= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eugine_Nier comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - 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 (474)
12 year olds are also highly influenced by their parents. It's easy for a parent to threaten a kid to make him vote one way, or bribe him, or just force him to stay in the house on election day if he ever lets his political views slip out. (In theory, a kid could lie in the first two scenarios, since voting is done in secret, but I would bet that a statistically significant portion of kids will be unable to lie well enough to pull it off.)
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you'll get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable. (Exercise for the reader: why is 'well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway' not a good response?)
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect. Imagine a test that is slightly biased and unfairly tests black people at 5 points lower IQ. So white people get to vote down to IQ 60 but black people get to vote down to IQ 65. Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
The problem with letting 12 year olds vote is not that they'd be overly influenced by their parents, it's that they they're worse at seeing through the various dark arts techniques people routinely employ and this would have the result of making politics even more of a dark arts contest than it already is.
So we should test for resistance to Dark Arts Techniques, rather than base it on age? Excellent idea!
And how exactly to you propose doing testing in a way that doesn't run into the problems with Goodhart's law I mentioned here?
Same way the driver’s-ed test or the citizenship test given to immigrants manage it? Or perhaps you think they don't ... I find it unlikely this design problem should be simply dismissed as unsolvable but it certainly needs to be borne in mind ... point, I guess.
The driver's-ed test and to a certain extent the citizenship test have different incentives then a voting test. In particular with a voting test the incentive is to turn it into a test of whether the person agrees with the test writers' political beliefs.
I have to admit, I'm just assuming you would arrange better incentives for the designers. Say, have independent reviews and connect them to salary, or only recruit those with a strong desire for neutrality (and give them access to domain experts). Then again, I have no idea if the incentives actually align for the creators of other tests ... everyone is crazy and the world is mad, etc, etc.
You seem to be massively underestimating how hard this is. You can't simply wave this problem away by invoking words like "independent", "neutrality", and "domain expert" as if they're some kind of magic spell.
... I wasn't. I was sketching out, off the top of my head, the basic precautions I would take on attempting something like this. You seem to be estimating the difficulty - the impossibility - on the basis of a model where you take no precautions whatsoever.