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Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. They mostly continue due to the apathy of the governed, I

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. They mostly continue due to the apathy of the governed, I'd say. The 40-something percent of voters who vote for the loser in various elections are explicitly registering their dissent from being governed by the people they didn't vote for. I'd say that those people certainly are wasting their time 'choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be', and from the steadily heightening vitriol in day-to-day politics, I think that's becoming clearer and clearer to everyday voters in the US. This, too, seems to be due in part to the fragmentation of sources from which people get political news; the genteel framing of debating with fellow citizens is breaking down with access to more varied and less controlled information.

TheCondor 16y ago
It's also an overly simple view of things. The 40% that vote for the loser aren't expressing dissent, only a much smaller percentage of them are expressing dissent. It's not a binary problem. That simplifies everything way too much. The candidates are too similar for it to be dissent. You have to go to the fringe topics to really make them disagree in the first place, you have to bring up abortion or which stem cell lines the federal dollars go to, or gay marriage or crap like that to even get them to start to disagree. Politics is competitive, the best politicians will hire the best analysts to study the polls of the masses and come up with platforms that appeal to the broadest set of people possible so that they can win the election. Likewise, the elections will continue to be "close" because of that.
jerf 16y ago
In a very LessWrong sort of way, you might find if you really think about it that the "apathy" of the governed is frequently quite rational. If you are a middle-of-the-road voter and really don't particularly care one way or the other which person gets elected or which proposals pass, why vote? If things are going fairly well, why vote? Arguably they're doing us a favor by not casting an essentially random vote. In the past couple of elections there's been a lot more participation, broadly from the Left in 2008 and broadly from the Right in 2010. Because not caring has become a lot less rational. Humans aren't rational by any stretch of the imagination but groups of humans are frequently far more rational than supposed, if you take the time to figure out their real incentives and not just the immediately obvious ones, or the ones being loudly claimed. (And yes, I agree there are truly apathetic individuals. But most people read "apathy" as simply a variant of "lazy" and I don't think that's necessarily as true as it pleases some people to believe.)

TheCondor 16y ago

It's also an overly simple view of things. The 40% that vote for the loser aren't expressing dissent, only a much smaller percentage of them are expressing dissent. It's not a binary problem. That simplifies everything way too much. The candidates are too similar for it to be dissent. You have to go to the fringe topics to really make them disagree in the first place, you have to bring up abortion or which stem cell lines the federal dollars go to, or gay marriage or crap like that to even get them to start to disagree. Politics is competitive, the best politicians will hire the best analysts to study the polls of the masses and come up with platforms that appeal to the broadest set of people possible so that they can win the election. Likewise, the elections will continue to be "close" because of that.

jerf 16y ago

In a very LessWrong sort of way, you might find if you really think about it that the "apathy" of the governed is frequently quite rational. If you are a middle-of-the-road voter and really don't particularly care one way or the other which person gets elected or which proposals pass, why vote? If things are going fairly well, why vote? Arguably they're doing us a favor by not casting an essentially random vote. In the past couple of elections there's been a lot more participation, broadly from the Left in 2008 and broadly from the Right in 2010. Because not caring has become a lot less rational. Humans aren't rational by any stretch of the imagination but groups of humans are frequently far more rational than supposed, if you take the time to figure out their real incentives and not just the immediately obvious ones, or the ones being loudly claimed. (And yes, I agree there are truly apathetic individuals. But most people read "apathy" as simply a variant of "lazy" and I don't think that's necessarily as true as it pleases some people to believe.)