one's a little bit trickier to understand the reason why you come up with something like goodness is you might have situations where low popularity is actually good for example, let's say you had a candidate and they have this uh you know, a 51% popularity.

So the, you know, the the amount of people that they're representing is really just let's say 51% or like, but, but let's say that 51% is the majority. In other words, the breakdown between majority and minority is 51 to 49 right? It can't be 50 50 because then you wouldn't have the definition of majority, right? So the closest you can get to parity would be 51% majority, 49% minority. So that means it, it, it's an issue that's split right down the middle.

So if you have an issue that's split essentially right down the middle, you might have a low popularity just because the majority number is almost identical to the minority. But that low popularity is not necessarily a bad thing because you might have a really good, good goodness because you're still overlapping, you being the candidate, you're, you're still overlapping with what is the majority opinion, right?

So it's basically a way of you, you want the three indices, the popularity, the universality and the goodness try to really get at the sense of representation uh for a given candidate. OK, someone who is supposed to be, whether that's elected or you know, or, or chosen by a law, you know, to, to represent the population. Now again, this is direct demo democracy so it would be sortition, it would be selected by law.

But this mathematical foundation can be used for representative democracy as well. And, and, and Dr uses his approach throughout the book to show how you take the baseline direct democracy, quantitative approach and then you add in different things to, to, to, to, to model representative democracy and, and on and on. But so the, so the foundation that we have here can be used for essentially all kinds of democracy.

OK. So popularity universality and goodness now how do you go about do, how do you go about capturing this mathematically? And I think this is really interesting, this is very much an approach that's used all throughout sciences. And it's really trying to capture these social aspects, you know, of a system with vectors. OK? It's, it's a, it's a geometric interpretation of the things that you're interested in.

OK. So we know that for example, going back to, you know, physics that a force produces a mechanical work if only it results in a motion, right? So you got forces acting on a body, but the useful part of that force would be the work that it creates. But that's only true if there's a motion that results. So you could say that only the effective component of a force vector is its projection on the direction of displacement.

Because all that really means is that we can capture kind of the properties of a system using numbers and we can think of those numbers geometrically. And if you do that, then you literally think of what kind of arrow is pointing in certain directions. Well, there's components to that arrow and some of those components are, are, are more useful for what you're trying to describe than other components.

OK. So you kind of pick apart the directionality of these sets of numbers that you're using to describe something physical and certain aspects of those directionality are, are much more important than others. And that's, that's this projection of the direction of displacement, so geometrically interpreted as projections of an institution's.

So if we think about politics and we think about um you know, these indices of representation, those can be geometrically interpreted as projections of the institution or the or, or the candidates characteristic vectors onto the characteristic mainstream vector of society. In other words, what we're basically saying here is we've got kind of two sides to the problem. When we talk about democracy, we've got whatever society is thinking and then we have whatever the candidates are thinking. OK?

The ones that let's, let's just say we elect them, you know, whether it's whether you do a random sample by ation or you elect them for, for this case, it doesn't even matter. Let's just say you have representatives. OK. So it might be 2024 election coming up and maybe it's going to be Biden again and maybe Trump's going to come back into the mix and maybe desantis comes in, you know, whatever. Right.

You've got two or three candidates that are coming forward, uh, and a, a as the main ones and they're gonna be competing against each other. Well, those candidates which are supposed to be, represent, uh, representatives, right? For society, they're gonna take a stance, uh, you know, they're gonna have their manifestos, they're gonna have their policies in place. They're gonna take a stance on the major social issues. OK?

So think of their social issues as being their vectors as being their, their, their, you could, you could capture whether they're for or against something with a set of numbers and a set of numbers can always be represented geometrically as an arrow, right?

So on that side, you've got here, here are the candidates opinions and you can kind of here's their sets of numbers as to whether or not they're for against these particular social issues and then you have society's opinions about them, right? A majority of people are in favor of this. A minority of people are in favor of it or against it rather, right? So, so let's say you take an issue like, you know, abortion.

Well, here's what society on average thinks about abortion on the one side and then on the other side, here's what the candidates think about abortion. And what you're trying to do is basically mash those two vectors together to see what pops out, which is a mathematic. You know, it's a simple way of saying mathematically, you know, you've got, here's what society thinks about abortions. We've captured that with numbers. Here's what the candidates think about abortion.

We've captured those with numbers. Now we're going to mesh those numbers together and you can do that in a way that essentially shows how the, the candidates characteristic uh vectors kind of overlap or project onto society's vectors or opinions. So it's a way of understanding the overlap essentially, right, between what society thinks and what the candidates are representing.

And of course, that's what you want to do because if you have candidates that are that if you're using indices of representation or representativeness to, to kind of assess how well a candidate is representing the general public, you essentially want to know how well their opinions overlap with what society thinks. And that's really the take home message here.

So, so whether you're doing that by geometric interpretation or more abstract or straight mathematics, you're just trying to see the overlap between what candidates believe or at least what they're saying and what society is saying. And that's really what it is just looking for that overlap. So the only component of the opinion vector of a candidate which determines their representativeness.

In other words, the only component that works for society to use the physics analogy, right is the projection of their opinion vector on a certain mainstream social vector. OK. And so because of that, we can come up with all these vector matrix formulas, which is what Andranik does in his book, The Mathematical Theory of democracy. Um these and, and so I'm not gonna pick apart all these mathematical equations.

So if you, if you're on Patreon, you can see all these vector matrix formulas but you know, don't get intimidated. All these are, are basically ways of slapping arrows together. OK? And what I mean by that is again, you've, you've got on the one side, you've got arrows that represent what society's thinking on the other side, you've got arrows that represent what the candidates are thinking.

And the different ways we basically bring those arrows together, which is what these vector matrix formulas are doing can give us these indices, indices of representativeness. OK? So you can do it, you can slap those arrows together in a way that tells you the popularity of the candidates, you can slap those arrows together in a way that tells you the universality of, of the candidates. And you can slap those arrows together in a way that tells you the goodness.

Again, popularity is the average size of the groups that are being represented by the candidates. The universality would be the frequency of cases that the majority is represented and the goodness is this kind of uh uh majority to minority ratio that helps you tease out situations where even if the popularity is low.

You know, if you've got good, if you've got high, goodness, it could still be a good situation and, and, and those are situations where you have a really split opinion down the middle on the issue, whether that's, you know, abortion or red flag laws or whatever it is. Ok. So, so again, let's just step back. It's a bit jargony here. But all this is, is, again, you've got society thinks certain things, you've got candidates think certain things.

And we need a mathematical way to see how good the overlap is between them. And you can do that with vectors, you can do that with arrows. And so we use these vector matrix formulas to slap those arrows together and find the overlap. And the way that you do that overlap will say something different about representativeness, popularity or universality or goodness. And that's just different ways of thinking about how well the representation is happening when a candidate is put forward in society.

OK? Um You can see for, for Patreon subscribers, you got two parts to all of these formulas, one is a constant and then the other side is just a scalar product of social and candidate vectors. So mathematically, the way you slap these arrows together is you take what's called a scalar product. Um you know, same thing as a dot product or an inner product, right? It's the same thing, right? As opposed to something like a vector product. It's just a way of multiplying sets of numbers together.

Again, when I say arrow, I literally just mean a set of numbers because, because any set of numbers can be geometrically interpreted as if it was on a chart of two dimensions and you drew an arrow. And so it points in a certain direction, right? So, so that's all these formulas are, is slap arrows together in different ways so that we can say something about the representation of society.

OK. So it's pretty cool if you think about it and you can, you can, you can use this approach mathematically to do all kinds of different things because anything that can be represented by a set of numbers, which is, you know, pretty much anything you can then geometrically interpret that and you can use vector matrix formulas like this to mix and match them in different ways to mathematically model the situation.

And again, once you've done it mathematically, that means we can do things like put them on a computer, we can run simulations, we can see what happens and just, you know, can kind of get into the combinatorics of things and try different situations.

You can kind of get a sense of what might make sense for democracy or maybe it'll help you explain what's happened in, you know, the last election, you know, this person had low popularity and yet they still won or yet they still, you know, let's look at, look at the goodness, look at the universality, look at the popularity, understand this in a more rigorous fashion. So you can actually kind of know what the heck we're talking about when it comes to these democratic situations.

Um I've got a slide here for Patreon subscribers that just kind of picks apart what a scalar product is. Right? Recall that the scalar product of two vectors is equal to the length of one vector multiply the length of the projection of the other vector on the first one. So it takes two equal length sequences of numbers in this case, like coordinate vectors and just returns a single number. And that's the point, right.

So conceptually just think about what that is, you know, again, society thinks this, that's one vector candidate thinks this that's another vector. So take those two sets of numbers, slap them together and give me a single number at the end. And that's exactly what the indices of representation or representativeness rather is, right? You want to slap two sides of an equation together and you just want to get one number on it. So I can look at that candidate and say your popularity.

Is this your universality? Is this your goodness? Is this, in other words, I can kind of rank you in terms of your ability to represent the popular opinion, right? So we have this algebraic definition, you know, you've got two sets of numbers. Here's a, here's B and you're basically just taking this dot product between these two, which is just a sum of products, right?

A times B plus A, A one times B, one plus A two times B two plus and on and on and on, you just get all that together, you get a single number at the end. OK. So, um so that's really the approach to do and we just slap sets of numbers together and create these indices.

And here's just this kind of visual here that I'm showing candidate vectors on the left social vectors on the right, bring them together this kind of geometric interpretation of essentially taking inner in a dot or an inner or scalar product between those two. Um And so you can say that the representative capacity of candidates depends exclusively on their position relative to the social mainstream, right?

So, so think about candidates as being arrows that point in a certain direction and you're either pointing in a similar direction to what society is or you're not, it, it kind of sounds like a really loose analogy, but it's actually quite mathematical, right? Because you can always almost always geometrically interpret right, the sets of numbers that you assign something.

And that geometric interpretation is a really nice intuitive way to think about, you know how to capture the similarity between two things. The the the you know, using vectors like this is used all the time in machine learning. Uh you know, which is the technology behind the quote unquote A I that you see and, and just kind of everywhere today. Um you know, it's used in simulations, it's used in, in modeling all over the place. So here we're just applying it to democracy.

OK. In the book Andre uh Tangent, uh you know, the Mathematical theory of democracy. He's got this table here where he kind of shows how he's bringing all this together. Um You know, again, kind of hard if, if for, for people that aren't on Patreon, but really what we're showing is we've got three questions. Now, these are related to Athenian democracy. So he uses, you know, Athen questions as an example, like should we help Sparta to put down a rebellion?

Should we pay for political participation? And should we uh remove powers from the APA? But it doesn't really matter what those questions are like, this could be like, should abortion be legalized? Should there be red flag laws for guns and something else? You know, whatever it is, whatever the issue is, right? Um And so you've got the social vectors which come in different forms. So some of them are, they're, they're adding weights to the questions.

So if you took the three questions, yada yada, abortion, yada, yada red flag laws, yada yada something else. And then you said, uh you know, does society think these are important or not? So regardless of which side you take you know, you might say, uh I'm really against abortion being legalized. But do you think it's important uh whatever, maybe, maybe it's not the most important or maybe you think that's really an important question regardless of which side you take?

So you can wait uh as a vector, its own vector, a social vector. How important do you think those questions are? So society can have have that opinion about it. There's also the vector of balance of opinions in society. So um not necessarily the importance of it, but just um you know, how does the breakdown look? Is society really uh for legalizing abortion or not? Are they really for the red flag laws or not?

And so you can kind of get a set of numbers that show, you know what, what, what is the the balance of opinions in society for these questions? OK. And then you can come up with all these other kinds of social vectors required to calculate the indices, right? And you can see them here at pug, but it's the same thing, it's the exact same concept.

You're just, you're thinking about democracy, you're thinking about representativeness, you want to calculate these indices, you come up with these sets of numbers, the breakdown of public opinion, uh the, you know, the weights or the how important each question is that's being put to, to whether that's being put to vote or uh that, that's just society, you know, is is going to be an issue that comes up in, in, in the next election or whatever it is.

And then you've got the vector of candidate opinions, right? You've got the three candidates and you've got basically one negative one. So if, if one, it means you're for that particular question, right? And if it's negative one, you're against it. And again, the reason you're doing this is you're just gonna slap these vectors together, right? To, to, to say what is the overlap between what society is thinking and what the candidates are thinking.

And by doing that because of that inner product that we take between vectors, you get these single numbers that are spit out, right? So you can start to rate. So here's where the candidates sit and then you can take averages uh across all three. So the average popularity across all candidates average universality, average goodness. So, you know, this is something you can go, if you're really interested, you can go kind of read yourself.

But I just, I want the take home message here to be that, you know, again, you've got a situation, you can represent the situation using sets of numbers, those sets of numbers can be geometrically interpreted as vectors. And now we can slap vectors together using inner products and doing that in all these different ways to say something about society. You know, it's really not that complicated.

Uh But of course, you got to think about how best to create these vectors and how to bring them together and why you would, you know, obviously, you know, uh Andranik is gonna argue in his book, why he's doing it this way. And he has um the full kind of uh background about, you know, uh kind of kind of proving that these vector matrix formulas are the way to do this for democracy. So, very interesting stuff. Um I'm just going to. So, so that's the background of the math.

I'm gonna give you some results that came out of the modeling uh using this mathematical framework for democracy. And then we'll take a quick look at the uh non-trivial playground where I've taken those vector matrix formulas, I've written them, you know, into the computer using programming language and now we can visualize them on the front end and that's just something you can go play with.

Um So some of the results are when you, when you put this framework in place, here's what we find out a representative and representative bodies selected by lot are expected to be fairly representative. Someone sounds kind of obvious. In other words, if you have a big population and you take a random sample, you should expect those to be fairly representative of the sample. Remember the Canadian example, right?

Monetary democracy, they were doing some random selection, you know, I can always challenge that. Well, yeah, I know you're randomly selecting but how, how do I know that's going to be representative, right. Well, you can expect that at least mathematically again, math models, it's kind of naive because you can't always truly capture the, the, you know, the, the whole complexity of the situation. But you can mathematically expect that random sample to be fairly representative.

And that shouldn't really be surprising. This is used in statistics all the time, right? If you want to take a representative of, of, you know, the opinion of a population, you're gonna take some random samples of that, you're not just gonna go to one, you know, district and I'm only gonna sample from there and then I'm gonna say that's represented the whole country or something that wouldn't make any sense.

Another result is even a single individual selected by law uh have the expected popularity and universality greater than 50%. So even if you just uh selected a single individual randomly, they could be expected to have decent popularity and universality, which is kind of interesting. Um Yeah, ju ju just by selecting one individual, right? So you, you kind of got to go to into the math to see why that is. But that's interesting. Um Some more interesting ones in an unstable society.

Personal power is more efficient than democracy. OK. Remember I talked about earlier that there were situations where even a dictator or someone that has a high concentration of power could be more efficient than the than democracy itself well, the situations, at least mathematically where we find this to be the case is in a very unstable society.

So if it's really unstable, you know, the issues that are being talked about, talked about a very polarized, you know, think about today, particularly in the US, right? We have really, really high, you could argue polarization across issues, right, abortion, red flag laws, you know, the way things are being taught in school, you know, whatever it is, you know, it's, it's not uh that that majority of the minority ratio, it's kind of split down the middle there.

You could say uh it's almost like you got two majorities, right? Um It's, it's just very, very polarized and in situations like that, you could argue at least this is what, you know, this particular mathematical framework is showing is that the concentration of power could almost be more efficient than democracy in these situations because it's almost like democracy can't work in the in situations where it's so polarized, so highly unstable society.

And that, and that instability might come from other, it might not just be the issues that people are split on. It could be, you know, we talked about the harshness of environment, right? We were looking at about uh we're looking at that in the last episode.

So something you know, maybe you're at war, there's some other friction in place in situations like that these nice democratic solutions almost become less useful and you need to start concentrating the power hopefully only temporarily because maybe that concentration of power starts to bring peace again. You know, it's kind of like someone just needs to make the decision, we need to get that peace. Once you get that peace back, then democratic solutions would take over once again.

Um Another result is parliaments and Magistrates selected by law from the society are expected to be representatives. In other words, you know, we we we said individuals are expected to be representative when they, when they're selected by laws, these institutions also. So parliaments, Magistrates um if you select those by law, so actually the Citizens Assembly in, in British Columbia, Canada would be a good example of that, right? Because well, it's extra parliamentary.

So it's not really a parliament but it is, you know, this, this representative body selected by law, it's a group of people and uh and those can be representative. Although in this case, parliament might take on also slightly a different meaning depending how you define that institution, right? But those institutions can indeed be represented when they are actually selected by law.

Um In other result, indices of representatives of any decisive body selected by law from society converge to their absolute Maxima as the size of the decisive body increases. OK. So if you have a bigger body that you're doing that you're that you're selecting from, then you would, you'd expect the representation that you selected randomly to be better. OK. It reproaches the Maxima. But this convergence depends only on the size of the decisive body.

OK. So this kind of goes against what I just said. The convergence depends only on the size of the decisive body, not on that of the society. OK. So, so I kind of take back what I said, actually, the indices of representatives, uh representativeness of any decisive body are going to converge to their Maxima. But that only depends on the size of the decisive body. In other words, if I'm gonna make an assembly, OK, you might get better representatives, the bigger the body is.

But that doesn't mean the population that you draw it from necessarily has to be bigger. So an example of this would be if you want to get good representativeness, Monaco needs as large a parliament as China. OK. So you take Monaco, Monaco, which is much smaller than something like China, you might say, well, China must need a large decisive body that you're formed because the population is so big.

And this is saying, no, you know, Monaco would need just as big of one as China, you know, uh even in Greece, right? You had like at one point, I think like 6000 members to the representative body, right? That was selected again by law. So it's it's not the size of the population that matters. It's the size of the representative body and it will approach its maximum, the bigger that that gets. So that's kind of interesting.

Um Another result, legislative bodies like assemblies or councils need many more members and executive bodies like Magistrates or ministries in order to provide the same degree of representativeness. So if you're comparing the type of legislative bodies, you can do that. Uh OK, just a few more here, a candidate can be representative with respect to popularity but not necessarily with respect to universality.

So you might have a popularity greater than 50% but a but a universality less than 50% you know, again, going back to those definitions, right? Popularity uh is, is essentially the average size of the group represented. The universality is the frequency of cases where the majority is actually represented. OK?

So you kind of have to think about that a little bit and, and pick apart those definitions, but it's important to do that because there are these situations where again, you might have a leader, they got really low popularity. So I guess they're bad. Well, maybe not, you've got this other measure called goodness.

You got the situations where maybe the questions are split down the middle, you know, you, you could be, you could have low popularity but only because the majority of the minority ratio is almost the same, right? It it's, it's like it's almost 1 to 1. Well, specifically 51% to 49% let's say. So there's these situ you gotta look at what is happening in society and pick apart in different ways to really know if that candidate is not right or not, right?

Uh You know, kind of like a real world example, right? You've got Trump who, you know, let's say that, you know, he didn't get the, the, the popular vote, ok? But because of the electoral college was put in place, he was able to get the win And there's a reason that's the case and that's, you know, you could say the US is not truly a, you know, representative democracy necessarily, it's actually a republic or a representative republic and, and electoral college is put into place.

So you don't have like really big states getting the overwhelming say in something you kind of normalize the data, standardize it in a way that even the smaller states have just as much a say as the bigger states and on and on. OK. So there's kind of a reason that even if you didn't win the popular vote, you're still supposed to win if you got the, you know, the electoral college and not.

So you, you have to look at it like this, you can't just take the top numbers of something, the the high level numbers and say, ok, now I understand the situation, someone might not have been as popular but they still won and there might be a reason to do that. Now you can decide whether you agree with something like the electoral college or not.

But that's the point is you got to pick these apart from different angles um in controversial situationss, democratic institutions like assemblies are inefficient and personal power can be more appropriate. That's, that goes back to like, you know, centralization of power. There might be a time and place for that when you've got a really polarized population or a really harsh environment that you're trying to, to operate.

Um uh a representation, represent representative government within uh the election winner is not necessarily the best representative of public opinion, right? Similar to what I just said previously and then representative democracy as it is guarantees no adequate representation of public opinion. OK. So representative democracy as it is guarantees no adequate, adequate representation of public opinion. So there's all kinds of ways to think about this.

And I think you'd really have to spend time to pick it apart. Think about, you know how big the population is the number of candidates, their positions, what society thinks mechanisms that are already in place that you like like like like the electoral college and you know, you go, you got to think about it from different angles. And by mathematically modeling democracy, we can think about how that plays out.

OK. So moving on into the non-trivial playground again, I'd just like to take some of the mathematic model mat mathematical modeling that I talked about and then put it on the computer so you can get some toggles and switches and things to kind of play around with. Um, so you can just come into here. So again, if we go to the, um, you know, home page, like I described last time, um, so we've got original tractability of calmness that we talked about in the last episode, right?

We've got a new episode on here which I'll just keep adding as I do them in precise destinations. And I've got three sections here that I talk about. One is for the popularity, one is for the universality and one is for the goodness. Um Here are the, you know, the vector matrix formulas essentially that capture as I describe the different uh indices of representativeness. What I have here for each of them is on the left. These are basically the vectors that you're playing with.

So the top one is going to be the social vector. And then the next three are the candidate vectors. You've got three candidates, right? And these ones are considered candidate opinions. So B one B two B three, this is the balance of public opinion. So you're basically just changing kind of the ratio or the amount or the weight of each of those questions as the public thinks about them.

So question one, maybe it's about abortion, you can toggle, you know uh uh what, what's, what's the balance of public opinion for that one. So if most public is in favor of the way that you frame that question. Maybe, you know, should we legalize abortion? Then you would rank that high. If not, you'd crank it low. Maybe this is the red flag laws. You know, most people are for it. Most people are not for it.

So you're basically just adding weight to how the public thinks about these three questions and then the candidates are across those three questions as well. And like I said, they're either four against it. And the way that, you know, Andra represents that mathematically is a one or a negative one. So if you're for it, it's one, if you're against it, negative one, right?

So we might say, you know, candidate two is against everything, you know, maybe candidate three is against two of them, but for one and then maybe candidate one is for everything. And so in this situation, um let's say something like this. So we got candidate one, all four, we got negative 11, negative 11 and negative one for candidate two and negative one, negative one and one for candidate three. So I'm just weighting the candidate opinions uh differently across these three questions.

So three questions, I bought public opinion at 0.4 for every of them and candidate one is in favor uh more than the other candidates. And so you can see that their popularity is high. In other words, you know, how many people are those candidates representing Well, you expect candidate one to be representing the most because I've cranked candidate ones uh you know, vector essentially in the positive direction with these, with these questions, right?

And again, as you play these differently, depending on how the candidate rankings are with respect to those questions. Right. Again, you gotta be on Patreon to see what I'm doing, obviously, but I'm just toggling essentially, you know, the the the amounts of the numbers that represent the vectors on both the social and candidate sides of this situation like I talked about. So hopefully, that makes sense.

So go ahead and play with that, you know, well, this candidate thinks this or this candidate thinks this and you can kind of use it as a, you know, a real situation maybe for the upcoming 2024 election or something that's happening currently in your district, you've got representatives, you've got questions of concern.

You've got, um you know, what you think the balance of public opinions or you could say what if the balance of public opinions were these, you know, how would that affect the popularity of the candidate? And of course, that is not the only industry uh uh or index of, of representativeness to look at. There's also the universality as we define it and do the same thing here. Uh I I instead of doing the balance of the public opinion, I'm doing the importance of the question.

So regardless of how the public thinks of it, you know, in terms of whether they're for gains, how important do they think of? Uh it is. So, again, think of a situation, think of the candidates and then think of for those three questions, how important, you know, maybe abortion is really important. Maybe the red gun, red flag law for guns isn't as, you know, whatever, for whatever reason.

And then the third question, you know, you wait it accordingly again, depending on where the candidates sit with respect to those issues, taking into account the importance of the questions. How does that change the universality of the candidate? How often are the candidates representing, are representing the majority, right to define universality? And then goodness three questions, you kind of have this generic social vector.

Uh you know, it's composed of a number of things, the importance of the questions. That's the mu here uh the A vector, you, you can kind of pick it apart and you probably ought to go to the book to really kind of tease out exactly what this means. But again, just remember how I define them throughout this episode, right? Popularity, universality and goodness, maybe you can recreate that situation where the popularity of one of these candidates is low, but the goodness ends up poking up high.

Why is that? Oh If I take a look at the way the social vector was done, if I take a look at the way that uh you know, the weightings of the different candidates were done, we can see that situation play out. So think about popularity, think about universality. Think about goodness play with these toggles back and forth. If you just want to build a little muscle memory out of it again, it's to kind of get really build the intuition behind some of this math. Maybe.

Think about your current, um you know, district or situation or an upcoming election or a previous election and how some of this plays out. It's, it's just a more rigorous way to mathematically divine these democratic situations.

Again, this mathematical model is based on direct democracy, but it can be extended uh you know, with these candidates, right, with, with these, you know, kind of chosen by lot or whether he's elected and on and on and it's just a kind of a kind of a fun way to kind of play around with that. So yeah, go play around with that. Um You know, click on the reference, it'll tell you the book, click on the episode, it'll take you to the episode.

And uh as I said before, I will continue to add some of these. Uh well, all of these really the the mathematical versions of the of kind of the mechanisms that I talk about in my episode to this playground. So you can kind of go play agro play around with that and it just helps, right? As you, as you toggle those things. Think about the situations, think about the math, think about the mechanism. Do you agree with it? Do you disagree with it? Is it naive? Does it seem to capture something?

Why doesn't something else get captured and bring it up? Bring it up on Twitter? Hit me with AD M or even a public and just say, hey, I was playing around the playground and something doesn't really make sense. I mean, I, I toggled this but, you know, or what does this mean? Or I didn't really understand what you meant when you said this, you know, you don't have to understand everything the first round nobody does.

Um So, so, but I think playing around with this builds a little muscle memory and some intuition to these mechanisms I think is important. So go ahead uh and, and, and that's open to everybody. You don't just have to be on um on the uh the Patreon to play with this head on over to non Treville dot online to play around with that playground, capture some of those mechanisms mathematically. So that is it that ends part two. You know, that was quite a lot to get through again.

That book was just under 900 pages, you know, with a lot of, a lot of interesting details. Normally I wouldn't spend as much time on a, on a topic, you know, I think democracy again, it is important socially, it's important from an engineering perspective.

It's important from an economic perspective trying to reach representation of the different components that come into to, to reform these systems that are critical to the way that, you know, society runs to the way that we teach things to the way that we design, you know, systems, whatever it is, right? I mean, democracy is important. I've got a bunch of suggested reading at the end. Go ahead and check that out.

You know, obviously the book itself, Baca Machiavelli and George Gro Greek mythology, Islam and Democracy, Christianity in the middle ages, you know, Martin Luther John Knox, John Mill, all these kinds of things, right? Philip the second of Spain, some of those historical examples that we talked about, obviously the American revolution, the French revolution, right?

Civil war, um you know, the politics of India, you know, go check that out, go go check, you know, so called ban in democracy, you know, the the the really the the democratic innovations that were added to democracy via what India, India was going to do. And again, just such a nice example of getting away from that western narrative that there's only one way to do it. Um You know, we made comments on the different revolutions, right?

Marxism, Leninism, we kind of got that end of history via Fukuyama. You got the better version of that end of history that, you know, in my opinion. And, and I think what uh you know John King was saying as well, is that really, this is just the end of that innocent look at democracy. And then of course, the mathematical theory of democracy, which I think is interesting.

And if you want to take a quantitative look at how this all plays out, go ahead and check that out, at least at the Wikipedia level, if not. And Drano's book itself and of course the playground that I put together, so lots to talk about. Uh you know, I thought it was pretty interesting. Uh You know, just, just to kind of end off here. Again, there's three things to mention. One is if you, if you like, if you, if you got something out of these episodes, you thought it was interesting.

Go ahead and give me a five star rating on Apple podcast, please. If you did like it, you know, it really helps to get that five star rating. And, um you know, if you can even write a little bit of a review, it just helps others know that, hey, this podcast might be worth listening to. Um If you want to help support the show, go head on over to patreon dot com slash nontrivial. And that'll give you obviously access to some of the visuals that I put together that accompany what I talk about.

You'll also get a PDF download of the slides that so you can kind of kind of get a nice summary of everything that was said and, and, and you get a copy of those images, um go head on over to substack as well and check out nontrivial where I actually do a written version of the episodes that I put together.

So if you'd rather read what I'm talking about, you know, there's usually a, a decent stagger between the audio version and what's on Patreon and what's on Substack, you know, I might do it like a month or two later.

I bring put together, but you can go see the written article versions of these topics and, and if, if reading is more your thing or you just want to spend kind of some slower time with these topics of things that I've said, go ahead and check out the articles that I write based on these episodes and hey, please recommend the podcast to a friend.

If you think it's worthwhile, you think someone else might be interested in, you know, it's just uh it's more motivating to put these things together when you know, you've got a decent audience to listen to. So go ahead and, and check some of those options out as always. Thank you so much. Your support means everything even, you know, whether you're a paying subscriber or not, just the fact that there are people listening. It really means a lot to me.

Um You know, hit me up on Twitter if you have any questions. If you have any suggestions always happy to do this. We got a lot more episodes coming up. So stay tuned to nontrivial where we take a look at these situations, we pick up about the underlying mechanisms and hopefully give you listeners, you know, a bit of a toolbox, a bit of an arsenal to use to think about a lot of these complex situations in a more rigorous and intelligent fashion. Thank you so much. Until next time, take care.