5 ms·

Let's not forget the two slippery fish in our hands that is other people's "ignorance" and our "knowledge."

throwanem 10y ago
Oh, certainly. That's why I didn't swap the person of the pronouns from the quote. As may seem likely from the thrust of my prior comment, I don't favor the universal franchise as a system of rule; it seems to me prone on the one hand to severe corruption as various actors seek to regather the sovereign power which this scheme so atomizes, and on the other hand to precisely the sort of popular enthusiasm which the American founders sought to render harmless, a purpose whose merit the events of the twentieth century do much to demonstrate. Most who espouse such an opinion of universal suffrage seem to imagine it being replaced by a scheme in which they themselves still have some, indeed a much larger, measure of the power to rule. I think this is a mistake; where it isn't a deliberate satisfaction of arrogance, it seems to me prone to encourage that arrogance develop. I'd rather see a scheme in which the practice of rule is the province of those trained and skilled in that very specialized profession. Of course, the problem of competent rule remains, and it's not a simple one - I don't think I could even produce a formal definition, although Singapore seems like a good example in a lot of ways, and perhaps Sweden, or the Nordic countries in general, in some others. In any case, recent history offers little that I can see to suggest that universal suffrage offers a uniquely, or even notably, reliable solution to this problem, either.
- blowski 10y ago
  > I'd rather see a scheme in which the practice of rule is the province of those trained and skilled in that very specialized profession. Great idea! We can get everybody to vote on who those people are!
  - throwanem 10y ago
    It's really not a simple problem to solve! But one doesn't need to solve it in order to realize the parallel with, say, a heavily politicized and deeply factional user group voting on who will be the next datacenter admin. And then voting on who should vote on whether the maintenance budget gets approved. And so on.
    - blowski 10y ago
      How would you feel if Donald Trump removed your right to vote, and then instituted a bunch of experts with whom you viscerally disagree? If you think some people are not educated enough to vote, then persuade them that they need to be educated.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        I'd feel as though nothing of significance had changed. But that's rather beside the point, don't you think? We're arguing the merits of democracy, not those of Mussolini- or Hitler-style dictatorship. While I concede that the one has frequently been seen to lead to the other, I'm not sure that that's in the scope of the conversation at hand, save as a particularly ugly failure mode.
        blowski 10y ago
        The only difference I can see between your suggestion and my hypothetical scenario is whether you like the experts in charge. If you advocate for technocracy, you have to accept that you might not like the technocrats who end up in power. When it comes to making policies on things like tax, healthcare, government spending, military intervention, etc, there are no right and wrong answers, just opinions. And often there are equally well-founded opinions that contradict each other. Democracy solves that conundrum by getting both sides to appeal to the 'demos', with universal suffrage defining the demos as (almost) the entire adult population. How would you solve it?
        throwanem 10y ago
        I don't believe I have advocated for technocracy, either. I'm not suggesting that professional scientists should govern; I'm suggesting that good governance is itself a professional specialty, parallel with, say, engineering, but very different in its nature, and should be approached as such, rather than by relying on the supposed wisdom of crowds. > How would you solve it? I wouldn't! I'm not remotely competent to do so. I think few people are, just as few people are competent to administer a large datacenter - a comparison to which I keep returning, because that's also a highly technical and rather abstruse specialty whose details and nuances are largely opaque to anyone not herself closely familiar with the task. But one need not be a skilled professional administrator to recognize that critical problems exist.
  - jnordwick 10y ago
    This is a very underrated comment.
- gmac 10y ago
  > I'd rather see a scheme in which the practice of rule is the province of those trained and skilled in that very specialized profession. Arguably that's what happens in many places. The UK has a large, non-partisan civil service supporting whichever the government is in power. But we don't let them decide our goals, because democracy is not primarily about choosing which way to solve widely-agreed problems. It's about deciding which things are in fact the problems that need solving. Training and skill are not critical to this. Incompetence and inefficiency are secondary problems, and any attempt to fix them by weakening democracy itself is a dangerous project that puts the cart before the horse.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > democracy is [...] about deciding which things are in fact the problems that need solving. Infrastructure maintenance, for example.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  Your speech pattern reminds me of Abraham Lincoln.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    A high compliment! I thank you very kindly for it, unmerited though I suspect it be.

Oh, certainly. That's why I didn't swap the person of the pronouns from the quote. As may seem likely from the thrust of my prior comment, I don't favor the universal franchise as a system of rule; it seems to me prone on the one hand to severe corruption as various actors seek to regather the sovereign power which this scheme so atomizes, and on the other hand to precisely the sort of popular enthusiasm which the American founders sought to render harmless, a purpose whose merit the events of the twentieth century do much to demonstrate. Most who espouse such an opinion of universal suffrage seem to imagine it being replaced by a scheme in which they themselves still have some, indeed a much larger, measure of the power to rule. I think this is a mistake; where it isn't a deliberate satisfaction of arrogance, it seems to me prone to encourage that arrogance develop. I'd rather see a scheme in which the practice of rule is the province of those trained and skilled in that very specialized profession. Of course, the problem of competent rule remains, and it's not a simple one - I don't think I could even produce a formal definition, although Singapore seems like a good example in a lot of ways, and perhaps Sweden, or the Nordic countries in general, in some others. In any case, recent history offers little that I can see to suggest that universal suffrage offers a uniquely, or even notably, reliable solution to this problem, either.

blowski 10y ago
> I'd rather see a scheme in which the practice of rule is the province of those trained and skilled in that very specialized profession. Great idea! We can get everybody to vote on who those people are!
- throwanem 10y ago
  It's really not a simple problem to solve! But one doesn't need to solve it in order to realize the parallel with, say, a heavily politicized and deeply factional user group voting on who will be the next datacenter admin. And then voting on who should vote on whether the maintenance budget gets approved. And so on.
  - blowski 10y ago
    How would you feel if Donald Trump removed your right to vote, and then instituted a bunch of experts with whom you viscerally disagree? If you think some people are not educated enough to vote, then persuade them that they need to be educated.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      I'd feel as though nothing of significance had changed. But that's rather beside the point, don't you think? We're arguing the merits of democracy, not those of Mussolini- or Hitler-style dictatorship. While I concede that the one has frequently been seen to lead to the other, I'm not sure that that's in the scope of the conversation at hand, save as a particularly ugly failure mode.
      - blowski 10y ago
        The only difference I can see between your suggestion and my hypothetical scenario is whether you like the experts in charge. If you advocate for technocracy, you have to accept that you might not like the technocrats who end up in power. When it comes to making policies on things like tax, healthcare, government spending, military intervention, etc, there are no right and wrong answers, just opinions. And often there are equally well-founded opinions that contradict each other. Democracy solves that conundrum by getting both sides to appeal to the 'demos', with universal suffrage defining the demos as (almost) the entire adult population. How would you solve it?
        throwanem 10y ago
        I don't believe I have advocated for technocracy, either. I'm not suggesting that professional scientists should govern; I'm suggesting that good governance is itself a professional specialty, parallel with, say, engineering, but very different in its nature, and should be approached as such, rather than by relying on the supposed wisdom of crowds. > How would you solve it? I wouldn't! I'm not remotely competent to do so. I think few people are, just as few people are competent to administer a large datacenter - a comparison to which I keep returning, because that's also a highly technical and rather abstruse specialty whose details and nuances are largely opaque to anyone not herself closely familiar with the task. But one need not be a skilled professional administrator to recognize that critical problems exist.
- jnordwick 10y ago
  This is a very underrated comment.
gmac 10y ago
> I'd rather see a scheme in which the practice of rule is the province of those trained and skilled in that very specialized profession. Arguably that's what happens in many places. The UK has a large, non-partisan civil service supporting whichever the government is in power. But we don't let them decide our goals, because democracy is not primarily about choosing which way to solve widely-agreed problems. It's about deciding which things are in fact the problems that need solving. Training and skill are not critical to this. Incompetence and inefficiency are secondary problems, and any attempt to fix them by weakening democracy itself is a dangerous project that puts the cart before the horse.
- throwanem 10y ago
  > democracy is [...] about deciding which things are in fact the problems that need solving. Infrastructure maintenance, for example.
antisthenes 10y ago
Your speech pattern reminds me of Abraham Lincoln.
- throwanem 10y ago
  A high compliment! I thank you very kindly for it, unmerited though I suspect it be.