Listening to Everyone's Concerns and Interests

We have been looking, half-heartedly, for ways to organize ourselves better. We find one way we like and stick to it, justifying it, and holding onto it as our identity. That resistance to exploration means that for all the effort we've given to 'organize better'... we've only TRIED some half-dozen or so different ways!

Winston Churchill famously said that "Democracy is the worst system of government... except for all the others that have been tried." Well, if even democracy is that bad, shouldn't we KEEP LOOKING for a better one? Here's an example, to whet your curiosity:

Instead of listening to the Majority... listen to Everyone.

How could we do that? Consensus is an option we tried, and it can work well in small communities, where there are no malicious actors stalling the process to coerce concessions. We have struggled to bring consensus to larger, more disparate, or unaligned collections of people. Here is a DIFFERENT way to listen to everyone: a List of Concerns!

Step One: Fill-Out Your List of Concerns & Interests

I'd love for this to be on an app, but you could even do it by snail-mail if you must! Each person has a single list, for ranking all of their Concerns and Interests together. (Putting all your Concerns & Interests on the same list lets us see if you have five interests which each rank higher than your first concern, or visa versa...) A Concern is anything you Don't Want to Happen, or you Want to Stop. An Interest is anything you Want to Happen, or you Don't Want to Stop.

Once everyone has listed their Concerns and Interests, they can go back at any time to change them! If you had a scary dream, update those Concerns with your premonition; a new video online might similarly inspire you to list a new Interest. You DON'T wait four years for an election, and your voice isn't ignored just because you are a minority. Everyone is included equally, all the way to the final choice.

Step Two: The Big List, All Together

Everyone's Concerns and Interests can be 'bucketed' by a publicly available, transparent A.I., and when it 'buckets' your Concerns, you can check & change that bucketing to correct the A.I. - it's just there to speed things up.

We can look at those 'buckets' now - issues like Bias, Homelessness, Prison Reform, Job Security. When a bucket gets LOTS of people, and they often put that issue HIGH on their list of Concerns & Interests, then we know it's a big issue for a lot of people, regardless of political affiliation.

We can all see what the people actually care about most, compared to the issues which divide us. Those divisive issues necessarily get only HALF of the population supporting them, so they are ranked as a LOWER-priority for government action. We would be focusing government on the shared issues which we at large want to address, outside of political divisions.

Step Three: The People's Mandate

Imagine what it would mean if the political class on both sides of the divide voted to change the laws... but none of the normal people wanted that change? For example, if they voted to change investment-banking laws so that their lobbyist friends would send them more cash? And what if, surprisingly, that investment-bank law triggered a massive financial crash, where the bankers were saved by tax-payer dollars? That would be defrauding us, as well as a violation of their promise to their constituencies.

It seems that the problem here is when we allow politicians to jump PAST what the people want, to instead address what their DONORS want. A simplistic way to curb this: "Legislators are MANDATED to address those issues which are at the TOP of the aggregate Concerns & Interests List of the entire population, before deciding lesser concerns." (That's the list we created in Step One & Two)

With a rule like that, legislators wouldn't be allowed to change banking laws... until they'd handled ALL the issues which normal people care about, FIRST.

And, there are more details below for the practical-minded folks to chew upon. Yet, the three steps above are essentially the whole concept: listen to everyone, combine all those concerns & interests into a complete list, and mandate that legislators address issues in the order of OUR Importance, NOT THEIRS.

Messy Details (awaiting your innovations!)

We don't want to only look at "the percentage of people who put this as a Concern or Interest" - we also weigh their concerns by how high it is on that person's own list. Yet - that's still not enough to understand what's really important to us.

Suppose 95% of the population listed 'Finding Parking' as a major Concern. I'm sure they would! However, finding parking is a moderate discomfort, not a life-threatening or liberty-crushing problem. Meanwhile, only a few people had to fear that Covid would kill them, probabilistically... though death is worse than finding parking, right? So, Pandemic Prevention & Response ought to be worth more and sit higher on the priorities, because we Multiply peoples' Concern-level by the intensity of the Impact. What multiple should you use? Is Covid 20x worse than parking? Or 20,000x worse? That is always rightly debated, because there isn't a correct answer - only an average of our answers, as a rough approximation. And our answers can change, which changes that estimate.

Canada has flat pay-outs for various accidents on the job and that seems to work fine, despite US Tort Lawyers' claim that "we need to have ambiguous, baseless pricing so that no one can agree how much worse Covid is, compared to finding parking." I'd rather listen to everyone and take the average, instead of squabbling and disagreement without resolution.

Similar to that 'Impact Multiplier' above, there should be a 'Tractability Multiplier'. That is to say, "If fixing this problem is easy, fast, cheap, reliable, without major opposition or disruption - then it takes somewhat higher priority." We can get a lot of successes under our belts, and those successes feed into our later-efforts. The 'secondary' later-issues are not lesser issues; we just need more time to solve them and so we are more likely to benefit from the insights that come with more time. The Apollo Mission would have been much more expensive in 1920, and we may be better at AGI-Safety a few decades from now, so a pause might be worth it.

Additionally, once the government is tasked with addressing Concerns & Interests, I am suspicious of each interest group using adversarial techniques to push their agenda, to have their favorite solution win regardless of its actual merits. I prefer Bill Ury's "principled negotiation": we agree on which Metrics or Outcomes we will value, and to what extent BEFORE we measure each option in front of us and compare them.

For example, if we hope to address issues of Education, then we would want to think of lots of options for making improvements - and those can come from anyone... yet, we ought to choose that option which best meets our collected, pre-registered goals and values. By preventing folks from "changing-my-mind about what is most important" they are unable to claim that their pre-existing favorite-policy "must" be superior to all others, after seeing how it fared in the data. Bill Ury's technique has been standard practice in negotiation and mediation since the late 70's - he used it, personally, to help diffuse tensions and resolve the Iran Hostage Crisis. Dude rocks!

I'm sure you can think of other factors to include as multipliers and constraints. And, please 'Red Team' to identify what additions & changes could be made to this that would strengthen it against abuse; your insights could inspire real change.