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TimS comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong
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I'm with you on the first two, but if the trait is interesting enough to talk about (intelligence, competence, or whatever), isn't that enough for consideration in policy making? If it isn't worth considering in making policy, why are we talking about the trait?
Politics isn't a value-free reflection of nature. The disvalue of reflecting a fact politically might outweigh the value. For instance, people aren't the same in their political judgement, but everyone gets one vote, for instance.
So if we don't base our politics on facts, what should we base it on? This isn't a purely rhetorical question, I can think of several ways to answer it (each of which also has other implications) and am curious what your answer is.
As for your example, that's because one-man-one-vote is a more workable Schelling point since otherwise you have the problem of who decides which people have better political judgement.
You include a copy of the Cognitive Reflection Test or similar in each ballot and weigh votes by the number of correct answers to the test.
(This idea isn't original to me, BTW -- but I can't recall anyone expressing it on the public Internet at the moment.)
This doesn't quite solve the Schelling point problem. You start getting questions about why that particular test and not some other. You will also get problems related to Goodheart's law.
Well... People might ask that about (say) university admission tests, and yet in practice very few do so with a straight face. (OTOH, more people consider voting a sacrosanct right than studying.)
ETA: now that I think about that, this might be way more problematic in a country less culturally homogeneous than mine -- I'm now reminded of complaints in the US that the SAT is culturally biased.
Keeping the choice of questions secret until the election ought to mitigate that.
Also in the US the SAT is only one of the factors effecting admissions.
Only partially. Also what about the people whose design the questions?
High-stakes testing, like the SAT, where voters - I mean, test-takers - have vastly more incentive to cheat, seem to do fine.
Come to think of it, the problem is that the people designing the SAT's have fewer incentives to bias them then people designing the election tests.