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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

>> . Similarly how do they stop majority dominance and snowballing into group think? E.g if there are way more men or women in a program and they use their larger numbers to amplify their freedom of expression in a way that affects the others.

Is that not the very definition of democracy? Majority rule easily and frequently overrides and marginalizes minorities. Its kinda the point.

Of course specific minorities have gained mind-share over the years with the majority, and thus become "in the majority". Usually this takes the form of a growing acceptance that others, although different, are still people.

Women have had the vote for barely 100 years. Civil rights. Gay rights. Marriage rights, and so on.

It seems like every era brings a new fight, a new minority to hate, fear, ignore, accept and embrace. The old-guard has a moral panic, wails about their "way of life", but alas they are the minority, so eventually get shouted down.

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Pure democracy works better when you’re talking about very large groups or if everyone is subject matter experts.

In smaller groups, you may only have one or two people vs tens of others on each end of the topic.

All those victories you mentioned were the results of decades of slowly convincing people to a more accepting way of thought.

But when you have classes with very few members of any given demographic , there’s a higher chance of a specific point of view being shut out completely without merit .

>> Pure democracy works better when you’re talking about very large groups

I'd argue it gets worse the larger the group. Its very hard to change the direction of a large group because of inertia. Libertarianism has been around a while, but struggles to get traction when pitted against the established norms. Even if individuals are convinced, it's hard to convert enough individuals to matter.

>> or if everyone is subject matter experts

Again, a small group of experts doesn't necessarily create concensus. We saw that during the pandemic where each country, guided by experts, had such a variety of responses. Lock-out (new Zealand), lock down (China), carry on (Sweden), and innumerable random configurations (USA) all lead to different outcomes. Or did they? Sociologists will be dining out on this for decades.

Most functional democracies (I'm thinking company boards, member based clubs etc) understand nuance, and letting everyone win a bit, while finding compromises between majorities and minorities.

The explosion of insanity though (think QAnon) makes a mockery of the democratic process, and exposes the root flaw of group-think. What if the majority think Tom Hanks drinks the blood of sacrificed babies - what price democracy then?

That’s fair, and yeah very good points. Certainly, even in my lifetime, democracy has led to subjugation of minorities.

I guess that goes back to my initial premise that “free speech” and “free expression” are poor descriptors, though I’m not sure what better ones would be.

People end up colloquially conflating them with absolute freedom , when outside of libertarians, most societies have rules around it.

I generally feel like codes of conduct are better than using terms like “free”. They denote nuance while allowing flexibility of the guidelines.

This is a good comment that is being suppressed :-)

>> Is that not the very definition of democracy? Majority rule easily and frequently overrides and marginalizes minorities. Its kinda the point.

Yes, so much this. And it's not even a bad thing. We need norms to be able to coexist, even if those norms are somewhat arbitrary and have space for improvement. Finding those norms through consensus and a majority is not the worst way to go.

Just cos majority shares an opinion it doesn’t mean that opinion is somehow “good”.

Further more, some advanced ideas will stay in minority since the majority will not be able to comprehend them.

Basically the rule of majority will generally breed mediocrity in my opinion.

>> Just cos majority shares an opinion it doesn’t mean that opinion is somehow “good”.

Exactly. For a couple hundred years _after_ US independence, the majority considered women to be second-class people. (quite a few still do.)

>> Basically the rule of majority will generally breed mediocrity in my opinion.

Mediocrity is the _goal_ - its not a bug its a feature. Spare us the rule of a person who considers them self to be exceptional.

Alas these days, democracy would do well to get mediocrity. Judging by some of the candidates in the last election, mediocre would have been a step up. (fortunately the voting public seemed to agree with me.)

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