It would acquire huge administrative efforts to test teens for their competence at voting
(You meant require, not acquire)
It would also require huge administrative efforts to test 18-year-olds for competence. So we simply don’t, and let them vote anyway. It’s not clear to me that letting all 12-year-olds vote is so much terribly worse. They mostly differ from adults on age-relevant issues: they would probably vote school children more rights.
It may or may not be somewhat worse than the status quo, but (for comparison) we don’t take away the vote from all convicted criminals, or all demented people, or all people with IQ below 60… Not giving teenagers civil rights is just a historical fact, like sexism and racism. It doesn’t have a moral rationale, only rationalizations.
It would also require huge administrative efforts to test 18-year-olds for competence. So we simply don’t, and let them vote anyway. It’s not clear to me that letting all 12-year-olds vote is so much terribly worse.
A randomly chosen 18-year-old is more likely than a randomly chosen 12-year-old to be ready to vote—though I agree that age isn’t necessarily the best cheap proxy for that. (What about possession of a high-school diploma?)
we don’t take away the vote from … all people with IQ below 60
A randomly chosen 18-year-old is more likely than a randomly chosen 12-year-old to be ready to vote
That’s the same problem under a different name. What does “ready to vote” mean?
What about possession of a high-school diploma?
That excludes some people of all ages, but it still also excludes all people younger than 16-17 or so. You get a high school diploma more for X years of attendance than for any particular exam scores. There’s no way for HJPEV to get one until he’s old enough to have spent enough time in a high school.
we don’t take away the vote from … all people with IQ below 60
Many would argue we should.
We should be clear on what we’re trying to optimize. If it’s “voting for the right people”, then it would be best to restrict voting rights to a very few people who know who would be right—myself and enough friends whom I trust to introduce the necessary diversity and make sure we don’t overlook anything.
If on the other hand it’s a moral ideal of letting everyone ruled by a government, give their consent to the government—then we should give the vote to anyone capable of informed consent, which surely includes people much younger than 18.
If it’s “voting for the right people”, then it would be best to restrict voting rights to a very few people who know who would be right—myself and enough friends whom I trust to introduce the necessary diversity and make sure we don’t overlook anything.
Yes, that would probably have better results, but mine is a better Schelling point, and hence more likely to be achieved in practice, short of a coup d’état. :-)
If it’s “voting for the right people”, then it would be best to restrict voting rights to a very few people who know who would be right—myself and enough friends whom I trust to introduce the necessary diversity and make sure we don’t overlook anything.
I think it works out better if you ignore your own political affiliations, which makes sense because mindkilling.
Even ignoring affiliations, if I really believe I can make better voting choices than the average vote of minority X, then optimizing purely for voting outcomes means not giving the vote to minority X. And there are in fact minorities where almost all of the majority believes this, such as, indeed, children. (I do not believe this with respect to children, but I believe that most other adults do.)
Well, you want larger margins of error when setting up a near-singleton than while using it, because if you set it up correctly then it’ll hopefully catch your errors when attempting to use it. Case in point: FAI.
EDIT: If someone is downvoting this whole discussion, could they comment with the issue? Because I really have no idea why so I can’t adjust my behaviour.
12 year olds are also highly influenced by their parents. It’s easy for a parent to threaten a kid to make him vote one way, or bribe him, or just force him to stay in the house on election day if he ever lets his political views slip out. (In theory, a kid could lie in the first two scenarios, since voting is done in secret, but I would bet that a statistically significant portion of kids will be unable to lie well enough to pull it off.)
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you’ll get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable. (Exercise for the reader: why is ‘well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway’ not a good response?)
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect. Imagine a test that is slightly biased and unfairly tests black people at 5 points lower IQ. So white people get to vote down to IQ 60 but black people get to vote down to IQ 65. Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you’ll” get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable.
“Maturity” isn’t obviously a desirable thing. What people tend to describe as ‘maturity’ seems to be a developed ability to signal conformity and if anything is negative causal influence on the application of reasoned judgement. People learn that it is ‘mature’ to not ask (or even think to ask) questions about why the cherished beliefs are obviously self-contradicting nonsense, for example.
I do not expect a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote to have worse outcomes than a country that does not. Particularly given that it would almost certainly result in more voting-relevant education being given to children and so slightly less ignorance even among adults.
I might be a little more generous than that. The term casts a pretty broad net, but it also includes some factors I’d consider instrumentally advantageous, like self-control and emotional resilience.
I’m not sure how relevant those are in this context, though.
The term casts a pretty broad net, but it also includes some factors I’d consider instrumentally advantageous, like self-control and emotional resilience.
I certainly recommend maturity. I also note that the aforementioned signalling skill is also significantly instrumentally advantageous. I just don’t expect the immaturity of younger voters to result in significantly worse voting outcomes.
“Maturity” is pretty much a stand-in for “desirable characteristics that adults usually have and children usually don’t,” so it’s almost by definition an argument in favor of adults. But to be fair, characteristics like the willingness to sit through/read boring informational pieces in order to be a more educated voter, the ability to accurately detect deception and false promises, and the ability to use past evidence to determine what is likely to actually happen (as opposed to what people say will happen) are useful traits and are much more common in 18-year-olds than 12-year-olds.
I do not expect a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote to have worse outcomes than a country that does not. Particularly given that it would almost certainly result in more voting-relevant education being given to children and so slightly less ignorance even among adults.
In my experience “voting-relevant education” tends to mean indoctrination, so no.
I do not expect a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote to have worse outcomes than a country that does not.
That’s a trick statement, because the biggest reason that a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote won’t have worse outcomes is that the number of such people voting isn’t enough to have much of an influence on the outcome at all. I don;t expect a country that adds a few hundred votes chosen by throwing darts at ballots to have worse outcomes, either.
The proper question is whether you expect a country that allows them to vote to have worse outcomes to the extent that letting them vote affects the outcome at all.
There is no trick. For it to be a trick of the kind you suggest would require that the meaning people take from it is different from the meaning I intend to convey. I do not limit the claim to “statistically insignificant worse outcomes because the 25 million people added are somehow negligible”. I mean it like it sounds. I have not particular expectation that the marginal change to the system will be in the negative direction.
I don’t find arguments against letting children vote very convincing either, except the argument that 18 is a defensible Schelling point and it would become way too vulnerable to abuse if we changed it to a more complicated criterion like “anyone who can give informed consent, as measured by X.” After all, if we accept the argument that 12-17 year olds should vote (and I’m not saying it’s a bad argument), then the simplest and most effective way to enforce that is to draw another arbitrary line based on age, at some lower age. Anything more complex would again be politicized and gamed.
But I think you’re misrepresenting the “influenced by parents” argument. 22-year-olds are influenced by their friends, yes, but they influence their friends to roughly the same degree. Their friends do not have total power over their life, from basic survival to sources of information. A physical/emotional threat from a friend is a lot less credible than a threat from your parents, especially considering most people have more than one circle of friends. The same goes for the 75-year-old—they may be frail and physically dependent on their children, but society doesn’t condone a live-in grandparent being bossed around and controlled the way a live-in child is, so that is not as big a concern.
The same goes for the 75-year-old—they may be frail and physically dependent on their children, but society doesn’t condone a live-in grandparent being bossed around and controlled the way a live-in child is
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect. Imagine a test that is slightly biased and unfairly tests black people at 5 points lower IQ. So white people get to vote down to IQ 60 but black people get to vote down to IQ 65. Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
You know, I can think of a worse test than that … eh, I’m not even going to bother working out a complex “age test” metaphor, I’m just gonna say it: age is a worse criterion than that test.
You might be able to argue that since people of different races don’t live to the exact same age, an age test is still biased, but I’d like to see some calculations to show just how bad it is. Also, even though an age test may be racially biased, there aren’t really better and worse age tests—it’s easy to get (either by negligence or by malice) an IQ test which is biased by multiple times the amount of a similar but better IQ test, but pretty much impossible to get that for age.
There’s also the historical record to consider. It’s particularly bad for IQ tests.
It’s not hard to come up with a scenario where having all voters be incompetents who choose the candidate at random is better for the population at large than just holding a racially biased election.
For instance, consider 100 people, 90 white and 10 black; candidate A is best for 46 whites and 0 blacks while candidate B is best for 44 whites and 10 blacks. For the population as a whole, B is the best and A is the worst. If the blacks are excluded from the franchise and the whites vote their own interests, the worst candidate (A) is always elected, while if everyone is incompetent and votes at random, there’s only a 50% chance of the worst candidate being elected
Although there’s more to politics than race, race is an important part of it, and we’re obligated to treat other people fairly with respect to race. The argument that it doesn’t matter how racially biased a test is because it’s good in other ways isn’t something I am inclined to accept.
The argument that it doesn’t matter how racially biased a test is because it’s good in other ways isn’t something I am inclined to accept.
I assume this is hyperbole, since obviously a truly perfect test could draw from any subset of the population, as long as it was large enough to contain near-perfect individuals.
With that said, I agree, we should attempt to avoid any bias in such a test, including that of race (I would not, however, single this possibility out.) That is what I meant by
That said, you would definitely have to be careful to ensure the test was as good as possible.
However, beyond a certain level of conscientiousness, demanding perfectly unbiased tests becomes counterproductive; especially when one focuses on one possible bias to the exclusion of others. In truth, even age is a racially biased criterion.
In context, MugaSofer had claimed that if a test that allows young people to vote based on IQ tests black people of equal intelligence as 5 points lower IQ, that’s okay because an age test is worse than that. I was, therefore, referring to that kind of bias. I’m not sure whether you would call “gives a number 5 points lower for black people of equal intelligence” ‘how the test works’ or ‘which outcomes it produces’.
In this context, MugaSofer’s test is clearly “how it works” because the test explicitly looks at the color of skin and subtracts 5 from the score if the skin is dark enough.
On the other hand, “which outcomes it produces” is the more or less standard racial bias test applied by government agencies to all kinds of businesses and organizations.
I didn’t describe a test which looks at the color of skin and subtracts 5; I described a test which produces results 5 points lower for people with a certain color of skin. Whether it does that by looking at the color of skin explicitly, or by being an imperfect measure of intelligence where the imperfection is correlated to skin color, I didn’t specify, and I was in fact thinking of the latter case.
These are two rather different things. I am not sure how the latter case works—if the test is blinded to the skin color but you believe it discriminates against blacks, (1) How do you know the “true” IQ which the test understates; and (2) what is it, then, that the test picks up as a proxy or correlate to the skin color?
Standard IQ tests show dependency on race—generally the mean IQ of blacks is about one standard deviation below the mean IQ of whites.
In my experience, if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they are claiming that properly understanding the question requires cultural context which is more or less common in one race than another.
An example I found here is a multiple-choice question which asks the student to select the pair of words with a relationship similar to the relationship between a runner and a marathon. The correct answer there was “oarsman” and “regatta”. Clearly, there was a cultural context required to correctly answer this question; examining the correlations between socioeconomic status and race, I would expect to find that the cultural context is more common among rich caucasians.
In my experience, if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they are claiming that properly understanding the question requires cultural context which is more or less common in one race than another.
In my experience if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they just don’t like the test results. Not always, of course, but often enough.
is more common among rich caucasians
Then the fact that East Asian people show mean IQ noticeably higher than that of caucasians would be a bit inconvenient, wouldn’t it?
In my experience if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they just don’t like the test results. Not always, of course, but often enough.
and
Steelman this.
What exactly do you mean by “often enough”? Do you mean to say that there is such a large number of false positives in claims of racial bias that none of them should be investigated? I am confused by your dismissal of this phenomenon.
Regarding the fact that East Asians tend to score higher than Caucasians on IQ tests (I am familiar with this difference in the US; I do not know if it applies to comparison between East Asian and majority-Caucasian countries), I would attribute it to culture and self-selection.
In the case of the United States, it is my understanding that immigration from Europe dominated immigration to the US during the Industrial Revolution—when the US was looking for, and presumably attracting, manual laborers—while recently, immigrants from Asia have made up a far larger share of the total immigrants to the US. I would guess that relative to European-Americans*, Asian-Americans’ immigrant ancestors are more likely to have self-selected for the ability to compete in an intelligence-based trade. This selection bias, propagating through to descendants (intelligent people tend to have intelligent children), would seem to at least partially explain why Asian-Americans score higher.
I do not have any information on Caucasians in their ancestral homelands vs. East Asians in their ancestral homelands.
*Based on recollection of stories told to me and verified only by a quick check online, so if others could chime in with supporting/opposing evidence, that would be appreciated.
I mean that a large number of different studies over several decades using different methodologies in various countries came up with the same results: the average IQ of people belonging to different gene pools (some of which match the usual idea of race and some do not) is not the same.
That finding happens to be ideologically or morally unacceptable to a large number of people. Normally they just ignore it, but when when they have to confront it the typical reaction—one that happens “often enough”—is denial: the test is racially biased and so invalid. Example: you.
Do you mean to say that there is such a large number of false positives in claims of racial bias that none of them should be investigated?
I do not believe I have said anything even remotely resembling this.
I am familiar with this difference in the US; I do not know if it applies to comparison between East Asian and majority-Caucasian countries
Yes, it does apply.
I would attribute it to culture and self-selection
Before you commit to defending a position, it’s useful to do a quick check to see whether it’s defensible. You think no one ran any IQ studies in China?
Thank you for clarifying your points. I mistakenly interpreted “often enough” as indicating some threshold of frequency of false positives beyond which it would not be appropriate to take the problem seriously. I apologize for arguing a straw man.
I was considering mostly the difference among people of different races in the United States, as I assumed that would minimize the effects of cultural difference (though not eliminate it) on the intelligence of the participants and their test results. I would anticipate that cultural influences do affect a person’s intelligence—the hypothetical quality which we imperfectly measure, not the impact that quality leaves on a test—as it can motivate certain avenues of self-improvement through its values, or simply allow access to different resources.
I am not surprised that there are IQ differences among racial groups. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that every culture and every natural environment and every historical happening in the entirety of human civilization happened to produce the exact same level of average intelligence. I would be surprised, but not shocked, to learn that there existed a strong, direct causation between race (as a genetic difference rather than a social phenomenon) and intelligence.
I did not mean to imply that because a test outputs different results for different racial groups, that it must be biased. I merely meant to say that bias can exist, though I am not certain whether or not it does, or to what degree. All in all, I seem to have made rather a fool of myself, jumping at shadows, and for that I am sorry.
An example I found here is a multiple-choice question which asks the student to select the pair of words with a relationship similar to the relationship between a runner and a marathon. The correct answer there was “oarsman” and “regatta”. Clearly, there was a cultural context required to correctly answer this question; examining the correlations between socioeconomic status and race, I would expect to find that the cultural context is more common among rich caucasians.
I’ve never seen any question resembling this on any IQ test I’ve ever taken. Have you? (Note that your link refers to the SAT I, which is not an IQ test.)
Is anyone claiming that the WAIS, for instance, is culturally biased in a similar way?
Feel free to propose that in fact it doesn’t matter how racially biased a test is because it’s good in other ways. I don’t know how many people will agree with you, though.
He claimed that a test that is bad overall is worse than a racially biased test. That might be a nontrivial argument if it he could show that it is worse by some fairly universal criterion. I pointed out that that he can’t show this, because I can come up with a scenario where the racially biased test is clearly worse than the overall bad test.
His reply to that was “there is more to politics than race”. In context (rather than by taking the literal words), he’s telling me that I shouldn’t emphasize race so much when talking politics. His argument for that? Um… none, really. There’s no argument to respond to or accept. All I can do is say “no, I don’t accept that premise. I think my emphasis on race is appropriate”.
If I may jump in here … Eugene seems to be asking if you consider non-racism inherently, terminally important or purely instrumental in the great war against sucky tests.
You seem to be agreeing that yes, racism really is more important than, say, conservative bias.
I’m not certain if you actually believe that … I would guess you do … but you seemed somewhat confused by the question, so I thought I’d ask.
That’s not an argument about race, that’s a generic argument about excluding any kind of people from an election—kids, mentally ill, felons, immigrants, etc.
It’s not an argument at all in that sense, it’s a counter-argument, to the claim that it doesn’t matter if a test is racist since the alternative is “worse overall”. I was pointing out that having a test be racist can be equivalent to being worse overall.
It also assumes that people will vote their own interests. Kids and the mentally ill presumably will not, so it doesn’t apply to them. And it assumes we care about benefiting them (and therefore that we care when a candidate is worse for the whole population including them); in the case of immigrants and possibly felons, we don’t.
I’d like to add this to the other posters’ responses:
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds.
Please taboo “immaturity” for me. After all, if taken literally it just means “not the same as mature, adult people”. But the whole point of letting a minority vote is that they will not vote the same way as the majority.
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect.
How is this different from saying that no test of 12-year-olds for “maturity” is perfect and therefore we do not give the vote to any 12 year olds at all?
How is this different from saying that no test of 12-year-olds for “maturity” is perfect and therefore we do not give the vote to any 12 year olds at all?
It isn’t all that different, but all that that proves is that we shouldn’t decide who votes based on maturity tests any more than we should on IQ tests.
“Well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway” is not a good response, but “show me your data that places 12-17 yo people significantly more immature then the rest of humanity, and taboo “immaturity” while you’re at it” is.
The first two, sadly, do make more sense, but then emancipation should become qualification to vote.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that pure experience—just raw data in your long-term memory—is a plausible criterion for a good voter. It’s not that intelligence and rationality is unimportant, since rational, intelligent people may well draw more accurate conclusions from a smaller amount of data.
What does matter is that everyone, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent, would be better off if they have a few elections and a few media scandals and a few internet flame wars and a few nationally significant policy debates stored in their long-term memory. Even HJPEV needs something to go on. The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they’re already pretty good.
The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they’re already pretty good.
By the same argument, they’d be even better voters 10 years later. Why not give the vote at 30 years of age, say?
Because any experience requirement draws an arbitrary line somewhere, and 18 is a useful line because it’s also the arbitrary line society has drawn for a lot of other milestones, like moving out of the house and finishing high school. Voting goes hand-in-hand with the transition out of mandatory formal education and the start of a new “adult life.” I think it makes sense that the voting age should be set to whatever age formal education ends and most people move out, but what age those things should happen at is again debatable.
One reason why those lines are drawn together is that, if voting age was much lower than the other lines, then young people would vote the other lines lower too: legal emancipation from their parents, legal rights to have sex and to work, and end of mandatory legally-enforced schooling.
People are unwilling to give the vote to 12 year olds because they’re afraid that they’ll vote for giving all other rights to 12 year olds as well. And most people would rather keep teenagers without rights.
ETA: on consideration I changed my opinion, see below. I now think it’s unlikely that 12 to 18 year olds would be a large and monolithic enough voting block to literally vote themselves more rights.
There’s actually a gradualist solution that never occurred to me before, and probably wouldn’t destroy the Schelling point. It may or may not work, but why not treat voting like driving, and dispense the rights piecemeal?
Say when you enter high school you get the option to vote for school board elections, provided you attend a school board meeting first and read the candidate bios. Then maybe a year later you can vote for mayor if you choose to attend a city council meeting. A year after that, representatives, and then senators, and perhaps each milestone could come with an associated requirement like shadowing an aide or something.
The key to these prerequisites IMO, is that they cannot involve passing any test designed by anyone—they must simply involve experience. Reading something, going somewhere—no one is evaluating you to see if you gained the “right” opinions from that experience.
When they’re 18 they get full voting rights. Those people who chose not to go through this “voter training” process also get full voting rights at 18, no questions asked—kind of like how getting a driver’s license at 16 is a longer process than getting one at 18 starting from the same driving experience.
This way, only the most motivated teens would get voting rights early, and everyone else would get them guaranteed at 18. There is likely potential for abuse that I may not have considered, but I believe with this system any prejudices or biases introduced in teens would be local, rather than the potentially national-scale abuses possible with standardized voter-testing.
Compared to, since you ask, the members of the student council that I elected when I was 12. Maybe you have had worse experiences for than I with elected student council representatives (my country has a different school culture and my grade happened to be one of the best to go through my school.) Or perhaps you have more respect for your current elected representatives. But for my personal experience the difference between national elections and school council elections is largely that the former has a larger body of sociopaths to select from so has stronger selection effects in that direction.
More generally the comparison I make is similar to Churchill’s:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
But they don’t need to be. The point of starting off very small is that the damage they can do is proportionally small. When we let teens learn to drive, we expect them to be significantly worse than the average driver, and they are, but they have to start at some point.
There aren’t enough 12 year olds who would vote that they can vote in things which adults nearly universally disagree on.
That’s true. Although, if they formed a voting block, it would be a significant one. But that’s not the real reason why people don’t want teenagers to vote.
I think it’s more of a feeling of what it means to be a full citizen with voting rights. People wouldn’t want to make teenagers into an oppressed minority that was denied full rights because it kept getting outvoted; it would feel unpleasant, scary and antagonistic.
Also, people under 18 are already permitted to have sex
That varies a lot between countries. Very few places have age of consent as low as 12-14 (puberty).
I also would like to note that it would be odd to apply a phrase like permitted to have sex to someone who was otherwise a full, voting citizen.
I won’t argue for the 21 year drinking age. For one thing, it was passed by federal governmental overreach (taking money from the states and not giving it back unless they passed a drinking age law).
The supposed reason for the 21 year old drinking age is that the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of impulse control, doesn’t fully mature until the early twenties, and therefore alcohol use before 21 would a) result in more mishaps like car accidents than alcohol use after 21, and b) harm brain development during a critical period. Which would be perfectly sound reasoning if it applied to voting, military service, cigarettes, lottery tickets, etc. If alcohol use is too risky because of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, then surely voting is too? But if you raised the voting age to 21 you’d have to raise the draft age, too, because it would be barbaric to send people off to die without even a nominal say in the decision to go to war. It’s far more practical to lower the drinking age.
Which would be perfectly sound reasoning if it applied to voting, military service, cigarettes, lottery tickets, etc. If alcohol use is too risky because of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, then surely voting is too?
Well for one thing alcohol’s effect is to further impair the prefrontal cortex.
But if you raised the voting age to 21 you’d have to raise the draft age, too, because it would be barbaric to send people off to die without even a nominal say in the decision to go to war.
But that’s not the real reason why people don’t want teenagers to vote.
Combined with your previous statement, that means that adults don’t want teenagers to vote because they would vote for other rights, but not out of fear they would actually get them. Which is decidedly odd.
Here’s something else to consider: perhaps adults think teenagers shouldn’t get those rights for a reason. Furthermore, perhaps most teenagers can’t comprehend that reason.
Of course, in making such a statement I need to avoid poisoning the well (I don’t want to say that any teenager who disagrees is ipso facto unable to comprehend), but even then, I think it’s pretty close to the truth.
(And a smart teenager is likely to think ‘I am smart enough and competent enough at making decisions to vote. But I know what a lot of other people my age are like, and they’re certainly not like that. I would overall be better off if I couldn’t vote as long as it kept them from voting.’)
(And a smart teenager is likely to think ‘I am smart enough and competent enough at making decisions to vote. But I know what a lot of other people my age are like, and they’re certainly not like that. I would overall be better off if I couldn’t vote as long as it kept them from voting.’)
What happens if we extend that reasoning to most adults as well? Is there some reason that most people become magically competent at 18? Perhaps things would be even better if voting were restricted further to some competent class of people?
(Of course that’s politically impossible, but it’s an interesting thought experiment)
Historically, the usual problem with that is that empowering competent people to make political decisions also empowers them to decide the meaning of “competent”, and the meritocracy slowly turns into an aristocracy. The purest example I can think of offhand is the civil service examinations gating bureaucratic positions in imperial China, although that wasn’t a democratic system.
Is there some reason that most people become magically competent at 18?
If you’re asking what the difference is between 18 − 1 day and 18, then that’s already been answered: whenever we need to make a distinction based on a trait that gradually changes, we’re going to have to set up some arbitrary boundary where the examples on one side are not very different from the examples on the other. The fact that the two sides are not very different is not a reason not to set the boundary.
Perhaps things would be even better if voting were restricted further to some competent class of people?
In most cases, we have no way to determine who is in such a class of people, that is not susceptible to gaming the system, abuse, and/or incompetent and reckless testing. It’s pretty hard to screw up figuring what someone’s age is.
Of course that’s politically impossible, but it’s an interesting thought experiment
Is my sarcasm detector broken or something? This experiment has been performed many times in many places, rich white males usually being the prime example of “some competent class”.
Actually, I find the Heinlein’s idea in Starship Troopers intriguing, where only ex-military are given citizenship.
Excuse me; politically impossible within the current political climate.
If you know of some way to restrict voting to some more competent reference class than “adults”, please do so.
History is against you, though, the power-holding reference class has been expanding rather than contracting (non-landholders, women’s suffrage, civil rights, etc).
One relatively simple (but also easily gameable) criteria is education and/or intelligence. Only 18-year-olds with a high school/college/postgraduate degree, only 18-year-olds with an IQ score/SAT score >= X, etc. We don’t want to try that because we know how quickly the tests and measurements would be twisted with ideology, and we worry that we would end up systematically discriminating against a class of people based on some hidden criterion other than intelligence/education, such as political views.
The problems with restricting the vote by some criterion of competence are:
1) the criterion will get subject to Goodhart’s law, this can be mitigated by using straightforward criteria, e.g., age.
2) the people meeting the criterion will act in ways that are in their interest but not in the interest of the people who do not fit the criteria, this is less of a problem with age because children already have adults, namely their parents, who have an interest in their children’s well-being.
the people meeting the criterion will act in ways that are in their interest but not in the interest of the people who do not fit the criteria, this is less of a problem with age because children already have adults, namely their parents, who have an interest in their children’s well-being.
That seems like a really serious problem. How much better off would children be if they were a special interest group and not their parents?
Well, at a certain point they’re just pushing buttons at random … but assuming a degree of filtering*, I would expect them to have at the very least a net positive effect. Although I suppose it’s possible (probable?) you have a lower opinion of children than me.
Come to think, even the interface could be enough to ensure this.
*Possibilities:
Not allowed to vote until they decide they want to.
Not allowed to vote until their parents say so.
Not allowed to vote unless they convince a panel of experts, judges, or random people off the street.
Not allowed to vote until they take a simple course on how to vote.
Not allowed to vote until a certain age (significantly lower than 18.)
Not allowed to vote unless passed by a qualified professional (Doctor? Psychiatrist?)
Not allowed to vote until they pass an exam (Politics? General knowledge? IQ? English?)
Most of these can also be combined in various ways, of course.
Many of your proposed filters do not really address Eugine_Nier’s point about Goodhart’s law.
If there is any structural bias in the first generation of vote filters, there are many reasons to be concerned that those who do not like the measure will not be sufficiently powerful to cause changes to the vote filters going forward.
I would expect them to have at the very least a net positive effect.
Evidence?
The way student counsel elections tend to play out is not encouraging to your case.
Also the problem with most of your proposed tests is that in practice they’re likely to degenerate into the test writer or administrator attempting to determine how they’d vote.
The way student counsel elections tend to play out is not encouraging to your case.
Having considered this further, I would no longer endorse that statement. Rather, I would expect a net positive effect relative to other types of voter.
Also the problem with most of your proposed tests is that in practice they’re likely to degenerate into the test writer or administrator attempting to determine how they’d vote.
While this is a problem—and one that, I suspect, rests on trying to control future government’s decisions—I’m going to go through the different ideas there, just for fun.
Not allowed to vote until they decide they want to.
Obviously, does not apply.
Not allowed to vote until their parents say so.
Almost certainly applies, but then, if you trust democracy anyway...
Not allowed to vote unless they convince a panel of experts, judges, or random people off the street.
Applies, barring certain safeguards, or the “random people” option if you like democracy and juries.
Not allowed to vote until they take a simple course on how to vote.
Technically applies, but we already have schools, so...
Not allowed to vote until a certain age (significantly lower than 18.)
Probably doesn’t apply … I guess someone who gets disproportionately old or young votes might try to change the age limit, for that reason.
Not allowed to vote unless passed by a qualified professional (Doctor? Psychiatrist?)
Depends on how much you trust doctors.
Not allowed to vote until they pass an exam (Politics? General knowledge? IQ? English?)
Since this was the original and “default” proposal, obviously, this applies. Although it might be hard to sneak into an English exam.
I think there would be knock-on effects for deliberately allowing incompetent doctors to qualify in order to indirectly mess with their ability to competently assess voters.
That’s not to say it might not be tried, I suppose …
Yes, I’ve attended one of those schools. The social science curriculum included some extremely blatant propaganda.
True. This is not usually considered a good argument against voting or schools, although perhaps it should be.
Although it might be hard to sneak into an English exam.
Not really.
“Explain, in your own words, why The Party is a glorious protector of our freedoms …”
Just kidding, I suppose you could make it easier to grade answers that agree with you higher—“why (or why not” questions where you’re expected to go for “why”, that sort of thing. And biased correctors would find biased answers more persuasive, I guess … it would be a lot harder than sneaking bias into a social science exam, though. (And that’s a stupid idea anyway :p)
Combined with your previous statement, that means that adults don’t want teenagers to vote because they would vote for other rights, but not out of fear they would actually get them. Which is decidedly odd.
I’ve thought about it, and I think this is more correct, and I was wrong before. (Or perhaps both reasons are correct, but this one is much stronger).
Historically, minorities who had voting rights but were otherwise legally discriminated against—blacks, gays, etc. - didn’t abolish that discrimination by simply voting themselves more rights. They had to fight for those rights by much more direct means.
Acquiring the vote is usually, historically, a relatively early step in the enfranchisement of a minority, and it doesn’t help directly in acquiring other rights. (I may be wrong about this; I’m not an expert.) When adults imagine the scenario of teenagers gaining the vote, it pattern-matches the narrative of an oppressed minority more or less violently fighting to gain other legal rights. Adults don’t want to give teenagers the vote because it would acknowledge them as an adversary, an independent force. It would give them some (perhaps symbolic) power and simultaneously frame them as opponents.
(And a smart teenager is likely to think ‘I am smart enough and competent enough at making decisions to vote. But I know what a lot of other people my age are like, and they’re certainly not like that. I would overall be better off if I couldn’t vote as long as it kept them from voting.’)
To go further in this vein: the smart teenager might realize that if only smart teenagers were allowed to vote, they would never have the numbers to influence the political state of affairs in their preferred direction; but if all teenagers were allowed to vote, the majority of them would vote in directions not aligned with the interests of the smart teenagers; therefore the smart teenagers would gain nothing from having voting rights, either way.
using the same argument, a smart adult might object to adults having voting rights, no?
The argument doesn’t just require that someone think they’re in a category containing a lot of bad voters. The argument requires that they think they’re in a category with voters who are comparatively bad, in contrast to people who are outside the category. A lot of smart adults would say “most voters are stupid”. But not very many would say “most voters like me are particularly stupid”.
A lot of smart adults would say “most voters are stupid”. But not very many would say “most voters like me are particularly stupid”.
That entirely depends on what the category of “voters like me” is—the category that may lose their votes. Very old people, mentally ill people, low IQ people, illiterate people, people with drug addictions… Within such category, an exceptionally (for the category) smart person may well think most other people “like them” are particularly stupid.
Well, if only smart teenagers were allowed to vote, they would be able to influence politics the same as any other minority—they can have an influence at the margins proportional to their size. The problem is that there’s no good way to say that only smart teenagers can vote just like there’s no good way to say that only smart adults can vote.
And a smart teenager is likely to think ’I am smart enough and competent enough at making decisions to vote. But I know what a lot of other people my age are like, and they’re certainly not like that.
You’re implying there’s supposed to be an age at which this stops being true?
It’s not logically consistent to believe that for all ages X people of age X are worse voters than average. There must be at least one age where the people of that age are better than average—it’s a logical necessity, because of how averages work!
I think you are confusing “most other voters my age are stupid” (which people can and do say at any age) and “most other voters in my group are particularly stupid, compared to the average voter”.
Actually, I was trying to make a joke, on the basis that the quoted section seems to imply the former.
Clearly I failed.
As an aside, have you considered applying that argument to other groups that were once disenfranchised? I’m not going to say it’s wrong, but that particular exercise certainly produces a worrying number of parrallels (similar to applying spaciest arguments to racist ones, as per the parent article.)
have you considered applying that argument to other groups that were once disenfranchised?
The argument is that a smart person in such a group would agree that the rest of them are too stupid to vote. It doesn’t apply to other disenfranchised groups until they actually would believe this too. I doubt that the other groups you are referring to would believe this.
I was thinking of women. Y’know, back in Ye Olden Days.
In general, I think, there is a tendency not to disenfranchise groups even if they are in some sense “below average”, because, y’know, representation be good. Again, imagine the racist pointing out that n**s have, on average, less education than we* do. Or maybe your model of Terrible People is less convincing than mine?
*he’s a racist, he aint talking to Them, he’s talking to Us White Guys.
EDIT: to be clear, I’m aware that those don’t necessarily follow, I’m just curious where Eugine draws the line and why.
FURTHER EDIT: If more experience = better, and you want the best possible pool of voters, then a “village elders” model springs to mind … that’s a pretty simplistic model, though.
FWIW, I’m under 30 and I still agree with him. (I’m not sure that unilaterally putting my proverbial money where my mouth is and refraining from voting until then when other people my age still vote would be a sane idea, though.)
In the interests of updating my model, did you believe this before reading his argument?
(I’m not sure that unilaterally putting my proverbial money where my mouth is and refraining from voting until then when other people my age still vote would be a sane idea, though.)
Nah, that just makes your age group even less sane.
(I’ve long suspected that, if we have to decide whom to allow to vote based on age alone, 18 is likely to be a lower threshold than optimal, but I have no strong opinion on what exactly the optimal threshold would be. Probably around the age at which the median youngster becomes economically independent from their parents, give or take half a decade.)
(I’ve long suspected that, if we have to decide whom to allow to vote based on age alone, 18 is likely to be a lower threshold than optimal, but I have no strong opinion on what exactly the optimal threshold would be. Probably around the age at which the median youngster becomes economically independent from their parents, give or take half a decade.)
12 year olds are also highly influenced by their parents. It’s easy for a parent to threaten a kid to make him vote one way, or bribe him, or just force him to stay in the house on election day if he ever lets his political views slip out. (In theory, a kid could lie in the first two scenarios, since voting is done in secret, but I would bet that a statistically significant portion of kids will be unable to lie well enough to pull it off.)
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you’ll get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable. (Exercise for the reader: why is ‘well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway’ not a good response?)
Don’t these two arguments cancel each other out? How can you simultaneously be concerned that children will vote immaturely and vote the same way as their parents?
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect. Imagine a test that is slightly biased and unfairly tests black people at 5 points lower IQ. So white people get to vote down to IQ 60 but black people get to vote down to IQ 65. Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
My favourite response to this is to retain the “everyone gets to vote at 18” aspect regardless of child enfranchisement. At least until you have tests people find acceptable or whatever.
How can you simultaneously be concerned that children will vote immaturely and vote the same way as their parents?
I have described two separate failure modes. I see no reason to believe that the two failure modes would cancel each other out.
My favourite response to this is to retain the “everyone gets to vote at 18” aspect regardless of child enfranchisement.
That doesn’t work. If everyone above age 18 can vote, black children can vote down to IQ 65, and white children can vote down to IQ 60, the result will still be skewed, although not by as much as if the IQ test was applied to everyone.
I see no reason to believe that the two failure modes would cancel each other out.
… you don’t? Could you explain your reasoning on this?
That doesn’t work. If everyone above age 18 can vote, black children can vote down to IQ 65, and white children can vote down to IQ 60, the result will still be skewed, although not by as much as if the IQ test was applied to everyone.
It doesn’t work perfectly. That’s far from the same thing as not working at all.
… you don’t? Could you explain your reasoning on this?
Yes. First of all, having two independent failure modes cancel each other out would be an astonishing coincidence. If you think that an astonishing coincidence has happened, you had better show some reason to believe it other than just saying “perhaps there will be an astonishing coincidence”. Second, it doesn’t follow that the two failure modes will always produce opposite results anyway. For instance, suppose that immature parents are more likely to pressure their kids into voting with the parents than mature parents are; then both failure modes increase the amount of immaturity-based votes.
It doesn’t work perfectly. That’s far from the same thing as not working at all.
It works worse, as far as racial bias goes, than having the 18 year old age limit and nothing else.
If you think that an astonishing coincidence has happened, you had better show some reason to believe it other than just saying “perhaps there will be an astonishing coincidence”.
I didn’t mean it as a coincidence. I meant that if you’re OK with adult voters, then you should be OK with kids parroting adult voters.
However, you have a good point about the possibility that poor voters might affect their children disproportionately. I can only respond that the same might be true of adult voters, but … yeah, there is definitely something to think about there.
It doesn’t work perfectly. That’s far from the same thing as not working at all.
It works worse, as far as racial bias goes, than having the 18 year old age limit and nothing else.
As I believe I pointed out elsewhere, there is more to life than racism. We are, in reality, talking about a tiny bias here. What kind of distortions are ageist biases producing?
Not to mention, in a racist world, oppressed minorities have lower life expectancy.
(Also, well …I feel uncomfortable just typing this, but the thought occurs that if the best test you can produce is racist, then maybe you should be updating the possibility that racists were onto something.)
I am okay with adult voters to the extent that any cure for poor voting by adults is going to be worse than the disease. Voting tests create incentives for corruption and mismanagement and historically have been associated with corruption and mismanagement pretty much whenever they have been used.
The problem with letting 12 year olds vote is not that they’d be overly influenced by their parents, it’s that they they’re worse at seeing through the various dark arts techniques people routinely employ and this would have the result of making politics even more of a dark arts contest than it already is.
Same way the driver’s-ed test or the citizenship test given to immigrants manage it? Or perhaps you think they don’t … I find it unlikely this design problem should be simply dismissed as unsolvable but it certainly needs to be borne in mind … point, I guess.
The driver’s-ed test and to a certain extent the citizenship test have different incentives then a voting test. In particular with a voting test the incentive is to turn it into a test of whether the person agrees with the test writers’ political beliefs.
I have to admit, I’m just assuming you would arrange better incentives for the designers. Say, have independent reviews and connect them to salary, or only recruit those with a strong desire for neutrality (and give them access to domain experts). Then again, I have no idea if the incentives actually align for the creators of other tests … everyone is crazy and the world is mad, etc, etc.
I have to admit, I’m just assuming you would arrange better incentives for the designers.
You seem to be massively underestimating how hard this is. You can’t simply wave this problem away by invoking words like “independent”, “neutrality”, and “domain expert” as if they’re some kind of magic spell.
… I wasn’t. I was sketching out, off the top of my head, the basic precautions I would take on attempting something like this. You seem to be estimating the difficulty—the impossibility—on the basis of a model where you take no precautions whatsoever.
Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
This is not a priori obvious. In any case why are imperfections with the test that happen to be correlated with race worse than imperfections correlated with occupation, social class, or any other trait that could act as a proxy for political beliefs?
(You meant require, not acquire)
It would also require huge administrative efforts to test 18-year-olds for competence. So we simply don’t, and let them vote anyway. It’s not clear to me that letting all 12-year-olds vote is so much terribly worse. They mostly differ from adults on age-relevant issues: they would probably vote school children more rights.
It may or may not be somewhat worse than the status quo, but (for comparison) we don’t take away the vote from all convicted criminals, or all demented people, or all people with IQ below 60… Not giving teenagers civil rights is just a historical fact, like sexism and racism. It doesn’t have a moral rationale, only rationalizations.
A randomly chosen 18-year-old is more likely than a randomly chosen 12-year-old to be ready to vote—though I agree that age isn’t necessarily the best cheap proxy for that. (What about possession of a high-school diploma?)
Many would argue we should.
That’s the same problem under a different name. What does “ready to vote” mean?
That excludes some people of all ages, but it still also excludes all people younger than 16-17 or so. You get a high school diploma more for X years of attendance than for any particular exam scores. There’s no way for HJPEV to get one until he’s old enough to have spent enough time in a high school.
We should be clear on what we’re trying to optimize. If it’s “voting for the right people”, then it would be best to restrict voting rights to a very few people who know who would be right—myself and enough friends whom I trust to introduce the necessary diversity and make sure we don’t overlook anything.
If on the other hand it’s a moral ideal of letting everyone ruled by a government, give their consent to the government—then we should give the vote to anyone capable of informed consent, which surely includes people much younger than 18.
Yes, that would probably have better results, but mine is a better Schelling point, and hence more likely to be achieved in practice, short of a coup d’état. :-)
I think it works out better if you ignore your own political affiliations, which makes sense because mindkilling.
Even ignoring affiliations, if I really believe I can make better voting choices than the average vote of minority X, then optimizing purely for voting outcomes means not giving the vote to minority X. And there are in fact minorities where almost all of the majority believes this, such as, indeed, children. (I do not believe this with respect to children, but I believe that most other adults do.)
Ah, but everyone thinks they know better … or something … I dunno :p
That’s just like saying “never act on your beliefs because you might be wrong”.
To be fair, that’s truer in politics than, say, physics.
Well, you want larger margins of error when setting up a near-singleton than while using it, because if you set it up correctly then it’ll hopefully catch your errors when attempting to use it. Case in point: FAI.
EDIT: If someone is downvoting this whole discussion, could they comment with the issue? Because I really have no idea why so I can’t adjust my behaviour.
12 year olds are also highly influenced by their parents. It’s easy for a parent to threaten a kid to make him vote one way, or bribe him, or just force him to stay in the house on election day if he ever lets his political views slip out. (In theory, a kid could lie in the first two scenarios, since voting is done in secret, but I would bet that a statistically significant portion of kids will be unable to lie well enough to pull it off.)
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you’ll get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable. (Exercise for the reader: why is ‘well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway’ not a good response?)
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect. Imagine a test that is slightly biased and unfairly tests black people at 5 points lower IQ. So white people get to vote down to IQ 60 but black people get to vote down to IQ 65. Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
“Maturity” isn’t obviously a desirable thing. What people tend to describe as ‘maturity’ seems to be a developed ability to signal conformity and if anything is negative causal influence on the application of reasoned judgement. People learn that it is ‘mature’ to not ask (or even think to ask) questions about why the cherished beliefs are obviously self-contradicting nonsense, for example.
I do not expect a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote to have worse outcomes than a country that does not. Particularly given that it would almost certainly result in more voting-relevant education being given to children and so slightly less ignorance even among adults.
I might be a little more generous than that. The term casts a pretty broad net, but it also includes some factors I’d consider instrumentally advantageous, like self-control and emotional resilience.
I’m not sure how relevant those are in this context, though.
I certainly recommend maturity. I also note that the aforementioned signalling skill is also significantly instrumentally advantageous. I just don’t expect the immaturity of younger voters to result in significantly worse voting outcomes.
“Maturity” is pretty much a stand-in for “desirable characteristics that adults usually have and children usually don’t,” so it’s almost by definition an argument in favor of adults. But to be fair, characteristics like the willingness to sit through/read boring informational pieces in order to be a more educated voter, the ability to accurately detect deception and false promises, and the ability to use past evidence to determine what is likely to actually happen (as opposed to what people say will happen) are useful traits and are much more common in 18-year-olds than 12-year-olds.
Interesting argument, I had never thought of that. I’m still sceptical about what the quality of such voting-relevant education would be.
On timescales much longer than politicians usually think about.
In my experience “voting-relevant education” tends to mean indoctrination, so no.
Or sometimes “economics” and “critical thinking.
That’s a trick statement, because the biggest reason that a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote won’t have worse outcomes is that the number of such people voting isn’t enough to have much of an influence on the outcome at all. I don;t expect a country that adds a few hundred votes chosen by throwing darts at ballots to have worse outcomes, either.
The proper question is whether you expect a country that allows them to vote to have worse outcomes to the extent that letting them vote affects the outcome at all.
In the US there are about 25m 12-17-year-olds.
In the last (2012) presidential election the popular vote gap between the two candidates was 5m people.
There is no trick. For it to be a trick of the kind you suggest would require that the meaning people take from it is different from the meaning I intend to convey. I do not limit the claim to “statistically insignificant worse outcomes because the 25 million people added are somehow negligible”. I mean it like it sounds. I have not particular expectation that the marginal change to the system will be in the negative direction.
And 75-year-olds are highly influenced by their children. (And 22-year-olds are highly influenced by their friends, for that matter.)
(I’m not saying we should allow 12-year-olds to vote, but just that I don’t find that particular argument convincing.)
I don’t find arguments against letting children vote very convincing either, except the argument that 18 is a defensible Schelling point and it would become way too vulnerable to abuse if we changed it to a more complicated criterion like “anyone who can give informed consent, as measured by X.” After all, if we accept the argument that 12-17 year olds should vote (and I’m not saying it’s a bad argument), then the simplest and most effective way to enforce that is to draw another arbitrary line based on age, at some lower age. Anything more complex would again be politicized and gamed.
But I think you’re misrepresenting the “influenced by parents” argument. 22-year-olds are influenced by their friends, yes, but they influence their friends to roughly the same degree. Their friends do not have total power over their life, from basic survival to sources of information. A physical/emotional threat from a friend is a lot less credible than a threat from your parents, especially considering most people have more than one circle of friends. The same goes for the 75-year-old—they may be frail and physically dependent on their children, but society doesn’t condone a live-in grandparent being bossed around and controlled the way a live-in child is, so that is not as big a concern.
Indeed, we outsource the job to nursing homes instead.
You know, I can think of a worse test than that … eh, I’m not even going to bother working out a complex “age test” metaphor, I’m just gonna say it: age is a worse criterion than that test.
You might be able to argue that since people of different races don’t live to the exact same age, an age test is still biased, but I’d like to see some calculations to show just how bad it is. Also, even though an age test may be racially biased, there aren’t really better and worse age tests—it’s easy to get (either by negligence or by malice) an IQ test which is biased by multiple times the amount of a similar but better IQ test, but pretty much impossible to get that for age.
There’s also the historical record to consider. It’s particularly bad for IQ tests.
No, sorry, I mean it’s worse overall, not worse because racist.
It’s not hard to come up with a scenario where having all voters be incompetents who choose the candidate at random is better for the population at large than just holding a racially biased election.
For instance, consider 100 people, 90 white and 10 black; candidate A is best for 46 whites and 0 blacks while candidate B is best for 44 whites and 10 blacks. For the population as a whole, B is the best and A is the worst. If the blacks are excluded from the franchise and the whites vote their own interests, the worst candidate (A) is always elected, while if everyone is incompetent and votes at random, there’s only a 50% chance of the worst candidate being elected
You realize there’s more to politics than race, right?
That said, you would definitely have to be careful to ensure the test was as good as possible.
Although there’s more to politics than race, race is an important part of it, and we’re obligated to treat other people fairly with respect to race. The argument that it doesn’t matter how racially biased a test is because it’s good in other ways isn’t something I am inclined to accept.
I assume this is hyperbole, since obviously a truly perfect test could draw from any subset of the population, as long as it was large enough to contain near-perfect individuals.
With that said, I agree, we should attempt to avoid any bias in such a test, including that of race (I would not, however, single this possibility out.) That is what I meant by
However, beyond a certain level of conscientiousness, demanding perfectly unbiased tests becomes counterproductive; especially when one focuses on one possible bias to the exclusion of others. In truth, even age is a racially biased criterion.
Do you define racial bias by how the test works or by which outcomes it produces?
In context, MugaSofer had claimed that if a test that allows young people to vote based on IQ tests black people of equal intelligence as 5 points lower IQ, that’s okay because an age test is worse than that. I was, therefore, referring to that kind of bias. I’m not sure whether you would call “gives a number 5 points lower for black people of equal intelligence” ‘how the test works’ or ‘which outcomes it produces’.
In this context, MugaSofer’s test is clearly “how it works” because the test explicitly looks at the color of skin and subtracts 5 from the score if the skin is dark enough.
On the other hand, “which outcomes it produces” is the more or less standard racial bias test applied by government agencies to all kinds of businesses and organizations.
I didn’t describe a test which looks at the color of skin and subtracts 5; I described a test which produces results 5 points lower for people with a certain color of skin. Whether it does that by looking at the color of skin explicitly, or by being an imperfect measure of intelligence where the imperfection is correlated to skin color, I didn’t specify, and I was in fact thinking of the latter case.
These are two rather different things. I am not sure how the latter case works—if the test is blinded to the skin color but you believe it discriminates against blacks, (1) How do you know the “true” IQ which the test understates; and (2) what is it, then, that the test picks up as a proxy or correlate to the skin color?
Standard IQ tests show dependency on race—generally the mean IQ of blacks is about one standard deviation below the mean IQ of whites.
In my experience, if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they are claiming that properly understanding the question requires cultural context which is more or less common in one race than another.
An example I found here is a multiple-choice question which asks the student to select the pair of words with a relationship similar to the relationship between a runner and a marathon. The correct answer there was “oarsman” and “regatta”. Clearly, there was a cultural context required to correctly answer this question; examining the correlations between socioeconomic status and race, I would expect to find that the cultural context is more common among rich caucasians.
In my experience if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they just don’t like the test results. Not always, of course, but often enough.
Then the fact that East Asian people show mean IQ noticeably higher than that of caucasians would be a bit inconvenient, wouldn’t it?
I’d like to quote you twice:
and
What exactly do you mean by “often enough”? Do you mean to say that there is such a large number of false positives in claims of racial bias that none of them should be investigated? I am confused by your dismissal of this phenomenon.
Regarding the fact that East Asians tend to score higher than Caucasians on IQ tests (I am familiar with this difference in the US; I do not know if it applies to comparison between East Asian and majority-Caucasian countries), I would attribute it to culture and self-selection.
In the case of the United States, it is my understanding that immigration from Europe dominated immigration to the US during the Industrial Revolution—when the US was looking for, and presumably attracting, manual laborers—while recently, immigrants from Asia have made up a far larger share of the total immigrants to the US. I would guess that relative to European-Americans*, Asian-Americans’ immigrant ancestors are more likely to have self-selected for the ability to compete in an intelligence-based trade. This selection bias, propagating through to descendants (intelligent people tend to have intelligent children), would seem to at least partially explain why Asian-Americans score higher.
I do not have any information on Caucasians in their ancestral homelands vs. East Asians in their ancestral homelands.
*Based on recollection of stories told to me and verified only by a quick check online, so if others could chime in with supporting/opposing evidence, that would be appreciated.
I mean that a large number of different studies over several decades using different methodologies in various countries came up with the same results: the average IQ of people belonging to different gene pools (some of which match the usual idea of race and some do not) is not the same.
That finding happens to be ideologically or morally unacceptable to a large number of people. Normally they just ignore it, but when when they have to confront it the typical reaction—one that happens “often enough”—is denial: the test is racially biased and so invalid. Example: you.
I do not believe I have said anything even remotely resembling this.
Yes, it does apply.
Before you commit to defending a position, it’s useful to do a quick check to see whether it’s defensible. You think no one ran any IQ studies in China?
Thank you for clarifying your points. I mistakenly interpreted “often enough” as indicating some threshold of frequency of false positives beyond which it would not be appropriate to take the problem seriously. I apologize for arguing a straw man.
I was considering mostly the difference among people of different races in the United States, as I assumed that would minimize the effects of cultural difference (though not eliminate it) on the intelligence of the participants and their test results. I would anticipate that cultural influences do affect a person’s intelligence—the hypothetical quality which we imperfectly measure, not the impact that quality leaves on a test—as it can motivate certain avenues of self-improvement through its values, or simply allow access to different resources.
I am not surprised that there are IQ differences among racial groups. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that every culture and every natural environment and every historical happening in the entirety of human civilization happened to produce the exact same level of average intelligence. I would be surprised, but not shocked, to learn that there existed a strong, direct causation between race (as a genetic difference rather than a social phenomenon) and intelligence.
I did not mean to imply that because a test outputs different results for different racial groups, that it must be biased. I merely meant to say that bias can exist, though I am not certain whether or not it does, or to what degree. All in all, I seem to have made rather a fool of myself, jumping at shadows, and for that I am sorry.
I’ve never seen any question resembling this on any IQ test I’ve ever taken. Have you? (Note that your link refers to the SAT I, which is not an IQ test.)
Is anyone claiming that the WAIS, for instance, is culturally biased in a similar way?
What’s your counter-argument?
It’s not an argument, it’s a premise.
Feel free to propose that in fact it doesn’t matter how racially biased a test is because it’s good in other ways. I don’t know how many people will agree with you, though.
You said you weren’t willing to accept the argument. Do you have any better reason than “I don’t feel like it”?
Wasn’t willing to accept what argument?
He claimed that a test that is bad overall is worse than a racially biased test. That might be a nontrivial argument if it he could show that it is worse by some fairly universal criterion. I pointed out that that he can’t show this, because I can come up with a scenario where the racially biased test is clearly worse than the overall bad test.
His reply to that was “there is more to politics than race”. In context (rather than by taking the literal words), he’s telling me that I shouldn’t emphasize race so much when talking politics. His argument for that? Um… none, really. There’s no argument to respond to or accept. All I can do is say “no, I don’t accept that premise. I think my emphasis on race is appropriate”.
Why is bias on the test that happens to correlate with race worse than any other bias?
I don’t see any argument in that.
If I may jump in here … Eugene seems to be asking if you consider non-racism inherently, terminally important or purely instrumental in the great war against sucky tests.
You seem to be agreeing that yes, racism really is more important than, say, conservative bias.
I’m not certain if you actually believe that … I would guess you do … but you seemed somewhat confused by the question, so I thought I’d ask.
That’s not an argument about race, that’s a generic argument about excluding any kind of people from an election—kids, mentally ill, felons, immigrants, etc.
It’s not an argument at all in that sense, it’s a counter-argument, to the claim that it doesn’t matter if a test is racist since the alternative is “worse overall”. I was pointing out that having a test be racist can be equivalent to being worse overall.
It also assumes that people will vote their own interests. Kids and the mentally ill presumably will not, so it doesn’t apply to them. And it assumes we care about benefiting them (and therefore that we care when a candidate is worse for the whole population including them); in the case of immigrants and possibly felons, we don’t.
I’d like to add this to the other posters’ responses:
Please taboo “immaturity” for me. After all, if taken literally it just means “not the same as mature, adult people”. But the whole point of letting a minority vote is that they will not vote the same way as the majority.
How is this different from saying that no test of 12-year-olds for “maturity” is perfect and therefore we do not give the vote to any 12 year olds at all?
It isn’t all that different, but all that that proves is that we shouldn’t decide who votes based on maturity tests any more than we should on IQ tests.
“Well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway” is not a good response, but “show me your data that places 12-17 yo people significantly more immature then the rest of humanity, and taboo “immaturity” while you’re at it” is.
The first two, sadly, do make more sense, but then emancipation should become qualification to vote.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that pure experience—just raw data in your long-term memory—is a plausible criterion for a good voter. It’s not that intelligence and rationality is unimportant, since rational, intelligent people may well draw more accurate conclusions from a smaller amount of data.
What does matter is that everyone, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent, would be better off if they have a few elections and a few media scandals and a few internet flame wars and a few nationally significant policy debates stored in their long-term memory. Even HJPEV needs something to go on. The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they’re already pretty good.
By the same argument, they’d be even better voters 10 years later. Why not give the vote at 30 years of age, say?
Because any experience requirement draws an arbitrary line somewhere, and 18 is a useful line because it’s also the arbitrary line society has drawn for a lot of other milestones, like moving out of the house and finishing high school. Voting goes hand-in-hand with the transition out of mandatory formal education and the start of a new “adult life.” I think it makes sense that the voting age should be set to whatever age formal education ends and most people move out, but what age those things should happen at is again debatable.
One reason why those lines are drawn together is that, if voting age was much lower than the other lines, then young people would vote the other lines lower too: legal emancipation from their parents, legal rights to have sex and to work, and end of mandatory legally-enforced schooling.
People are unwilling to give the vote to 12 year olds because they’re afraid that they’ll vote for giving all other rights to 12 year olds as well. And most people would rather keep teenagers without rights.
ETA: on consideration I changed my opinion, see below. I now think it’s unlikely that 12 to 18 year olds would be a large and monolithic enough voting block to literally vote themselves more rights.
There’s actually a gradualist solution that never occurred to me before, and probably wouldn’t destroy the Schelling point. It may or may not work, but why not treat voting like driving, and dispense the rights piecemeal?
Say when you enter high school you get the option to vote for school board elections, provided you attend a school board meeting first and read the candidate bios. Then maybe a year later you can vote for mayor if you choose to attend a city council meeting. A year after that, representatives, and then senators, and perhaps each milestone could come with an associated requirement like shadowing an aide or something.
The key to these prerequisites IMO, is that they cannot involve passing any test designed by anyone—they must simply involve experience. Reading something, going somewhere—no one is evaluating you to see if you gained the “right” opinions from that experience.
When they’re 18 they get full voting rights. Those people who chose not to go through this “voter training” process also get full voting rights at 18, no questions asked—kind of like how getting a driver’s license at 16 is a longer process than getting one at 18 starting from the same driving experience.
This way, only the most motivated teens would get voting rights early, and everyone else would get them guaranteed at 18. There is likely potential for abuse that I may not have considered, but I believe with this system any prejudices or biases introduced in teens would be local, rather than the potentially national-scale abuses possible with standardized voter-testing.
We already let 12 year olds vote for student council. The results are not encouraging.
We let adults vote in federal elections. I’m not especially impressed with those results either.
Compared to what?
Compared to, since you ask, the members of the student council that I elected when I was 12. Maybe you have had worse experiences for than I with elected student council representatives (my country has a different school culture and my grade happened to be one of the best to go through my school.) Or perhaps you have more respect for your current elected representatives. But for my personal experience the difference between national elections and school council elections is largely that the former has a larger body of sociopaths to select from so has stronger selection effects in that direction.
More generally the comparison I make is similar to Churchill’s:
But they don’t need to be. The point of starting off very small is that the damage they can do is proportionally small. When we let teens learn to drive, we expect them to be significantly worse than the average driver, and they are, but they have to start at some point.
The upside of letting teens drive is that it’s easier for them to get from place to place. Whereas expanding the vote is purely zero sum.
There aren’t enough 12 year olds who would vote that they can vote in things which adults nearly universally disagree on.
Also, people under 18 are already permitted to have sex (though not necessary with people who are much older).
That’s true. Although, if they formed a voting block, it would be a significant one. But that’s not the real reason why people don’t want teenagers to vote.
I think it’s more of a feeling of what it means to be a full citizen with voting rights. People wouldn’t want to make teenagers into an oppressed minority that was denied full rights because it kept getting outvoted; it would feel unpleasant, scary and antagonistic.
That varies a lot between countries. Very few places have age of consent as low as 12-14 (puberty).
I also would like to note that it would be odd to apply a phrase like permitted to have sex to someone who was otherwise a full, voting citizen.
How about applying a phrase permitted to have a beer to someone who is a full, voting citizen?
I won’t argue for the 21 year drinking age. For one thing, it was passed by federal governmental overreach (taking money from the states and not giving it back unless they passed a drinking age law).
The supposed reason for the 21 year old drinking age is that the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of impulse control, doesn’t fully mature until the early twenties, and therefore alcohol use before 21 would a) result in more mishaps like car accidents than alcohol use after 21, and b) harm brain development during a critical period. Which would be perfectly sound reasoning if it applied to voting, military service, cigarettes, lottery tickets, etc. If alcohol use is too risky because of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, then surely voting is too? But if you raised the voting age to 21 you’d have to raise the draft age, too, because it would be barbaric to send people off to die without even a nominal say in the decision to go to war. It’s far more practical to lower the drinking age.
Well for one thing alcohol’s effect is to further impair the prefrontal cortex.
Taboo “barbaric”.
Combined with your previous statement, that means that adults don’t want teenagers to vote because they would vote for other rights, but not out of fear they would actually get them. Which is decidedly odd.
Here’s something else to consider: perhaps adults think teenagers shouldn’t get those rights for a reason. Furthermore, perhaps most teenagers can’t comprehend that reason.
Of course, in making such a statement I need to avoid poisoning the well (I don’t want to say that any teenager who disagrees is ipso facto unable to comprehend), but even then, I think it’s pretty close to the truth.
(And a smart teenager is likely to think ‘I am smart enough and competent enough at making decisions to vote. But I know what a lot of other people my age are like, and they’re certainly not like that. I would overall be better off if I couldn’t vote as long as it kept them from voting.’)
What happens if we extend that reasoning to most adults as well? Is there some reason that most people become magically competent at 18? Perhaps things would be even better if voting were restricted further to some competent class of people?
(Of course that’s politically impossible, but it’s an interesting thought experiment)
Historically, the usual problem with that is that empowering competent people to make political decisions also empowers them to decide the meaning of “competent”, and the meritocracy slowly turns into an aristocracy. The purest example I can think of offhand is the civil service examinations gating bureaucratic positions in imperial China, although that wasn’t a democratic system.
If you’re asking what the difference is between 18 − 1 day and 18, then that’s already been answered: whenever we need to make a distinction based on a trait that gradually changes, we’re going to have to set up some arbitrary boundary where the examples on one side are not very different from the examples on the other. The fact that the two sides are not very different is not a reason not to set the boundary.
In most cases, we have no way to determine who is in such a class of people, that is not susceptible to gaming the system, abuse, and/or incompetent and reckless testing. It’s pretty hard to screw up figuring what someone’s age is.
So why do we treat age as if it functions as one? Genuinely asking.
Because it’s a proxy that deals with the problems I mentioned here much better than attempting to measure competence directly.
So, to be clear, you’re not saying that there’s no test of competency, but that age is the best test of competency we have?
I guess we’re starting to run into the limits of theorizing in the absence of experimentation
So you agree that in the absence of other tests having an age-based cutoff at 18 is better than having no cutoff or a lower cutoff?
If you have a proposal that deals with the problems I’ve mentioned here and here, I’m willing to consider it.
Not really, but in the absence of spare countries to run controlled trials on...
Is my sarcasm detector broken or something? This experiment has been performed many times in many places, rich white males usually being the prime example of “some competent class”.
Actually, I find the Heinlein’s idea in Starship Troopers intriguing, where only ex-military are given citizenship.
Excuse me; politically impossible within the current political climate.
If you know of some way to restrict voting to some more competent reference class than “adults”, please do so.
History is against you, though, the power-holding reference class has been expanding rather than contracting (non-landholders, women’s suffrage, civil rights, etc).
One relatively simple (but also easily gameable) criteria is education and/or intelligence. Only 18-year-olds with a high school/college/postgraduate degree, only 18-year-olds with an IQ score/SAT score >= X, etc. We don’t want to try that because we know how quickly the tests and measurements would be twisted with ideology, and we worry that we would end up systematically discriminating against a class of people based on some hidden criterion other than intelligence/education, such as political views.
And to be fair, you’d have to give ten or a hundred votes to people with PhD’s in political science.
The problems with restricting the vote by some criterion of competence are:
1) the criterion will get subject to Goodhart’s law, this can be mitigated by using straightforward criteria, e.g., age.
2) the people meeting the criterion will act in ways that are in their interest but not in the interest of the people who do not fit the criteria, this is less of a problem with age because children already have adults, namely their parents, who have an interest in their children’s well-being.
That seems like a really serious problem. How much better off would children be if they were a special interest group and not their parents?
Probably a lot worse since they generally don’t have the experience to know what policies are actually in their interest.
Well, at a certain point they’re just pushing buttons at random … but assuming a degree of filtering*, I would expect them to have at the very least a net positive effect. Although I suppose it’s possible (probable?) you have a lower opinion of children than me.
Come to think, even the interface could be enough to ensure this.
*Possibilities:
Not allowed to vote until they decide they want to.
Not allowed to vote until their parents say so.
Not allowed to vote unless they convince a panel of experts, judges, or random people off the street.
Not allowed to vote until they take a simple course on how to vote.
Not allowed to vote until a certain age (significantly lower than 18.)
Not allowed to vote unless passed by a qualified professional (Doctor? Psychiatrist?)
Not allowed to vote until they pass an exam (Politics? General knowledge? IQ? English?)
Most of these can also be combined in various ways, of course.
Many of your proposed filters do not really address Eugine_Nier’s point about Goodhart’s law.
If there is any structural bias in the first generation of vote filters, there are many reasons to be concerned that those who do not like the measure will not be sufficiently powerful to cause changes to the vote filters going forward.
Wait, I thought Goodhart’s law was the one about “teaching to the test”?
Yeah, not all of those are equally good. I suspect they may all be better than the current criteria, but don’t hold me to that.
Evidence?
The way student counsel elections tend to play out is not encouraging to your case.
Also the problem with most of your proposed tests is that in practice they’re likely to degenerate into the test writer or administrator attempting to determine how they’d vote.
Having considered this further, I would no longer endorse that statement. Rather, I would expect a net positive effect relative to other types of voter.
While this is a problem—and one that, I suspect, rests on trying to control future government’s decisions—I’m going to go through the different ideas there, just for fun.
Obviously, does not apply.
Almost certainly applies, but then, if you trust democracy anyway...
Applies, barring certain safeguards, or the “random people” option if you like democracy and juries.
Technically applies, but we already have schools, so...
Not allowed to vote until a certain age (significantly lower than 18.)
Probably doesn’t apply … I guess someone who gets disproportionately old or young votes might try to change the age limit, for that reason.
Depends on how much you trust doctors.
Since this was the original and “default” proposal, obviously, this applies. Although it might be hard to sneak into an English exam.
Don’t forget that it’s a piece of paper issued by the state that makes you a doctor as opposed to someone illegally practicing medicine.
I think there would be knock-on effects for deliberately allowing incompetent doctors to qualify in order to indirectly mess with their ability to competently assess voters.
That’s not to say it might not be tried, I suppose …
Yes, I’ve attended one of those schools. The social science curriculum included some extremely blatant propaganda.
Not really.
True. This is not usually considered a good argument against voting or schools, although perhaps it should be.
“Explain, in your own words, why The Party is a glorious protector of our freedoms …”
Just kidding, I suppose you could make it easier to grade answers that agree with you higher—“why (or why not” questions where you’re expected to go for “why”, that sort of thing. And biased correctors would find biased answers more persuasive, I guess … it would be a lot harder than sneaking bias into a social science exam, though. (And that’s a stupid idea anyway :p)
I’ve thought about it, and I think this is more correct, and I was wrong before. (Or perhaps both reasons are correct, but this one is much stronger).
Historically, minorities who had voting rights but were otherwise legally discriminated against—blacks, gays, etc. - didn’t abolish that discrimination by simply voting themselves more rights. They had to fight for those rights by much more direct means.
Acquiring the vote is usually, historically, a relatively early step in the enfranchisement of a minority, and it doesn’t help directly in acquiring other rights. (I may be wrong about this; I’m not an expert.) When adults imagine the scenario of teenagers gaining the vote, it pattern-matches the narrative of an oppressed minority more or less violently fighting to gain other legal rights. Adults don’t want to give teenagers the vote because it would acknowledge them as an adversary, an independent force. It would give them some (perhaps symbolic) power and simultaneously frame them as opponents.
To go further in this vein: the smart teenager might realize that if only smart teenagers were allowed to vote, they would never have the numbers to influence the political state of affairs in their preferred direction; but if all teenagers were allowed to vote, the majority of them would vote in directions not aligned with the interests of the smart teenagers; therefore the smart teenagers would gain nothing from having voting rights, either way.
That’s when you meet the venous valve: using the same argument, a smart adult might object to adults having voting rights, no?
Yes indeed. Of course, note that the argument does not apply to only smart adults having voting rights.
Things also change if we think that “smart adults” are a less monolithic bloc of interests than “smart teenagers”, which, it seems to me, is the case.
“Might”?
The argument doesn’t just require that someone think they’re in a category containing a lot of bad voters. The argument requires that they think they’re in a category with voters who are comparatively bad, in contrast to people who are outside the category. A lot of smart adults would say “most voters are stupid”. But not very many would say “most voters like me are particularly stupid”.
That entirely depends on what the category of “voters like me” is—the category that may lose their votes. Very old people, mentally ill people, low IQ people, illiterate people, people with drug addictions… Within such category, an exceptionally (for the category) smart person may well think most other people “like them” are particularly stupid.
Well, if only smart teenagers were allowed to vote, they would be able to influence politics the same as any other minority—they can have an influence at the margins proportional to their size. The problem is that there’s no good way to say that only smart teenagers can vote just like there’s no good way to say that only smart adults can vote.
You’re implying there’s supposed to be an age at which this stops being true?
It’s not logically consistent to believe that for all ages X people of age X are worse voters than average. There must be at least one age where the people of that age are better than average—it’s a logical necessity, because of how averages work!
I think you are confusing “most other voters my age are stupid” (which people can and do say at any age) and “most other voters in my group are particularly stupid, compared to the average voter”.
Actually, I was trying to make a joke, on the basis that the quoted section seems to imply the former.
Clearly I failed.
As an aside, have you considered applying that argument to other groups that were once disenfranchised? I’m not going to say it’s wrong, but that particular exercise certainly produces a worrying number of parrallels (similar to applying spaciest arguments to racist ones, as per the parent article.)
The argument is that a smart person in such a group would agree that the rest of them are too stupid to vote. It doesn’t apply to other disenfranchised groups until they actually would believe this too. I doubt that the other groups you are referring to would believe this.
I was thinking of women. Y’know, back in Ye Olden Days.
In general, I think, there is a tendency not to disenfranchise groups even if they are in some sense “below average”, because, y’know, representation be good. Again, imagine the racist pointing out that n**s have, on average, less education than we* do. Or maybe your model of Terrible People is less convincing than mine?
*he’s a racist, he aint talking to Them, he’s talking to Us White Guys.
This would probably actually not be a bad idea.
… 40? 60?
I’m guessing you’re over 30 years old :P
EDIT: to be clear, I’m aware that those don’t necessarily follow, I’m just curious where Eugine draws the line and why.
FURTHER EDIT: If more experience = better, and you want the best possible pool of voters, then a “village elders” model springs to mind … that’s a pretty simplistic model, though.
FWIW, I’m under 30 and I still agree with him. (I’m not sure that unilaterally putting my proverbial money where my mouth is and refraining from voting until then when other people my age still vote would be a sane idea, though.)
In the interests of updating my model, did you believe this before reading his argument?
Nah, that just makes your age group even less sane.
Which one? I hadn’t read this comment until now.
(I’ve long suspected that, if we have to decide whom to allow to vote based on age alone, 18 is likely to be a lower threshold than optimal, but I have no strong opinion on what exactly the optimal threshold would be. Probably around the age at which the median youngster becomes economically independent from their parents, give or take half a decade.)
OK, that answers my question. Thanks.
Don’t these two arguments cancel each other out? How can you simultaneously be concerned that children will vote immaturely and vote the same way as their parents?
My favourite response to this is to retain the “everyone gets to vote at 18” aspect regardless of child enfranchisement. At least until you have tests people find acceptable or whatever.
I have described two separate failure modes. I see no reason to believe that the two failure modes would cancel each other out.
That doesn’t work. If everyone above age 18 can vote, black children can vote down to IQ 65, and white children can vote down to IQ 60, the result will still be skewed, although not by as much as if the IQ test was applied to everyone.
… you don’t? Could you explain your reasoning on this?
It doesn’t work perfectly. That’s far from the same thing as not working at all.
Yes. First of all, having two independent failure modes cancel each other out would be an astonishing coincidence. If you think that an astonishing coincidence has happened, you had better show some reason to believe it other than just saying “perhaps there will be an astonishing coincidence”. Second, it doesn’t follow that the two failure modes will always produce opposite results anyway. For instance, suppose that immature parents are more likely to pressure their kids into voting with the parents than mature parents are; then both failure modes increase the amount of immaturity-based votes.
It works worse, as far as racial bias goes, than having the 18 year old age limit and nothing else.
I didn’t mean it as a coincidence. I meant that if you’re OK with adult voters, then you should be OK with kids parroting adult voters.
However, you have a good point about the possibility that poor voters might affect their children disproportionately. I can only respond that the same might be true of adult voters, but … yeah, there is definitely something to think about there.
As I believe I pointed out elsewhere, there is more to life than racism. We are, in reality, talking about a tiny bias here. What kind of distortions are ageist biases producing?
Not to mention, in a racist world, oppressed minorities have lower life expectancy.
(Also, well …I feel uncomfortable just typing this, but the thought occurs that if the best test you can produce is racist, then maybe you should be updating the possibility that racists were onto something.)
I am okay with adult voters to the extent that any cure for poor voting by adults is going to be worse than the disease. Voting tests create incentives for corruption and mismanagement and historically have been associated with corruption and mismanagement pretty much whenever they have been used.
The problem with letting 12 year olds vote is not that they’d be overly influenced by their parents, it’s that they they’re worse at seeing through the various dark arts techniques people routinely employ and this would have the result of making politics even more of a dark arts contest than it already is.
So we should test for resistance to Dark Arts Techniques, rather than base it on age? Excellent idea!
And how exactly to you propose doing testing in a way that doesn’t run into the problems with Goodhart’s law I mentioned here?
Same way the driver’s-ed test or the citizenship test given to immigrants manage it? Or perhaps you think they don’t … I find it unlikely this design problem should be simply dismissed as unsolvable but it certainly needs to be borne in mind … point, I guess.
The driver’s-ed test and to a certain extent the citizenship test have different incentives then a voting test. In particular with a voting test the incentive is to turn it into a test of whether the person agrees with the test writers’ political beliefs.
I have to admit, I’m just assuming you would arrange better incentives for the designers. Say, have independent reviews and connect them to salary, or only recruit those with a strong desire for neutrality (and give them access to domain experts). Then again, I have no idea if the incentives actually align for the creators of other tests … everyone is crazy and the world is mad, etc, etc.
You seem to be massively underestimating how hard this is. You can’t simply wave this problem away by invoking words like “independent”, “neutrality”, and “domain expert” as if they’re some kind of magic spell.
… I wasn’t. I was sketching out, off the top of my head, the basic precautions I would take on attempting something like this. You seem to be estimating the difficulty—the impossibility—on the basis of a model where you take no precautions whatsoever.
This is not a priori obvious. In any case why are imperfections with the test that happen to be correlated with race worse than imperfections correlated with occupation, social class, or any other trait that could act as a proxy for political beliefs?