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This brings up an interesting question. How come citizens are deemed qualified and knowledgeable and educated enough to vote for their governors, but not knowle

This brings up an interesting question. How come citizens are deemed qualified and knowledgeable and educated enough to vote for their governors, but not knowledgeable and educated enough to spot fake news and make their own good judgement. This is somewhat contradicting , IMHO

DFHippie 6y ago
It's not that they're good at picking their government, but that this is the best of awful alternatives. And everyone is capable of being taken in by sufficiently convincing lies. Do we give up and give the liars free rein or do we try to improve the situation? The simplest rough cut to improve the situation is to remove the voices of parties whose interests are clearly aligned against the citizens' making a wise choice. Does Putin want America to be misgoverned? Then maybe he shouldn't be free to spread lies during the election.
wizzwizz4 6y ago
There are people who definitely should not be voting. The trouble is… how do we decide who they are? Well, it's as simple as whoops we're in a dictatorship now. Plus, the unwashed masses might not be very good at deciding who's acting in their best interests… but the set of people who are good at deciding who to vote for has different interests (on average) to the set of all people. So even if there were a perfect way of doing this, it wouldn't achieve what we want it to achieve. I really want the minimum voting age to be lowered to 7 – it's something my seven-year-old self swore to do. But then parents would basically get an extra vote for each child they have, given how easy it is to control a seven-year-old's access to information and how much trust they place in their parents' judgement, and that would be really bad. So I'm not actually going to support such a measure. (Rebellious teens, on the other hand… well, perhaps 14-year-olds voting wouldn't be so bad. Except there would then be higher incentives to manipulate them, and do we really want to put 14-year-olds through that? Well… you could argue they're already being put through that, so perhaps? But —)

DFHippie 6y ago

It's not that they're good at picking their government, but that this is the best of awful alternatives. And everyone is capable of being taken in by sufficiently convincing lies. Do we give up and give the liars free rein or do we try to improve the situation? The simplest rough cut to improve the situation is to remove the voices of parties whose interests are clearly aligned against the citizens' making a wise choice. Does Putin want America to be misgoverned? Then maybe he shouldn't be free to spread lies during the election.

wizzwizz4 6y ago

There are people who definitely should not be voting. The trouble is… how do we decide who they are? Well, it's as simple as whoops we're in a dictatorship now. Plus, the unwashed masses might not be very good at deciding who's acting in their best interests… but the set of people who are good at deciding who to vote for has different interests (on average) to the set of all people. So even if there were a perfect way of doing this, it wouldn't achieve what we want it to achieve. I really want the minimum voting age to be lowered to 7 – it's something my seven-year-old self swore to do. But then parents would basically get an extra vote for each child they have, given how easy it is to control a seven-year-old's access to information and how much trust they place in their parents' judgement, and that would be really bad. So I'm not actually going to support such a measure. (Rebellious teens, on the other hand… well, perhaps 14-year-olds voting wouldn't be so bad. Except there would then be higher incentives to manipulate them, and do we really want to put 14-year-olds through that? Well… you could argue they're already being put through that, so perhaps? But —)