4 ms·

Maybe we should just directly delegate voting to experts? Or are you saying that you can't trust any organization to evaluate political candidates and programs?

• tptacek 8y ago
  In general, we do delegate voting to experts: we vote for the nominees of our preferred parties. Note that I'm not saying you should be forced to do that, just that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it.
  • patrec 8y ago
    The "preferred parties" is a bit of a sleight of hand here. Why not delegate the choice what party you should prefer to experts, too? Works for China!
    • tptacek 8y ago
      In what way is it a sleight of hand? I'd argue that most people delegate almost the entirety of their voting decision to some external authority, in almost exactly the same way as they'd sign up for and use a service like NewsGuard.
      • patrec 8y ago
        Is the election of Trump largely a result of independent expert advice? Would you like to see more adoption of a similar system for news curation?
        • tptacek 8y ago
          The question isn't whether we should delegate. We make bad decisions when we don't. The question is who we should delegate it to. Anyone who told you to vote for Trump was a bad source.
          • HNContentMod 8y ago
            Yes. Technology should be used to suppress anyone who says to vote for Trump in much the same way we should reject anyone who says vaccines cause autism. In fact, both views should be censored because of how dangerous they are.
          • patrec 8y ago
            Maybe we need more delegation experts? Recursively? ;) Anyway, you originally wrote: > you can't trust any organization to evaluate news sources. That can't be true. But it can. Successful delegation requires alignment of incentives, oversight or some (well founded) trust relationship. Otherwise, if the stakes are high enough (and if you get to shape the voting or news-consumption and non-consumption of a sizeable fraction of people, they are) bad things will happen to those who are willing delegate, in aggregate. What makes the expert more trustworthy than the politician or news-source itself? Why would you be better at picking one than the other? Credentials? Max Boot is one of the “world's leading authorities on armed conflict” and well-credentialed (academically and organizationally). Do you trust him? Did the American Tax Payers get a good return of investment of following his expertise laid out in “The Case for American Empire” to the tune of a few trillion Dollars? Tucker Carlson says no, we shouldn't trust Max Boot. Should we trust him instead? Why not? The answer is that you can only delegate these things to the extent you're able and willing to critically evaluate the quality and basis of the advice (since you have no mechanism to align incentives). And I'd be shocked if you could come up with a single broadly trustworthy news source evaluation organization -- I am not aware of one, are you? Assuming there is one, how would it stay that way longer term?
            • tptacek 8y ago
              I don't understand your argument. Obviously, if you refuse to delegate any decision you make to experts, you will make worse decisions. If evaluating news media isn't your full-time job, you will do a poorer job of it than someone who was trained to do it and has years of experience and context to do it with. You seem to be under the weird impression that I'm saying all experts are trustworthy. No, obviously not. I don't trust Max Boot (I trust Tucker Carlson far less). I'm selective about who I delegate parts of my decisionmaking to, and you should be too. Again: the point isn't that NewsGuard is good (I have no idea if it is). The point is that the very concept of NewsGuard doesn't offend reason or civic virtue.