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Comment by progne | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a democracy in which you vote your IQ from an official test. If your IQ was measured at 114 your vote counts 114 times, etc. This seems obviously unfair. But would it improve the results? My intuition fails me here, I can't predict.

I wonder if that rule would have swung Brexit the other way? That would give an idea of the magnitude of the difference.

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Several forms of "census suffrage" exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Householder_Franchise (Check the other languages because they are more complete and better document the various forms).

On Wikipedia I frequently check other languges for comparison but I've never seen it recommended before.

Are there others who do it too?

The people with high IQ may vote to further the interests of people with high IQ, effectively oppressing the people with low IQ.

Too lazy/tired to work it out in detail but afair IQ is normally distributed so I don't think this linear weighting would bring high IQ much if any advantage vs the average person when weighted by sample count (because there's so many more average people). But the low IQ population would be seriously at a disadvantage vs the average and high IQ populations.

We're saying the same thing, it just depends on where you put the groupings. The top 50% of the bell curve would have outsized voting power compared to the bottom 50% (which is what I meant by "high" vs "low").

> the interests of people with high IQ

What would that be? More library funding? NASA? NSF?

Let's say for the sake of argument that people with high IQ are more likely to have white-collar jobs which rely on intellectual ability, and people with low IQ are more likely to have jobs consisting mostly of manual labor. I would expect jobs to be distributed this way even in a theoretical society where IQ was a perfect measure of true intelligence, and where manual labor was respected and not necessarily lower-paid.

It stands to reason that the white-collar, high IQ voters would be less concerned with policies which affect manual laborers. These could include workplace safety protections, certification requirements, etc.

Smart people are equally greedy and corruptable.

And have greater ability to leverage that in to oppression of others.

This entire idea if IQ or "smart" as somehow better has tried and failed repeatedly in history. There is no benevolent ruler, as they will get displaced in short order.

Even with one-person-one-vote voting systems people often vote to further their own interests, sometimes to the detriment of minorities.

Brexit should have gone the other way anyway, a constitutional change like that should require a 70% majority. But the EU was coming after the tax safe havens like the british virgin islands and the rich do so like their money…

How large a majority was required to join the EU? The threshold to create a law or join a treaty should be at least as high as to revoke or leave.

Heck, even a simple majority would probably have fine if the vote wasn’t claimed to be non-binding. People vote differently when they are told their votes don’t matter.

Though not a measure of IQ, the USA used to require landownership as the litmus test for voting. It might be a similar enough metric.

Not a valid comparison.

Imagine, if you will, a world with no income tax, no sales tax, because those things were very difficult (if not impossible) to reliably know. Instead what you could know is real estate ownership, because that was tracked by the government. Then you also had a new country that was frustrated with taxation without representation. So you form those who represent the country as those who pay taxes.

The availability of land in those days it was easy enough for anyone who wanted to get it. It was also a way to turn a citizen in to a tax payer. Equating this to IQ is similar in the same way that ice cubes and electrical arcs are the same.

Whilst I appreciate your point- what happens if the higher the IQ, the more likely to be a sociopath (for example)?

And secondly- just because someone has a lower IQ, doesn’t mean their vote and view is any less valid.

The issue here, imho, is more that the fraudulent claims by the leave were not shut down so lower intelligence people were less able to understand and realise what was happening. They put their trust into the liars who were in it for their own gain rather than the good of the nation. This is, for me, the real story.

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