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Comment by seomis | Hacker News Reader

To those commenting with some variation of "only informed citizens should vote," pause and consider how much overlap there is with your idea of what an "informed" voter is with race/class lines. You may be unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases?) insisting that voters in the US should be, disproportionately, wealthier whites.

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Studies on statistical aggregations often show that a crowd can make a better guess collectively than any individual member.

If you ask a crowd to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, the people who are the worst overestimaters and underestimaters tend to cancel one another out, and the mean and median of all responses will be shockingly close to the actual numeric value. Therefore, my hypothesis is that reaching 100% voter turnout will be more beneficial per unit cost than any attempt to "inform" the citizenry already most likely to vote.

Here is a thought experiment. 20% of voters are knowledgeable about a subject, and vote accordingly. 80% vote based on a coin flip. How do the random voters harm the outcome of the vote? They add noise to the result, certainly. But if the signal from knowledgeable voters is unable to overcome the random noise, how certain can you really be that those people are correct? Is it at all important to know what percentage of all voters cared enough about the subject to self-inform, rather than just trust their lucky voting coin?

Outside a hypothetical, people are very rarely entirely ignorant of a subject. Even if they know only one true thing about it, when they vote based on that thing, it is incorporated into the statistical aggregate, and therefore influences the final result in some small way. If you restrict the vote to knowing certain things, only those things end up influencing the final result, and you can therefore bias the result by changing the test criteria.

The comparison is fundamentally flawed because the amount of jellybeans in a jar is an objective fact not subject to interpretation by anyone's values.

Ask 1000 6th graders the value of Euler's constant, or what the best fiscal policy is, and see how good the results.

I used to think this way. The thing that changed my mind was learning how much people think the USA spends on foreign aid[1]. On average, Americans think 28 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, but it is about 1 percent. People base policy preference on their mistaken impression. When informed of the correct amount, the number who think America spends too much on foreign aid changes from 61% to 30%.

Foreign aid is one persistently misunderstood issue that I know of, but I worry that there might be many similar issues.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/07/the-b...

To be more precise[0]:

  2013 US Budget                 ~= $3 803 300 000 000
  +- International Affairs        = $   52 018 676 000 ( 1.37%)
     +- State Operations          = $   17 702 825 000 ( 0.47%)
        +- Int'l Orgs             = $    3 386 331 000 ( 0.09%)
     +- Foreign Operations        = $   33 810 927 000 ( 0.89%)
        +- Bilateral Assistance   = $   21 134 577 000 ( 0.56%)
        +- Int'l Security         = $    8 791 500 000 ( 0.23%)
        +- Multilat. Int'l Orgs   = $    2 875 204 000 ( 0.08%)
        +- Foreign Banks/Funds    = $    2 548 553 000 ( 0.07%)
        +- Direct Food Aid        = $    1 533 859 000 ( 0.04%) [1]
        +- US AID                 = $    1 450 806 000 ( 0.04%)
        +- Independent Agencies   = $    1 258 585 000 ( 0.03%)
  +- US Dept. of Defense         ~= $  672 900 000 000 (17.7 %)
  Total Military SA+FR+UK+DE+JP  ~= $  283 500 000 000
  2013 AAPL total expenditures   ~= $  136 000 000 000

What people think of as "foreign aid" may vary. The budget covers everything from bed nets to bullets. If you count only spending on operations that most directly assist poor foreigners, such as US AID, Peace Corps, and UNICEF, rather than just writing checks to foreign politicians, militaries, and bankers, it amounts to about $7-$10 billion, or 0.2%-0.3% of the budget.

And nothing in the US budget takes up more than 25% of it. The top 4 items are, in fact, Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, military, and debt service (6.5%!). Even if you count all military spending as some sinister form of foreign aid, you can't get to 28%. The problem there is not just being uninformed. Someone must be actively spreading misinformation--lying to the public. That's a much bigger problem than simple ignorance, and trying to restrict turnout to only "informed" voters is not going to help when people believe they are informed after hearing enough lies.

[0] http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/224071.pdf [1] paid to US Dept. of Agriculture

As you point out, being "uninformed" seldom means total ignorance and a random vote, so throwing relatively uninformed non voters into the mix is unlikely to be neutral

So the question is what factors people who are largely indifferent to and ignorant of politics will incorporating into the statistical aggregate to a greater extent than voters that do care.

I'd suggest that the little pieces that people who don't know or care very much about politics tend to be aware of are [i] the recognised status quo (incumbent, major parties) [ii] the status quo ante (incumbents actually picking up votes based on old campaign promises they didn't deliver! and "the party of Lincoln") and [iii] the most simplistic elements of campaign advertising and media coverage.

Are these likely to be signals of who will be the more competent and popular government which the more motivated and generally more informed voters have tended to unfairly overlook, or just noise?

Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people.

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

The averaged length is likely to be close to the length of the median Chinese person's nose.

It would not in any way be accurate in terms of judging the fact that is the length of the Emperor's nose, but it would be the best possible guess China could possibly make based on the information then available to it.

You could as easily ask America how many grams of cocaine George W. Bush used while avoiding overseas military operations. And if you can ask that, you can also ask whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would make a better U.S. President.

You don't vote on facts. You vote on opinions. And if you want to know "America's opinion", more responses will yield more accurate results.

Since white people are disproportionately less likely to be convicted of a felony (even when committing the same crime), aren't proponents of the idea that every eligible voter must vote also insisting that voters in the US be disproportionately white?

Only if such proponents also advocate maintaining the status quo of using our criminal justice system as a means of disenfranchisement.

I didn't (and wouldn't) make such a comment. However, based on my personal experience, if wealth or race were a predictor at all, my "informed voter" group would likely be comprised of disproportionately few wealthier individuals.

I know politically informed minimum wage folks, and some really politically-flawed doctors and upper-level managers who spend so much time on their job or kids they don't care to read into politics. The "informed voters = rich whiteys" theory is just an assumption that infers people who want informed voters are often racist. Lets leave race out of such discussions and stick with how we could make an unbiased solution (race/class blind qualifier tests or whatever).

What if we don't think we could make an unbiased solution? What if the best solution is to simply get everyone to vote?

We won't know until we try. People are afraid of this option because they will be called elitist (see parent commenter), but the 'elites' would not be the ones a good solution would favor. If it fails then we fall back to where we are now.

"but the 'elites' would not be the ones a good solution would favor"

Depends on who gets to define what a good solution is. Given that our country has a huge history of, and still has a problem with suppressing and disenfranchising minorities and women, I am not willing to experiment with anything that's not designed to expand the vote to as many people as possible.

>Lets leave race out of such discussions and stick with how we could make an unbiased solution (race/class blind qualifier tests or whatever).

2008 voter turn outs: whites = 64%; blacks = 60%; Asian = 32%; Hispanic 31%.

education: 9th grade = 23%; High school grades = 50%; some college = 65%; BA = 71%; advanced degree = 76%.

Income shows the exact same, that as income goes up voter turn out goes up.

In theory I would agree with you that an unbiased solution resulting in 100% voter turn out across the board is the way to go. However, until such a solution manifests itself, how can race or any other existing bias be left out of the discussion? Isn't addressing existing bias in voter turn out part of the solution?

This is an interesting point. I suppose the counter would be that we only want the politically informed people who would naturally self-select anyway. It shouldn't matter if there is a bias in previous voter-turnout as many of the previous people who did vote would now not qualify, and the non-voters just stay as-is. Anyone who abstains would also need to vote as abstaining to make sure turnout stays high. I'm just riffing here, getting deep into the weeds of how a potential system could work.

how do i vote this up roughly 1,000,000 times? does that happen here or is that only a reddit thing (please excuse my ignorance -- i try to spend very little time in online comment threads and a lot of time working on vote.org)

So let me get this straight, you are trying to encourage people to vote but think your vote here on hacker news should be worth 1,000,000 times more than others?

> does that happen here or is that only a reddit thing

Each registered user can upvote each comment once; with a little accumulated track record, they alternatively can downvote once. Soliciting upvotes, etc. is against guidelines and generally not done. Talking about voting, rather than the subject at hand, is generally frowned upon.

So, more importantly, why do you support this comment so strongly?

Perhaps wealthier whites are more informed on average? Why does race or class matter?

Informed on what, though? Which candidate will be better for getting things like mandatory sick days passed, or which candidate will be better for business?

Those are highly correlated issues so perhaps pick a better example?

> Perhaps wealthier whites are more informed on average? Why does race or class matter?

Perhaps they are more informed on issues that affect wealthier whites and on the ways they affect wealthier whites. They probably are much less informed about what's affecting the poor Latino district.

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