[SEQ RERUN] Stop Voting For Nincompoops

MinibearRex

Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many people try to vote "strategically", by considering which candidate is more "electable". One of the most important factors in whether someone is "electable" is whether they have received attention from the media and the support of one of the two major parties. Naturally, those organizations put considerable thought into who is electable in making their decision. Ultimately, all arguments for "strategic voting" tend to fall apart. The voters themselves get so little say in why the next president is that the best we can do is just to not vote for nincompoops.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The American System and Misleading Labels, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many people try to vote "strategically", by considering which candidate is more "electable". One of the most important factors in whether someone is "electable" is whether they have received attention from the media and the support of one of the two major parties. Naturally, those organizations put considerable thought into who is electable in making their decision. Ultimately, all arguments for "strategic voting" tend to fall apart. The voters themselves get so little say in why the next president is that the best we can do is just to not vote for nincompoops.

That's a bad example, if I remember US history right the civil rights movement was mostly supported by academics and the intellectual elite. It also had at the very least the sympathy of non-Southern newspapers. Or in other words, opinions among say professors and influential newspaper editors in the 1960s was probably closer to majority opinion on the subject in 1970s and even 1980s, than the majority opinion of their time. I think that's actually the relevant group to watch, since this is an analysis of the role of opinion makers.

This is actually true for a lot of things. The opinions of those in power and quite often those in public have basically for the last 100 years or so always basically lagged for 20 years or so behind the prevailing opinion on a subject on a random Ivy League university. The charitable way to interpret this is that there exists something like moral progress and universities are a reliable truth finding mechanism and thus tend to get it right first. The alternative interpretation is that universities and the media are much more opinion makers than truth seekers and that the Ivy Leagues class are basically the institutions that determine the parameters of a status competition among the elites (which then both trickles down due to imitation, as well as gets spread by media and legislated by government) every generation.

Under that interpretation they hold massive power over society. Reflecting on that I think that would more or less make them the ruling class.

As I noted in my later reply, the Civil Rights movement is older than the 1940-1960 period. Advocating federal anti-lynching laws predates the 20th Century. Yet Strauder v. WV is reasonably representative of elite opinion of the time. See also Shipp v. United States, where the Supreme Court held a sheriff in contempt and sentenced him to a few months for allowing a lynching.