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That's what I find so disgusting about this tendency of many people. If I don't care enough about an issue to be rigorous about it, then by definition I don't c

That's what I find so disgusting about this tendency of many people. If I don't care enough about an issue to be rigorous about it, then by definition I don't care enough about it to 1) vote based off of it or 2) spread my uninformed opinion about it (when I do talk about it, I'm clear that I have only a tentative, uninformed model of the situation). People have often defended the average voter with "people have busy lives and don't have time to think about this stuff" (and as you point out, don't really have the will to), but I've never understood how it's defensible to treat policies that affect other people's lives as idle fun.

mindslight 8y ago
IMHO what it comes down to is that "Democracy" has become our national religion. Not in the general sense of rule by the people, but the specific implementation wherein everybody picks and votes their yes/no option. Poor results can never be attributed to the abstract ideal itself, but rather can only be due to a lack of adherence to the process. So it is paramount that everybody adopts an opinion, no matter how ill-informed. Refraining to take part in that (or even worse being a spoil sport) is met with the same disdain as naysaying at any celebration. It's the difference between someone saying they root for a different team or saying they don't care much for baseball - the latter is going to sour the conversation pretty quick. At least with sports it's clear that the outcome is essentially frivolous.
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  I agree. Another thing that I failed to understand from a pretty young age was this frenzy to turn out every single vote, and the treating of turnout as a per se good thing. As far as I can tell, an uninformed vote, determined entirely by fashion and social pressure, is _worse_ than a missing vote.
chocolatebunny 8y ago
An individual may not be that well informed when voting but the collective of all votes is supposed to average out to something more reasonable. There was a story about a bunch of people who were guessing the weight of an ox in a state fair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_standard_deviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_st...) where people were generally not very well informed but the average weight guessed was pretty accurate. There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them.
- tiredyam 8y ago
  Interesting, I’ll bite; what do you think are the main problems plaguing western democracy currently?
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  Sure, and that's the core value proposition of democracy, but it doesn't address my complaint. This over-simplified model isn't quite relevant in the face of the huge incentives to screw with voters' epistemology that voting creates. There was no small-ox constituency trying to push voters towards estimating lower, because it didn't matter, while modern culture is suffused with politics, and not symmetrically with respect to every issue. There's a reason that my original comment was disgusted by the tendency I'm describing, instead of modeling it as stupidity: a voter would have to be unbelievably dumb to think that their gut feeling is even remotely useful when it comes to 1) complex topics 2) that they haven't bothered to inform themselves about, 3) for which there are a huge amount of resources dedicated to skewing their views on the issue. > There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them. I agree with you in that I don't think it's a "voters these days" problems as much as a "most people's moral reasoning is horrifically stunted, in any population and time period". This is a baseline flaw of democracy, and one of the things that made Churchill call it "the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried". But the inevitability of it across a population doesn't mean it can't be criticized at the individual level.

mindslight 8y ago

IMHO what it comes down to is that "Democracy" has become our national religion. Not in the general sense of rule by the people, but the specific implementation wherein everybody picks and votes their yes/no option. Poor results can never be attributed to the abstract ideal itself, but rather can only be due to a lack of adherence to the process. So it is paramount that everybody adopts an opinion, no matter how ill-informed. Refraining to take part in that (or even worse being a spoil sport) is met with the same disdain as naysaying at any celebration. It's the difference between someone saying they root for a different team or saying they don't care much for baseball - the latter is going to sour the conversation pretty quick. At least with sports it's clear that the outcome is essentially frivolous.

wutbrodo 8y ago
I agree. Another thing that I failed to understand from a pretty young age was this frenzy to turn out every single vote, and the treating of turnout as a per se good thing. As far as I can tell, an uninformed vote, determined entirely by fashion and social pressure, is _worse_ than a missing vote.

chocolatebunny 8y ago

An individual may not be that well informed when voting but the collective of all votes is supposed to average out to something more reasonable. There was a story about a bunch of people who were guessing the weight of an ox in a state fair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_standard_deviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_st...) where people were generally not very well informed but the average weight guessed was pretty accurate. There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them.

tiredyam 8y ago
Interesting, I’ll bite; what do you think are the main problems plaguing western democracy currently?
wutbrodo 8y ago
Sure, and that's the core value proposition of democracy, but it doesn't address my complaint. This over-simplified model isn't quite relevant in the face of the huge incentives to screw with voters' epistemology that voting creates. There was no small-ox constituency trying to push voters towards estimating lower, because it didn't matter, while modern culture is suffused with politics, and not symmetrically with respect to every issue. There's a reason that my original comment was disgusted by the tendency I'm describing, instead of modeling it as stupidity: a voter would have to be unbelievably dumb to think that their gut feeling is even remotely useful when it comes to 1) complex topics 2) that they haven't bothered to inform themselves about, 3) for which there are a huge amount of resources dedicated to skewing their views on the issue. > There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them. I agree with you in that I don't think it's a "voters these days" problems as much as a "most people's moral reasoning is horrifically stunted, in any population and time period". This is a baseline flaw of democracy, and one of the things that made Churchill call it "the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried". But the inevitability of it across a population doesn't mean it can't be criticized at the individual level.