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> 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 ge

• 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.
          • blowski 10y ago
            If AWS manages its datacentre in a way that I am not happy with, I can switch to Azure. If the UK is managed in a way I am not happy with, democracy allows me to vote to change the managers. To keep with your comparison, restricting the right to vote is like restricting the right to switch datacentres. Restricting the right to stand in an election is like restricting the right to run my own datacentre. Of course, in a nation state I can't secede and run my own government and that is the intractable problem. How do you administer a country with millions of people in such a way that all of them are happy with your administration? It's impossible, whichever system you choose.
            • throwanem 10y ago
              > democracy allows me to vote to change the managers Does it? There's that appointed civil service with which to contend, as another commenter mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and like any bureaucracy, one of its primary efforts is that of ensuring its own continuity through changes in the elected administration alongside which it operates. (Perhaps "above which", depending how much credence you give the idea that it's the civil service which actually runs a country, and the electees are more or less just there to amuse the proles. I've known a few civil servants who gave this idea considerable credence, which makes it difficult for me to dismiss out of hand.) Even leaving that aside and assuming democracy works according to the junior high social studies model, to what extent does your vote enable you to predict a given candidate's behavior once elevated to office? Is there any reason at all, in the modern era, to imagine that we ever vote for anyone based on any real knowledge of how he or she will behave once elected? Why does the phrase "campaign promise" connote as it does?
• jnordwick 10y ago
  This is a very underrated comment.