From the original article:
If the voters had ignored the media telling them who the front-runner was, and decided their initial pick of "serious candidates" based on, say, the answers to a questionnaire, then the media would have had no power.
Yes, this is presently [extremely unlikely]. But there's this thing called the Internet now, which humanity is still figuring out how to use, and there may be another change or two on the way.
I've lost count of the number of times that I've read such claims from otherwise reasonable people. Yet to me they've always seemed absurd. What is supposed to be this magical property that differentiates the internet from previous technologies for communication and publishing so radically?
What is supposed to be this magical property that differentiates the internet from previous technologies for communication and publishing so radically?
The magical property is the zero marginal cost of publishing. In the age of print, most people had very little opportunity to publish their views, but now anyone can start a blog. No doubt an interesting debate could be held on the topic of exactly how radical of an innovation this is (some saying "extremely radical," some saying "hardly radical at all"), but surely you agree that the accessibility of the medium has some effect, or I wouldn't be reading your words.
Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The American System and Misleading Labels, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.