I am confused. Isn't that how democracy works?
This is what needs to change. Recently there was a story that Reese Witherspoon was in a jury, and the other jury members thought she was a real lawyer because of Legally Blonde. These people are not qualified to serve on a jury let alone vote.
Why are we getting input from people that couldn't run a small low traffic corner store on how to run a country? It's ridiculous, and it's the reason the US is in the mess it is now.
But how do you decide who votes? The fairest is obviously to allow voting for everyone. As soon as you try to single out 'unsuitable' people, you run into a problems of how you would do so? You could try to give people a basic test, but these 'literacy' tests were historically used to supress all kinds of minorities.
That is the true problem of democracy, it sucks, but everything else is miles worse. The people voted, the people get what they voted for. If you want a different result, convince people to vote differently.
That doesn't mean they would b e used to oppress minorities today. Except the minority that is deemed too ignorant to be granted a right to vote based on failing the test.
> That is the true problem of democracy, it sucks, but everything else is miles worse.
I don't think that's true, it's just that there is little motivation to come up with better alternative and people who try just get shit on for even trying as though it were an insurmountable goal.
In some places, of course it would be used to oppress minorities.
In other places, it would likely be used to oppress some other majority faction.
Not if the test and infrastructure for administering it is designed well to be resistant to this type of abuse, which it's possible to do.
Ideally, the goal would be not for people to resent not passing thee test and being unable to vote, but being motivated to better themselves until they are able to vote.
And therefore it will actually help?
Is anyone actually this naive?
Repeat: there is a whole academic discipline about optimal voting. But it must become a real concern...
You mean my post? I'd say the weakness in what I propose are no where near as bad as the weaknesses in the system we currently have.
> there is a whole academic discipline about optimal voting.
And I would never discard that or the results of the relevant research, but I genuinely think the system we have in place is too flawed, to fundamentally broken, to really make progress or fix things. Half the country literally considered anything from any legitimate source that clashes with their beliefs as 'fake news'.
How does academia suggest this problem should be addressed?
No, I meant that about «weighted votes» with heavily imperfect criteria for the weighing.
> no where near as bad
Never an excuse for skipping due diligence.
> suggest
I suggest the problem is taken into serious consideration, because already looking at phenomena like gerrymandering is astonishing, and anti-intellectualism is abasing on both sides (of the failed and the failing), etc. There are leaking faucets: stop ignoring them, plan and fix them. That means, find solutions, propose them, convince the public, have them implemented.
How? Half the public outright denies truth and fact, proudly.
My point is that isn't happening. Due to partisan deadlock party P can't implement solution S.
If that «half the public outright denie[d] truth and fact, proudly» caused such «partisan deadlock» that «party P [couldn]'t implement solution S», what you had stated would be that no legislation would be passed...
> The fairest [would be] obviously to allow voting for everyone
Certainly not, you are playing on a shade of meaning of "obvious" (i.e. "apparent"): that is strongly unfair to the gifted, cultivated etc. - it is unfair in terms of merit. And it is unfair to those who want an optimal system at their residence, etc.
It just means the people can (eventually) get rid of a bad one.
Article gives no clear answer to why would it will make everything worse. It does, however, speculate on how it may be a bad decision, but no one knows for sure.
This comes just weeks after security analysts sounded the alarm on Sandworm stealing credentials and data from American organizations. Sandworm is the operations wing of Russia's Military Intelligence Unit 74455, part of the GRU, that has been blamed for waging cyberwarfare against America's critical infrastructure.
That 'graph links directly to:
"Two Russians sanctioned over cyberattacks on US critical infrastructure" (22 July 2024)
<https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/22/russians_sanctioned_o...>
And:
"Kremlin's Sandworm blamed for cyberattacks on US, European water utilities" (17 April 2024)
<https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/russia_sandworm_cyber...>
The Register has tags linking to other Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) stories which detail many further such instances:
<https://www.theregister.com/Tag/Cybersecurity%20and%20Infras...>
Which is a very small sampling of what can be found online.
HN itself turns up nearly 300 story submissions for "russia hackers":
<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=russia%20hackers>
Let's dispense with the asking of facile questions readily answered within the article itself or very proximate resources. It is at best strongly disingenuous.
Otherwise, it is not a value per se: that would be a "tyranny of the majority".
Only if the population is sufficiently educated and good intentioned, and even then it's still the will of the majority, but because it's not a negative result it isn't considered a tyranny.
But the point is, a proper decision system boosts optimality at most "under inspiration" from the preferences of the voters, but not bound to that. Those voters may not even be a "majority"; there are many implementations (already forms of "ranked preferences") in which the idea of "majority" largely loses its meaning, etc.
I mean it closer to 'unjust rule'. For example, Jim Crow laws were an example of tyranny of the majority, and that power was not sized illegitimately. If the majority really wanted to restore something like that, there isn't any system in place that would stop them, not ranked choice voting, nothing - we have to rely on good education so they wouldn't want to do that, but we would need a clean slate to do that as well.
To many people are poorly educated, and raise their kids to be skeptical of education. That's such an immense problem that I'm not sure the US can really recover.
If we were starting from a clean slate, where everyone was well educated, it should work in theory, but even so I think we can have a much better system to any form of democracy we have now.
The term "tyrant" historically was used for rulers who were not part of the recognized dynasty: usurpers. The term shifted to "arbitrary power" because the tyrant ruled without grounds founding an authority. We can say "tyranny of the majority" as it can be valued as unfair that anything (majorities included) have power without full substantial authority.
> If the majority really wanted ... there isn't any system in place that would stop them
That is false, because there can be systems that do not attribute powers to majorities. (In fact, the rule of minorities is quite extensive in history, and not all voting systems give powers to majorities - or, as already expressed, the idea of "majority" loses a direct sense in some even simple voting systems.)
Which democratic systems of government prevent a majority from voting in new representatives to change the law as they see fit?
Majorities may be used technically but it is not the majority of the population that determines the policy (which remains indirect anyway).
They can still always overrule it though. That's inescapable in a democracy.
If you disagree, I hope you can give a more fleshed out example than, what seems to be, to be the vague handwaving you have been doing so far - no offense intended.
Close to impossible to say without consideration of specific implementations of the exemplary sub-frameworks proposed.
> a more fleshed out example
A John Rawls like framework of common best interest in not appointing beasts, coupled with criteria to discriminate beasts? The point is not about providing a detailed solution here, but in pointing in a direction beyond simple, lacking forms of democracy, suboptimal in theory and in results. If you have naïve processes in place, faults will eventually show: the system must become resistant. A large number of possible improvements can be considered: the point remains that they must be studied - this has never been the "end of history", if only because in too many systems the fool and the bright have similar impact.
And I need to say: like in all systems, checking what went wrong, why it went wrong, and implementing solutions so that it will not go wrong again.