Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrTonyD | Hacker News Reader

I've often thought that those who make decisions for society should be required to pass a test to show they understand all sides of an issue. It is absurd to me that politicians are currently allowed to make the wide variety of decisions that they make. I don't think anybody really wants to vote for them to do that. (There was an old episode of Star Trek that had officer candidates use the holodeck to be exposed to a wide variety of situations and outcomes. I would think that whatever we could do to emulate that should be a requirement for making associated decisions.)

View on HN

Then you get someone who would Kirk the Kobayashi Maru.

The danger there is that the people who write the test end up having some power. They can choose a biased set of questions or even demand wrong/biased answers. Being political issues, often nobody knows the right answers anyway.

So we'd need elections to choose who writes the tests and then who gets to vote for them?

The great thing about democracy is that no matter what goes wrong to the country internally, the blame lies with the people who voted for those politicians, or didn't bother to vote, which is most people. It's a way to thrash out difficult decisions where the people deciding are the same people who end up affected by them. There are gaps in this idea of course, like persecuting minorities and voters being more concerned about their tribal membership

You're very correct.

In the US, we've had variations of that in the US under the guise of a literacy test.[1] Promoting "understanding" sounds like a great idea until the test itself is made a weapon against groups that are considered "undesirable" by the majority of the populace.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

> great thing about democracy is that no matter what goes wrong to the country internally, the blame lies with the people who voted for those politicians, or didn't bother to vote, which is most people

In the abstract, this is true.

In the perception, it's always the leaders that screwed up - or whomever they can blame.

In democracy, as with most politics, perception is reality

I've often thought that apart from the very fewest national security issues all government should be conducted in the open: all cabinet meetings should be public, all political areas should be monitored and the results available to all, and all private political discussion between politicians should be banned on pain of imprisonment. If they've nothing to hide they've nothing to fear, right?

The problem I see with that proposal is that it would entirely eliminate the ability of Congress to compromise on anything, for fear of a video going viral showing them ceding ground on contentious issues and being used against them next election.

> all private political discussion between politicians should be banned on pain of imprisonment

Is that a public event, too?

Who gets to enforce the public-vs-private thing?

A lot of politicians are close friends. Some are even married to eachother. How is it practical to stop them discussing politics privately?

I'm guessing nobody at all would want to be a politician under those circumstances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com