= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
PhilGoetz comments on Vote Qualifications, Not Issues - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (185)
The heart of the problem is not how we vote for officials - it's that we vote for officials, instead of getting to vote on issues.
Americans are proud of being "governed by the people", yet a citizen has no effective way to have any influence on any particular issue! If it's very important to me to promote gay rights or environmental responsibility, I'm supposed to vote for a Democrat? How effective is that?
We need to ditch representative democracy if we want democracy. (The next question is whether we want democracy.)
This doesn't seem to work very well in the places that use it (like California). Voters' lack of information about policy specifics becomes an even bigger problem, and a lot of poorly drafted legislation gets passed by initiative.
I think "One person, one vote" is to blame, not democracy in general. A different voting system should be developed that weighs how much people care about a particular issue, and how much they know about it.
To weigh how much people care about an issue, you could:
To weigh how much people know about an issue, you could:
You could frame legislation not as a binary pass-or-fail proposition, but as having a parameter that varies from, e.g., 0 to 1000, and have people vote on the parameter value, and take the average or median.
I am aware that these ideas have problems. It is not helpful to respond to ideas by immediately dismissing them because they don't work perfectly out of the box. There is a powerful bias toward de-emphasizing the problems with existing social arrangements. The problems with one-person one-vote are vast; and IMHO any of the above ideas, while problematic, would be less problematic.
It is anti-helpful to present a bunch ideas with a disclaimer that premptively dismisses all discussion of problems with the ideas.
The same problems can be discussed in a constructive way rather than a dismissive way.
If you're going to try this....
The fee should be proportional to income.
I suggest that service in the military should only be relevant if you're voting on military matters. Perhaps having been a civilian in a battle zone should count, too.
There may be ways to define relevant experience in other matters, but it's tricky. Is having been a student enough to give added weight to one's votes about education?
The interesting question about literacy tests would be how you keep them honest-- the historical problem is that blacks and whites didn't get the same test.
I've thought that requiring all votes to be write-ins would be a way of checking on knowledge and/or commitment.
I was thinking about a prediction test, too-- it's very much in the spirit of LW.
I think Congress shouldn't be voting on the predictions-- if the result is that ambiguous, the prediction shouldn't be counted.
What problems do you think your suggestions have? What problem are you trying to solve?
This seems like it'd either be easily gameable or very intrusive, and complex to set up in the latter case.
These suggestions seem rather subject to bias, to me, in a way that's not immediately obvious. Different factions consider different facts about an issue important, and if whoever is making a particular test is a member of or even particularly aware of the interests of a particular faction, they could weight the test to make it easier for members of that faction to pass it. This would not necessarily be obvious to people who don't know much about the issue.
For example, consider abortion. I expect pro-lifers to be much more likely to know how many abortions have been performed in recent years, and whether that number is trending up or down; it's a useful benchmark for them in determining if their activism is working. Pro-choicers are unlikely to care about that number, since they see the choice to have an abortion as a personal one, but might care more about rape statistics or the number of children waiting to be adopted or some other fact that a pro-lifer would probably consider irrelevant.
This is discriminatory against people with disabilities, particularly dyslexia, which does still sometimes go undiagnosed, and may be more often undiagnosed or untreated in minorities and poor people. (That is the case for some similar learning disabilities, but I don't know about dyslexia in particular.)
To further improve this system you could make the votes freely exchangeable and instead of having periodic elections let people use these votes whenever they want to express an opinion. The number of 'votes' that people obtain will be based on how much value they provide to other people and they can divide them up to spend on whatever is important to them.
Now if we could just get the government out of the way completely and prevent it from interfering in this system we'd have capitalism.
California may not be a good example since under the California system it is difficult to repeal legislation passed by initiative.