> Enter, O practitioner of conversational charity, and be welcomed.
Hey, if you don't have fun in life, what's the point? :)
> My point was that they are relevant, in the sense that inability doesn't necessarily imply malice.
Valid perspective that I overlooked.
> My analogy is "off" in that it is not literal, hard barriers, as with Earth->Alpha Centauri---but then, so was yours, in the sense that the owner of a company is a single individual and doesn't have collective action problems, whereas an electorate has nothing but. But I'd contend that my analogy is more useful/relevant to the specific issue of "owner potency" than the company owner analogy--which was the point.
Completely agree. I do indeed realize there is a collective action problem (I happen to think that this is the #2 problem), but my point or strategy in using this very simplified approach, however flawed my performance was, was to try to "counter" the perception (to the degree that it exists) that:
>> In a republic where deal-making has to happen, if you ran on W, X, Y, and Z, you might have to compromise on Z to get W, X, and a watered-down version of Y.
...is "just how it is", &/or "cannot be improved upon", or "is being done in mostly a well-intentioned manner", etc.
We have absolutely no idea how true any of these (and the hundreds of other plausible excuses) beliefs are. Which brings us to my supplementary point:
>> and if I asked them for insight into what, specifically, is happening behind the scenes, and they told me "it is literally not possible for us to provide you with that information" (and wouldn't say why it is not possible), I would be immediately launching a side project with the intent to replace the whole lot of them.
Is it not true that the American public, even if they were interested, has extremely little insight into what is really going on in the political system? Oh sure, there are plenty of "facts", reports, newspaper articles, and various other forms of messaging they can avail themselves of, but how accurate and comprehensive are these things with respect to what is actually going on? My intuition suggests: "not very".
> A company owner can of course expel management any time they like. My point is that a country is not like a company, and more specifically, an electorate is not like an individual. That last point is very important, and the crux of my argument. There are many many differences between working for a single owner, or even a board, vs an electorate....
All of the points and constraints you raise are completely valid, and very hard problems! But think of it this way: you came up with these (and could surely come up with many, many more) after perhaps a few minutes of back of the napkin systems analysis, something you can do because you presumably have many years of system-agnostic experience in doing so. My question is: has a serious and thorough analysis been performed on this system complex system, in recent history, by people who are deeply familiar with the wide spectrum of powerful new capabilities mankind has at its fingertips, in the form of software, AI, and the networked nature of the vast majority of the population (let's leave aside the current(!) intelligence level of this population, which is another system that deserves some analysis). Based on unbiased observations (say, an alien with no priors) of casual forum conversations, one might easily think so. But is it actually true? Exactly(!) how optimized is our current implementation of democracy? Has anyone even taken a proper look at it? Is there any evidence whatsoever that this task has been performed in an honest, substantial manner, by a bi-partisan group of unbiased, arms length, highly skilled people? My intuition suggests: "No, this has not been done."
> Just as adding more engineers to a project makes it later, adding more voters to a discussion of an issue (particularly complex issues) makes the electorate dumber and less reasonable.
Right! But this project is distinctly different than all others: it has no written in stone due date. Theoretically, we have infinite time! Although in practice, it's completely possible that we may even have less than a decade, considering the multiple legitimate "existential" crises we have on deck - but this is no reason to not do anything! On the contrary, we should be sorting out the completely ridiculous & petty arguments we have on this very site, and then proceed to put our collective minds to work on solving the actual fucking problem(s) that present themselves for this country, and the entire world...should we not?
But what do we actually do with our minds? Have the same old arguments year after year, mostly in the same form as prior years, and of a quality not all that dissimilar to that which you would find on /r/politics. Which then raises an even more important question, perhaps the most important question: why do we behave like this?
Is our behaviour part of the problem? And to be clear, I'm not talking only about "those people" (you know the ones), I'm talking about everyone.
> There's also the issue that, and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, what you're really talking about isn't "putting the right people in office." Because that begs the question: right for what? Say you replaced politicians with computers who would do exactly what they were told. Well, we can guess how that would turn out, because we have computers---having a perfect servant like that tends to spotlight the weaknesses in the programmer's thinking. How does one run a nation-state? Remember, we don't give the electorate power over this because we think they actually know how to do it. Rather we do it as a circuit breaker/safety measure to keep a functioning feedback loop in place---to put a lower bound on how bad things can get.
This is all just proper systems analysis - problems and constraints that must be accommodated. We do the analysis, and then we decide upon an initial approach, and then we adjust as needed, like literally every other competently executed project on the planet. And you never stop, because you are working within a dynamic, infinitely complex system.
> I have various suggestions on how things could be improved---they mostly don't matter because I am just one voice among 300 million
That yours is but one voice among 300 million is only one problem. Let's say you stumbled upon a genuinely brilliant idea - what would you do then? Write a letter to your political representative, sending that idea into the very system we're currently discussing?
I think the problem that mother nature has dealt us may fall under this category:
> “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos
For the sake of argument, let's assume that's the case. What then shall we do about it? It seems to me our ancestors found themselves in a rather similar predicament...what did they do?