What "Vote on Values" Actually Does

I. The Standard Model

The most sophisticated version of democratic theory goes like this: vote on values, bet on beliefs.

Robin Hanson's futarchy separates the two functions of governance: deciding what to want (values — voted on democratically) and deciding how to get it (beliefs — settled by prediction markets). The architecture assumes these are orthogonal axes you can independently vary. Citizens contribute the "what for." Markets contribute the "how."

This is the best proposal available within the standard ontology. It takes seriously both the democratic intuition (people should determine their own goals) and the epistemic problem (crowds are bad at causal reasoning). It is also built on a foundation that dissolves under examination.

The foundation: values are a kind of thing that can be meaningfully voted on.

What does this actually mean? What is the mechanism? What does "voting on values" physically produce? Not what does it intend — what does it do?

II. What the Mechanism Produces

Values are replicators. They inhabit minds the way viruses inhabit cells. They reproduce through transmission, mutate across contexts, compete for substrate, and face selection pressure. The feeling that you "chose" them is part of the colonization strategy — property #5, the self-model construction that makes the infection invisible to the host.

If values are replicators, then "the will of the people" at any moment is the current distribution of meme-infections across the population.

Voting on values, therefore, is a measurement of replicator fitness. The value that gets the most votes is the value that most successfully colonized the most hosts. That's it. That's what the mechanism produces.

The structural reasons this divergence is systematic rather than occasional: temporal feedback asymmetry (political benefits arrive within one electoral cycle, policy costs accumulate across decades), causal opacity asymmetry (proximate political cause is visible, distal policy failure is obscured by complexity and contestable attribution), and elimination mechanism asymmetry (failed replicators rarely face extinction pressure — Swedish rent control has survived 80 years of documented dysfunction). These three asymmetries mean information and good intentions don't fix the mechanism. Legislators who know rent control destroys supply still pass it; voters who know politicians are self-interested still elect them. The selection pressure operates independently of what individuals know.

The properties that make a replicator transmissible: low cognitive load, high emotional arousal, built-in immunization against critique, identity fusion, and orthogonality to truth. "Everyone should be equal" has built-in majority appeal — most people are below the top. "Sacrifice the present for the future" has built-in minority appeal — most people prefer now to later. The ecology selects for what spreads, not what works.

"Vote on values" creates an efficient machine for optimizing the most infectious virus. Not because democracy is bad. Because the mechanism doesn't and can't distinguish between a replicator that benefits the host and one that consumes it.

III. The Wrong Unit

There is a deeper problem than transmissibility bias. Democratic preference aggregation takes the individual as the unit of measurement. Each person gets one vote. The aggregate is a sum of individual preferences.

But the object being optimized — civilization — is not an individual. It is a telic system with its own persistence requirements, capital stocks, and failure modes. Civilizational flourishing is not the sum of individual satisfactions any more than organismal health is the sum of individual cell preferences.

The classic illustration: Desvousges et al. (1993) found that people pay roughly the same (~$80) to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds from oil ponds. This is cited as "scope insensitivity" — a cognitive bug. But the deeper problem is that the question itself imports the wrong unit. Bird populations are self-renewing; individual bird deaths don't matter for the ecosystem's sustained complexity unless they threaten population viability. "How many individual units of bad?" is already the wrong question. The human response — "roughly the same regardless of magnitude" — may be tracking the right variable: "is there a systemic problem?" rather than "how many individual units?"

This is the unit-of-concern problem in miniature. The bird study reveals what happens when you try to aggregate individual-level valuations for system-level phenomena. The individual can't produce a meaningful scalar response because the phenomenon isn't scalar at the individual level. "How bad is this for the ecosystem?" is a categorical question — healthy, stressed, threatened, collapsing — not a quantity you can price.

The same structural incapacity applies when you ask individuals to "vote on" civilizational strategy. Civilizational survival, institutional health, intergenerational capital maintenance — these are systemic phenomena that don't decompose into individual preference units. Asking individuals to vote on civilizational strategy is like asking cells to vote on organ function — the wrong level of analysis, producing outputs that are meaningless at the level where the decision actually operates.

Nobody in the existing intellectual landscape takes civilization as the terminal unit of concern. Turchin describes civilizational dynamics without engineering. Spengler and Toynbee narrate civilizational arcs without mechanism. Singapore practices civilizational optimization without ever theorizing it. Bostrom and longtermism treat civilization as instrumentally valuable — a vehicle for producing individual welfare, not terminally valuable as a telic system. Even network states default to libertarian ontology underneath. The specific gap: nobody derives the optimization target from physics, takes civilization as the terminal unit, AND provides mechanism design for maintaining alignment.

IV. The Separation Is the Error

Return to futarchy's core move: separate values from beliefs. Vote on what you want, bet on how to get it.

But are values and beliefs separable?

A maximally flourishing civilization IS one that maximally expresses its deepest commitments. A dying civilization ISN'T expressing its commitments regardless of what it claims. "Values" aren't an input to the optimization — they're either identical to flourishing or an output of the flourishing state.

If physics constrains the telos — if the only non-arbitrary objective function is sustained generation of organized complexity over deep time — then "vote on values" is either:

• Redundant: everyone votes for flourishing, which is what you should optimize for anyway
• Destructive: people vote for something OTHER than flourishing, and you efficiently optimize for the wrong thing

The hedge: instrumental preferences ARE subjective and vary across civilizations. Language, aesthetics, cultural forms, which side of the road to drive on. A civilization with maximum survival margin has more room to express these. So "vote on values" makes sense at the preference layer — but that's "vote on which flavor of ice cream the government cafeteria serves," not "vote on the objective function of civilization." A much smaller role than the standard model envisions.

"Vote on values, bet on beliefs" embeds the assumption that values are subjective — which is exactly what telos-from-physics rejects. The three functional categories — instrumental preferences, coordination technology, axiology — show that futarchy treats all three as vote-on-able when only Category 1 is genuinely subjective. Category 2 is evaluable by performance. Category 3 is constrained by physics.

But the problem is worse than miscategorization. Voting measures along a dimension — replicator fitness — that tracks transmissibility rather than function in any of the three categories. The most transmissible preference isn't the best preference. The most transmissible coordination technology isn't the most effective one. The most transmissible axiological position isn't the most physics-compatible one. Replicator fitness cross-cuts function: "equality" contains both axiological components (equal dignity — potentially physics-required for large-polity stability) and parasitic components (equal outcome — demonstrably substrate-degrading). Voting can't distinguish these because both propagate through the same hosts. It measures which package has the highest viral load, regardless of which components within the package are functional and which are parasitic.

V. The Viral Load Problem

The specific pathology becomes visible when you combine the replicator analysis with democratic mechanics.

Consider which value-replicators win democratic elections:

The properties that make a value-replicator electorally fit are systematically anti-correlated with the properties that make it civilizationally adaptive. Not randomly uncorrelated — anti-correlated. The mechanism reliably selects against civilizational fitness.

This is why democratic consensus drifts toward short-termism. Short-term-reward memes outcompete long-term-investment memes in transmissibility. "Benefits now" wins against "sacrifice now for your grandchildren" as the dominant trajectory in every democracy. The egalitarian ratchet is one instance of this general mechanism: each stage of egalitarian escalation has majority appeal (most people are below the top at each stage), so the ratchet turns in one direction regardless of downstream consequences.

Voting aggregates viral load. The election doesn't measure wisdom. It measures which replicator most successfully colonized the most hosts during the campaign season.

VI. The Containment Response

The standard response to this analysis is itself a replicator move: absorb the critique's language without changing the hard core.

"Yes, voters are imperfect. That's why we need better institutions, better education, better information." This response treats the problem as a calibration error — fix the inputs and the mechanism works. But the mechanism doesn't have a calibration problem. It has a unit of analysis problem. No improvement in individual voter quality fixes the structural incapacity of individual preference aggregation to value civilizational-scale goods. Better-informed cells still can't vote on organ function.

"Deliberative democracy solves this." Deliberation can improve individual belief quality. It cannot change the fact that the aggregate still measures transmissibility-weighted infection rates. A deliberative assembly that votes on values is a slower, more thoughtful replicator fitness contest. Still a replicator fitness contest.

"Constitutional constraints solve this." Closer. Constitutional constraints remove certain domains from the voting mechanism — you can't vote to abolish free speech, can't vote to establish a state religion. This is the correct structural move: recognize that some things should not be determined by preference aggregation. But existing constitutions constrain process (how decisions are made), not telos (what the system optimizes for). The constitutional constraint says "you must follow these procedures." It doesn't say "the procedures must produce civilizational flourishing." The missing layer.

The futarchy response is more specific and worth addressing directly. Hanson does not claim that voting produces wise values — he is explicit about this. His 2026 position grounds values naturalistically: what people identify as core values are shallow mental structures shaped by biological and cultural evolution; adaptiveness itself is the deepest value. He further acknowledges that selection mechanisms can break — global monoculture has disrupted cultural evolution by eliminating competition between distinct cultural experiments, producing drift toward maladaptive norms. His proposed fix: tie the "vote on values" half to stable long-term metrics (aggregate population over centuries, total energy usage, "as early as possible a date for our descendants to reach the stars") rather than current shifting preferences. He also acknowledges, however, that futarchy itself fails when "price estimates seem to conflict with deep shared morals, they are denounced" — the markets get overridden, not followed. His ultimate solution therefore is elite persuasion: "cultural elites to look much more favorably on 'Social Darwinist' values." He concedes that "technocratic solutions cannot substitute for shifted cultural values."

This is a significant partial convergence — Hanson agrees current preference aggregation cannot adequately specify the values half, agrees selection mechanisms can break, and agrees mechanism design requires prior value alignment to work. Three residual problems remain. First, "adaptation" as a value criterion is circular — what persisted was adaptive, by definition. You cannot engineer toward a tautology. Sustained syntropy is the falsifiable, predictive version: a measurable property of a system's current state that predicts persistence before the selection event, not a label applied after it. Second, his proposed sacred metrics are proxies, not the underlying principle: aggregate population can be maximized at the expense of complexity; "reaching the stars" is a specific goal, not a general criterion. The metrics he wants to enshrine must themselves be evaluated against something — and that something is what the physics-grounded telos provides. Third, elite persuasion is itself a replicator contest. The values that win elite buy-in are the most transmissible among elites, not necessarily the most physics-appropriate. Hanson has correctly diagnosed broken selection at two levels (monoculture, current preferences) while his proposed solution — persuade elites to value the right proxies — operates at a third level subject to the same mechanism. The non-arbitrary exit is to derive the criterion from thermodynamics rather than select it by persuasion: sustained generation of organized complexity over the longest time horizon is what distinguishes configurations that persist from those that don't, not as a preference asserted by someone, but as an engineering constraint discovered from first principles.

VII. What Would Work

If "vote on values" produces replicator fitness contests, what produces civilizational alignment?

Constraints from physics, not preferences from polls.

The AI alignment community already has this intuition. You don't align a powerful optimizer by asking it what it wants. You build architectural constraints that make certain behaviors structurally stable and others structurally expensive. The reward signal is designed, not discovered by asking the AI's "preferences."

Applied to governance:

1. Derive the telos, don't vote on it. If physics constrains which configurations persist, the objective function isn't a matter of opinion. "Sustained generation of organized complexity over the longest possible time horizon" is the only non-arbitrary telos. This is what telocracy means — governance with a purpose derived from physics, not from polls. The criterion is derived by physics, not by a committee — "does this configuration sustain organized complexity?" is checkable like bridge load calculations, not privileged like priestly revelation.

2. Measure outcomes, not preferences. A Fourth Branch that continuously audits whether institutions produce their stated outcomes — not whether citizens are satisfied. Satisfaction is a replicator-mediated signal. Outcomes are physics.

3. Hard constraints on identified failure modes. Switzerland's debt brake is a prototype: a constitutional rule, installed once by referendum, that fires automatically when the system drifts from sustainability — removing future fiscal decisions from continuous preference aggregation. Extend this to demographics, infrastructure maintenance, institutional health. Don't ask whether people want fiscal sustainability. Make fiscal sustainability a structural constraint like gravity.

4. Reserve voting for what voting can handle. Instrumental preferences — where to build the park, which cultural programs to fund, how to allocate the discretionary budget. Things where individual preference is genuinely the relevant input and where the wrong answer doesn't produce civilizational failure. "Vote on ice cream flavors" is a coherent procedure. "Vote on the laws of thermodynamics" is not.

This isn't anti-democratic. It's recognizing that democracy is a tool with a specific domain of validity — and that applying it outside that domain doesn't produce better outcomes, it produces more efficient optimization of the most infectious replicator.

VIII. The Meta-Problem

One last structural observation. This essay's argument cannot propagate through the mechanism it critiques.

"Don't vote on values" will never win a vote on values. It pattern-matches to "elitism," "technocracy," "you think you're better than the people." These are antibody responses — kill patterns that fire before evaluation reaches the reasoning layer. The egalitarian replicator's immune system is specifically optimized to neutralize exactly this kind of analysis.

This is not a reason the analysis is wrong. It is a prediction the analysis makes about itself. If "vote on values" is a replicator fitness contest, then the proposition "stop voting on values" should lose every fitness contest — because it reduces the replicator's influence. And it does.

The implication: the path from here to there does not run through democratic persuasion. It runs through crisis, competitive pressure, parallel institutions, or hard constraints installed during constitutional moments. The same paths that every structural reform in history has required, for exactly the same reason: structural capture cannot be reformed through the process it captures.

Your civilization already has a telos. It's the one installed by the fittest replicator in the current ecology. The question is not whether to have a telos, but whether to have one derived from physics or one derived from a popularity contest among viruses.

The underlying physics: The Question Nobody Asks. The replicator dynamics: Values Are Replicators.

Related reading:

• Values Are Replicators — The ontological foundation: values inhabit you, not the reverse
• Values Aren't Subjective — Three categories of "values" and why conflating them enables evasion
• Telocracy — Governance with a purpose derived from physics, not polls
• The Governance Alignment Problem — Why the job of "politician" is structurally misaligned
• The Containment Pattern — How "we already account for that" neutralizes this critique without paradigm change