Demeney Voting

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 17 Jun 2023 08:29
Open in Logseq
    • Demeney voting is the idea that the interests of children ought to be reflected in voting power, and you do this by giving their parents the ability to proxy their vote until they come of age. I thought of this on my own, but was not surprised to find it already had a name and a history.
    • A variant on this idea: weight everyone՚s voting power by their life expectancy (that is, by their stake in the future). That too has prior art: Age-Weighted Voting by William MacAskill
      The author has been tainted by various EA scandals
    • Actually these are independent mechanisms and you could do one or both together. They are variants of the same abstract idea, that you can and should weight voting by the actual amount of future human life at stake.
    • While implementing complicated voting systems is extremely difficult, you could maybe compute the "Demeney outcome", that is, take the real vote and figure out what the outcome would be if you weighted everyone's choice appropriately. That's not the same thing as actually voting under such a regime, but interesting nonetheless.