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Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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Winston Churchill
That's like saying that the best argument against capitalism is a five minute conversation with the average person about how he decides to buy things.
Or, in other words, Fallacy of composition .
Just because individual voters vote poorly (or because individual purchasers only buy things based on how cheap they are) doesn't mean that democracy (or the market) don't work.
Also, remember that Churchill was a colonialist and opposed the independence of India.
Test: find someone who just voted and ask the person to (a) justify their vote, and (b) justify the purchase of some large ticket item (cell phone, car, house) they made. I bet they make more intelligent arguments for (b) than (a).
Given an impartial arbitrator to judge the intelligence of the arguments, I think I would probably take that bet, at least for cell phone or laptop scale purchases, rather than something like a house or car, where the decisions are usually made over much longer timeframes.
However, regardless of which decisions people argue for more persuasively, it doesn't really prove much, because these types of explanations overwhelmingly tend to be justifications people create for themselves, rather than the true reasons underlying their decisions.
They may be able to justify the act of purchase, but they won't be able to justify (or usually, even comprehend) how their purchase affects the prices and supply of items on the market. Yet their purchase does exactly that, and does so much better than some central authority setting prices and deciding how much of an item is to be sold. In fact, that's the best system we've found so far of running a market and it depends on millions of people who are only acting for their own selfish reasons and have no idea how what they are doing affects the larger picture.
Isn't it sort of embarrassing to use an ad hominem against a quote which is so obviously misattributed?
You can use an ad hominem against an argument from authority. It's fighting fire with fire by showing that the authority isn't such a good authority. Sure, that has no bearing on the truth of the statement, but the appeal to authority never did in the first place.
The point is that Churchill opposed democracy in a situation where the verdict of history is that opposing democracy was absolutely the wrong thing to do. A quote which shows Churchill being elitist and against democracy completely fits with that. That isn't obviously a case of misattribution at all, it's just Churchill being Churchill.
Of course, Churchill was known for speaking out in favor of democracy in the context of Britain, but don't confuse that with wanting democracy for everyone.
What point would that be? True opposing independence for India turned out to be wrong, then again independence for the African colonies has been mostly a disaster.
The cases are not really parallel. A bad capitalist loses money and becomes less strongly weighted in a sensible list of all capitalists. A bad voter gets a bad government, but is quite unlikely to lose his vote as a result, although it's been known to happen. But the feedback is very slow, very uncertain, and worst of all, binary - you can't lose 10% of your vote.
It's not strictly binary. Absurdities like the electoral college and gerrymandering can effectively devalue some people's votes without eliminating them outright.
You're confusing the different metrics at work.
Capitalism is about capital accumulation. People who are good at achieving capital accumulation, by whatever (hopefully legal) means, become rich capitalists.
Democracy is about the will of the voters. Since it does not have a metric to optimize for outside the will of the voters, it does not actually care if the voters are complete idiots.
Democracy is supposed to optimize for the will of the voters, but in fact it optimizes for the ability to get the votes. If I can make people vote for me even if I don't give them what they want (e.g. because I lie to them, or because I convince them that my competitors would be even worse), I win the election.
I could similarly say: People who are good at getting votes, by whatever (hopefully legal) means, become successful politicians in democracy.
You are entirely correct, and this is the good critique of democracy.
Democracy uses the will of the voters as a tool to build a good society for the voters, in the same way that autocracy uses the will of a philosopher-king to build a good society for the subjects. It, or rather the people who set it up, didn't give a damn about the will of the voters per se; what they wanted was the wellbeing, agency, and other CEV stuff of the population. You are confusing their means with an end in itself.
I think you are correct, provided your own assumptions that politics is about building a good society for the subjects/voters/citizens, ie: that politics is a large-scale extension of ethics.
However, most people don't share the LW notions of ethics, so real-world politics has tended to be more sort of, "What people resort to when fundamental ethical disagreements occur over terminal values or moral epistemology." I think this view is more historical: politics has been an extension of diplomacy, a continuing attempt to prevent Hobbes's "war of all against all" (or rather, a war of Moral Greens versus Moral Blues versus Moral Grays versus Moral Reds, etc for however many different fundamental moral views are current in the population).
What are LW ethics? DIfferent individuals seem to adopt every possible theory except Divine Command, AFAICT.
And how would it help?
I don't think there is even that exception.
ETA: There have been long term participants who had that ethical system (and associated beliefs). Both because they were simply religious and because they went loopy with convoluted meta reasoning and ended up back there.
I suppose people use the term "LW ethics" to refer to Eliezer's moral indexicalism (Is there a name for the position that has actually been adopted into more wide-spread use here?) plus consequentialism, but I agree with the objection to the suggestion of uniformity.
Isn't there an entire ethics Sequence?
Never mind, I'll bugger off.
It seems to consist of someone thinkign aloud and changing their mind.
Wait, did I miss something? Which change of mind are you referring to?
Huh. Might as well stake my own position then. Humean sentimentalist/emotivist here, what up?
What about the auto bailouts and record bonuses in finance after the recent economic crisis? Or do you think this is a case of the faults you point out in democracy (slow, weak punishment) leaking into capitalism?
People use the words "capitalist" and "capitalism" to mean several different things, and a lot of conversations using that word run awry because the participants either don't realize this — or, worse, become derailed into dictionary arguments about whose definition is legitimate.
For instance, many right-libertarians use "capitalism" to mean an economic system that is simultaneously unregulated and free from coercion and fraud. The way they use the word, the United States today does not have a "capitalist" economy.
Meanwhile, many leftists use "capitalism" to mean an economic system in which a minority of participants own the industrial and finance capital, and through this ownership exercise economic and political power over the majority who make use of that capital to do labor. The way they use the word, the United States does have a "capitalist" economy.
For that matter, some use "capitalist" to mean an advocate of capitalist economy; others use it to mean an owner of capital. A capitalist might not be a capitalist. For instance, right-libertarians might say that Warren Buffett, who advocates increased taxes on the rich, is a capitalist [investor] who is not a capitalist [advocate of unregulated free market].
They aren't equivalent. Markets have very strong self-corrective behavior that either punish poor decisions, or reward someone else who fixes the result of the poor decision. Democracy punishes poor voter decisions extremely weakly if at all, and on much longer timescales. The behavior of individual voters can be generalized to the behavior of voters en masse.