Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think more broadly, we're (re?)discovering various weak spots in democratic governments, and all at once globally.

Ones that strike me include:

- Most crucially, democracy relies on an educated electorate, but access to really excellent education is minimal globally. This exposes democracies to disinformation and populism

- Democracies are not great at long-term investment and planning, due to the rapid election cycle and politicians needing to manage polls in ~real time

- We long relied on media as gatekeepers and curators of sound political analysis and facts, but a revenue race to the bottom means media now chase ragebait and owner politics instead

- The uncomfortable truth is that a lot of successes of Western Democracies happened when they weren't all that democratic. Anything prior to 20th century was really plutocratic at best, then there was a slow expansion of the vote, but even then, there simply weren't that many terrible options to vote for. Even an uneducated electorate can make a good choice when all you can do is choose between two decent options

- Not entirely related, but I think shift from values-based societies to consumption/hedonistic societies broke the unwritten contract of democratic systems, where you vote not for your immediate benefit, but for some kind of societal one.

As Churchill supposedly quipped, democracy still seems like the least bad option, but that shouldn't mean we don't discuss improvements. I don't really know where we go from here - pumping lots of money into education would possibly do it eventually - but awareness is a good first step to fixing.

> Most crucially, democracy relies on an educated electorate, but access to really excellent education is minimal globally. This exposes democracies to disinformation and populism

Not so sure about that. Some of today’s autocratic leaders are incredibly smart and educated people and still took the wrong turn. If education doesn’t work for these leaders why should it work for the electorate?

Hence, I’m leaning more towards your last point that it’s maybe more about values and morals? A common understanding of what is „good?“ You can certainly sharpen these through education but there seems to be more at play. Our world also seems to have moved beyond some of the simplistic moral frameworks of the past… Maybe the current times of turbulence are the precursor to the development of new moral frameworks?

The world hasn't gotten better informed. More than 90% of the world still believes in absurd fairy tales.

I don't think we're lacking intelligent and motivated people who want to be elected to implement their agenda - for good or bad reasons.

Rather, the electorate is not equipped to tell the good ones from the bad ones. And I don't even mean, they aren't voting the way I'd like. Trump is doing everything he said he'll do, and his popularity is so low. Why? We see this over and over again.

Otherwise, I cannot reconcile how people are genuinely voting for terrible politicians and falling for blatant populism and propaganda.

Because we all do. There is a limit to all of us how much we can process and how much we truly want to challenge rather than just accept. In personal life, at work, in politics, and even more so for the big questions of humanity. All of us accept a lot of things at face value and move on. Some put maybe more attention to politics, others have maybe better heuristics, and some select few are maybe smart enough that they can constructively challenge more than others

> Some of today’s autocratic leaders are incredibly smart and educated people and still took the wrong turn

This assumes every person has the same goals. The reality is that the privileged (autocrats at the extreme end of the spectrum) have completely different incentives and objectives. E.g. a person who gets most of their income through salaried work benefits from completely different (often opposite policies) than a person who gets most of their income from renting real property or from taking a cut from the profit of companies he "owns".

> Maybe the current times of turbulence are the precursor to the development of new moral frameworks?

Hopefully.

I for one would like to see a consistent (without contradictions) moral system not based on "authority" (religion or state).

I think a lot of this comes down to feelings if insecurity and fear. It's much easier to vote for values over greed when you feel you have all of your needs met. But I think globalization expanded and highlighted the wealth disparity throughout the world, and seeing people that have vastly more than you can make you feel vulnerable. The vulnerability slides into fear and anger, and then you're more willing to vote for the strongman with questionable morals who's promising to do something to allay your fears, even if it's at the cost of the democracy.

Good points, though I have some other thoughts (note that this is coming from an American; I don’t know the situation in other democratic countries):

1. More people have access to a university education today than in previous generations. Granted, not everybody goes to college, and I’m concerned about the relatively low standards of today’s high schools outside of highly-ranked ones that serve as feeders to elite universities.

2. I wholeheartedly agree. Moreover, I feel modern American culture as a whole, and not just politics, is very short-term driven compared to previous generations, though this is a perception and I have no data to back this up. I feel so many businesses, for example, are hyper-focused on achieving the next quarter’s targets. To put it in computer science terms, sometimes a greedy approach isn’t optimal.

3. I sympathize, but this is not the first time America has dealt with a reckless media landscape. I remember reading in high school about “yellow journalism” and its role in instigating the Spanish-American War.

4. I wonder if modern presidential primary elections helped contribute to polarization as opposed to the old, pre-George McGovern methods of choosing presidential nominees? The Democratic and Republican parties used to be less uniform ideologically, and party bosses often picked compromise candidates to try to appeal to different factions of each party. The pre-Civil Rights Democratic Party was an alliance of Northern pro-union, moderate-to-liberal politicians and Southern conservatives. The Republican Party had Northeastern moderates (like Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.) and conservatives from other parts of the country (like Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater). On one hand primaries are arguably more democratic, but on the other hand they’ve fueled polarization.

5. I’ll have to think about this some more.

I see the real problem as having a president in the first place. Politics is about compromise and achieving mutual benefit. Electing a singular person is contrary to both.

> democracy relies on an educated electorate, but access to really excellent education is minimal globally

1) Even locally in countries where education is decent, democracy seems to be weakening, with authoritarianism rising.

2) People talk about education is a general thing but really, a lot of the stuff is biology, chemistry, memorizing book and author names in literature without deeper understanding, etc. What we're missing is education focused on logic and reasoning, both formal and the so called critical thinking - the ability to detect biases, manipulative ("rhetorical") techniques, lying etc. There's focus on "presentation skills" but nothing about "anti-presnetation skills" - detecting nicely packaged bullshit and detecting poorly presented good ideas. And what's completely missing is basic psychology and psychopathology (many politicians have blatant NPD or ASPD, yet people still vote for them).

3) There's no requirement for voting except age. Maybe voters should have to answer a few questions about math and formal logic and their vote weighted by how much they get right. Or simple questions about the party they're voting for.

> 1) Even locally in countries where education is decent, democracy seems to be weakening, with authoritarianism rising.

I mean, either these voters are right and are seeing something I don't. Or they aren't smart enough to vote. I'm not trying to be elitist but the world does feel a bit like a bus where the people are increasingly voting to go down the cliff, just to shake things up a bit.

> Maybe voters should have to answer a few questions

I think about it from time to time. I guess the concern would be that the flat earthers & co will be more motivated and organised, grit their teeth, pass the tests (since political pressure will stop them from being too hard) and educated people will be less keen. I can totally imagine this in my native Poland, where the populist right is actually polling consistently around only 35% but is very organised and has the highest turnouts.

> the people are increasingly voting to go down the cliff, just to shake things up a bit.

1) I think a lot of people (correctly) feel that their quality of life is not improving the way it should be according to the (so often discussed) technological progress and growing economy, yet don't have the ability to think about the system as a whole and the root causes.

I could be wrong too but the way I see it is that an increasingly large cut of wealth goes to the already massively rich.

Any kind of passive income is IMO exploitation by a different name. If you're not putting in work, then the money coming out has to come from other people's work. Finite investment should yield finite reward. Owning companies should be illegal just like it's illegal to own humans already (at least in the civilized world but it took even us a long time to get here).

> since political pressure will stop them from being too hard

Calibrating the difficulty correctly will be hard but we won't know until we try. Politics is adversarial so the way of coming up with questions probably(?) has to be as well.

I think people should be able to vote on laws directly - see my other comments. That would hopefully cut down on some populism and also incentivize not voting on stuff you don't understand.

But as long as we're stuck with political parties, we could try systems where each candidate party provides a list of questions+answers (with a maximum amount). Or where anybody can submit a question if they collect enough signatures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com