I could just call you a nasty, evil person, but instead I’m going to argue against you on more “rational” grounds.
One of the most important facets of democracy for good decision-making is the feedback loop between electors and elected, and thus between decision-makers and those affected by decisions. Voting is an informational signal from the ruled to the rulers, and legislation is an informational signal from the rulers to the ruled.
Now, what do we know about standard-issue humans trying to make decisions under partial certainty or great uncertainty regarding time-varying and complex pleasure/pain signals to optimize a large system for the expression of a broad system of values (and thus available good/evil stimuli)?
If you answered “they can’t really do it well”, I disagree. My position is: they need swift, sharp feedback in order to do it well. Humans are actually remarkably good at decision-making when given swift, sharp feedback signals.
So what’s the problem with an undemocratic democracy, or a technocracy as such? It shatters the feedback loop that’s signalling:
To the voters: how well their expressed policy preferences effect their expressed values, and how well their expressed values in the voting booth match their actual values as they experience themselves on an everyday basis.
To the government apparatus: what the masses prefer in public policy, how well the government is effecting those preferences, what impact actual enacted policies have on the voting masses, and the stability of the collective whole of society.
No feedback loop means the system as a whole can and will eventual spiral out of control from sheer divergence, as the people in power no longer know or care about the experience of the masses, leaving the masses with no reason to support the system itself, setting the stage for either a mass exodus or a revolt and thus destabilization of the State.
If you answered “they can’t really do it well”, I disagree. My position is: they need swift, sharp feedback in order to do it well. Humans are actually remarkably good at decision-making when given swift, sharp feedback signals.
I agree with this. The place where I don’t follow your analysis is the assumption that voting is the primary means of feedback. We only hold elections every few years. If you want “swift” feedback, elections are not the tool for you.
Moreover, they don’t give very precise feedback in any real democracy. In, say, the UK, the election sends basically two bits of information per voter—LibDem, Tory, Labor, or other. Even in the US, the ballot just doesn’t encode a lot of information about voters; it’s single or double-digit bits per year. And each additional bit per voter is hugely expensive to collect. It costs millions of dollars to pay for all the analysis, campaigning, advocacy and so forth that goes into a national or regional election.
Happily, we don’t rely on elections as our primary mechanism for sending signals to the government. Functioning democracies have an amazingly rich set of mechanisms for getting prompt feedback from the public. We have opinion surveys. We have newspaper editorial pages. We have constituent letters and phone calls. We have donations. We have private meetings between government officials and lobbyists. We also have the whole panoply of economic indicators—politicians do notice when the stock market crashes or when bond rates spike.
I think trying to optimize the information content of the election system is missing the point. Elections aren’t the right tool for preference elicitation. Elections are there to give force to voter preference—they’re not only a measurement tool or even primarily a measurement tool. They’re a civic ritual to demonstrate the presence or lack of voter support for the government and they’re a system to designate a specific alternative in the event that the incumbents are voted out. it’s important that the election produces a clear outcome and an outcome with enough political support to sustain itself until the next election. It’s not important that it extracts the maximum information about the voter preferences on election day.
In conclusion: If you want swift and detailed feedback from the public, run a telephone poll. Rounding up millions of people and asking them about their preferences every few years is a lousy way to measure sentiment.
I agree with this. The place where I don’t follow your analysis is the assumption that voting is the primary means of feedback. We only hold elections every few years. If you want “swift” feedback, elections are not the tool for you.
Moreover, they don’t give very precise feedback in any real democracy. In, say, the UK, the election sends basically two bits of information per voter—LibDem, Tory, Labor, or other. Even in the US, the ballot just doesn’t encode a lot of information about voters; it’s single or double-digit bits per year. And each additional bit per voter is hugely expensive to collect. It costs millions of dollars to pay for all the analysis, campaigning, advocacy and so forth that goes into a national or regional election.
Well yes. This is a very good criticism of our current democracies.
I could just call you a nasty, evil person, but instead I’m going to argue against you on more “rational” grounds.
One of the most important facets of democracy for good decision-making is the feedback loop between electors and elected, and thus between decision-makers and those affected by decisions. Voting is an informational signal from the ruled to the rulers, and legislation is an informational signal from the rulers to the ruled.
Now, what do we know about standard-issue humans trying to make decisions under partial certainty or great uncertainty regarding time-varying and complex pleasure/pain signals to optimize a large system for the expression of a broad system of values (and thus available good/evil stimuli)?
If you answered “they can’t really do it well”, I disagree. My position is: they need swift, sharp feedback in order to do it well. Humans are actually remarkably good at decision-making when given swift, sharp feedback signals.
So what’s the problem with an undemocratic democracy, or a technocracy as such? It shatters the feedback loop that’s signalling:
To the voters: how well their expressed policy preferences effect their expressed values, and how well their expressed values in the voting booth match their actual values as they experience themselves on an everyday basis.
To the government apparatus: what the masses prefer in public policy, how well the government is effecting those preferences, what impact actual enacted policies have on the voting masses, and the stability of the collective whole of society.
No feedback loop means the system as a whole can and will eventual spiral out of control from sheer divergence, as the people in power no longer know or care about the experience of the masses, leaving the masses with no reason to support the system itself, setting the stage for either a mass exodus or a revolt and thus destabilization of the State.
I agree with this. The place where I don’t follow your analysis is the assumption that voting is the primary means of feedback. We only hold elections every few years. If you want “swift” feedback, elections are not the tool for you.
Moreover, they don’t give very precise feedback in any real democracy. In, say, the UK, the election sends basically two bits of information per voter—LibDem, Tory, Labor, or other. Even in the US, the ballot just doesn’t encode a lot of information about voters; it’s single or double-digit bits per year. And each additional bit per voter is hugely expensive to collect. It costs millions of dollars to pay for all the analysis, campaigning, advocacy and so forth that goes into a national or regional election.
Happily, we don’t rely on elections as our primary mechanism for sending signals to the government. Functioning democracies have an amazingly rich set of mechanisms for getting prompt feedback from the public. We have opinion surveys. We have newspaper editorial pages. We have constituent letters and phone calls. We have donations. We have private meetings between government officials and lobbyists. We also have the whole panoply of economic indicators—politicians do notice when the stock market crashes or when bond rates spike.
I think trying to optimize the information content of the election system is missing the point. Elections aren’t the right tool for preference elicitation. Elections are there to give force to voter preference—they’re not only a measurement tool or even primarily a measurement tool. They’re a civic ritual to demonstrate the presence or lack of voter support for the government and they’re a system to designate a specific alternative in the event that the incumbents are voted out. it’s important that the election produces a clear outcome and an outcome with enough political support to sustain itself until the next election. It’s not important that it extracts the maximum information about the voter preferences on election day.
In conclusion: If you want swift and detailed feedback from the public, run a telephone poll. Rounding up millions of people and asking them about their preferences every few years is a lousy way to measure sentiment.
Well yes. This is a very good criticism of our current democracies.