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Nic_Smith comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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What problem is this trying to address? Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter makes the case that democracies choose bad policies because the psychological benefit from voting in particular ways (which are systematically biased) far outweigh the expected value of the individual's vote. To the extent that your system reduces the number of people that vote, it seems to me that a carefully designed sortition system would be much less costly, and also sidesteps all sorts of nasty political issues about who designs the test, and public choice issues of special interests wanting to capture government power.
The basic idea of a literacy test isn't really new, and as a matter of fact seems to have still been floating around the U.S. at late as the 1960s
And why do you claim this is "republican meritocracy" when it isn't republican per se (small r)?
Erm, from that link, I understood that "sortition" means "choosing your leaders randomly". Why would I want to do that? Is democracy really worse than random?
"And why do you claim this is "republican meritocracy" when it isn't republican per se (small r)?"
Probably because that word doesn't mean what I think it means. I assumed that "republican" means that people like you and me get to influence who gets elected. Which is part of my proposal.
Is democracy really worse than random?
I don't think the matter has been well tested.
Democracy might be worse than random if the qualities needed to win elections are too different from those needed to do the work.
Democracy might be better than random because democracy means that the most obviously dysfunctional people don't get to hold office. This is consistent with what I believe is the best thing about democracy-- it limits the power of extremely bad leaders. This seems to be more important than keeping extremely good leaders around indefinitely.
Sortition worked quite well for ancient Athens. Don't knock it.
That is indeed what systematically biased voters imply. Because so many people vote, the incentive for any one to correct their bias is negligible -- the overall result of the vote is not affected by doing so. Also consider that an "everyone votes" system has the expense of the vote itself and the campaigns.
Ok, it wasn't clear that you were talking about voting within a republic from the initial post.