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Scientists Say People Aren't Smart Enough For Democracy To Flourish
cold fjord writes "The inability of the incompetent to recognize their own limitations is a story that has been covered before on Slashdot. But, what happens when you apply that finding to politics? From the article: 'The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies. The research shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. If people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments...democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."'"
"Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they 'effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.''"
I would still say that's a plus.
"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Emotions! In your brain!
I think a properly enforced constitutional republic really does beat democracy. It has some built in safeguards for this form of idiocy, unfortunately we've more or less proven we can vote and ignore our way around the safeguards.
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Alexis de Tocqueville pretty much summed up the problem with democracy: "A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it."
That is one of the reasons why the founders of the United States wisely chose a republican form of government instead of a democracy (neither to be confused with the political parties we have in the USA today).
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Can somebody explain to me what they mean by "not smart enough"?
'They' don't read about a subject before making a comment, and instead expect some random individual of dubious agenda to do it for them.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
A better question is, why does anybody think Santorum or Obama, let alone a 3rd world dictator, is any smarter than anybody else? Most people manage most of the rest of their lives just fine, why should politics be any different?
Free Martian Whores!
Churchill only said what he said because he didn't live long enough to see the rise of modern Corporatocracy, which is the new worst form of government other than the ones who came before it, including democracy!
Everything old is new again I see. Monarchies, theocracies, feudalism, etc. are based on the presumption that the "commoner" is incapable of ruling her/himself and that it is the holy privilege of a select few to rule.
Bullshit.
People are more educated, more connected, more aware of society on a large scale than ever before. Now is the time to have more democracy, not less. Eliminate the electoral college system so that voters outside of Iowa, California, and Florida get to decide national elections. Have more binding referendums and propositions so that people aren't stuck voting on which guy or gal in their town looks best in a suit but on actual issues that affect their lives.
Sure, voters don't research candidates and issues as much as we'd like and it would be great to have more scientists, engineers, and doctors running for office rather than lawyers and CEO's. That's idealism. To say that people simply aren't smart enough to govern themselves is elitist, bordering on fascist. I would rather be ruled by the collective will of a population with an 8th grade average literacy rate than the singular will of a man who happened to be born into the "right" family.
People seem to miss the point about Democracy, citing it as the best form of government. The actual definition, and the reason it was selected for the fledgling nation of the United States, is that is was the "least bad" form of government. Aristotle defined 3 types, and therefore 6 variants of government. The best, and the worst, are single person rule - a good, just and benevolent ruler can accomplish the most good as he has the fewest obstacles to enacting his decisions, a dictator or tyrant can do the most harm for the same reason. The secong "best" and second "worst" are rule by a small percentage of the population, as in an aristocracy - it is less efficient, both for good or bad, in that it requires getting concensus or at least a majority of the few to agree to enact a decision. The least good, and least bad, based on the effort needed to get anything enacted or done is rule my the majority of the people through voting/acclaimation/concensus, enacted through representatives. This is the hardest to enact a good policy, but also the hardest to get a bad policy enacted as well. The founding fathers determined that a government that could do the least to run people's lives based on the effort necessary to enact the laws and policies necessary would offer the greatest protection from the actions of that government in any negative way. They also apparently hoped and trusted that people would be intelligent enough to favor good policy when they heard it. Most interesting in the aristotle-defined definition of types of government is this ; the word we selected to define our chosen form is the one he used to define government by the people at its worst - A good "public" government was in his terms, a "Polity" - a bad one was a "Democracy"
Can somebody explain to me what they mean by "not smart enough"?
In this context, it means someone who is insufficiently skilled at smelling bullshit. If a plurality of voters were competent in this regard, we would have had different leadership at the national level for pretty much all of the past 100 years. The individuals doing the voting aren't nearly as much to blame as those doing the politicking though, since they basically search FOR the weakness of the populace and use it to their advantage (the prevalence of the term "class warfare" nicely sums up how absurd the discourse is at this point), instead of searching for the best possible good and then putting that in front of the voters.
At the meta level, it's back on the voters to not even realize that this is a problem, as I suspect most will react to this article with the phrase "fuck you for telling me I'm not smart!"
You got 7 responses and none of them actually answer the question. They mean specifically that people cannot identify experts in the area of economics and leadership when tested. That's a pretty crippling problem, and worth discussion, even if the headline doesn't identify with enough precision the real problem(irony?).
Maybe he is.
Being able to see your limitations- step back and say "I don't understand" is a much stronger sign of intelligence than thinking you know the answer if you don't.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Speaking as a scientist, whenever you see an article refer to "scientists" without any attribution, the best policy is to ignore it. Credit the specific person or group. "Scientists" are not a cohesive whole who all agree on everything, and this statement is almost assuredly not consensus opinion.
As to the content:
"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
--Winston Churchill
I've not really paid attention to Santorum, but listening to Obama speak and looking at what he did at Harvard it's pretty obvious that he's smarter than average. Whether or not he is more competent as a political leader than average is not necessarily dependent on this.
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A scientist (or any academic) can always produce an interesting study with an interesting result, when they get to frame the question. This article summary starts out:
There's your problem right there. The democratic process does not exist to choose the "best" candidate or policy. Democracy is advocated on the belief that all individuals have an inalienable right to a degree of self-determination; to participate in the maintanance of the system that governs them. It is about being fundamentally free, not correct.
----
Not to be confused with Col.
I think the morale is, "be wary of people claiming that democracy doesn't work or is no longer necessary".
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Bingo!
About six months ago, my wife and I were doing some shopping at the local mall. Within earshot, I overheard a young high school girl saying "I don't need to remember any of that, I just "Google" everything in life. Google answers everything". It's like I was living in a bad dream. Now I *know* we are truly fucked. Precious snowflakes just ripe to be lead by the pied piper for that single vote that leads to a dictatorship.
While some political systems are inherently better than others at fostering freedom, in the end they all fail. It all comes down to people. People are are what hold civilization together. Their lack of participation is ultimately what brings them down.
Life is not for the lazy.
Because "Everyone knows that X is true" and "X is true" are loosely correlated at best.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
"Republic" means "no monarchy." "Democracy" means "elections." Don't pretend those words mean anything more than that.
Republic and Democracy: France
Democracy but not Republic: UK
Republic but not Democracy: PRC
Neither: Saudi Arabia
So please, please stop with the trite, hackneyed nonsense about "This is why the US Constitution is republican but not democratic" because... no.
I'm not worried about ignorant voters as much as I'm worried about people who know they are ignorant but claim to be proud of it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You've obviously never been to Chicago. Getting elected by dead people is a proud tradition there.
"incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people"
Not sure why it took "research" to understand this. I thought everyone knew this.
Nah; it's more likely that they're actually competent scientists, who understand that things that "everyone knows" are usually wrong. So they go through the effort of applying scientific methods, which usually weeds out the things that everyone "knows" that aren't actually true. This does have the occasional PR disadvantage that you end up verifying that a common belief is actually true, leading to others ridiculing your apparent waste of time. But in the long run, the successes of scientific methods have slowly led to a world that it better than the old world of people just accepting things on authority or because they "sound right" without bothering to test them.
Perhaps with time we might even build on this study, and discover effective ways of weeding out the mediocre from positions of power. We do know that, to a lot of people, it's "obvious" how to do this, but history tells us that the obvious methods don't seem to work well. They tend to give us even more malevolent oligarchies than the modern democratic systems produce. Maybe there's no way to fix this, but it's possible that methods will be discovered (and verified ;-), and even incorporated into our political and management systems. But, as the saying goes, further research is needed. That research will occasionally verify that something we know is correct. But not as often as we might like.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The Founding Fathers very much foresaw the future. These were men very well versed in political theory, and they would have known the lessons of the ancient Greek democracies, in particular Athens, where the citizens having basically a direct line to the executive could create dangerous, even catastrophic decisions. One can well imagine a representative assembly in Athens being less than keen on taking on Sparta, but there was no representative assembly. If a guy could stand in front of the assembly of eligible Greek voters and convince them that Athens would become a great empire if it went to war with Sparta, they voted right then and there, and it became policy.
Basically the whole point of the Electoral College and Congress is to create an intentional roadblock between the popular will and government policy, to give debate and sober second thought a chance to properly analyze a policy. It isn't a perfect system, but sometimes I wonder if the United States was a direct democracy if it wouldn't have flamed out like Ancient Athens did, just one catastrophic popular policy away from ruin.
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In this case, it means "everyone else". Like when people think about their driving skill -- everyone else sucks.
The problem is they hand out licenses to anyone who wants them. In my state they want you to memorize road signs and regulations but they do not require you to demonstrate any actual skill with the vehicle or basic knowledge of physics. Hence we have people who are panicky, don't know how to correct without overcorrecting, who tailgate, brake while cornering, unnecessarily brake uphill, and don't understand what banked curves are (when they're not too busy crossing over the median towards opposing traffic that is). The older people who have 25-30 years of "experience" have simply repeated the same uncorrected bad habits for that time. That's what "experience" means to them. It doesn't mean critically evaluating their own performance and trying to improve it.
The state could deal with this using a driving simulator that throws certain surprise situations at the prospective driver to see if they have learned how to handle them. Certain behaviors like tailgating or weaving out of your lane like most SUV drivers do results in no license for you for X period of years. Behaviors like not knowing how to properly corner or not realizing that you have more traction available for steering when you're not also braking results in more training.
Voting is tougher. In the early days of the USA, only a small minority could vote. You had to be white, male, and you had to own land at a time when most people didn't. Obviously the requirement that voters be white was plain racism, though at the time the same racism meant only whites would be educated. The exclusion of women meant that what we now call "big government" proposals had less support automatically (this has been proven and I don't care how anyone feels about facts - women tend to look for security from an external source and the government is only too happy to offer it). The exclusion of anyone who didn't own land tended to mean the voters were educated and prosperous enough that they could devote time to being active in politics.
Oh and the fact that Senators were appointed by the states to represent the states meant you had one part of the legislature that didn't have to run campaigns, didn't have to worry about the way the wind was blowing, and could actually vote their conscience. Changing that was a bad idea. It was an important check against the soundbite-driven (well really headline-driven, back then) world we know today.
What I'd like to see is some kind of very tough civics test as a requirement for voting. It should be as openly and transparently administered as possible, so that anyone who wants to study and learn could pass it but very few who didn't care to study would stand a chance. In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival. The last thing I would change is that all campaigns be publically funded, each candidate gets a very generous amount, and any other "contributions" are treasonous bribery resulting in a death penalty for the candidate and 20 years in prison for the one "contributing" the money.
With something like that, we could have a nation again.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Those are the very obvious bad drivers. There are also other bad drivers such as: Driving in the left lane but not passing anyone. (you should be in the right most lane unless you are passing or making room for someone merging in) Passing someone extremely slowly so traffic backs up behind you. (cruise control drone) Merging into 60 mph taffic going 40 mph. (you should be merging in at 60) Not using your blinker in a timely manner. (turning it on as you turn does not help other drivers much) Edging into other lanes (usually because you're on your fucking cell phone and can't multitask for shit) Not staying in your lane on curves. Merging when you are supposed to yield. Slamming on your breaks because you see a police car while you're in rush hour traffic going well within the speed limit.
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There is a difference between knowing and understanding. The ability for Americans to understand has been on the waning side for quite some time. When people rely on TV, news, and Google searches point-blank, what they know to be factual isn't necessarily so. Only though understanding can you decipher what is and isn't factual among the knowledge you're seeking. Therefore, simply accepting knowledge without understanding leads to mental atrophy of the brain. In other words, the "dumbing down" of society leads to political abuse by those either in or seeking power.
Life is not for the lazy.
"Now I *know* we are truly fucked." -- Every member of every older generation ever.
Yeah, as if we had anything resembling democracy. There are Republicans tampering with voting machines and Democrats getting elected by dead people and any reform is blocked because the party that is losing by the reform just blocks it.
I guess it is an idiocracy, because people are too stupid to realize how they get fooled.
There's always going to be shenanigans and tampering at the edges. Unless you believe in conspiracy theories... JFK won in 60 because Richard Daly had ballots altered in the basement of city hall, Diebold threw the election to Duyba in '04, etc... those shenanigans aren't enough to throw the result one way or the other.There are simply too many other people doing it right.
If we are an "idiocracy", it's not because of our politicians, but because of our own choices. We do things like demand budgets be cut, but then add "but not my *insert benefit here*".
President John Adams was just one of many who noted that unless the citizens themselves prize virtue, government will be corrupt and ineffective. We all complain about various political policies on both sides of the ideological spectrum, but at the core of our most important problems lies a big heapin' helping of hypocrisy... on our part. There's no conspiracy about that. We have to look in the mirror.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
This sounds good on paper, but could it not lead to extreme abuse? Think of how badly the parties sway the little things to be in their favour. Now think of how much they would warp the civics test. I feel that it would not take long until the civics test became a way from keeping people with opposing views from voting rather than ensuring only allowing qualified vote.
The U.S. Constitution was designed to restrict what the government could do to those it governed. The Founding Fathers were more concerned with what people who held power could do when that power was arbitrary and unchecked.
The problems with government we have now are not a matter of not finding or identifying the right experts, because the system of government was originally designed to allow experts to function independently of government. The chief design flaw in such a republican democracy is that it depends almost entirely on the morality of its citizens. This system of government could never hope to control a selfish people out to "get theirs". It could never hope to maintain itself if the representatives were chosen for the bacon they brought home rather than the recognized desire to preserve the individual liberties of fellow citizens.
In selecting representatives it required only that we recognize forthrightness, honesty, and the prioritization of individual liberty over governmental power. But in order to recognize that in others, those same desires and convictions must be present in those doing the selection. When the majority no longer select along those lines, but select on popularity or out of some notion of personal gain, we get what we starting to see now; arbitrary power exercised by the capricious and corrupt.
We don't have a total loss yet, of course. We're not close to being the most corrupt country on Earth, but we're not the least corrupt anymore. Our education, in particular with regard to the notion of individual liberties as innate and not granted by government, is sadly lacking now. If we don't teach the importance of the system of government, and we have a complicit media that continues to deliver the message that the Constitution is just some piece of paper that is no longer useful (or worse, means what we decide it means today), then selection of representation will be poor.
Or maybe he, and Bush before him, know some things you don't?
I'm not saying that anyone should blindly follow their elected leaders but:
- both these men were from radically different backgrounds and philosophical stances
- both these men achieved the office of POTUS. Of course, I know it's a concrete fundamental that Bush was an idiot, and it's a concrete fundamental of the Right that Obama was elected only because he was was a charmingly coffee-colored candidate for the politically-correct drones of the Democrats, but seriously: both of them were/are PRESIDENT. That's a hell of an accomplishment.
Could it just *possibly* be that both men, of at least reasonable intellect, when faced with the full disclosure of what the US intelligence community knows, decided on the SAME course for reasons that are mutually sound? Reasons we don't know, and probably won't know for 50 years if ever?
Nah, that's unpossible.
-Styopa
Unfortunately, there's almost no aspect of civics that isn't contested by a top-4 party (democrat/ows/repulican/tea). There'd be no hope of constructing a test people coudl agree on.l
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You're ensuring a process by which one demographic (wealthier, more educated) are given all authority over another (less wealthy, less educated). You are ensuring an aristrocracy in which the elite rule the serfs and the serfs have little or no voice.
I get where you're coming from. We are rapidly approaching the reverse of the above where those whom are wholly reliant upon the government for their subsistence will continue to vote to retain (and in fact, increase) that subsidy without regard for the financial feesibility of such a vote.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
it's a lot easier to bribe a few dozen than an entire electorate.
These days, do the politicians actually bribe an entire electorate? Seems like they still bribe only a few dozen. But instead of the few dozen being the civil servants, they're bribing the demagogues who run the media.
Okay, technically, campaign ads don't count as bribery. But note how the demagogues talk only about the people who run ads, and not about people who have interesting issues to bring to the voters. They're reporting the election like it's a popularity contest, and it makes me sick.
See, I think that your proposal to exclude "entitlement" beneficiaries is just cover for discriminating against impoverished and minority voters.
What's the problem with that? A few of the poor might be civically involved and responsible, such as yourself. But on the average, poor people have been shown to have bad decision-making skills. Also, "causality" mentioned "benefits" because he would prefer if decisions were not made by people who stand to benefit at the expense of the rest of the country.
Also, "minority"? Are you serious? You're playing the structural racism card, and that's not a healthy way to play. Oh no, we can't increase our standards, or else a group that is disproportionately represented in the lower score will be disadvantaged. Played one way, why can't they be like Asians, who suffered prejudice and came out ahead? Played another way, why don't we extend the franchise to undocumented Hispanics, who may have just as much stake in our country as we do?
Have a nice time.
Then we have a huge problem. Democracy is *wholly dependent* on having an informed voting base. If there are major national policies being carried out based on information that is not available to the voters - especially when those policies are contrary to the will of the voters that put the representatives in office in the first place - then we are no longer operating as a democracy and need to seriously re-evaluate what we want out of our government. As you say, these men are from radically different backgrounds and philosophies, if they chose the same course based on some intelligence how is it possible for voters to make an informed decision the next time around? Americans aren't yet children that need to be coddled.
I understand the need for occasional *operational* secrecy when it comes to specific bits of intelligence that could endanger individuals involved in those operations. These are details in deployments, technologies, even negotiations with foreign powers when we need to keep from showing our hand up front that should be kept in confidence for a time. However, you simply can not have an educated and informed voter base when you hide information that is being used for entire government policies. If Obama's reversal on GITMO and other policy carry-overs from Bush are based on intelligence, the voting public needs to be aware of that intelligence and reasoning for the reversal to make informed decisions at the next election cycle.
+1 Disagree
I agree with you completely; civics test to demonstrate you care enough about the process to learn about the candidates
Fantastic solution - I volunteer to me the grader. I promise to make sure that only those who have answered all the questions "correctly" get to pass and to vote.
People don't have to be experts, nor do they have to right all the time for representational democracy to function.
I've been pointing out for some time that in fact most of us, myself included, lack the expertise to elect a government based on their proposed policy platform (even assuming the candour of the politicians). But as you say that does not mean that representative democracy cannot function.
To me the telling statement in TFA (not by D-K) was that the "advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."" That is exactly wrong!
The advantage of a representative democracy is not the right to elect a government of our choice to office --since as stated above almost all of us are ill qualified to make this judgement --the advantage is the right to dismiss from office a government which is under-performing, and that, as the recipients of the effects of poor performance, We The People are in the best situation to judge.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke