91–100 of 123 posts
Perhaps we can save democracy by replacing the voting mechanism by placing people in groups of 10, and letting them reach consensus before making a vote.
Or groups of 11, so if they can't reach consensus there is at least a tie breaking mechanism.
Perhaps we can save democracy by replacing the voting mechanism by placing people in groups of 10, and letting them reach consensus before making a vote.
That was how the US Senate originally operated. You would elect your state legislature (where your vote is much less diluted than at the federal level) and they would elect your Senator. Early 20th century populism took that away. It also meant that the states now have no representation in the federal legislature, which led to an almost immediate federal takeover of basically everything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like trial by jury. I like it.
Trial by jury gets one set of 10 (12, whatever), whereas the consensus model described would have n sets of 10. I seriously doubt the wisdom of a crowd goes up when the total crowd size shrinks to 10. I suspect it plummets. This does call into question the notion of a multiple-jury trial (maybe videoconferenced in, where the individual juries do not interact with each other). Based on this study's findings, it would…
Perhaps we can save democracy by replacing the voting mechanism by placing people in groups of 10, and letting them reach consensus before making a vote.
If one will say "lets vote for X" and the rest will say "yea whatever".
They did not reach any consensus as the discussion did not really happen.
Only way to make democracy work is to let ppl who care reach consensus.
You can make a case that democracy is a grand application of “wisdom of large crowd”. But if that can easily and consistently outperformed then do we have better political system than democracy? What are the consequences of this?
Democracy (as in, majoritocracy) is mainly a way to keep people from fighting each other (because they know they ll be outnumbered). Wisdom was not the primary goal (Aristotle and Plato considered it a terrible system - even most public offices were appointed by lot).
Ostracism, Plutarch says[0], "was not usually inflicted on the poorer citizens, but on those of great houses, whose station exposed them to envy...every one was liable to it, whom his reputation, birth, or eloquence raised above the common level...ostracism was not the punishment of any criminal act, but was speciously said to be the mere depression and humiliation of excessive greatness and power; and was in fact a gentle relief and mitigation of envious feeling, which was thus allowed to vent itself in inflicting no intolerable injury, only a ten years' banishment. But after it came to be exercised upon base and villainous fellows, they desisted from it..."
[0] in his life of Aristides.
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…
The former isn’t true for income and doesn’t remain true for wealth for more than a couple generations. The latter is of course true because... math. 99% of the people are always going to be in the bottom 99%.
When you talk about the 1 percent for income, you are capturing doctors, lawyers, professors, and small business owners with your angst. Many of those people absolutely earned their position by busting their ass. You don’t become a successful spinal surgeon by having daddy grease the wheels. You do it by taking on $400k in debt and spending most of your 20s in school.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We work longer hours, have less nutritious and safe food, and have an epidemic of "mental illness" stemming from our lack of social bonds and community. But because we have medicine and electronic gadgets we declare ourselves to be much better off. This smacks of rosy retrospective bias. Even if we have less nutritious food, which is debatable, we have an abundance of it, sufficient to feed us all and we don't suff…
>Even if we have less nutritious food, which is debatable It really isn't, it has been measured. With increased atmospheric CO2, plants grow faster and end up with a much higher calorie:micronutrient ratio. We also consume vast quantities of industrial waste products now like "vegetable oil", HFCS and soybean by-products. >we have an abundance of it, sufficient to feed us all and we don't suffer famines and shortages…
Yet you provide none despite you making the extraordinary claims. Worrying about society overeating wasn’t even a thing in the US until the 50s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With increased atmospheric CO2, plants grow faster and end up with a much higher calorie:micronutrient ratio. Citation please. > We also consume vast quantities of industrial waste products now like "vegetable oil", HFCS and soybean by-products. Naturalistic fallacy. "Industrial waste" isn't necessarily harmful. > Famine wasn't as common as you seem to think it was, unless you include impoverished states, in which…
>Citation please. https://www.google.com/search?q=co2%20plant%20nutrition >Naturalistic fallacy. "Industrial waste" isn't necessarily harmful. It is not a naturalistic fallacy. The things I mentioned are harmful. Industrial waste may not be necessarily harmful, but it is also not necessarily food. We consume it because it is industrial waste, not because it is food. It is harmful, we consume it in vast quantities, it…
That’s a senseless statement. Nobody lives in the Stone Age today. That’s a period of time.
If you’re referring to primitive tribes with no outside world contact, then you’ll need to provide evidence and definitions for healthier/happier. They have high infant mortality rates, they kill disabled children, they die from treatable illnesses, and they starve during bad years.
Of course they have mental illness, there is no evidence they are immune to Down syndrome, schizophrenia, or anything else. They are just much more likely to murder or ostracize people having too much difficulty fitting into the tribe.
>It is harmful, we consume it in vast quantities
Ugh, you accidentally forgot to provide any evidence of its harm again. You just preceded it with another naturalistic fallacy that implied that it must be harmful because it’s industrial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have orders of magnitude safer food, fewer mentally ill than feudal folk. And we have medicine that works. Its disingenuous and incorrect to dismiss it so glibly.
I am not dismissing medicine. But the existence of medicine now does not mean life centuries ago was a horrifying existence struggling to survive as popular culture suggests. There are still primitive people now, whose existence is far closer to that subsistence stereotype than medieval Europeans were. They are overwhelmingly happy and healthy. They eat better than we do, are healthier than we are, and work less than…
Additionally, if they are in any kind of environment where they have to do manual labor for food, they work way more than most Americans do. Standing around for 40 hours a week making coffees for people is a walk in the park compared to tilling a field with a hoe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given more time I can remember something, or I can notice that the last question gives some hints or even unrelated associations that help to answer the first question. I don't think "if you don't know the answer in 20 seconds you won't ever know it" is true.
As far as I understand it, these were not simple right/ wrong questions, but questions about estimating a continuous measure (height, age, percentages). I have no reason to believe that questions were related or would give hints. Such a correlation would destroy the power of the experiment. As far as I understand it, this paper is not about "Do you know what is true or false in 20 seconds" but "what is a value you co…
In 20 seconds for the Eiffel Tower I’ll just pull a number out of my ass. In 5 minutes I will think through the comparison charts it shows up next to on other high rises. I’ll remember the half scale one in Las Vegas and its relative height to the Bellagio across the strip (about the same) and that the Bellagio was about 40 stories. Given 40 stories at 13 feet per floor, you get 520 ft * 2 = 1040 ft for the Eiffel Tower.