eli_sennesh comments on Democracy and rationality - Less Wrong

8 Post author: homunq 30 October 2013 12:07PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 11 November 2013 08:38:13AM 1 point [-]

I agree with this. The place where I don't follow your analysis is the assumption that voting is the primary means of feedback. We only hold elections every few years. If you want "swift" feedback, elections are not the tool for you.

Moreover, they don't give very precise feedback in any real democracy. In, say, the UK, the election sends basically two bits of information per voter -- LibDem, Tory, Labor, or other. Even in the US, the ballot just doesn't encode a lot of information about voters; it's single or double-digit bits per year. And each additional bit per voter is hugely expensive to collect. It costs millions of dollars to pay for all the analysis, campaigning, advocacy and so forth that goes into a national or regional election.

Well yes. This is a very good criticism of our current democracies.