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Comment by mattlutze | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to which country you're assigning these noble ideals.

In no place I've lived would the average person walking into the voting box have spent time studying the history of banking law and policy to make a well-informed rational decision. They'd at most have read the opinions of some journalists or listened to a news reporter, and would make their decision after discussions between similar poorly informed friends/colleagues.

Fierce debates != well-informed debates.

We elect representatives because it's known that the body politic, once it reaches a large size, doesn't have the time to be well-informed on all decisions they'd need to make as a pure democracy. To suggest so exposes a serious need for a second look at the situation.

Representative democracy isn't elective oligarchy.

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> I'm curious to which country you're assigning these noble ideals.

Actually all of them.

> In no place I've lived would the average person walking into the voting box have spent time studying the history of banking law and policy to make a well-informed rational decision.

Because most people have been mercilessly been beaten into obedience, and the belief that they aren't actually able to think by themselves, that they're inferior to the oligarchs in command (hint: they aren't. The President is no better than me and no better than the garbage man).

In 2005, in France, the "referendum on a European Constitution" lit an immense debate, and there was an incredibly well-formed decision on an enormously obtuse tome of legalese.

You can check that similar debates are common in Switzerland. People actually think about the problem, discuss it, and vote in conscience.

If you think people aren't able to think and decide autonomously for themselves, you are actively opposing democracy.

Ordinary elective oligarchy is the ideology that mostly pass as "democracy" nowadays, but please don't stay abused and go on pretending you like democracy when you don't.

> You can check that similar debates are common in Switzerland. People actually think about the problem, discuss it, and vote in conscience.

Or in 90%+ of the case they just follow the opinion of the federal council.

> [...] (hint: they aren't. The President is no better than me and no better than the garbage man).

I would be surprised if he would be better than The Garbageman.

http://dilbert.wikia.com/wiki/The_Garbageman

Both of you are correct. The problem with direct democracy these days is that it ignores the power of mass media, which is to say it ignores the influence of money on a statistically significant portion of the voters.

Premise 1: if you continue adding people to the voting pool on an issue, at some point (X) you're going to exceed the number of people who have interest / time / capability to render themselves informed.

When you do, mass media begins to exert a much greater effect on the outcome (as these people are more susceptible to having their opinions swayed).

Premise 2: If you shrink the pool of potential voters, but keep the money involved the same, then corruption increases

There are of course things you can do legally to fight both of these negative outcomes, but I feel you'll always be fighting the basic tendencies. The solution then isn't direct democracy (where mass media overrides logic) or oligarchy (where corruption rules) but some point in between.

> Both of you are correct. The problem with direct democracy these days is that it ignores the power of mass media, which is to say it ignores the influence of money on a statistically significant portion of the voters.

That's why the example of the 2005 French referendum is so important. All of mainstream politics were campaigning for "Yes". All of media, papers, TV, radios were exclusively campaigning for "Yes". However, the "No" vote won by a comfortable margin 55% to 45%, and the campaign for the "No" almost entirely took place on the internet and social networks.

The outcome and the results are useless without normalizing against an unadvertised baseline.

If either traditional/big media or the internet and social networks influenced the vote by pursuading people who didn't do their own research -- that's a fundamental problem.

> Actually all of them.

I suspect you live in a bubble. Have you met many average voters?

Quite a lot, and I try to and avoid the self-satisfying feeling of smug contempt or disdain. And I've met people pretty close to the highest level of command of this world, too. Therefore I feel entitled to compare them and I'm absolutely certain that the difference between the lowest pavement sweeper and POTUS is much, much smaller than the oligarchy wants you to believe. Because you know, that would mean that democracy, equality, freedom are actually possible. That the rich and powerful don't actually deserve any special treatment. etc.

It would imply no such thing.

Voters do not have much incentive to make informed votes since the expected impact of their vote is very small. As a result, they tend to use their vote for signaling purposes, as a way to reflect the type of person they want to be, rather than based on what they anticipate the consequences of their vote will be.

If voters are so astute and informed, how do you explain that they radically disagree on the consequence of various policies, and that their disagreement can be predicted based on their parent's politics? How do you explain that in polls, voters position align so well with the left-right axis?

We aren't just talking about values here, but about a non subjective assessment of the consequences of policies. How odd that it would cluster in this way!

*> Voters do not have much incentive to make informed votes since the expected impact of their vote is very small.

True. This is called learned helplessness. But people can also learn autonomy, emancipation instead, given the possibility to make an impact.

I'm not pretending that people are "astute and informed", they aren't; but they're definitely able to become so.

Because most people have been mercilessly been beaten into obedience, and the belief that they aren't actually able to think by themselves, that they're inferior to the oligarchs in command.

I don't agree. I've read quite a bit of economics, I read serious newspapers from a range of political viewpoints, and I have a technical degree. All of this merely helps me to appreciate just how ignorant I am, and how complicated the world is.

Imagine that my local council asked its residents how much money this year should be dedicated to renewing the sewerage system, which is a typical example of the small but important decisions that have to be taken on behalf of the public. I don't know the first thing about sewerage engineering. If the council tells me that they recommend $10M then I have literally no idea whether this is the right number, even to an order of magnitude.

The Pointy Haired Boss is a character in the Dilbert cartoons. He doesn't understand the technology Dilbert is working on, but that doesn't stop him from telling Dilbert how to do his job. Direct democracy puts the public in the role of the PHB, and the results would be very similar.

But the thing is, the members of the council don't know either. Do you think the retired economist or the graduate in communication studies - the two most senior members of my local council - know about sewers?

> In 2005, in France, the "referendum on a European Constitution" lit an immense debate, and there was an incredibly well-formed decision on an enormously obtuse tome of legalese.

On the contrary, the outcome of the referendum was less about the merits of the proposed constitution, and more an expression of growing anti-Establishment social opinion and a demonstration of discontent with the majority parties and President Chirac.

> If you think people aren't able to think and decide autonomously for themselves, you are actively opposing democracy.

If you think people aren't able to determine how to choose reasonable facsimiles of their moral/social/economic position through which to abstract their effect on the daily operation of a state, you are actively opposing democracy.

Being able to choose when and how to make decisions must be a core component of the free exercise of democracy.

Switzerland, actually, is bloody good at this referendum thing. They do it all the time, and because of that the level of debate is relatively high and the populace make far better choices than you would see in a country without the same situation.

Can you point to a Swiss referendum campaign with a high level of debate? I've only closely followed one referendum campaign in Switzerland, I'll admit, but the level of debate in that one was quite low, even by the standards of a typical European election campaign. That was the 2014 referendum on whether to put quotas on Schengen-zone immigration [1]. It was basically the usual shouting match over immigration you'd expect anywhere, full of a lot of vitriol and not much in the way of rational debate or accurate statistics. The outcome was also what you'd expect anywhere else too, predictable more by demographics than argumentation: rural areas and less-educated people voted to restrict immigration, cities and the highly educated voted not to, so the final outcome depended mainly on voter turnout among each of those groups. Since getting your base as riled up as possible is a better way of getting turnout than rational debate, that's what both sides did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_immigration_referendum,_...

>the level of debate is relatively high and the populace make far better choices than you would see in a country without the same situation.

What about the Swiss referendum on an absolute ban on the construction of minarets? (note: not a ban on building mosques)

Switzerland, like many other European countries, has planning laws that decide on the architectural appropriateness of a building in its surrounding environment on a case-by-case basis. But this referendum, passed by a majority of the Swiss population, placed a complete ban on a minaret ever being built again in Switzerland. That was a completely democratic decision by the people of Switzerland. But was it based on informed debate? Or reactionary and emotional appeals? [1]

[1]http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/files/2010/11/ch-1.jpg

> In no place I've lived would the average person walking into the voting box have spent time studying the history of banking law and policy to make a well-informed rational decision

It is the responsibility of those advocating for a position in favour/against fractional reserves to inform voters and debate in front of them. Experts who can't or refuse to communicate to laypersons on matters than concern the latter are near useless.

> Representative democracy isn't elective oligarchy.

It's kind of funny, because when I looked up the word oligarchy, I noticed that Wikipedia had an entry for the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy#United_States

Both the ruling class and the public of the 21st Century United States have a great deal of emotional investment in pretending that we are some sort of hyper-equitable nation, governed wisely by the public in the interests of freedom and the general good, instead of our government being a plutocratic shit-show.

To be fair, the indoctrination starts at a very young age.

>In no place I've lived would the average person walking into the voting box have spent time studying the history of banking law and policy to make a well-informed rational decision.

Do they study laws, ethics, psychology, sociology, or criminology before making laws? The average voter on any issue is not educated. Why should any issue be given special consideration for this? And if this is an issue with every issue, then the issue is with democracy itself.

We can observe from the american congress that an elected minority is no better informed than the population at large. They have passed laws that were far to large for them to have read in the given time, they don't even have debates.

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