The Council of 17

From Nuggets Of Wisdom
Revision as of 12:51, 6 July 2022 by Oli (talk | contribs) (Created page with "There's a council of 17 people who are responsible for making yes or no decisions, and vote once a week on a different topic each time. Each of the voters feels that their pe...")
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigationJump to search

There's a council of 17 people who are responsible for making yes or no decisions, and vote once a week on a different topic each time.

Each of the voters feels that their personal decision is more important than others because they have better judgement than others, as people often do.

One of these people is X and he knows another voter Y who X knows is easy to bribe to vote the way X wants.

The 17 meet each Friday. However, on the Thursday before, X gathers 9 of these voters together (including Y) and proposes a pact. The 9 will have a secret vote, and vote yes or no on the issue that will come up on the Friday. The pact agreement is whether that vote between the 9 ends up majority yes or no, they agree to all vote that way on the Friday. Since the 9 will be the majority of the council, they are guaranteed that the decision of the 9 will become the decision of the 17. Each voter feels that their vote will count for more if they're 1-of-9 rather than 1-of-17, so they agree.

However, on the Wednesday before, X gathers 5 of those 9 and agree a similar pact - they will vote between them, the majority vote will be the vote all will use at the Thursday meeting of 9, which will then be the winning vote on the Friday.

However, on the Tuesday, X has gathered 3 of those 5 - being X, Y and one other, with the same arrangement.

X knows he can bribe Y. So X decides how to vote, tells Y to vote the same way on the Tuesday between 3, which becomes the majority for the Wednesday with 5, then the Thursday with 9 and the Friday with 17.

So one person voting (plus one who can be bribed) can influence a much larger vote.

This works for a much larger body... each sub-group needs to be half the larger group plus one in size, so even if you start with a group vote of hundreds you could make enough sub-groups to bring the vote down to 3 people.

Obviously it relies on people honouring the pack (perhaps the sub-group should be 60% of the larger group to allow for defections) and relies on people not realising what's going on, especially if they're already in 3 of these subgroups they would probably realise that there are more of them.