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Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

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Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#61

Post by vidarh »

agsdfgsd wrote: post #48
pjc50 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else pointed out, the EU is boring infrastructure: people don't care about power and sewers until they stop working. I'm not convinced that people intrinsically "care" about migration, rather that they have a set of material problems (employment, wages, housing, public services) and have been told to blame migration for them. And to the extent that they do care, how can they care about the "flow" rate of m…

>I'm not convinced that people intrinsically "care" about migration Lots of people do. For many people it genuinely is about maintaining the nations their ancestors spent hundreds of generations creating. Nations, not states. Somalians can never be part of the German nation, no matter how long they have citizenship in the state called Germany. You can't spend decades telling white people how evil colonialism was, and…

Your idea of nations "their ancestors spent hundreds of generations creating is historical fiction. A hundred generations is around 2500 years. Look at some maps of migrations in Europe over the last 2500 years, and the idea of people mostly staying put over that time frame is demolished.

Modern English is a West Germanic language, coming from the Germanic tribes that pushed aside the Celts, for example. The reason it doesn't sound more like Dutch and German being the Norman invasion and subsequent exchange with the French. Modern German on the other hand isn't closer to Dutch or Danish than it is because High German from the South has supplanted the Low German native to Northern Germany, parts of the Netherlands and Southern Denmark as political shifted in the last 100-200 years.

And from the UK at least, it is clear that the people who care most are the people who have the least experience with it.

It's about fear, where origin is a proxy.

Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#62

Post by patcon »

This TED video tuned me into this research earlier in 2018, and while not rigorously tested, there are some even more interesting hypotheses that are being sussed out of the experiment:

https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_and_dan_ariely_how_...

Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#63

Post by vidarh »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #26
tormeh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is quite a fundamental 'scope creep' going on in the EU How can you scope creep from "ever closer union"? The scope was as big as it could get already. Now, that passage has been removed at the behest of Cameron, but I can't remember any statement constricting the scope, so now the scope is simply undefined, I guess.

'ever closer union clause' is not tantamount to arbitrary Federalization of powers. It's mostly a strategic view. Change of power requires change in law, which happens every now in terms of treaties, the last of which, would have been roundly elected by the plebes went on to be put into motion anyhow. Arbitrary scope creep is happening in some fronts, for example, when there is a decision to be made about gray areas…

> 'ever closer union clause' is not tantamount to arbitrary Federalization of powers. It's mostly a strategic view.

"Ever closer union" was a compromise, because those who favour full federalisation know it would be impossible for some member states to accept.

The idea of a full "United States of Europe" been there from at least the early 19th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Europe

Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#64

Post by fsloth »

agsdfgsd wrote: post #44
fsloth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is not a vehicle for correctness or efficiency. It's entire point is to distribute political power to a wide powerbase with a constant churn. This is to disable known pathologies of entrenched power bases and to discourage social stratification. Since modern states don't have an entrenched hereditary aristocracy we don't really have a concept of what democracy shields us from, since we've not had to suffer…

>Since modern states don't have an entrenched hereditary aristocracy We absolutely do, but because we are bombarded with propaganda telling us they "earned it" by "working hard" and "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" we pretend it is just a co-incidence that the people born into the top 1% almost always remain there, and people born in the bottom 99% almost always remain there. >After public schooling became…

Sure, I simplified a lot. The current western world order is still much more fair to the common folk than feudalism.

The education aspect was not as much about how much more educated the aristocracy was rather that the unwashed masses rose to their level, and it was not anymore sufficient to say that god has decreed duke X a distinguished gentleman and commoner Y a filthy peasant.

It is not easy to rise social ladders, but it's way easier with our figment of a fair society, rather than if we believed social status was a fixed quantity given by the creator of the universe.

The pithy armchair psychologist in me would claim modern society is much more facilitating towards a growth mindset than a feodal one.

Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#65

Post by patcon »

notahacker wrote: post #22

There's a big unanswered question about whether "debate" is quite so useful at improving accuracy of answers when it consists of an audience with strong priors listening to motivated reasoning rather than people deferring to the people who are most confident they have a decent grasp of the subject of a neutral trivia question. I think it's conceivable the opposite effect might occur if the experiment were be to repea…

In the same experiment (but still unpublished) they actually find evidence that a similar CONSENSUS effect is observed in polarized issues with no clear "best" choice.

https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_and_dan_ariely_how_...

The most interesting bit to me is the fact that a rare middle position stakeholder, a "high confident gray", allows groups to reach consensus more often. This potentially has huge applications in system design of the processes of democracy imho

Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#66

Post by vidarh »

Askolein wrote: post #19
mtgx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be direct democracy . No "democracy" on Earth is actually a direct democracy, but a representative democracy, which seems more in line to what this study proposes, no? A small group of elected officials to "debate" issues.

Switzerland is close to a direct democracy with a model based on: representative democracy by default but direct as soon and anytime the people feels the subject should be handled so. That system has proven very stable.

It has proven stable in the sense that it's still there, sure.

It has also proven prepared to continue oppressing substantial parts of the population for much longer than most of the rest of Europe (e.g. only giving suffrage to women on a federal level in the early 70's).

To me the Swiss system is a demonstration of the fundamental flaw of straight majority decisions.

Democracy is ultimately defined best not in terms of the expression of the wishes of a majority of the franchised, but how well protected the wishes of the minority and the disenfranchised are.

Most other places this has taken the form of e.g. bicameral systems and strong forms of legal oversight (to be fair the Swiss system was reformed substantially in constitutional reforms in the 90's), and other forms of expressly diluting the power of the majority to impose change.

Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#67

Post by arethuza »

GarvielLoken wrote: post #43
hobofan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That system has proven very stable. Caveat: with a small, well-educated population. Try and apply the same system elsewhere and your mileage may vary.

Then the obvious solution is to divide nation states down to small, well-educated populations no?

Say about 6 million people? On average?

[I'm a Scot - though that's not where I got the number from]

Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#68

Post by ebetica0 »

I wonder how much statistical independence has to play in this. e.g. the large crowd can be biased when they influence each other in a way that the small debates cannot. What happens when you have small independent debates versus large independent crowds?

Re: Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

#70

Post by agsdfgsd »

vidarh wrote: post #61
agsdfgsd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not convinced that people intrinsically "care" about migration Lots of people do. For many people it genuinely is about maintaining the nations their ancestors spent hundreds of generations creating. Nations, not states. Somalians can never be part of the German nation, no matter how long they have citizenship in the state called Germany. You can't spend decades telling white people how evil colonialism was, and…

Your idea of nations "their ancestors spent hundreds of generations creating is historical fiction. A hundred generations is around 2500 years. Look at some maps of migrations in Europe over the last 2500 years, and the idea of people mostly staying put over that time frame is demolished. Modern English is a West Germanic language, coming from the Germanic tribes that pushed aside the Celts, for example. The reason i…

>the idea of people mostly staying put over that time frame is demolished.

That idea was never put forward. Again, a nation is a people.

>It's about fear, where origin is a proxy.

It seems rather arrogant to tell other people what their beliefs are and what they are about. Would you tell Indians that they were evil racists for being "afraid" of the British invaders? That they just don't have enough experience, and you, being so much more wise and experienced know better than they do, and should be allowed to dictate to them who is allowed in their country?

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