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Comment by fwn | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if the French - or the Founding Fathers - had waited for their populace to reach some artificially high and fundamentally undefined level of education before instituting democracy on the idea that democracy presupposes education.

This would rightly be understood as a shallow hold-out. ... and they would probably still be waiting today.

Education is hard work and does not happen spontaneously. Good governance can facilitate education. But people should always be assumed to be capable of judging their informational environment independently of formal education. Not to do so would be deeply paternalistic and infantilizing.

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Except you forget that when democracy was first unveiled only white, land-owning males could vote because they supposed that they were educated and self-interested enough to make good decisions. The founding fathers were well-known to not trust the public for making decisions and thats WHY we (in the USA) have laws written up and argued over by the House and Senate and not popular vote...

Yes, I know that argument. So I'm curious: Would you support the initial restriction to only white, land-owning males as reasonable? Do you think, for example, that US women's suffrage required women to be educated first?

And, as you seem to assume, this skepticism led to more indirect forms of democratic institutions: Would you argue against direct democratic institutions in the U.S. on the same basis?

Yeah, and democracy didn't just spontaneously appear - its the result of education and debates by educated people.

I think this really misses my point, and also is just factually wrong as the other poster responded.

>But people should always be assumed to be capable of judging their informational environment independently of formal education. Not to do so would be deeply paternalistic and infantilizing.

That's not the point. The question was "what can be done to combat misinformation" and my response was "education" which in the democracies that I'm aware of, is generally provided by the gov't. You are talking about something else entirely, and a bit pejoratively as well, which is ironic because you are talking about education but apparently completely missed the point.

> The question was "what can be done to combat misinformation" and my response was "education"

No, the topic was that whether the thesis that technologies like ChatGPT enable misinformation is a reason to keep the technology unfree.

And in response to that topic it was me, not you, who introduced education. You then just added a loaded question designed to hint at a preexisting government.

edit: I can't add further comments anymore due to HN limits, but notice how the person responding to me is changing the topic after I pointed out that they are misrepresenting the earlier discussion.

They wrote:

> The question was "what can be done to combat misinformation" and my response was "education"

But they weren't able to point at the comment where 1) this question supposedly emerged and 2) their response supposedly brought up education as a solution.

Preexisting gov't? Where do you live? Most people here live under a gov't - why are you being this obtuse. Bizarre that you think you are in a position to state what my intent was when my last response to you was that you missed my point. So much for making an effort to understand.

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