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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Furthermore, while philosophically I don't want to see any barriers to voting, full participation is not a good thing in the abstract. It is like free speech; great idea but that doesn't mean we just say everything. Similarly, everyone has the right to vote but for heavens sake people with only a shallow clue should stay away from all but the most basic of policy questions.

Lot of great people of average intelligence. They should not be trying to involve themselves in governance. There should be no expectation or need that they get involved. Average people make poor decisions vs the unusually intelligent. Political discourse should elevate, not mean-regress.

The magic of voting is that most people vote for a side in a semi-random manner and cancel each other out harmlessly.

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> while philosophically I don't want to see any barriers to voting, full participation is not a good thing in the abstract.

Have you ever heard people say, when government policies transfer wealth from the young to the old, that it's because young voters have low voting rates while old voters have high voting rates?

If you believe politicians will naturally favour the interests of demographics who vote, then having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society.

(Not that it's worked flawlessly for Australia, I'll admit)

> ... having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society...

The logical endgame of that approach is to have a big tug-of-war between two big coalitions struggling to steal stuff off the other (which, in fairness, is a pretty common equilibrium in democracies).

That actually goes right to the heart of the issue - you can't get a just society by doing things by the numbers. To get a just society, just policies need to be implemented. If the winning side of an election wants just policies then there will be a just society. Otherwise society will be injust. Participation doesn't change the dynamics of that at all - if anything it makes it harder because the majority is generally an unprincipled blob and certainly does not make time to reflect on matters of fairness (Australia is hardly a just society, simply that the people getting a bad deal are relatively small minorities, not actively mistreated and can be reasonably ignored). If we had a reliable process for achieving a just society we'd use that instead of democracy.

>The logical endgame of that approach is to have a big tug-of-war between two big coalitions

...why just two? He specifically mentioned advocating for ranked choice voting, which would make it a tug-of-war between N coalitions, and would lead to better outcomes that our current broken two-party system.

Power is somewhat binary - either you've got it or you don't. Ranked choice doesn't change that. The advantage of ranked choice voting is it allows people to be more expressive in signalling who they want to be in power.

And if N coalitions playing tug-of-war, that means there is an (N-1)/N chance that your preferred one loses. It is much better if everyone agrees not to play that game and adopts smarter strategy. Which has little to do with the number of people participating in the election.

> If you believe politicians will naturally favour the interests of demographics who vote, then having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society.

But it doesn't solve this particular issue.

The whole population is aging. Which means we're going to see higher and higher percentage of old people vs young people. Now what? We demand higher turnover rates from the young to cancel it out?

I agree on the principle, but I want to argue a small point. You say intelligence, when I think an average IQ person who studies policy as a hobby and puts time and effort into being informed will be vastly more capable of proper governance than a 115-120IQ person who doesn’t put the time in. I think the main thing here is education and information distribution and how (in our case, poorly) we set up the infrastructure and social mechanisms to perform these.

Well ... if I were going to be precise, I'd prefer that people with >110IQ, Stage 5 on Bob Kagen's 5-stage adult development model, had an interest in politics, a well developed sense of fairness and evidence-based beliefs were running the show. But that is a big ask and I might not like it when I see it.

Either way, encouraging stupid people to participate is not the way. At best it is a harmless no-change manoeuvre.

I’d like to see that too, but the way to get citizens with the qualities you desire is, imo, infrastructural and not best done via a filter. Currently, we churn people out of high schools half literate then feed them profit-driven slop on their tvs and phones, then we expect them to somehow make cogent political decisions. I don’t know this for a fact, but my intuition is that if you improved the relevant infrastructure you’d produce a majority population capable of pretty solid political thought, where your solutions more resemble band-aids with undemocratic side-effects. It would be harmless if you did it perfectly, but any real-world anti-voter filter or social pressure would inevitably be used for undesirable, irrational ends.

People who study policy as a hobby have an unfortunate tendency to fall into reddit bubbles of like minded individuals, think in theories only and loose touch with with how the world actually operate back on earth.

We have systematically annihilated the traditional alternative sources of community that would put people in contact with local, on-the-ground politics. Individuals, left isolated, often end up participating in a bastardized facade of politics built on media consumption. If you want to improve this you have to address the systems creating the isolation.

If it’s not people who study policy as a hobby, then who ought to be voting?

Pretty much everyone who wants to and is old enough for it. That would include people who have families they spend time to, friends they priorities and who have variety of hobbies and jobs.

I think the issue is that that doesn’t really prepare you to vote on national or often even statewide issues.

Yes it does, as much or more as spending whole day in a reddit/blogosphere bubble of like minded individuals with the same interests does.

Having interacted with many people who don’t engage with any kind of political media, this isn’t true. It’s very difficult to have any clue what to vote for or why when you have no information; these people end up going off vibes. Spending all day listening to choir preaching may still diffuse useful information about current issues into you by accident.

Democracy is not perfect, but it's better than the alternative.

What would your response be to someone who, hypothetically, might view this sentiment as some unsettling combination of elitist and vaguely authoritarian and then decides that maybe you shouldn't be voting? Would you be bothered by that?

Philosophically I don't want to see any barriers to voting, so I would disagree with them.

You're assuming there's a significant, positive correlation between voter motivation and voter quality (thoughtfulness?). I wouldn't assume that.

so cancel democracy? a ruling party is about to give that a shot for sure :)

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