Hacker News Reader

Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

>Current implementation of democratic systems is result of the fact that process for voting had been expensive in pre-Internet era. One of the major thing Internet does is to make process of voting dirt cheap. One no longer has to setup physical voting booths, deploy thousands of election officials, physically tally votes and so on. This means we can give direct democracy a real chance. Why should we let senators or presidents make all of the decisions for us for years? Why not just vote for every issue directly? Why shouldn't anyone on Internet be able to propose a law and have it voted by people in the country directly? This can change everything...

Cost of physically tally votes isn't the reason the US is a representative democracy. The mob is inherently irrational, stupid and over reactive, which is why the founders settled on representatives. Case-by-cases voting also doesn't solve this problem, even with the internet.

View on HN

"The mob is inherently irrational"

I strongly disagree with this sentiment or at least I think it should be put to the test more often. There's some wisdom of the crowd factors that would suggest the mob doesn't need to be smart on an individual basis but my main objection is philosophical in nature. It strongly object to the Plato ideal of elitists that rule over the dumb (be it for good reasons or not). I think the case outlined by Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (particularly book 1) is pretty solid.

>I strongly disagree with this sentiment or at least I think it should be put to the test more often.

Donald Trump is proving that sentiment right now.

More seriously, there's a difference between a crowd and a mob. Notably, crowd opinions are uncorrelated - everyone in the crowd comes to their own conclusion, and then they vote. Mob opinions are correlated. People whose opinion differs from the mob, even are intimidated into either changing their opinion or, at the very least, remaining silent. Thus the mob quickly converges on a single opinion, whereas the crowd maintains a diversity of opinions.

I'm not trying to argue either way here - my argument is above - but do you think Twitter and social media in general favors the mob over the crowd?

When it comes to internet vigilantism, it appears to be the case.

>Mob opinions are correlated. People whose opinion differs from the mob, even are intimidated into either changing their opinion or, at the very least, remaining silent.

Voting is supposed to be secret. So I don't think what you say applies at all.

People, for the most part, don't come to political opinions on their own, they are influenced by others. It doesn't take overt threats, people just don't want to be different than their peers, so they do what the people around them do.

I believe that very recent human evolution is favoring the abandonment of critical thinking. As N generation increases, Wisdom of the crowd decreases. There is also evidence that ""educated"" people have been outbred by ""uneducated"" people in the western world recently [0][1]

[0] https://edge.org/response-detail/23788

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence

Education, and IQ aside, which I find both rather primitive measures (one is credentialist and the other is biased) - there is a Cost-Benefit analysis involved in the decision to have children, that many are not participating in to begin with. I find the above two links incorrect in that _education_ or _IQ_in_general_ can be true measures of "real" intelligence. however, their argument still stands.

The point I'm getting at is Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N > Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N+1, during and after the modern age.

NB: these are just my beliefs. I also find that IQ is not the most reliable measure for intelligence, given Flynn effects, given the biased nature in testing itself, and given more recent cognitive psychologies understanding of differing "realms" of intelligence.

> There is also evidence that ""educated"" people have been outbred by ""uneducated"" people in the western world recently

Well, yeah. Decision to have kids is not rational. Decision to have a LOT of kids (an old coworker has 10) ipmay even be accompanied by religious delusions or some misguided notion that one has a lineage to protect.

I think we should not incentivize people to have children. No tax break per dependent. No tax break for saving towards your children's college. Basically, the only people who have kids should be people willing to take responsibility. Of course, we need to step up ways we take care of young people but it is the relationship between a society (through government I guess) and a young person. For example, easy, free of cost access to health care, easy, free of cost access to education, nutritious meals dad in school, and so on but no incentives for parents to have kids.

> The point I'm getting at is Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N > Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N+1, during and after the modern age.

I feel like this belief is similar to my previous ideas of a glorious past, almost a heaven we got handed down but were unable to keep up. We are looking at the past with Rose colored glasses. I mean surely the average man today is not as smart as Plato was has a mind to think in scientific processes as Lavoisier did. Now, I have to be careful of making a bad assumption that a newer generation is always wiser but I think I can safely say the newer generation has the benefit of hindsight.

Basically what I'm saying is while there seems to be a trend of decline, it might actually be a trend of enlightenment overall and we just see the top declining while we might not see all boats slowly rising.

> I think we should not incentivize people to have children.

It's not that simple. If your people won't breed, your civilization will die out, along with all its values, culture and legacy. That is, if it doesn't get conquered by another civilization before. Incentivizing "wrong" people to breed may be a danger, but disincentivizing everyone is even more dangerous.

> If your people won't breed, your civilization will die out, along with all its values, culture and legacy.

Does it matter in the long run? All civilizations eventually die out. If it doesn't matter in the long run, why does it matter in the short term? Let's not pretend like we care about future generations. Clearly, the baby boomers don't care about what they have done to our generation. No offense but when people talk about culture, legacy,and pride all I hear is "keep grinding and don't stop to think for yourself, peasant".

I doubt the glorious Roman empire or the Egyptian empire were worth anything to ordinary folks living at that time

The alternative is the misery of completely unsupported subsistence farming.

> Does it matter in the long run? All civilizations eventually die out.

Does anything matter in the long run? Everything will eventually die out, universe included.

> Let's not pretend like we care about future generations.

Well, I honestly do.

> I doubt the glorious Roman empire or the Egyptian empire were worth anything to ordinary folks living at that time

I don't know about Romans or Egyptians, but as an ordinary low-to-middle-class citizen of a developing country I like it in here. Yes, the western civilization has a lot of bad aspects. But I like the stability we have, the progress we've been making. I want my children to live in an even better world, where various disabilities can be cured through the advancements in medicine, where people have some, if limited, time for intellectual pursuits, where there is a base on the Mars. Where people can believe in whatever god they want, or none at all, and generally don't kill each other over it.

So I apologize if I'm being too protective of the civilization I live in, but I like it and I want it to continue. For myself, my children and their children, and every other human too.

where there is a base on the Mars. Where people can believe in whatever god they want, or none at all, and generally don't kill each other over it.

Science fiction, we can make happen. I'm afraid not killing over religion will turn out to be fantasy.

> It's not that simple. If your people won't breed, your civilization will die out, along with all its values, culture and legacy.

This assumes the obviously false position that culture, values, etc. are transmitted genetically, and exclusively so. If you want to assure survival of culture, you need to assure the spread of your memes; spreading your genes isn't essential.

I did not assume such a thing. I agree that it's about memes, not genes, but most of cultural values transfer occurs before adulthood.

I think you have too much faith in humanity. Your average citizen is poorly educated, ignorant of basic economic principles and is too certain of their often incorrect opinions. This is why communism happens. It's easy to see the appeal of fair distribution of wealth, is harder to understand why that's a doomed economic model. Yet look at Venezuela. With nearly a century of counterexamples, the government there continues to destroy the economy because that's what the mob wants. Now the mob can't buy toilet paper or baby formula.

I object in principle to elitism, which has its own shortcomings, but let's not pretend the mob would make good decisions. They'd ignore minorities and make seemingly smart but ultimately foolish decisions again and again on emotional grounds instead of from a position of logic and knowledge.

"The mob is inherently irrational, stupid and over reactive"

This was the main thrust of the monarchist argument against representative democracy. Most dictators have used it too.

The other one is that people "are not ready" for more democracy but maybe they will be one day. Mubarak favored this excuse - that is, before murdering demonstrators in cold blood who had the gall to ask for it.

Just because dictators used it doesn't mean it isn't right. And I think its truth is self-evident, if you just care to look around. Democracy has good sides, like bloodless government transitions, but one thing it does not do is facilitating sane decision making.

The opposite seems self evident to me.

Saner decision making:

Switzerland > US > Egypt > North Korea

Level of democracy:

Switzerland > US > Egypt > North Korea

I used to think Singapore was a good example of "benevolent dictatorship", but after living here for a few years I've come to understand that this isn't the case. The ruling party has made some spectacularly bad decisions that they wouldn't have without more democratic accountability, and many of the good decisions they did make were stolen from the opposition (whomever they happened to be at the time).

> And I think its truth is self-evident

Reads as if you are saying that nothing can convince you otherwise.

Seeing a mob coming up with non-completely-idiotic solutions to problems on a regular basis would. I doubt it's possible in principle though, even without negative (with various degrees of malice) influence of the media. It's funny how the tool that's supposed to guarantee accountability in a democracy is also the thing that dumbs it down.

>The mob is inherently irrational, stupid and over reactive

Any type of democracy relies on trusting the public to decide for themselves.

It is an old idea that education is the solution to this problem: "The commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty" -- inscribed outside the Boston Public Library, 1895.

There is a big difference between relying on people to make decisions for themselves in domains of life that affect only them (i.e., personal decisions), and relying on people to make decisions for others. This debate is about how many people should have a voice in making decisions in government, but the more important question is what decisions should be made by government, regardless of how many people participate (though I would argue more is generally better than less).

Representative democracy has hardly been a solution for irrationality, stupidity, or over-reaction.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others"

"Recourse to pithy aphorisms is the refuge of the lazy" -- me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com