The Court of Public Opinion

Welcome to the Court of Public Opinion​

Let's start with a definition.

This (should be) a first-class citizen of our Democracy and always capitalized.

Description of the Court​

The Court is a virtual colosseum filled with all members of our Republic. It is free from outside influence or internal conversation. We drop something into the center of the arena and judge it, and the machine outputs how each individual feels about it. Typically we summarize this collection into an overall opinion.

In short: A machine that examines policy as applied and outputs public opinion about it.

Measuring Policy​

Measurement is a critical piece missing from our Democracy. We spend tons of time on the politics of policy implementation and never take the time to ask if policy we have implemented already is good or if it should be adjusted. To do this, we must first determine what good means. Our Constitution tells us that sovereignty rests for "We the people", the citizens of the United States. It is ultimately the people who decide how well government performs. We to measure public opinion to figure this out.

Corporate news organizations cannot fill this role. Their corporate profit motive interferes with the interests of the general public. Furthermore, private for-profit corporations have no place inside of Democracy. Authority within can only be held by citizens. State-created legal entities do not belong here. We have relied on media corporations to measure public opinion for as long as I can remember and they have failed us utterly.

The Court of Public Opinion remedies this as an agency in the public trust. Unchained from profit motive and business interests it objectively measures public opinion on contentious issues like immigration policy. We cannot drop something so vague as immigration into the arena and expect a valid result. Immigration is many things depending on individual points of view, and when you drop this into the arena people are not seeing the same object. We must ensure that everyone is measuring the same object by examining the underlying facts of immigration. We cannot measure immigration, but we could measure current policy on number of immigrants allowed per year.

Measurement results for that question would still not be reliable, however. The responses would include several ignorant zeroes and unlimited responses. I think most honest people would simply say that they don't know, and that is ok. The Court can use this deviation and interest in the topic to determine educational opportunities for the public. Not everyone will choose to learn about every topic because we are all busy people. We want to present data in ways that are simple to understand:

• What is the policy supposed to accomplish?
• What is our measurement of what it is actually does?
• What should we be doing differently?

The public needs to know where we are and what a policy means so that we can help determine where it should go.

Correctness of policy​

A definition of policy correctness:

The difference between these things are error. Congress and courts should seek to reduce this error and understand the causes. Some possibilities on the immigration question:

• People may not understand the good and bad economic impact of immigration policy.
• People may be observing impacts not yet discovered.
• Public policy may need adjustments.
• etc

Large differences between expectation and actual policy cause angst in the public because they are not getting what they want. Large deviations of several policies over time can destabilize the Republic. This is a bad thing.

A public policy forum​

Issues around policy can be very complex. Media currently pushes the narratives that are profitable for them. Different sources produce different narratives creating variation in points of view. The public needs a place to discuss issues like immigration policy so that they can improve the opinion of the overall Court. I would also include an AI analysis of the policy that the public could easily peruse.

It is not meant to replace how we communicate to legislators on issues. It's a tool that policy experts can use when making policy decisions. It gives critical public feedback into the policy system so that we can improve the policy without the firehose of potentially millions of comments.

The Court of Public Opinion as a public agency​

I envision an agency along the lines of the Congressional Budget Office, except with public opinion on law. It measures public perception about our laws in ways that resist propaganda.

1. Determine points of law that the public should measure. An example could be if we think the H1-A visa program is bringing the right number of people in to meet its goals.
2. Clarify point of contention to establish facts around the position. How many we projected to need last year and how many we actually brought in are examples.
3. Clarify the purpose of a law. H1-A is about bringing immigrants in to help with seasonal farm labor. We want to measure how well it does at that task.
4. Learn what the public wants to know and what they want changed without corporate or independent media filters in the way.
5. Maintain and defend the public's position on laws in media.
6. Forum where people can discuss particular issues like on a message board.

Power to the people through Constitutional Amendment​

I would love to see the people granted with the power to remove any person from government office with a 2/3 vote of the general public including Supreme Court justices, the President, Legislators, cabinet heads, or any other public official in any branch of government. It is backfilled by the existing process for that position.

A check by The People against all three branches of government. Never again can we allow unchecked government authority as we see with our tyranny today. This is my dream of our next Constitutional amendment.

It cannot happen in our current news media ecosystem, but I think that problem can be solved too.

Nerd Stuff​

I believe that there are mathematical solutions here. I lack the skills right now to work on them. The most important thing I learned in statistics class is that small problems in your methodology can lead to wildly inaccurate results.

Be aware that individual opinions are not fungible when doing statistical analysis and I don't care what the central limit theorem says. You aren't analyzing "facts" like with BMI. You are measuring multi-dimensional opinion that cannot be summarized into simple binary conclusions. I will try to explain my thinking.

A measure like BMI should fall into a normal distribution. We are measuring and working with objective facts. With policy, The Court is measuring subjective opinion about a fact. Subjective opinion has several associated dimensions that may be influenced by things like, "Have I had my morning coffee yet?". There is additional work to do around normalizing opinion into rational opinion here.

I don't think you could aggregate left and right positions on immigration policy because their other dimensions are too far apart for meaningful comparison. I think this is probably solvable by mathematicians. The version where The Court analyzes an indefinite object (ie. immigration in general) is too complex to be solvable because it creates indefinite many to many relations. By making the target object definite, we collapse this structure into a many to one relation that we can deal with.