#twothirds

[agreed-upon-solutions]

[kyleemclauren]

There needs to be a voting-based check on the power of the supreme court. They’re currently totally unaccountable dictators, and all branches of our government need to be under the ultimate control of the voters. We can't be expected to pass a constitutional amendment every single time they rule something insane.

[emvisual]

Esta es la bailarina de longboard Valeriya Gogunskaya en un vídeo para promocionar TWOTHIRDS. Una marca de ropa ecológica. El vídeo está rodado en Portugal.

[agreed-upon-solutions]

There is no system whatsoever to ensure accountability to the people in the United States!

You may want to check out Agreed Upon Solutions - It is our proposal for exactly how government should work instead. It is fully implemented and you can try it out as much as you want.

You are given a ballot on literally Every Thing, and voting is done to determine policies with high consensus. We perform clustering to divide votes into two "parties", Up and Down, then require the 95% confidence interval on a balanced-representation vote to be above a supermajority opinion threshold (twothirds).

Anything that meets this standard should be a bounding guideline for policy, anything that does not can be delegated to representatives. This leaves room for leaders to make complex or unpopular decisions, without ever sacrificing democratic accountability.

The twothirds system is designed to work alongside any government, as a way of providing sanity and guard rails. If anyone has a better system, we'd love to hear it.

Quietly losing my mind over the fact that Elon Musk has straight up orchestrated a coup of our executive branch and like....I don't even know what, if any, system we have in place to fix this. Like... He's just taken control of the money and locked out the actual appointed officials. What the fuck.

[two-thirds]

72% of Americans believe there should be more government regulation of what companies can do with their customer's personal information.

Twothirds Is Enough!

[two-thirds]

Nice

[dr-gaytorius]

Some things never change

[agreed-upon-solutions]

Agreed Upon Solutions is built to exemplify a kind of constructive theory of politics. We want to answer the question "what is the best possible democracy," without worrying about the requirements of political feasibility.

If you ask yourself what the most imaginably perfect democracy does, it's something like "Talk about everyone's opinion, on every topic, in order of most to least important. Then everyone votes and reaches consensus about what to do, and that's how the decisions are made."

When the list of issues is small and there aren't too many people, it's possible to do this. But, it doesn't scale. The largest group I'm aware of that does it successfully are the Quakers, and their ability to pull it off is one of the most remarkable acts of community trust I have ever seen; not something that can reasonably expected of a crowd of strangers. So what's the best you can do with a public website?

It turns out there's an answer to this, because doing something very similar is an important problem in the theory of distributed databases. Consider the problem of trying to predict real-world majority opinion using noisy ballots. You want to output "Yes", "No" or "Unknown", for all opinions. Your goal is to say "Yes" or "No" for as many opinions as possible. You are allowed to say "Unknown" whenever you want, but you must never give a wrong answer. This is impossible without assuming an upper bound on the amount of noise, so your goal is to maximize the amount of noise you can handle while still remaining correct. For our examples, we'll assume "Yes" is the majority position.

The noise in the polls is assumed to be Byzantine, a kind of adversarial and unavoidable worst case error. Not only are some votes in your sample guaranteed to be bad, they're bad in the worst possible way, chosen with full knowledge of how your voting system works. This does not just mean always voting "No". They might, for instance, want to blend in if your voting system has some sort of reputation system, to spring their traps at the worst possible moment. In reality, the situation is probably not this dire, but by assuming the worst you can derive the most stable system.

In this system, majority voting does not work. If your vote comes down to 50.1%\49.9%, your adversary could easily change less than a percent of the votes and flip the outcome. Your margin of resistance is 0%.

Let's say you do the opposite, and require a unanimous vote. Then all you need is a single voter to defect, which brings the system to a halt. Your margin of resistance is also 0%.

The optimum threshold turns out to be twothirds.[1][2] A robot can't flip a close decision or block a unanimous decision without having a third of the vote. All you need to do is keep robots below 33% of the vote, which feels like an achievable technical goal.

We're not trying to implement a voting system based on elaborate id checks, we're trying to implement one based on extensive use of fault tolerant algorithms. This is an approach that has not been well studied, because it has some significant downsides: specifically, it does not always reach a decision. Our attitude is that doesn't matter, as long as some questions can reach agreement we'll always be able to make forward progress.

The rest of what we do is similarly involved. There are no direct replies because it makes harassment effectively impossible. We discuss every thing because it's a constructive version of "provide any comment". The "Most Important Thing" pins down a shared answer to an otherwise very vague concept. It's not just limited to voting, either, it extends all the way through the design of the website. If you have an account you can enable "solid mode" in your account preferences to make the website less bouncy on mobile. Why? Because it feels better to touch, and we care about that. Much of what we expect to feel odd about the website is intentional. [3]

This is not a traditional approach to politics. It's a set of ideas unusual enough that it's easier to build, run, and demonstrate that they work in practice; than it is to successfully argue they "would hypothetically work if it were built". That's the core of constructive politics, making arguments by building working examples. It's hard to argue something can't be done when it already exists.

==========

[1] The concept of a "twothirds" is much more involved than simply a number, which is why we write "twothirds" instead of "two-thirds"

[2] Depending on your view of the United States government, the margin of resistance is either one person, nine people, or a few hundred people, for a total margin of resistance of <0.001%. That's why we're facing a possible civil war next week, exciting stuff. \s

[3] This does not include navigational, performance, or conceptual clarity issues. If you experience those, let us know.

[two-thirds]

I actually use "members of congress should not be allowed to trade stocks" as my most obvious example of a pre-existing twothirds. It consistently has 90+% approval ratings when polled.

It's up there with "we should have sanitation workers", which is my normal example of something everyone agrees on that might randomly become a target for political terrorists.

"Uber drivers should have to display id in their windows, like taxi drivers" is our example of a nontrivial twothirds, which comes from a case study.

Examples might be rare, but we can solicit a *lot* of suggestions, a useful list is pretty much guaranteed to exist. The fact that I can list items from it means that writing a bunch of these down and presenting it all at once could be a crazy useful list for a baseline political platform. Just saying.

Twothirds Is Enough.

[kyleemclauren]

Can we please just do direct democracy? Please? I don't ever want to vote on another candidate again, I just want to be able to express my opinions directly at the polls. I just want to vote on laws and policies myself.

Imagine you go into the voting booth and get to have a say on hundreds or thousands of proposals, allowing you to express exactly what you wanted in full detail. You get to vote on *everything* - Israel vs Palestine, KOSA, police funding, NASA funding, abortion, queer rights, school policies - everything. We could put every supreme court decision on the national ballot. We wouldn't have to ever think about any of these people ever again.

Imagine if there was an easy way for citizens to propose laws. Not like, the staggeringly difficult slog of managing hundreds of people collecting signatures, but a government agency that did research into how popular citizen proposed initiates were, and made recommendations to get them passed into law.

We need to be talking about constitutional convention level solutions to our problems. The parties will never learn.

[offjumpoladulkittiporn]

twothird reunion 🥰

[kyleemclauren]

Yeah, we should all vote out Clarence Thomas.

If I see any of you posting shit about not voting, in the year of Clarence Thomas saying we should revisit Marriage Equality and little girls being banned from school sports for having short hair, know that I WILL eat you first when we're in the Mad Max Fury Road level of planet fuckery.

[two-thirds]

Voters believe former presidents should not have immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.

Twothirds is enough!

[toycoheartful]

Khan Chinchilla is a Chinchilla PawPant - Who want to be hunting to shoots Ducks, Mallards, Rabbits, Lions, Lionesses, Rhinoceros, Bears, Snakes, Pythons, Anacondas and More Animals and even Law-bots and He getting likely to Bruce Stone

Name: Khan Chinchilla (Chinchilla de Khan)

Species: Chinchilla PawPant

Sexually: Bisexual

Sex: Male

Power: His gun-hand to shoots Law-bot and other people

Friends: Rabbidbot "Toyco" White-Rabbit, Felipe White-Rabbit & Bruce Stone

Rival: Acanthus Cape Vulture

Theme Song: Hunted by Priority One, TwoThirds & Jonny Rose

How does Khan Chinchilla are the name of Khan like "Khan Doorman?"