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Perplexed comments on Vote Qualifications, Not Issues - Less Wrong
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Comments (185)
There is one thing I'd like to add, which I thought was implicit but which the feedback so far indicates wasn't.
If an issue has smart people on one side and stupid people on the other, then taking the wrong side is overwhelming evidence that a politician is stupid, and therefore unqualified. For example, it would be wrong to vote for a politician who was a creationist, regardless of their other qualifications, because there aren't any smart and sane creationists. But this isn't really a controversial issue, in the sense that I meant it - the overwhelming majority of intelligent people agree.
I mean this only to apply to issues that are controversial in the sense that approximately equally sized groups of qualified people exist on either side. In those cases, people should expect that most of their opinions were picked up socially and reinforced by confirmation bias.
Whereas high integrity politicians pick up their opinions on these topics ... how, exactly?
I doubt that politicians have any more time to self-educate themselves on most issues than I do. And I am quite confident that they have less time to self-educate regarding the small fraction of the issues which I consider to be the most important ones.