On the day of the Scottish independence referendum, it is interesting to think about how large collections of people should make decent decisions on big issues. Voting isn’t a bad way forward, but when issues are big and likely to be irreversible (at least for a while), there is a fear that a bad decision might be made. In particular, there is always a fear that some minor slip-up, or some temporary surge of feeling, might distort the result.<\/p>\n
One approach to this is to require a “supermajority”. That is, the change needs the approval of more than 50%, for example needing 66% support or 80% support. Surely, the argument goes, if a decision is that important<\/em>, it oughtn’t to depend on the whims of a few people around the borderline. This approach brings a bias towards the status quo—it sees the change<\/em> as the problem, whereas we might want to say that the decision not to change might be just as momentous a decision. Put another way, once something has been fixed one way, it means that a small minority can keep it that way.<\/p>\n Instead, I propose multiple votes over a reasonable time scale<\/em>. One of the problems with the single vote, even with a supermajority, is the “morning after” effect; a rush of enthusiasm for one side or the other, or a single screwup by one side, can mean that people might make a capricious decision on the day. By repeating the vote a number of times and averaging in some way, these effects could be smoothed out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the day of the Scottish independence referendum, it is interesting to think about how large collections of people should make decent decisions on big issues. Voting isn’t a bad way forward, but when issues are big and likely to be irreversible (at least for a while), there is a fear that a bad decision […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1838"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1846,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838\/revisions\/1846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}