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#120 – Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy

80,000 Hours Podcast

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Using Quadratic Voting to Prevent Favoritism in National Project Selection

The concept entails proposing ideas for governmental investment to tackle global challenges, with limited bandwidth for government input. Only ideas resonating the most with people proceed to the next stage. Out of 200 projects, 20 teams are selected for incubation, and five receive recognition. Through quadratic voting, each participant distributes 99 points among projects, emphasizing that one cannot put all points on a single project. This prevents favoritism towards friends' projects. Participants are incentivized to explore and vote for multiple projects to maximize impact. This system ensures a diverse set of 20 projects win, prompting unsuccessful projects to redirect their resources to resonating ideas. Overall, this mechanism design encourages individuals to share expertise and energies among the selected projects.

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