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That's painting it more black and white that I think it is. Proponents of elections won't argue that their system will always produce someone suited for the job

That's painting it more black and white that I think it is. Proponents of elections won't argue that their system will always produce someone suited for the job, just that it will produce the person much the electorate believes is suited for the job. The big difference is probably that a proponent of elections believes that the masses have a better idea of who is suited for that job than random selection, and proponents of sortion disagree.

_0ffh 6y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of mental divergence going on. Try to talk with someone about directly democratic elements in a state's administration, and many will happily tell you that the same people who are a) perfectly capable of choosing good administrators are also somehow b) absolutely incapable of choosing good policies. Obviously everything you would need to get from a) to b) is choosing someone who is capable of making good policy decisions and then vote for whatever policy that person is arguing for. That's practically a logical proof.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Not to say that, for choosing a good administrator you must also be sure that the person isn't lying and will stay honest for the next X years; has enough competence to manage to get the proposal ahead; won't change his mind; has enough of a selection of good proposals that is worth voting more than the competitors. Choosing a policy is easier by orders of magnitude, and yet people can only be trusted to solve the hard problem, never the easy one.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    The argument isn't that the public is particularly good at choosing administrators, but that they have some ability to weed out bad administrators, and administrators have some pressure to perform. Unlike the public, they accept blame for the negative consequences of popular decisions like tax cuts or spending increases. The ability to take unpopular decisions is a feature not a bug. One can make a similar theoretical argument that it is harder, possibly 'orders of magnitude' so for a CEO to determine the reliability of prospective hires to be accountable for decision making, and yet they invariably do despite greater ability to take executive decisions than the public
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      > but that they have some ability to weed out bad administrators Hum... How would that work on the real world? It would carry some merit if people could have a vote of non-confidence and put politicians out of their positions, but it is very rare to see anything like this around the world. The fact that delegating things right is way harder than doing it oneself is well accept on management. People still delegate because doing does not scale. There is no argument against direct democracy there.
      - notahacker 6y ago
        Many countries have recall mechanisms, and most of the real world has term limits, and most candidates represent parties who expect to outlast individuals who retire. Most large firms have management teams staffed by people whose job is deciding (and owning a budget, and knowing rather than doing). And that's in businesses whose scope isn't on the scale of 'basically everything'. Their existence isn't an argument against direct democracy so much as a comprehensive refutation of the argument that informing oneself about decision makers is far more difficult than making every decision
nine_k 6y ago
Voting would make so much more sense if it wasn't a dumb "first past the post". It has a ton of downsides, like increased partisanship (if not outright hostility) and voting not for people who you think are suitable but for the least bad people who, as you think, have a chance to be elected. The only reasonable voting system known to date is preferential / Condorcet voting. It's successfully applied e.g. by the Debian project.
- frenchy 6y ago
  I have a particular hatred for FPTP too, but claiming that the only reasonable voting system is one that no state uses is like claiming the only reasonable programming language is <insert-awesome-toy-language>. Things rarely suck until you start using them.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  The huge upside to First Past the Post is that the electorate definitely understands why their candidate lost the election because it's so simple. The purpose of Democratic elections is not something like "good government". We haven't the faintest idea how to do that. What elections do for us is enable bloodless transitions of power. The useless idiots currently in power can be voted out and you can replace them with the useless idiots you want to be in power instead if you can get enough votes. Will they be any better? Well of course you hope so, but the one thing I'm sure of it is that fighting a civil war over it would be worse. So the problem to think about isn't "Which electoral system best satisfies Arrow's conflicting criteria in my opinion as an educated person who has spent a lot of time thinking about it?" but "What ensures the people who voted for Bob not Alice will accept that Alice won?". If you're choosing a single person like the leader of your Executive or something equally consequential democratic elections are (along with sortition) one of the least terrible of the bad options you have, and complicated mechanisms like the Schulze method you're talking about are likely to mean losers are defiant so they're probably the wrong choice compared to First Past the Post or other simple methods. If like Debian you're basically just picking the head of a club, it's scarcely matters how you do it, Schulze seems over-complicated to me but it's just not a big deal. Having democratic elections isn't important for this purpose anyway - nobody is going to kill and die for Debian leadership otherwise, but knock yourselves out.

_0ffh 6y ago

Yeah, there's a lot of mental divergence going on. Try to talk with someone about directly democratic elements in a state's administration, and many will happily tell you that the same people who are a) perfectly capable of choosing good administrators are also somehow b) absolutely incapable of choosing good policies. Obviously everything you would need to get from a) to b) is choosing someone who is capable of making good policy decisions and then vote for whatever policy that person is arguing for. That's practically a logical proof.

marcosdumay 6y ago
Not to say that, for choosing a good administrator you must also be sure that the person isn't lying and will stay honest for the next X years; has enough competence to manage to get the proposal ahead; won't change his mind; has enough of a selection of good proposals that is worth voting more than the competitors. Choosing a policy is easier by orders of magnitude, and yet people can only be trusted to solve the hard problem, never the easy one.
- notahacker 6y ago
  The argument isn't that the public is particularly good at choosing administrators, but that they have some ability to weed out bad administrators, and administrators have some pressure to perform. Unlike the public, they accept blame for the negative consequences of popular decisions like tax cuts or spending increases. The ability to take unpopular decisions is a feature not a bug. One can make a similar theoretical argument that it is harder, possibly 'orders of magnitude' so for a CEO to determine the reliability of prospective hires to be accountable for decision making, and yet they invariably do despite greater ability to take executive decisions than the public
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    > but that they have some ability to weed out bad administrators Hum... How would that work on the real world? It would carry some merit if people could have a vote of non-confidence and put politicians out of their positions, but it is very rare to see anything like this around the world. The fact that delegating things right is way harder than doing it oneself is well accept on management. People still delegate because doing does not scale. There is no argument against direct democracy there.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      Many countries have recall mechanisms, and most of the real world has term limits, and most candidates represent parties who expect to outlast individuals who retire. Most large firms have management teams staffed by people whose job is deciding (and owning a budget, and knowing rather than doing). And that's in businesses whose scope isn't on the scale of 'basically everything'. Their existence isn't an argument against direct democracy so much as a comprehensive refutation of the argument that informing oneself about decision makers is far more difficult than making every decision

nine_k 6y ago

Voting would make so much more sense if it wasn't a dumb "first past the post". It has a ton of downsides, like increased partisanship (if not outright hostility) and voting not for people who you think are suitable but for the least bad people who, as you think, have a chance to be elected. The only reasonable voting system known to date is preferential / Condorcet voting. It's successfully applied e.g. by the Debian project.

frenchy 6y ago
I have a particular hatred for FPTP too, but claiming that the only reasonable voting system is one that no state uses is like claiming the only reasonable programming language is <insert-awesome-toy-language>. Things rarely suck until you start using them.
tialaramex 6y ago
The huge upside to First Past the Post is that the electorate definitely understands why their candidate lost the election because it's so simple. The purpose of Democratic elections is not something like "good government". We haven't the faintest idea how to do that. What elections do for us is enable bloodless transitions of power. The useless idiots currently in power can be voted out and you can replace them with the useless idiots you want to be in power instead if you can get enough votes. Will they be any better? Well of course you hope so, but the one thing I'm sure of it is that fighting a civil war over it would be worse. So the problem to think about isn't "Which electoral system best satisfies Arrow's conflicting criteria in my opinion as an educated person who has spent a lot of time thinking about it?" but "What ensures the people who voted for Bob not Alice will accept that Alice won?". If you're choosing a single person like the leader of your Executive or something equally consequential democratic elections are (along with sortition) one of the least terrible of the bad options you have, and complicated mechanisms like the Schulze method you're talking about are likely to mean losers are defiant so they're probably the wrong choice compared to First Past the Post or other simple methods. If like Debian you're basically just picking the head of a club, it's scarcely matters how you do it, Schulze seems over-complicated to me but it's just not a big deal. Having democratic elections isn't important for this purpose anyway - nobody is going to kill and die for Debian leadership otherwise, but knock yourselves out.