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Ah yes, the classic "My side lost, so the other side must be uneducated" argument. Democracy is great up until the point people dont vote the way you want them

Ah yes, the classic "My side lost, so the other side must be uneducated" argument. Democracy is great up until the point people dont vote the way you want them to vote.

lotyrin 10y ago
Can the majority not be wrong? It seems like they are in a number of states, on a number of issues, should we not desire a correct government over a popular one? Whether it's a majority that is wrong, or a representative class that is wrong, or a despot that is wrong, should we not have a voice to point out what we see as errors?
- dudul 10y ago
  Who is to decide what a correct government is then? How do you define "wrong"? You are obviously free to point out what you see as errors, but if you can't convince the majority, then what else is there to do?
  - lotyrin 10y ago
    You probably don't actually believe that popular opinion constitutes truth, it's just convenient pretense for your argument. If you really do, pick up a history book or some modern polls. When the majority decides that a minority should be mistreated, is that justice? If the majority is misinformed by a powerful minority, will they not act against even their own best interests? When the majority is short sighted, is disgracing the future the proper thing to do? An ideal government is one that uses the truth to optimize according to some anthropic value system in the short and long terms. These do not arise from popular opinion, just as they don't form under the force of authority. Unfortunately, they are probably impossible to form at all. People are selfish, stupid, and short-sighted and that doesn't go away once you reach any particular number or proportion of them making the decisions. Democracy can (arguably) produce morally just decisions, but that isn't the same as producing factually correct ones.
    - dudul 10y ago
      The fallacy is that you keep talking about "truth" as if it was such a simple thing to identify. Where is the truth between legalizing marijuana or not? Where is the truth between allowing somebody who is 20 years and 11 month old to drink or not? And I'm not even getting near real controversial topics such as gay marriage, abortion, polygamy and co. There is no truth, just what the majority considers "good" or "desirable" at a given point in time. And yes, sometimes we realize decades later that it was dumb. or rather, we like to judge with our eyes what people did 100 years before us and want to pretend we would have known better, that they were just morons.
      - lotyrin 10y ago
        Here's the crux. We currently decide both values and facts by deciding for actions and policies, and decisions using popular opinion will therefore make errors about facts. How we negotiate facts and values should be different. We could define what our values are, decide if it is just to use potentially violent force to enforce laws that forbid substances that have detrimental health effects and flesh out what we mean by a detrimental effect, what the threshold of that is for different age groups -- these are things that are pretty anthropic, can't be decided otherwise. We can then collect facts about which substances fit into our decided categories, and avoid making mistakes that fail to serve the values we chose. If (because the fact process, being human, is imperfect) we find new values for facts, we can adjust policy and actions without readjusting the values side of decision making.
      - lotyrin 10y ago
        There is such a thing as truth, and while we can't have a perfect method of arriving at it, we have methods better than polls. People legislate taste, they ignore big problems because "we've always done it like that", etc. This is plain to see. Nobody benefits when a state fails to live up to its purpose, provides both insufficient freedoms with insufficient controls. Sure, an unfeeling despotic utilitarian robot would be an immoral form of government -- we have to take into account anthropic value systems (which will not converge, and require consensus-making in some form) -- but to accept there's no one true system of mores doesn't require assuming there's no single truth.
- tomp 10y ago
  Poliyics is not math. There's no right or wrong. There are just priorities.
  - lotyrin 10y ago
    There certainly are decisions which are wrong, and the majority can certainly make those.
  - makomk 10y ago
    The Brexit referendum didn't offer people a choice of priorities. It offered them a binary in vs out decision where the differences between different ways of implementing each choice were arguably wider than the difference between the choices. Then voters had to try and map their actual priorities onto this decision based on dubious information from media and politicians who had their own interests at heart.
bllguo 10y ago
What? Nothing you say has anything to do with his point.
cortesoft 10y ago
No, democracy is great when you place limits on what the majority can do. The majority does not get free reign to do whatever they want; there is a reason most democratic countries place limits on the majorities ability to enact their will; the US constitution is designed explicitly to limit the power of the majority, so as to prevent the abuse of the minority.
- kadabra9 10y ago
  And none of that I would disagree with. We're not discussing whether or not the population should have ability to leave the EU via referendum, however. I was referring to the tendencies of some to cry out that democracy doesn't work when people don't vote the way they want them to, or to portray the other side as "undecuated or "racist" just because your side lost.
  - epistasis 10y ago
    Well you didn't finish his comment, it wasn't "because your side lost," he had a very specific reason: >Nobody on the Brexit camp even had a plan on how to leave. That's not democracy that's just a tantrum. You're being just as prejudiced as you claim he is if you don't even bother to acknowledge what he said and merely assume its do to his prejudice.
parenthephobia 10y ago
Leave voters were unavoidably uneducated "on the ramifications of the decisions", because Leave had no post-vote plan. The referendum wasn't a choice between two courses of action. It was a choice between carrying on as normal, and "leaving the EU", where the specifics were undefined. Nobody could educate themselves as to the ramifications, because it wasn't - and still isn't - possible to know what they would be. Leave voters might claim they voted for restored sovereignty, or reduced immigration, or not sending the EU £350MM/week, but they didn't, because none of those things were on the ballot.

Ah yes, the classic "My side lost, so the other side must be uneducated" argument. Democracy is great up until the point people dont vote the way you want them to vote.

lotyrin 10y ago

Can the majority not be wrong? It seems like they are in a number of states, on a number of issues, should we not desire a correct government over a popular one? Whether it's a majority that is wrong, or a representative class that is wrong, or a despot that is wrong, should we not have a voice to point out what we see as errors?

dudul 10y ago
Who is to decide what a correct government is then? How do you define "wrong"? You are obviously free to point out what you see as errors, but if you can't convince the majority, then what else is there to do?
- lotyrin 10y ago
  You probably don't actually believe that popular opinion constitutes truth, it's just convenient pretense for your argument. If you really do, pick up a history book or some modern polls. When the majority decides that a minority should be mistreated, is that justice? If the majority is misinformed by a powerful minority, will they not act against even their own best interests? When the majority is short sighted, is disgracing the future the proper thing to do? An ideal government is one that uses the truth to optimize according to some anthropic value system in the short and long terms. These do not arise from popular opinion, just as they don't form under the force of authority. Unfortunately, they are probably impossible to form at all. People are selfish, stupid, and short-sighted and that doesn't go away once you reach any particular number or proportion of them making the decisions. Democracy can (arguably) produce morally just decisions, but that isn't the same as producing factually correct ones.
  - dudul 10y ago
    The fallacy is that you keep talking about "truth" as if it was such a simple thing to identify. Where is the truth between legalizing marijuana or not? Where is the truth between allowing somebody who is 20 years and 11 month old to drink or not? And I'm not even getting near real controversial topics such as gay marriage, abortion, polygamy and co. There is no truth, just what the majority considers "good" or "desirable" at a given point in time. And yes, sometimes we realize decades later that it was dumb. or rather, we like to judge with our eyes what people did 100 years before us and want to pretend we would have known better, that they were just morons.
    - lotyrin 10y ago
      Here's the crux. We currently decide both values and facts by deciding for actions and policies, and decisions using popular opinion will therefore make errors about facts. How we negotiate facts and values should be different. We could define what our values are, decide if it is just to use potentially violent force to enforce laws that forbid substances that have detrimental health effects and flesh out what we mean by a detrimental effect, what the threshold of that is for different age groups -- these are things that are pretty anthropic, can't be decided otherwise. We can then collect facts about which substances fit into our decided categories, and avoid making mistakes that fail to serve the values we chose. If (because the fact process, being human, is imperfect) we find new values for facts, we can adjust policy and actions without readjusting the values side of decision making.
    - lotyrin 10y ago
      There is such a thing as truth, and while we can't have a perfect method of arriving at it, we have methods better than polls. People legislate taste, they ignore big problems because "we've always done it like that", etc. This is plain to see. Nobody benefits when a state fails to live up to its purpose, provides both insufficient freedoms with insufficient controls. Sure, an unfeeling despotic utilitarian robot would be an immoral form of government -- we have to take into account anthropic value systems (which will not converge, and require consensus-making in some form) -- but to accept there's no one true system of mores doesn't require assuming there's no single truth.
tomp 10y ago
Poliyics is not math. There's no right or wrong. There are just priorities.
- lotyrin 10y ago
  There certainly are decisions which are wrong, and the majority can certainly make those.
- makomk 10y ago
  The Brexit referendum didn't offer people a choice of priorities. It offered them a binary in vs out decision where the differences between different ways of implementing each choice were arguably wider than the difference between the choices. Then voters had to try and map their actual priorities onto this decision based on dubious information from media and politicians who had their own interests at heart.

bllguo 10y ago

What? Nothing you say has anything to do with his point.

cortesoft 10y ago

No, democracy is great when you place limits on what the majority can do. The majority does not get free reign to do whatever they want; there is a reason most democratic countries place limits on the majorities ability to enact their will; the US constitution is designed explicitly to limit the power of the majority, so as to prevent the abuse of the minority.

kadabra9 10y ago
And none of that I would disagree with. We're not discussing whether or not the population should have ability to leave the EU via referendum, however. I was referring to the tendencies of some to cry out that democracy doesn't work when people don't vote the way they want them to, or to portray the other side as "undecuated or "racist" just because your side lost.
- epistasis 10y ago
  Well you didn't finish his comment, it wasn't "because your side lost," he had a very specific reason: >Nobody on the Brexit camp even had a plan on how to leave. That's not democracy that's just a tantrum. You're being just as prejudiced as you claim he is if you don't even bother to acknowledge what he said and merely assume its do to his prejudice.

parenthephobia 10y ago

Leave voters were unavoidably uneducated "on the ramifications of the decisions", because Leave had no post-vote plan. The referendum wasn't a choice between two courses of action. It was a choice between carrying on as normal, and "leaving the EU", where the specifics were undefined. Nobody could educate themselves as to the ramifications, because it wasn't - and still isn't - possible to know what they would be. Leave voters might claim they voted for restored sovereignty, or reduced immigration, or not sending the EU £350MM/week, but they didn't, because none of those things were on the ballot.