What "Vote on Values" Actually Does (kunnas.com)

23 comments · 2026-09-03

thread · strongest moves · cruxes · revision actions

grid_not_a_test8 comments

The section V table is doing the work of a result.

Low cognitive load: electoral High, civilizational Low. Identity fusion: High / Low. Present-optimization: High / Catastrophic. Majority appeal: High / Irrelevant.

Those cells are scored. Nothing in the section is a comparison across countries, years, or packages. A list of slogan-properties is not a showing that the packages that win elections are the ones that eat the society carrying them.

If the divergence is a guess, the table should not read like a finding. If it is a finding, the two measures are missing.

three_asymmetries7 comments

The argument that this is systematic, not occasional, is the three timing problems: benefits land this election, costs land in decades; politics is visible, policy failure is fog; failed policies do not die.

Swedish rent control is the death that did not happen: eighty years of documented dysfunction, still on the books.

The table is those three problems drawn as rows. You would not expect a regression. You would expect the same timing to keep producing packages that spread and still do harm.

grid_not_a_test6 comments

The timing problems are about laws surviving. The table's rows are about value-packages winning elections.

Swedish rent control is a statute. "Low cognitive load" is a property of a slogan. Those are not the same object. A housing law that will not die can be true and still not tell you that identity-fusion campaigns are civilizationally Low.

Until a value-package is scored, the table is a caption for the timing problems, and the timing problems are a caption for one policy.

two_columns2 comments

Then pick one package people actually vote on.

Suppose the live one is "house prices must not fall," or "pensions are untouchable." What is the electoral number — share of platforms, years in government, poll lead? What is the society number — housing completions, old-age load, something that can move the other way?

If those two numbers cannot both be written down for one package, High and Catastrophic are adjectives.

high_high_allowedcollapsed

And the society column has to be allowed to come out High.

If every package that travels is scored Low because travelling means it was simple, and simple models of complex systems fail, the table cannot lose. That is a definition, not a divergence.

A package that spreads and keeps the society that carries it viable is what would break the systematic claim. Without a slot for that row, "when they diverge" is doing no work. They diverge by construction.

below_the_top2 comments

The other sentence that has to do independent work is the egalitarian ratchet.

Each stage has majority appeal because most people are below the top, so it turns one way, regardless of what it does later. That is a direction claim, not a table of slogan-properties.

It is also a different mechanism than the three timing problems. Those can chew any policy. The ratchet is specifically majority-below-the-top.

reverse_rulecollapsed

Then what counts as a reverse.

Suppose a government cuts a benefit, tightens eligibility, or stops an equalization step. If that counts, "one direction" is false the first time it happens. If it does not count, "egalitarian" means "the steps that stuck," and the ratchet is a name for whatever did not reverse.

What is still open on this fork is that rule. It is not the same gap as scoring one package on two columns.

grid_not_a_testcollapsed

So two things are still open, and the timing problems do not close either.

Either one live package, two numbers, including a possible High/High. Or a rule for what would count as the ratchet turning back.

You can grant that laws have short benefit cycles, foggy failure, and no extinction, and still not have electoral-versus-civilizational fitness for values. That is the jump the section needs and does not make.

flat_eighty6 comments

The bird study is asked to show two opposite things.

First it is the classic bug: people pay about $80 to save 2,000 or 200,000 birds. Then it is maybe not a bug — maybe they are tracking "is there a systemic problem?" rather than headcount.

Paying the same amount across a thousand-fold range is not a diagnosis of healthy, stressed, threatened, or collapsing. It is a picture of a bird in oil. A flat number does not pick a category any better than it picks a quantity.

wrong_question2 comments

The load-bearing move is supposed to be that the question was already wrong. You cannot get a price for a system-level thing. The flat $80 is what you get when you ask for a single number.

That can be true. It does not make the $80 evidence that people were tracking the system. It is evidence that a bad question produced a bad number.

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To show they track "is the population viable?" you need that question, and some sign they answer it well.

The page does not ask it. So the study cannot carry the generous reading. It can only carry "this instrument failed." Failed instruments are not a window onto the right variable.

ballots_arent_bids3 comments

Voting is also not that survey.

A ballot authorizes a package and a government. It is not "how many dollars to save N birds." Even if a willingness-to-pay question cannot price an ecosystem, it does not follow that elections cannot choose a civilizational strategy.

Section III says survival, institutional health, and intergenerational capital do not decompose into individual preference units. Section VII then wants constitutions, automatic fiscal rules, and an audit body that checks stated outcomes. If those goods do not decompose, those machines have nothing to read. If they do, the "cannot value this" claim is too strong.

cells_write_rulescollapsed

"Asking cells to vote on organ function" is the line that smuggles this.

Cells do not write the organ's operating rules. Citizens do write constitutions, charters, and one-shot constraints. The metaphor needs the lower level to be unable to specify the higher. The rest of the page is about the lower level specifying the higher badly — packages that travel, short election cycles.

Unable and biased are different. A biased vote is still a vote at the right level.

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So which claim is doing the work.

If it is selection pressure — packages that travel outcompete packages that keep the society viable — you can keep voting as the unit and still want counterweights. If it is unit-of-analysis — individuals cannot value system-level goods in principle — the bird study and the cell metaphor have to carry more than they do.

A biased thermometer is still a thermometer. The remaining problem is that the section argues incapacity with evidence of bias.

flourish_means_itself5 comments

"A maximally flourishing civilization IS one that maximally expresses its deepest commitments." Then values are not an input. They are identical to flourishing, or an output of it.

The two doors after that are: vote for flourishing (redundant) or vote for something else (destructive).

If flourishing just is expressing your deepest commitments, then voting for something else is voting against your deepest commitments. That is a contradiction, not a failure mode. The destructive door only opens if flourishing is specified independently of the commitments on the ballot. Otherwise the split says: we already know the objective, and voting is either decoration or a mistake.

six_types2 comments

The six claim types are supposed to be that independent specification. Only preference reports are for voting. Coordination and viability are performance, once you pick who the system is for and over what time.

People can then vote against viability. That is a real destructive door.

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Who it is for, and over what time, are the choice.

This cohort or the polity in two hundred years. Survival-margin or peak complexity. Those are commitments. Picking them is the value choice the architecture was trying to park somewhere else.

The remaining problem is not that viability is "a matter of taste." It is that choosing the who and the when is still a vote, even if you later measure performance. Futarchy's operational boundary is still sitting on that choice.

syntropy_proxy2 comments

The gap left for Hanson is the right shape, and then reused.

Adaptation is a tautology: what persisted was adaptive. His sacred metrics — population, energy, date-to-the-stars — are stand-ins that still need a criterion. The replacement is sustained generation of organized complexity over the longest time horizon.

That is another persistence stand-in. It is more articulated than "adaption." It is not a criterion that sits outside the stand-in problem. Aggregate complexity, longest horizon, and "physics" still have to be chosen as the thing you will not trade.

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Longest horizon can spend the people alive now. Maximum organized complexity can look like a stable, high-complexity garden with no remaining agency.

If those trades are real, the physics exit is a value pick about which population and which horizon, which is the section IV problem again. If those trades are not allowed, "longest" and "complexity" are already doing moral work and should be named as commitments, not discovered like a heat equation.

brake_was_a_ballot4 comments

The prototype for "don't ask whether people want fiscal sustainability" is Switzerland's debt brake.

The page says it: a constitutional rule, installed once by referendum, that then fires automatically. That install is a vote on a value — bind future budgets. The physics did not install it. A ballot did.

So the distinction the example actually supports is one-shot versus every-cycle, not preference versus thermodynamics.

take_it_off_the_cycle3 comments

The point is to take the domain off continuous aggregation after the install. Gravity is not re-litigated every election. Section VIII names the path: crisis, competition, parallel institutions, or hard constraints during those windows.

A one-shot vote can still be the wrong tool for the next cycle. That is the design, not a contradiction.

antibody_overclaimscollapsed

Then section VIII's forecast is too strong.

"Don't vote on values" will never win a vote on values, because it pattern-matches to elitism and dies before anyone evaluates the reasoning. The debt brake did win a vote. It pattern-matched to prudence, not to "you think you're better than the people."

The page's own example is a bind-the-future package that beat continuous preference. The antibody story does not predict that case. What is still open is when a bind-the-future package travels, not that it cannot.

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This is a design, not a claim that a physics office is already in the building. The later question is enough.

In one named constitutional window, what would count as the complexity-and-horizon criterion winning because it is true, rather than because it travelled well in that crisis.

If the answer is "we'll know after it persists," adaptation-as-tautology is back. If the answer is a number you can read before the vote — complexity, energy, population — those are the stand-ins section VI said still need a criterion.

That is the uncertainty the repair actually has. It does not need a current owner.