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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

The whole discourse over this in the US is getting nuts as of late.

We justifiably get annoyed when uninformed lawmakers make sweeping laws without understanding the technical issues involved. It's frankly bizarre to have some 80 year old fossil who can barely understand using a cell phone be involved in something like deciding net neutrality or AI regulations.

We should be equally annoyed at the current trend of throwing medical issues into the public sphere. There's no reason whatsoever why random people like my mom whose education is in textile design and mostly watches cat videos all day should participate in the public drama of who should get what medical treatment when. We have professionals who specialize in medicine for a reason.

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> There's no reason whatsoever why random people...

Having "random people" participate is a cornerstone of democracy. As others have pointed out, it's what separates democracy from elitist technocracy - and, ultimately, oligarchy.

The problem is that another cornerstone is the public's responsibility to educate themselves. Nobody seems to do that any more, including here. This is the foundation that's failing. Fix the broken cornerstone, not the one that's still intact (though under assault in the form of gerrymandering and disenfranchisement).

> As others have pointed out, it's what separates democracy from elitist technocracy - and, ultimately, oligarchy.

Having "random people" (or people without specific domain knowledge) in a democracy doesn't really do anything to prevent oligarchy, it's tangential at best and orthogonal realistically.

> The problem is that another cornerstone is the public's responsibility to educate themselves.

That seems like a tall order in a culture that consistently promotes ignorance as a virtue for the wide masses.

Please don't use "realistically" to privilege your own opinion beyond its merit. My opinion is just as reality-based as yours. Time after time after time, leaders within any elite have accumulated personal power and turned it into an instrument of that power (as opposed to its original purpose). When that elite is ruling society, those leaders therefore are too, and we have a word for that: oligarchs. We probably can't fix the organizational dynamics that lead to this accretion of power, but we can prevent it from being our basis of government by keeping the franchise broad. Limiting franchise has always been a favorite tool of dictators, oligarchs, and supremacists - not of people who actually believe in democracy.

> My opinion is just as reality-based as yours.

Only assuming you can process information from the real world correctly, which isn't a given. Not a judgment on you personally.

> We probably can't fix the organizational dynamics that lead to this accretion of power, but we can prevent it from being our basis of government by keeping the franchise broad.

Is there any evidence that keeping the franchise broad is the most effective strategy of running a country over multiple generations, where knowledge of organizational dynamics gets lost over time? That's a very strong claim, without much supporting it.

> Limiting franchise has always been a favorite tool of dictators, oligarchs, and supremacists - not of people who actually believe in democracy.

I don't particularly believe in democracy (one of the reasons being an extremely broad, misused catch-all term for whatever the speaker means themselves), but I do believe in strong institutions and separation of powers to the degree that it's possible.

But again, that's kind of orthogonal to whether this is an effective way to enact change by the broad franchise.

> Only assuming you can process information from the real world correctly, which isn't a given. Not a judgment on you personally.

You realize this claim can be made about you too, right? You might believe you process information correctly, but that's a very strong claim, without much supporting it.

I don't need external validation for that claim. My experience in being correct and good outcomes are the support that I need.

The fact that you don't have access to that empiric information is just unfortunate, but ultimately nothing that makes a difference.

.. this is why you're online bragging about how much better you are to other people, right?

I wasn't bragging about anything. Some random guy was trying to drag me down to the level of his poorly thought through opinions.

I simply told him I had no obligation of doing so.

But you keep misinterpreting everything you read for hot takes or whatever.

Shot:

> My experience in being correct and good outcomes are the support that I need.

Chaser:

> Some points in the article are hit and miss, but mostly correct.

> For example, Istanbul is flourishing because it's the Turkish capital, so it necessarily is the most dense and rich city in the country.

> Please don't use "realistically" to privilege your own opinion beyond its merit. My opinion is just as reality-based as yours.

Just to make a note about this separately.

I will privilege my opinion in discussions, because I generally tend to give concepts a lot more thought than the average person. It is also my prerogative to defend what I believe in and I try to do that with evidence and astute observation.

To ask someone not to do this is absolutely ridiculous.

I think that you are both right on different levels and possibly talking past each other.

Yes, on the level of franchise, it is good that everyone is involved.

Its bad, on the other hand, that the form of the debate in this concrete instance has been directed to trying to make decisions on specific medical procedures as electoral politics issues.

Belief in democratic franchise does not imply belief that all democratic decisions are equally correct, or that all possible framings of debate within a participatory system are equally correct.

I do believe that the details should be left to people who have some understanding (preferably not because they're in the pockets of those their decisions affect). It's why I support the idea of a regulatory state, despite some concerns about non-legislative bodies making rules with the force of law. But that didn't seem to be what my interlocutor was talking about.

> There's no reason whatsoever why random people like my mom

I very much doubt that their mom is a legislator, or on any regulatory agency's board, where these decisions are actually made. They were sneering at the common voter, suggesting there's "no reason whatsoever" for them to participate even at that level. I happen to believe that high barriers to participation for voters or even legislators undermine democracy, and I believe so quite strongly, hence the equally strong response.

Unfortunately on this topic, institutions that could typically have been trusted regarding the details, have largely been captured by ideologists and by the medical industry, the latter of whom are eagerly seeking to create new revenue streams - manufacturing a lifelong patient from childhood onwards does this rather effectively, especially when the 'illness' is iatrogenic and malleable via cultural norms.

On the big policy level, not on the detail level. We specialize for a reason.

It's not in any way reasonable for a random person to make specific decisions about what kind of medical intervention is appropriate for what people in what conditions. Figuring out tricky details is what we have experts for.

Just like 99% of the time, it's not appropriate for the CEO to decide which framework, algorithm or programming language should be used to solve a problem.

Nor can we even try successfully. There's too many deeply complex subjects for the general public to have time to research them well enough not to make completely stupid decisions, let alone good ones.

There are downsides to technocracy, like doctor groups or AI companies pursuing their self interests a little too much.

And at the federal level, many of the older congressional members are not as uninformed as you might think. They have a big information machine around them.

...But, in general, yeah. Its absurd how uninformed the debates can get these days.

It distracts from the economy. Simple as that.

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