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Batty's avatar

Thanks for sharing this post, a few thoughts

- I think it's hard to delve into this area well without addressing the elephant in the room: the poor incentivization to provide good votes at all.

- Raising the price of votes to filter out noise is an interesting idea, but I didn't find the argument for why we should expect the remaining votes to the better than the the other scenario. There seems to be an implied assumption that a given citizen's vote quality would be identical whether they were paying information/etc. costs to vote or paying information/etc. costs plus $500 to vote.

- It isn't clear to me how we should think of error costs. You seem to imply that the bad votes coming from error are just as bad as informed votes are good, but that shouldn't work -- bad and good votes that cancel out are not a major harm. We could analyze the problem of noise (which is huge), but you also seem to identify certain bad decisions voters make as shallow or dumb. I don't know how to deal with that attitude in this context, where at times you seem to rely on the rationality assumption.

- "democracy is a process to obtain a good, not a good in and of itself...democracy is...only as useful as the justness of the laws it produces" -- this seems incorrect, but I don't want to read your other piece.

- It isn't clear to me why this number should be binary or bounded. Why don't people who pay $250 get half a vote and people who pay $5000 get ten votes? (The UBI system seems orthogonal.)

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