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Lumifer comments on Democracy and rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (47)
I worry that this sort of analysis puts process ahead of results.
In large-scale decisionmaking, such as regional or national politics, most voters are confused and inattentive. I think this is inevitable and even proper. The world is too complicated for most people to have informed and thoughtful opinions on most topics. As a result, I don't particularly care if the process delivers results most voters want. Instead, I care if the process delivers decent results. And in particular, I want decent results for impatient voters and potentially-dishonest election apparatus. First-past-the-post has the important benefit that as a voter I have to indicate one preference, rather than an ordering. This requires strictly less input from me, and therefore probably less attention and thought, which is a Good Thing.
I would be interested to hear an argument for why all the voting theory stuff is useful in practice, given the constraints and goals of practical politics.
We have some examples of cities and countries that use systems other than first-past-the-post. Which of these actually are better governed as a result?
You seem to want some kind of a hidden technocracy where what the (ignorant and confused) voters say they want doesn't matter much.
Which quickly goes to requiring zero input from you.
Most people wouldn't call the result a democracy.
This is how most of the First World is run. I think Belgium's 589 days without an elected government, during which Belgium was not much misgoverned at all, provide a nice natural experiment demonstrating this. To quote the blogger Foseti:
It isn't great but I expect it outperforms popular input. In the third world in particular, experiments with having popular input into actual governance seem to end badly, though I am the first to admit there are important confounding variables.
When it comes to managing cities, the more technocratic the city is the more prosperous it tends to be, now of course correlation isn't causation, but overall I'd rather live in a prosperous city than a non-technocratic one, and if something can scale for cities with millions of inhabitants, why not small countries?
Except most people do. And the case can be made it is a democracy in the same sense say Sweden is a monarchy.
Kinda but not really. The mandarins / professional bureaucracy aren't a technocracy to start with and the voters aren't quite that powerless. But that's a fairly big discussion, probably for another thread.
A large subset of political ideas/solutions/proposals suffer precisely from the problem that they scale badly. For example, democracy.
Which is not an interesting or meaningful sense at all.
I want the voters to have neither too much nor too little influence. I don't know how to characterize that amount other than by the results, unfortunately.
This is not the historical experience. Britain has had elections that matter, going back many centuries. In their system, the general election ballot is quite simple: "which of party's candidate do you like?" In contrast, a US general election ballot can have several pages of officials, referenda, and so forth. In California, it's routine to have 30 separate things to vote on every two years, at just the state and federal levels.
My sense is that Britain is better governed and has a more stable political system, I think in part because the voting avoids over-burdening the electorate. Simple elections don't seem to degenerate to dictatorship, and more complicated systems don't produce results I like better.