3 ms·
I find this discussion a bit pedantic and ivory-towerish. Fact is that democracy is constantly under attack say voter suppression etc. The question should be
by galaxyLogic 7y ago
I find this discussion a bit pedantic and ivory-towerish.
Fact is that democracy is constantly under attack say voter suppression etc.
The question should be about what can be done in practice to make democracy work better, not whether it "is" a perfect system or not.
Democracy can be made to work better if people get informed, there are proposals like "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy" and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting which should be discussed more in the media.
And how about making the election day a national holiday?
- SmirkingRevenge 7y agoThe other question to ask, is "What actually works better?". Precious few governments in the history of man have not been large-scale atrocity generating machines. Democracies generally seem to offer most, more of a chance than the others. There's always Trump... in democracies, the Trumps are constrained by law. In most other cases, the Trumps wield absolute power. Pick your poison.
- galaxyLogic 7y agoThat's the question, what works. I assume access to computers and internet can have a big impact on democracies, so history may or may not be a good guide on what works and what not
- dantheman 7y agoI think people being informed is actually part of the problem - you want democracy to do very little. The more informed people are, the more willing to believe they can engineer the society that they want. This seems to always fail.
- DubiousPusher 7y agoI see no reason to believe that ignorance decreases the human desire to act politically.
- Supermancho 7y agoI see no reason to disbelieve that ignorance decreases the human desire to act politically. If you don't know you've been wronged (or limited) and you don't know what change is effective, or you are supplied with necessarily limited misinformation...you spend your efforts in other pursuits.
- DubiousPusher 7y agoI neither believe or disbelieve in this hypothesis. Given an absence of evidence upon the issue I see no reason to believe either way.
- corford 7y agoPerhaps consider leveraging Occam's razor while you accumulate more evidence to satisfy a firm position. Or do you adopt a similarly ambivalent approach to everything you encounter if it lacks immediately presented evidence?
- mistermann 7y agoA potential problem I see in this approach is that many people seem to mistake Occam's Razor conclusions, aka intuition as far as the common man is concerned, as the truth. I would argue that widespread adoption of explicit acknowledgement that in fact, many (if not most) of the the current Top 100 Disputes in the public sphere actually have an answer of UNKNOWN (as opposed to what 95% of politicians, intellectuals, and thought leaders would have us believe), would go a very long way towards kicking off a process whereby global society could start towards reaching consensus compromise on all issues. I fully realize this belief is amazingly naive if considered within the context of objective reality and history, but I also believe it is absolutely true (if perhaps unachievable given our current state of affairs).
- DubiousPusher 7y agoKnowing things for certain is hard. People are uncomfortable when an answer is unknown. They are usually even less happy when told something can't be known. But I agree. My hope is that the frailty of human reason and the limits of human knowledge can become wider spread and that can help people stop holding such confident and unwaivering views.
- haimez 7y agoAre the emergent properties of a near random system preferable to live alongside/underneath? I suspect your answer mostly depends on your current socioeconomic status and overall faith in “the system”.