@xgranade@wandering.shop I'd like to propose something more radical: "voting systems", as a category, are overall just a bad tool for policymaking.
It encodes 'popularity' as the fundamental metric, and invites contests that center around it; while leaving no space for mutual collaboration on improving policy, let alone nuance.
IMO, voting systems only serve authoritarian ideologies as they are a tool of power imbalance; they do not serve egalitarian, collective ones which seek to take into account everyone's needs.
A healthy egalitarian political system would look like a conversation, not like a tally.
@Qyriad @xgranade@wandering.shop I'm inclined to say that the problem is in the question - "scaling that" assumes a similar structure to what we have today, with vast numbers of people being governed by a small central government body according to a fixed set of rules that applies to all of those people.
From all that I know of community building, psychology, social relations, and so on - I simply have no reason to believe that that structure can ever work. It fails even basic social cohesion tests right out the gate (like the infamous 'maximum cohesive group size' of some 250-ish participants).
That's not to say that we don't need ways to coordinate things across large amounts of people, because those people do exist and there *are* practical matters to be concerned about, but I don't think that "scaling a political system" is the way to go about that.
I'd expect the solution to be in the category of "how can multiple small groups of people co-exist in a shared environment", rather than "how do you govern a massive group of people".
@joepie91 @Qyriad @xgranade
i think there's a lot of benefit to gain from understanding that the reason voting systems are self-contradictory is because electoral politics are self-contradictory, which is because the idea of managing a state is self-contradictory because the idea of states is self-contradictory.
you can't scale voting systems that way because human decisionmaking doesn't scale. to do it as a conversation you have to be able to listen, and there's only so many you can listen to.
@joepie91 @xgranade
I'm fascinated because I generally think that I favor greater democracy.
I view the US system as anti-democratic & yet the results are touted to reflect the consent of the governed. If you add together non voters & votes against, the US government has probably never met that legitimacy test.
I have hoped for greater enfranchisement to lead to better results. I see the wisdom in your statement that voting contests inherently produce bad results.