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Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

And in this age of information and technology, many of these people are voting to decide the next leader of the only superpower left on Earth.

This may sound grossly elitist, but democracy can be super scary sometimes.

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I don't mean to be snarky here. I am honestly just trying to put these issues in context by pointing out that if you believe today's "uneducated" people being able to vote is "scary", then you should take a gander at the average level of education of voters in 1960. Even fewer college grads, even fewer high school grads, even MORE people that we would today term "dropout". Additionally, the further back that you go timewise, the more poorly educated the populace was.

I'm just saying that if you believe it to be bad today, then you would have certainly believed it to have been much worse in the 50's or 60's before the protocols for avoiding certain types of war had been fully established and implemented.

But we, as mankind, survived. And I think it's fair to say that we, as mankind, thrived.

There is a lot of negative information out there about the world today, and it can be demoralizing. But it's not about how many negative things happen to you, or your nation, or your world. It's more about our reactions to these things.

In this particular instance for example, do you say... "Hey... let's educate more people!" ?

Or do you say "Hey... let's take away the right to vote!" ?

It's not really what happened to you that determines your future... it's your reaction to it that determines your future.

Here's a historical table of literacy rates:

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#attainment

The current estimate is 14% - and it hasn't changed for a decade.

The disparity makes me wonder if the figures are right, but it's nearly impossible to find reliable research on literacy in the US.

You'd think it would be assessed annually, but it isn't. The NAAL data is the most recent definitive survey, and that was done in 2003. I can find one survey since, but the National Institute for Literacy which is quoted in it seems to have closed in 2010.

The fact that there seems to be so little federal interest in rigorously tracking literacy is even more amazing to me than the nominal rate.

Democracy is a really shitty form of government. It prevents tyrants, and it prevents a single party from holding power for too long. Which are great benefits over, e.g. monarchies. But the average voter isn't informed enough to really understand all the issues. So who wins isn't really correlated with who is best or who is right.

In my ideal form of government, the representatives would not be elected, but randomly sampled from the population. There would also be an education and IQ test, and it would only take from the top 5% of the population or so.

A "representative democracy" is one specifically where the average voter doesn't need to be informed enough to really understand all the issues, and that's supposed to be its advantage. In contrast, direct democracy is best when all the voters (have the time to) understand the issues. But that's not very pragmatic, so we do representative democracy. But of course, that has its own issues, as what to understand moves from "the issues" to "the candidates".

Somehow, this reminded me of this bit by Douglas Adams From "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" (in part):

    "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much
    assume that the government they've voted in more or
    less approximates to the government they want."
    "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
    "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
    "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again,
    "why?"
    "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said
    Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162557-it-comes-from-a-very-...

I understand the purpose of representative democracy. In theory voters vote for representatives instead of policies, but in reality they do vote for policies. And in practice representatives to pander to voters, and various other interests.

With the infrastructure available today we should be able to do a hybrid direct-representative model and also have multiple representative delegations that we can change on an ad-hoc basis (i.e. not just at elections).

For example, on some issues, I might like to do the research and make my own decision, while for other issues I might trust and delegate to a representative for that set of issues, and for a third set of issues I might trust and delegate to a different representative.

That reminds of this excerpt:

“For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.”

― Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth

Or have the next version of AlphaGo run things.

AlphaGov

A large part of being a politician is the social skills to get people onside. A random sampling based on education and IQ isn't going to give you that.

But that's exactly the problem. It selects for people who are charismatic and good at playing political games. Rather than people who are good at selecting the best policies.

Arguably, those political games should be necessary in a system where compromise is essential to forming policy.

As it stands, the American populace has been expertly prepared to engage in our political process to the fullest extent possible. That is, to spectate the circus act for a while, and then with great certainty and condescension, choose one of two preselected options.

Voting is considered holy, a sacred ritual immune from criticism. There exist alternatives like sortition - I favor a combination of sortiton and standardized testing.

Maybe Trump is the only politician with the knowledge/freedom to act on that realization, leading to landslide victories by appealing to the lowest common denominator in US voters. I guess that's exactly what democracy is.

In theory that's why we have delegates. Unfortunately the delegates are now bought and paid for by the same corporate interests that have our country in its current state...

And ultimately the electoral college in the event it's believed voters made an egregious error in electing their president. Don't think we'll see that happen regardless of winner this cycle.

That's one of the biggest reasons why we do and should have universal public education. And why we should invest the resources to make it a high quality education (for instance, pay teachers salaries that make teaching as attractive a profession to intelligent people with student debt as finance or consulting is -- or at the very least better than a guarantee of near-poverty).

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