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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."'"
Can somebody explain to me what they mean by "not smart enough"?
"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!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Republic
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.
We just want more funding for our research... why can't people see how important it is!
This is my sig.
The best quote I've heard is that true democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner (usually attributed to Ben Franklin).
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!
"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.
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"
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?).
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
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.
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Not to be confused with Col.
The first and main advantage of democarcy over is that a government can be thrown out without a bloody revolution. This prevents common people being hurt by the political plays of violent social climbers, where previously they were used as literal pawns on the battleground.
It usually also has the benefit of keeping the current leader in check; a truly terrible elected government will have a quick fall, so they have to at least pretend to cater to the will of people. This is a small plus that too often can be subverted, but even without it I'd say that the first reason makes democracy worth every penny.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
A few thousand years ago, philosophers were already indicating that the inherent problem with Democracy was that the majority of people were never going to be smart/wise/informed enough to make appropriate decisions. The founders of the United States also identified this as a problem, and had many debates about how to mitigate the dangers.
The first problem is that most people just aren't knowledgeable of advanced theory and precedents in any domain. That's not to say they're "dumb" or "stupid", just that they don't know everything, because nobody can know everything.
Basically, unless you're a physicist, imagine that you had to pick which form of energy supply should you back for interstellar travel. Should we pursue producing anti-matter (which can store incredibly much energy, but is so ridiculously ineffective to produce that we'll need several breakthroughs before it's even feasible to use like in Star Trek) or should we go with micro-black-holes and Hawking radiation, basically harnessing the incredible energy released as a small enough black hole evaporates? Both actually pack the same joules per kilogram, because at the end of it, both will have converted mess into energy as per e=mc^2. Maybe the black hole promises a bit less losses.
But anyway, imagine you had to vote on which of the two should get a trillion dollars in research grants to get us off this piece of rock before some mass extinction event gets us.
Now that's not to say that you're dumb or anything. You're a smart and educated person, and perfectly capable of rational thought and logical decisions. But unless you're a physicist, you won't know enough to understand what the choices are, much less to pick the best. They get a physicist proponent of each of the two to explain until they're blue in the face, but chances are even after a year you still won't know enough to make an informed choice.
Now worse yet, imagine that it's not just YOU who gets a vote, but also that hippie chick who only heard of "quantum" in some bogus quantum chi crystal pendants she wears. And that dude who actually believes that the universe is less than 6000 years old and less than 6000 light years across, because the bible says so. Yeah, I wouldn't rely on him to estimate the amount of energy for star travel correctly, when he literally believes that everything is three million times closer than the scientists think. And millions of other woefully unqualified people.
You probably see how the result of that vote will be no closer to picking the right one, than flipping a coin.
And those are probably the worst, because, quoth Bertrand Russell, "[i]The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.[/i]" YOU, if you're not a physicist, and are all that smart and educated, will probably realize, "wait, why are they asking me? I don't know enough to judge that." Whereas the guy who thinks "quantum" is the mystical force in his new crystal pendants he bought from some dodgy site, will actually be more likely to think he knows enough about it.
In effect, it's just Dunning-Kruger in action. The less you actually know, the more you'll grossly overestimate what you know.
And it's really getting worse for topics where everyone thinks they know something about, like economics. You'll find very few people who actually understand what, say, Keynesian vs Austrian School economics say. Or to what extent they even make testable predictions. Or to what extent they were ever actually tested.
But you'll find a LOT of people who think they know EXACTLY which theory will fix the economy, and furthermore, which candidate has the best grip on it, and exactly what they should do differently about it too.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with letting people vote on it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The best quote I've heard is that true democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner (usually attributed to Ben Franklin)
And true liberty is when the sheep has a gun
"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 have found it useful to let go of the pedantry (for lack of a better word) when judging other's speech based on the use of specific words. You clearly understand that smart can mean different things in different contexts, or in different people's minds. Rather than trying to figure out what this one specific person believes, ask yourself, does this person's general idea (i.e. "non-smart people aren't good at judging smart peoples' competency") hold up in most cases where you allow 'smart' to mean whatever you imagine it to mean?
You stated that you're somewhat gullible and not so 'smart' when it comes to people skills. (I'm still learning and am not a social butterfly myself.) Would it then follow that you are not so good at judging the competency of people who have excellent social skills? I submit you would be able to in general tell that a person is more competent than you, but you would have a hard time judging some nuances of just how good of a "player" someone is compared to others.
Likewise, one subject I have been trying to learn about lately is the economy. I know very little about it. My bullshit detector is top notch and honed from many years of active use. Most times I can spot dumb/misinformed people within minutes. But when it comes to a subject like this that I'm not too familiar with, I really have to put that thinking cap on to analyze what this person is saying and finally after a while decide if this person is either a complete moron talking totally out of his ass, or the second coming of Jesus in economist form.
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