> You seem to be talking about a thought experiment involving theoretical societal improvements and an omniscient oracle.
Yes, the omniscient oracle is a representation of the ability in thought experiments to know via the definition of the thought experiment what is true (virtually, within the thought experiment). This is unlike the object level reality we live in and are discussing, where what is true is only somewhat known (which itself often cannot be known) - for example, in this scenario, it is not known:
- what goes on behind closed doors in political circles
- what the intentions of all political participants are
- to what degree each individual person within our "democracies" are optimal
- to what degree the complex structural design of our "democracies" is optimal, or is as advertised/perceived to be the point of contention
> I'm talking about real countries and parties and political movements....
Let's see:
> ...that...
Wait minute....what is the nature of this "realness", where you can somehow possess knowledge of many thousands of object level actors and activities whom you have never met, and have no way of monitoring?
> ...care about democracy generally being aware that an educated electorate is vital for a well-functioning democracy, while dictators and people looking for a more restrictive and dogmatic society are generally aware that certain ideas and knowledge are a threat to their rules or their ideas about society.
Here you seem to be comparing "democracies" to dictatorships, an easy win, as if somehow the point of contention in the text of the conversation above is that. It is not.
You have not ~disproven or even argued against the speculative question/proposition contained within the thought experiment, but rather dodged it.
> Of course there's a contradiction in there....
That is not the only problem in there.
Noteworthy: accurately and comprehensively discerning the ideas contained within language (thought experiments, etc), with proper usage and references to object level vs abstract representations of reality (which can easily be mistaken for the thing itself, people being what they are) is a fairly sophisticated skill...one that needs to be learned, and that can easily not be noticed to be lacking, particularly during the discussion of "culture war" topics like this one.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
> What happens if people vote against democracy?
Here you are referring to "democracy" the abstract concept, but there is another existence of democracy: the object level entity that manages our affairs (and all the other things that the individual actors do within it: some known, some unknown, some hallucinated), and like any object level entity, it is only as good as it is. And, our ability to know what that is, is limited, a factual phenomenon which many people's knowledge of is also limited. And, this state of affairs is directly downstream from our education system.
> But anyway, I think it's pretty clear we're talking about completely different issues.
Yes, and it may not be possible to be otherwise, which I would say is strong evidence for my very point: the quality of our educational system is suspiciously (to me) low, on an absolute scale, and that it is very interesting that many if not most people do not have the ability to question, as they could easily do with most other things (how fast a car can go, how efficient an algorithm is, whether an ideology opposed to one's preferred ideology (ie: dictatorships) is flawed, etc), the very organizations that exert control over the world they live in more than any other.
I really struggle to understand how this can be so universally uninteresting, and I truly wonder if it is purely organic.