bramflakes comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong

5 [deleted] 02 February 2014 01:35PM

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Comment author: Jiro 02 February 2014 06:53:35PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: bramflakes 02 February 2014 07:36:01PM 5 points [-]

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.