#twothirds

[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.

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[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.

[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.

[justesurlapeau]

[two-thirds]

Twothirds Is Enough.

Source

Tax the rich

[two-thirds]

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

Twothirds is enough!

[two-thirds]

I'm very suspicious about 68% for reducing sanctions on Venezuelan oil. It's extremely difficult to get that large a portion of a survey to take a position on an issue even close to that niche, which makes me think there's some degree of push polling happening, or at least not a properly handled "don't know\don't care" group. Same with "Restricting China's use of AI chips", the wording alone there is non-neutral. Do you have a source link?

Here is a chart with some despair-inducing implied morals:

Do more to spread the good news of an AI arms race, keeping a lid on refugees, and cracking open the earth to churn out more global warming. Also either drop the trans stuff or bury and soft-pedal it lest ppl keep noticing

[claraprivat]

Shooting Two Thirds

Cinematographer Kike Martín Estilismo Laura Arias Velasco, Ruby Orita, Xoana

[publictaknews]

Two-thirds of taxpayers likely to migrate to the new regime in 2023-24: CBDT chief

Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) chairman Nitin Gupta has said that he expects at least 50-66 per cent (two-thirds) of taxpayers to switch to the new tax regime in the next financial year itself. “We have left it to the taxpayers how many people will shift to the new tax regime. We have left it to the taxpayers which tax regime they want to be in, but we think at least 50 per cent 65-66 per…

[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.

[dr-gaytorius]

Some things never change

[two-thirds]

Voters overwhelmingly believe the Supreme Court needs a code of ethics.

[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.

[agreed-upon-solutions]

Agreed Upon Solutions is a project to run a scalable supermajority direct democracy.

We're developing the technology like a game (to make voting friendly for users), but we have a roadmap to develop the core into something usable for creating fully fleshed out laws. Our initial release this week focuses on the first step: Finding consensus opinions on literally any issue.

Here's a simple version of how it works:

• We have created a ballot containing literally every thing: over 157,000 common nouns extracted from Wikidata. By removing all the people, places, slogans, etc, we've removed the marketing and are left with core concepts. (Hence, "every thing", not "everything")

• Users are able to rank topics in order of importance. It's an enormous list, so we have three ranking modes to make things easier: Most Important, Random, and Hybrid.

• Within each topic, we're holding what we call a twothirds vote, which tries to rank up comments with supermajority consensus.

• We generate visualizations of the voting pattern, as well as calculate an "agreeability" score representing how likely it is we think this statement would meet with majority approval offline - The goal is to identify positions that can gather enough support to be passed using the regular legislative process in bulk, allowing us to bundle together these ideas in the future to bypass the normal legislative gridlock.

Our goal of holding a policy election on November 5th, concurrent with the US election. Before then, we need comments, lots of them! Here's our current list of most important things. The more diverse the set of opinions we can gather, the better we'll be able to tune the system to make sure we're considering multiple perspectives fairly.

If you believe that democracy needs some serious technical improvements, then come help us out! Beneath our playful exterior is a lot of ambition, your comments will genuinely help make real-world democracy better.