An idea I've long advocated, albeit half-jokingly. The discussion is better than the idea, and worth reading in full. For me the crucial point is the final one :
I like to say I’m a fan of democracy, and I’m also a fan of Iron Maiden, but I think Iron Maiden has quite a few albums that are terrible — and I think democracy is kind of like this. It’s great, it’s the best system we have so far, but we shouldn’t accept that it can’t be improved.
We might recognize that it’s better than anything else we’ve tried, and yet we can also see that there are all these persistent pathologies that exist, and so we should be asking, “How can we fix them?” We should be constantly experimenting and discovering what works and what doesn’t.
So epistocracy is just an idea, an attempt to do even better than we’re currently doing. There’s a lot at stake. We’ve eliminated a lot of problems. We have equal rights for LGBTQ people now; we treat African Americans better than we used to, though still much worse than we should. Women have more rights. We’ve reduced poverty. These are all good things.
But we’ve also bombed lots of countries and committed atrocities and engaged in all sorts of injustices at home and abroad. We can always do better.
Actually working out improvements to the system are beyond the scope of an early-morning G+ post so I'll just add a few points :
- Stop saying "democratisation" as though that automatically makes literally anything better. It doesn't.
- Democracy at least occasionally produces enormous problems. We've known about the vulnerabilities to ideology-driven (rather than evidence-driven) rhetoric since its very beginning. And right from the start this has led to disasters.
- Any suggested improvements don't need to make the system utopian, they just need to make it perform better than it does now. They ought to be tested on small scales before being applied generally, whenever possible.
- Consider whether the problem is simple ignorance or of evaluating information. Do you know the Prime Minister's middle name ? I don't. Wouldn't help me if I did. You can either try and modify the voting system to select better voters, or try and improve the voters themselves. Either way this may necessitate much broader changes to the information system, e.g. education and the media.
I could go on, but there's stuff to do. As with most things, that's what blog posts are for :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/09/building-better-worlds-i.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iia.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iib.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iic.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/01/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/10/what-some-nerd-thinks-about-star-trek-ii.html
Via Joerg Fliege.
Originally shared by Johnny Stork, MSc
Should People Need to Prove They Are Informed Before Being Allowed to Vote?
"In 2016, Georgetown University political philosopher Jason Brennan published a controversial book, Against Democracy. He argued that democracy is overrated — that it isn’t necessarily more just than other forms of government, and that it doesn’t empower citizens or create more equitable outcomes."
"According to Brennan, we’d be better off if we replaced democracy with a form of government known as “epistocracy.” Epistocracy is a system in which the votes of people who can prove their political knowledge count more than the votes of people who can’t. In other words, it’s a system that privileges the most politically informed citizens."
#philosophy #democracy #epistocracy
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-book-epistocracy-jason-brennan
Not even half jokingly for me, entirely seriously and for most of my adult life. The difficulty has always been implementation.
ReplyDeleteThe quiz is the obvious way to do it but I think I have a better system. Ballots don't have names or logos on them, they have a randomly generated identifier - A, B, C, etc. Before the vote, polling cards come with a fixed quantity of paper (I think 2-3 sides of A4 per candidate), fixed typeface, no pictures or colour, still no party or politician names, just the random identifier - and each candidate has that space to write out their position/policy/promises.
People have to actually read to decide who they want to vote for because there is no other way to know where to place their mark on the ballot - they can't just choose the party (or logo) they always choose. If people can't be arsed to read a few pages every couple of years, they can either not vote or cast their vote at random.
It's not perfect. But it's probably better than what we have right now. It also attempts to solve more problems than just clueless voters, it limits race/gender/party biases and pushes policy to the front.
It's not the first time I've run across the idea. :-)
ReplyDeleteHeinlein's Starship Troopers proposes this idea, but the only knowledge checked for is military knowledge -- they only let ex-military vote. It leads to a rather militaristic society, which happens to be handy plot-wise when the humans encounter an Alien Race That Cannot Be Reasoned With (TM). :-)
As Mat Brown said, the detail is in the implementation. One of the primary requirements I would check for is a basic understanding of how the state/nation collects revenue, and how it spends it, and how balanced these expenditures are.
try and improve the voters themselves
ReplyDeleteThis was the ideal of the French Revolution, in that everyone should be given the tools to think by themselves. This is also why, since Napoleon, French high school has philosophy courses.
Which is the theory, of course. In practice, Revolution thinkers completely underestimated how much easier it is to not think and how fallible we are in this regard, and philosophy courses tend to devolve into a boring, incomplete and ineffective summary of the history of philosophy with a RNG multiplier for grades.
Still, improvements in this regard are still possible.
On the other hand, there is the Soviet approach of attempting to change citizens by force to make them good Communists. Multiple large-scale experiments thoroughly debunked the idea, though as with the EMDrive, some people keep pushing for it, underlining the problem in question.
As for limiting vote to minimally informed people, I don't see how we can implement that unless we already are an utopia who doesn't need it in the first place.
The people in power will by definition be the ones to decide of the implementation, and they will also by definition be the ones put there by a flawed system by playing the dirtiest technical tricks and the basest human desires. Even if some try to do a good job about it, and even if some of those are competent enough to do so, they simply won't be numerous or powerful enough, and the whole thing will devolve in a parody of fairness tailored to silence segments of the population and/or to be gamed by others segments.
Even if it is by some miracle initially successful, there only needs one failure for it to switch back to disguised oligarchy mode, from which it won't be able to crawl back.
It would be an unstable equilibrium waiting for disaster, even more than democracy is - with its idiotically simple "everyone vote" basis, democracy is somewhat harder to subvert without simply breaking it.
Mat Brown My girlfriend has exactly the same selection criteria. Unfortunately there's a problem : politics is about far more than issues. If I don't trust someone, I don't vote for them. And to trust them I need to know who they are.
ReplyDeletehttp://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-political-drake-equation.html
Could be useful in the future...aeon.co - A mathematical BS detector can boost the wisdom of crowds | Aeon Essays
ReplyDelete