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DanArmak comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - LessWrong
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Indeed, I wouldn't object to this directly. One could however argue that it is bad for indirect reasons. It would acquire huge administrative efforts to test teens for their competence at voting, and the money and resources might be better spent on education or the US army (jk). In order to save administrative costs, using a Schelling point at the age of, say, 18, makes perfect sense, even though there certainly is no magical change taking place in people's brains the night of their 18th birthday.
(You meant require, not acquire)
It would also require huge administrative efforts to test 18-year-olds for competence. So we simply don't, and let them vote anyway. It's not clear to me that letting all 12-year-olds vote is so much terribly worse. They mostly differ from adults on age-relevant issues: they would probably vote school children more rights.
It may or may not be somewhat worse than the status quo, but (for comparison) we don't take away the vote from all convicted criminals, or all demented people, or all people with IQ below 60... Not giving teenagers civil rights is just a historical fact, like sexism and racism. It doesn't have a moral rationale, only rationalizations.
12 year olds are also highly influenced by their parents. It's easy for a parent to threaten a kid to make him vote one way, or bribe him, or just force him to stay in the house on election day if he ever lets his political views slip out. (In theory, a kid could lie in the first two scenarios, since voting is done in secret, but I would bet that a statistically significant portion of kids will be unable to lie well enough to pull it off.)
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you'll get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable. (Exercise for the reader: why is 'well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway' not a good response?)
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect. Imagine a test that is slightly biased and unfairly tests black people at 5 points lower IQ. So white people get to vote down to IQ 60 but black people get to vote down to IQ 65. Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
And 75-year-olds are highly influenced by their children. (And 22-year-olds are highly influenced by their friends, for that matter.)
(I'm not saying we should allow 12-year-olds to vote, but just that I don't find that particular argument convincing.)
I don't find arguments against letting children vote very convincing either, except the argument that 18 is a defensible Schelling point and it would become way too vulnerable to abuse if we changed it to a more complicated criterion like "anyone who can give informed consent, as measured by X." After all, if we accept the argument that 12-17 year olds should vote (and I'm not saying it's a bad argument), then the simplest and most effective way to enforce that is to draw another arbitrary line based on age, at some lower age. Anything more complex would again be politicized and gamed.
But I think you're misrepresenting the "influenced by parents" argument. 22-year-olds are influenced by their friends, yes, but they influence their friends to roughly the same degree. Their friends do not have total power over their life, from basic survival to sources of information. A physical/emotional threat from a friend is a lot less credible than a threat from your parents, especially considering most people have more than one circle of friends. The same goes for the 75-year-old - they may be frail and physically dependent on their children, but society doesn't condone a live-in grandparent being bossed around and controlled the way a live-in child is, so that is not as big a concern.
Indeed, we outsource the job to nursing homes instead.
"Maturity" isn't obviously a desirable thing. What people tend to describe as 'maturity' seems to be a developed ability to signal conformity and if anything is negative causal influence on the application of reasoned judgement. People learn that it is 'mature' to not ask (or even think to ask) questions about why the cherished beliefs are obviously self-contradicting nonsense, for example.
I do not expect a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote to have worse outcomes than a country that does not. Particularly given that it would almost certainly result in more voting-relevant education being given to children and so slightly less ignorance even among adults.
"Maturity" is pretty much a stand-in for "desirable characteristics that adults usually have and children usually don't," so it's almost by definition an argument in favor of adults. But to be fair, characteristics like the willingness to sit through/read boring informational pieces in order to be a more educated voter, the ability to accurately detect deception and false promises, and the ability to use past evidence to determine what is likely to actually happen (as opposed to what people say will happen) are useful traits and are much more common in 18-year-olds than 12-year-olds.
I might be a little more generous than that. The term casts a pretty broad net, but it also includes some factors I'd consider instrumentally advantageous, like self-control and emotional resilience.
I'm not sure how relevant those are in this context, though.
I certainly recommend maturity. I also note that the aforementioned signalling skill is also significantly instrumentally advantageous. I just don't expect the immaturity of younger voters to result in significantly worse voting outcomes.
Interesting argument, I had never thought of that. I'm still sceptical about what the quality of such voting-relevant education would be.
On timescales much longer than politicians usually think about.
In my experience "voting-relevant education" tends to mean indoctrination, so no.
Or sometimes "economics" and "critical thinking.
That's a trick statement, because the biggest reason that a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote won't have worse outcomes is that the number of such people voting isn't enough to have much of an influence on the outcome at all. I don;t expect a country that adds a few hundred votes chosen by throwing darts at ballots to have worse outcomes, either.
The proper question is whether you expect a country that allows them to vote to have worse outcomes to the extent that letting them vote affects the outcome at all.
In the US there are about 25m 12-17-year-olds.
In the last (2012) presidential election the popular vote gap between the two candidates was 5m people.
There is no trick. For it to be a trick of the kind you suggest would require that the meaning people take from it is different from the meaning I intend to convey. I do not limit the claim to "statistically insignificant worse outcomes because the 25 million people added are somehow negligible". I mean it like it sounds. I have not particular expectation that the marginal change to the system will be in the negative direction.
You know, I can think of a worse test than that ... eh, I'm not even going to bother working out a complex "age test" metaphor, I'm just gonna say it: age is a worse criterion than that test.
You might be able to argue that since people of different races don't live to the exact same age, an age test is still biased, but I'd like to see some calculations to show just how bad it is. Also, even though an age test may be racially biased, there aren't really better and worse age tests--it's easy to get (either by negligence or by malice) an IQ test which is biased by multiple times the amount of a similar but better IQ test, but pretty much impossible to get that for age.
There's also the historical record to consider. It's particularly bad for IQ tests.
No, sorry, I mean it's worse overall, not worse because racist.
It's not hard to come up with a scenario where having all voters be incompetents who choose the candidate at random is better for the population at large than just holding a racially biased election.
For instance, consider 100 people, 90 white and 10 black; candidate A is best for 46 whites and 0 blacks while candidate B is best for 44 whites and 10 blacks. For the population as a whole, B is the best and A is the worst. If the blacks are excluded from the franchise and the whites vote their own interests, the worst candidate (A) is always elected, while if everyone is incompetent and votes at random, there's only a 50% chance of the worst candidate being elected
You realize there's more to politics than race, right?
That said, you would definitely have to be careful to ensure the test was as good as possible.
Although there's more to politics than race, race is an important part of it, and we're obligated to treat other people fairly with respect to race. The argument that it doesn't matter how racially biased a test is because it's good in other ways isn't something I am inclined to accept.
What's your counter-argument?
I assume this is hyperbole, since obviously a truly perfect test could draw from any subset of the population, as long as it was large enough to contain near-perfect individuals.
With that said, I agree, we should attempt to avoid any bias in such a test, including that of race (I would not, however, single this possibility out.) That is what I meant by
However, beyond a certain level of conscientiousness, demanding perfectly unbiased tests becomes counterproductive; especially when one focuses on one possible bias to the exclusion of others. In truth, even age is a racially biased criterion.
Do you define racial bias by how the test works or by which outcomes it produces?
That's not an argument about race, that's a generic argument about excluding any kind of people from an election -- kids, mentally ill, felons, immigrants, etc.
It's not an argument at all in that sense, it's a counter-argument, to the claim that it doesn't matter if a test is racist since the alternative is "worse overall". I was pointing out that having a test be racist can be equivalent to being worse overall.
It also assumes that people will vote their own interests. Kids and the mentally ill presumably will not, so it doesn't apply to them. And it assumes we care about benefiting them (and therefore that we care when a candidate is worse for the whole population including them); in the case of immigrants and possibly felons, we don't.
I'd like to add this to the other posters' responses:
Please taboo "immaturity" for me. After all, if taken literally it just means "not the same as mature, adult people". But the whole point of letting a minority vote is that they will not vote the same way as the majority.
How is this different from saying that no test of 12-year-olds for "maturity" is perfect and therefore we do not give the vote to any 12 year olds at all?
It isn't all that different, but all that that proves is that we shouldn't decide who votes based on maturity tests any more than we should on IQ tests.
The problem with letting 12 year olds vote is not that they'd be overly influenced by their parents, it's that they they're worse at seeing through the various dark arts techniques people routinely employ and this would have the result of making politics even more of a dark arts contest than it already is.
So we should test for resistance to Dark Arts Techniques, rather than base it on age? Excellent idea!
And how exactly to you propose doing testing in a way that doesn't run into the problems with Goodhart's law I mentioned here?
Same way the driver’s-ed test or the citizenship test given to immigrants manage it? Or perhaps you think they don't ... I find it unlikely this design problem should be simply dismissed as unsolvable but it certainly needs to be borne in mind ... point, I guess.
The driver's-ed test and to a certain extent the citizenship test have different incentives then a voting test. In particular with a voting test the incentive is to turn it into a test of whether the person agrees with the test writers' political beliefs.
I have to admit, I'm just assuming you would arrange better incentives for the designers. Say, have independent reviews and connect them to salary, or only recruit those with a strong desire for neutrality (and give them access to domain experts). Then again, I have no idea if the incentives actually align for the creators of other tests ... everyone is crazy and the world is mad, etc, etc.
You seem to be massively underestimating how hard this is. You can't simply wave this problem away by invoking words like "independent", "neutrality", and "domain expert" as if they're some kind of magic spell.
Don't these two arguments cancel each other out? How can you simultaneously be concerned that children will vote immaturely and vote the same way as their parents?
My favourite response to this is to retain the "everyone gets to vote at 18" aspect regardless of child enfranchisement. At least until you have tests people find acceptable or whatever.
I have described two separate failure modes. I see no reason to believe that the two failure modes would cancel each other out.
That doesn't work. If everyone above age 18 can vote, black children can vote down to IQ 65, and white children can vote down to IQ 60, the result will still be skewed, although not by as much as if the IQ test was applied to everyone.
... you don't? Could you explain your reasoning on this?
It doesn't work perfectly. That's far from the same thing as not working at all.
Yes. First of all, having two independent failure modes cancel each other out would be an astonishing coincidence. If you think that an astonishing coincidence has happened, you had better show some reason to believe it other than just saying "perhaps there will be an astonishing coincidence". Second, it doesn't follow that the two failure modes will always produce opposite results anyway. For instance, suppose that immature parents are more likely to pressure their kids into voting with the parents than mature parents are; then both failure modes increase the amount of immaturity-based votes.
It works worse, as far as racial bias goes, than having the 18 year old age limit and nothing else.
I didn't mean it as a coincidence. I meant that if you're OK with adult voters, then you should be OK with kids parroting adult voters.
However, you have a good point about the possibility that poor voters might affect their children disproportionately. I can only respond that the same might be true of adult voters, but ... yeah, there is definitely something to think about there.
As I believe I pointed out elsewhere, there is more to life than racism. We are, in reality, talking about a tiny bias here. What kind of distortions are ageist biases producing?
Not to mention, in a racist world, oppressed minorities have lower life expectancy.
(Also, well ...I feel uncomfortable just typing this, but the thought occurs that if the best test you can produce is racist, then maybe you should be updating the possibility that racists were onto something.)
I am okay with adult voters to the extent that any cure for poor voting by adults is going to be worse than the disease. Voting tests create incentives for corruption and mismanagement and historically have been associated with corruption and mismanagement pretty much whenever they have been used.
"Well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway" is not a good response, but "show me your data that places 12-17 yo people significantly more immature then the rest of humanity, and taboo "immaturity" while you're at it" is.
The first two, sadly, do make more sense, but then emancipation should become qualification to vote.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that pure experience - just raw data in your long-term memory - is a plausible criterion for a good voter. It's not that intelligence and rationality is unimportant, since rational, intelligent people may well draw more accurate conclusions from a smaller amount of data.
What does matter is that everyone, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent, would be better off if they have a few elections and a few media scandals and a few internet flame wars and a few nationally significant policy debates stored in their long-term memory. Even HJPEV needs something to go on. The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they're already pretty good.
By the same argument, they'd be even better voters 10 years later. Why not give the vote at 30 years of age, say?
Because any experience requirement draws an arbitrary line somewhere, and 18 is a useful line because it's also the arbitrary line society has drawn for a lot of other milestones, like moving out of the house and finishing high school. Voting goes hand-in-hand with the transition out of mandatory formal education and the start of a new "adult life." I think it makes sense that the voting age should be set to whatever age formal education ends and most people move out, but what age those things should happen at is again debatable.
One reason why those lines are drawn together is that, if voting age was much lower than the other lines, then young people would vote the other lines lower too: legal emancipation from their parents, legal rights to have sex and to work, and end of mandatory legally-enforced schooling.
People are unwilling to give the vote to 12 year olds because they're afraid that they'll vote for giving all other rights to 12 year olds as well. And most people would rather keep teenagers without rights.
ETA: on consideration I changed my opinion, see below. I now think it's unlikely that 12 to 18 year olds would be a large and monolithic enough voting block to literally vote themselves more rights.
There aren't enough 12 year olds who would vote that they can vote in things which adults nearly universally disagree on.
Also, people under 18 are already permitted to have sex (though not necessary with people who are much older).
That's true. Although, if they formed a voting block, it would be a significant one. But that's not the real reason why people don't want teenagers to vote.
I think it's more of a feeling of what it means to be a full citizen with voting rights. People wouldn't want to make teenagers into an oppressed minority that was denied full rights because it kept getting outvoted; it would feel unpleasant, scary and antagonistic.
That varies a lot between countries. Very few places have age of consent as low as 12-14 (puberty).
I also would like to note that it would be odd to apply a phrase like permitted to have sex to someone who was otherwise a full, voting citizen.
There's actually a gradualist solution that never occurred to me before, and probably wouldn't destroy the Schelling point. It may or may not work, but why not treat voting like driving, and dispense the rights piecemeal?
Say when you enter high school you get the option to vote for school board elections, provided you attend a school board meeting first and read the candidate bios. Then maybe a year later you can vote for mayor if you choose to attend a city council meeting. A year after that, representatives, and then senators, and perhaps each milestone could come with an associated requirement like shadowing an aide or something.
The key to these prerequisites IMO, is that they cannot involve passing any test designed by anyone - they must simply involve experience. Reading something, going somewhere - no one is evaluating you to see if you gained the "right" opinions from that experience.
When they're 18 they get full voting rights. Those people who chose not to go through this "voter training" process also get full voting rights at 18, no questions asked - kind of like how getting a driver's license at 16 is a longer process than getting one at 18 starting from the same driving experience.
This way, only the most motivated teens would get voting rights early, and everyone else would get them guaranteed at 18. There is likely potential for abuse that I may not have considered, but I believe with this system any prejudices or biases introduced in teens would be local, rather than the potentially national-scale abuses possible with standardized voter-testing.
This would probably actually not be a bad idea.
... 40? 60?
I'm guessing you're over 30 years old :P
EDIT: to be clear, I'm aware that those don't necessarily follow, I'm just curious where Eugine draws the line and why.
FURTHER EDIT: If more experience = better, and you want the best possible pool of voters, then a "village elders" model springs to mind ... that's a pretty simplistic model, though.
FWIW, I'm under 30 and I still agree with him. (I'm not sure that unilaterally putting my proverbial money where my mouth is and refraining from voting until then when other people my age still vote would be a sane idea, though.)
In the interests of updating my model, did you believe this before reading his argument?
Nah, that just makes your age group even less sane.
This is not a priori obvious. In any case why are imperfections with the test that happen to be correlated with race worse than imperfections correlated with occupation, social class, or any other trait that could act as a proxy for political beliefs?
A randomly chosen 18-year-old is more likely than a randomly chosen 12-year-old to be ready to vote -- though I agree that age isn't necessarily the best cheap proxy for that. (What about possession of a high-school diploma?)
Many would argue we should.
That's the same problem under a different name. What does "ready to vote" mean?
That excludes some people of all ages, but it still also excludes all people younger than 16-17 or so. You get a high school diploma more for X years of attendance than for any particular exam scores. There's no way for HJPEV to get one until he's old enough to have spent enough time in a high school.
We should be clear on what we're trying to optimize. If it's "voting for the right people", then it would be best to restrict voting rights to a very few people who know who would be right - myself and enough friends whom I trust to introduce the necessary diversity and make sure we don't overlook anything.
If on the other hand it's a moral ideal of letting everyone ruled by a government, give their consent to the government - then we should give the vote to anyone capable of informed consent, which surely includes people much younger than 18.
Yes, that would probably have better results, but mine is a better Schelling point, and hence more likely to be achieved in practice, short of a coup d'état. :-)
I think it works out better if you ignore your own political affiliations, which makes sense because mindkilling.
Even ignoring affiliations, if I really believe I can make better voting choices than the average vote of minority X, then optimizing purely for voting outcomes means not giving the vote to minority X. And there are in fact minorities where almost all of the majority believes this, such as, indeed, children. (I do not believe this with respect to children, but I believe that most other adults do.)
Ah, but everyone thinks they know better ... or something ... I dunno :p
That's just like saying "never act on your beliefs because you might be wrong".
To be fair, that's truer in politics than, say, physics.
Well, you want larger margins of error when setting up a near-singleton than while using it, because if you set it up correctly then it'll hopefully catch your errors when attempting to use it. Case in point: FAI.
EDIT: If someone is downvoting this whole discussion, could they comment with the issue? Because I really have no idea why so I can't adjust my behaviour.