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RolfAndreassen comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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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.
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?
Not in the sense that he announced a change of mind. More an overall drift.
Huh. Might as well stake my own position then. Humean sentimentalist/emotivist here, what up?
The logical structure of ethical claims.
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].