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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Not to come off as too cynical but I've increasingly come to the conclusion that the public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond. On one hand I find that appalling and poisonous for a democracy. On the other hand, imagine everyone having to spend 30+ minutes on every important topic. It quickly gets out of hand. One could argue that the media should do that research but if they incorporate that in their communication they lose most of their audience who needs to be picked up where they are.

It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury

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> It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury

I think this is how the electoral college was intended to function. This is a hard problem to solve, especially when some of the players aren't operating in good faith.

> public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond

This is convincingly (to me) explained by the removal of critical thinking courses in public schools, at least in the US. I never experienced them myself but I've heard they included exercises like determining if a statement is fact or opinion, true or false, etc. There was very little of that when I was in school and it was certainly never a dedicated hour-block in high school.

I agree with the premise here completely, but not what it's in response to necessarily.

Most people keep very shallow knowledge of most subjects, but this doesn't mean things shouldn't be reported. It just means they(media) shouldn't spend a ton of time explaining how said numbers are calculated. Most people read, hear, or otherwise know the current inflation rate, but not exactly how it's calculated.

All that to say, if some metric isn't being reported, there's a reason - likely for some agenda being pushed.

Are the metrics not reported? Everything I mentioned can be found and it's discussed. Just with more niche audiences or piecemeal

One just needs a couple of hours per important subject with proper mentorship. Then most mews is repeated patterns or red herrings

Or more education.

Sortition would help a little but at the end of the day this is why democracy just doesn't work in practice.

Lol, wut? Any system that's been working better in practice?

There are small outlier countries like Singapore that have extremely well but at scale democratic countries have greatly outperformed other systems

Technically these aren't incompatible: it's possible that democracy doesn't work but nothing else does either— there's no natural law that says there must be a system of political and social organization which actually works in the world we have now. I have been drifting in this direction myself the last few years; it's discouraging, but it seems to be the only conclusion supported by the evidence.

It works ok in the short term. Note that most democracies (especially the current best performing ones) are extremely young despite the idea being ancient.

You see this on smaller scales as well. Most of people's complaints about "capitalism" are really about the short sighted decisions corporate leadership often make because it has to answer to an anonymous mob of shareholders.

The only thing that actually works is good leadership with long term vision and if anything democracy gets in the way of that.

The benefit of democracy is that it has somewhat of a self-correcting mechanism build in and it functions without violence. Autocracies don't have that.

You say Democracies have a short track record. While this is true in the grand scheme of things, each individual non-Democracy that came before did as well. Rulers conquered each other's countries, usurped the current leaders etc. quite regularly. I'm not sure I'd count that as stable and longer-lasting.

Autocracies have plenty of self-correction mechanisms. Generally each level is sustained by some kind of grudging consent from the levels above and below.

Right. Usually there is 100% authority in some kind of dictator. You instead have something that is more like an oligarchy. You have different interest groups with varying levels of influence. In some sense democracy works like this too. Every society has stakeholders that need to be bought off or suppressed and there are various equilibria on how that is done.

>You say Democracies have a short track record.

I actually said the exact opposite.

That's true, but there is a natural law that says that there must be some system of political and social organization that gets employed in practice, so hopefully we can identify the least ineffective one.

There's the problem of scale, and also of duration. Let's say Lee Kuan Yew genuinely wants what's best for Singapore as a whole. How do you ensure that the next autocrat will be equally benign?

This is the exact issue. There is a lot more variance in autocrats. You can get Lee Kuan Yew and you can get Kaiser Wilhelm. With democracy you are much more likely to get something in the middle. In the end of the day the cost of an bad autocrat is higher than the opportunity cost of a milk toast government compared to Lee Kuan Yew. China is still catching up from the Mao years.

I do work that social media will change this though

milquetoast, not milk toast

Both actually. Milquetoast was a fictional character used to characterize extreme timidity, as if he were the personification of milk toast. Eventually, the name became a synonym for the attitude. But the name comes from the food

TIL

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