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Comment by zzyzz | Hacker News Reader

I always think about this.

If you can't trust people with the ability to see or hear certain information, how can you even trust them to vote?

because people don't need to be scientifically literate to express their desires in the form of a vote, which is mainly concerned with tasking representatives with what people want, not how they're going to get it.

It's perfectly coherent to think that voting is a good mechanism to express preferences while at the same time thinking that your average person can't really validate scientific claims.

I don’t think there’s nearly as much daylight between these as you’re suggesting. Just look at how current beliefs in COVID or climate science fall along political preference lines. Scientific literacy is absolutely important to express coherent preferences on how policy should address these matters.

My take would be that precisely because we've democratized science there is now such a thing as a political preference on scientific matters. Which shouldn't exist, because science should not be in the business of adjudicating political preferences. And we now often have the worst of both worlds. Politicized scientists and a pseudo-scientific public.

discourse about values in regards to covid or climate is sensible. Do you want more freedom, more safety, fewer deaths, more economic growth? That's something every person has a meaningful position on. The safety of mrna vaccines? That's not a layman's question, and these factual technical questions are where misinformation enters the picture.

And the twisted thing about the debate is that saying this often creates accusations of elitism. But really, if scientific literacy is required to have coherent political preferences, what does that say about the right of participation of people in a democracy who are simply not educated or smart enough?

<< But really, if scientific literacy is required to have coherent political preferences, what does that say about the right of participation of people in a democracy who are simply not educated or smart enough?

Ellul would likely argue that prerequisite of any propaganda is the obligation for a preference -- regardless of whether the individual knows anything at all. The purpose is to include him/her in the machine.

Personally, to me it is akin to my aunt telling me computer's are devil's creation ( she did ) and be the downfall of us all ( possible ). Yeah, maybe basic literacy is necessary to participate.

You shouldn't expect voting to yield good decisions even if voters are individually rational [1], which they mostly aren't [2]. However, voting does have a big civil rights benefit: it lets minority groups protect themselves from the tyranny of the majority in cases where they have a strong preference one way (e.g. because their rights are being blatantly violated) and the majority has a weak preference the other way. A few percentage points one way or another can swing elections, so a sufficiently pissed-off minority can have surprising political power on the margin.

[1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter

That’s a lot of ifs that need to be fulfilled. I don’t think your italicized “does” is warranted with so many unrealistic conditions.

I've always felt voting was a bad idea. It drives candidates to waste inordinate amounts of time and money on campaigning. For many posts, the ancient Athenians selected people at random (sortition) usually from a pool of willing candidates. A large enough random selection would be represenative. This would work well for the US House of Representatives.

Your comment implies that you don't want representatives, you want other people to vote for whatever it is you want. All I can say to that is: ask God for the serenity to accept those things you cannot change.

That is really interesting. Do you know if it's been used anywhere else? Even non-governmental type votes?

It's been used in student government and there's been some research behind it. I originally heard about it on an episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast.

https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/the-powerball-revolution/

https://democracyinpractice.org/

https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/mbio.00422-16

Sortition was part of election process for Venetian doges - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice

Jury duty.

I don't trust myself to vote. I feel that being informed enough to make an informed vote is a full time job, and I don't have that "luxury". Otherwise you might as well roll a dice or vote the pretty face. Or just don't vote.

Elections are determined by people who don’t think about that. If you are probably more informed than the average voter, you can improve the signal:noise ratio.

I'm probably less informed. I don't follow the news (or really any mainstream media) because signal to noise ratio is too bad and there's too much negativity. I have no clue what our politicians are up to.

I sympathise.

There is however a famous quote about this: “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them” - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/03/misinformed/

That question is the type of thing that a backdoored voting machine or corrupt election board could solve.

Luckily, so far there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Google and twitter made the election go the way they wanted via selective display of information.

Second, mail in ballots for sure won Democrats the election.

No fraud? They changed the rules so they could win

I think a more relevant question is:

If there were widespread voter fraud, how would you hear about it? Knowledge mechanisms have become so centralized I’m not certain the general public could be informed anymore.

You forgot the sarc tag

I'm pretty sure I've heard that part of the reason to block "disinformation" is so that people don't get "misled" into voting the wrong way.

For example you can Ctrl-F "disinformation" on this Time article: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

For some people democracy means letting people chose from options pre-approved by experts, because the people, in their view, can’t be trusted with being correctly informed, or coming up with useful options.

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