My problem with democracy is that most people are stupid. More precisely, they are relatively good at saying whether they are happy or unhappy, starving or fed, etc. They can give a relatively reliable “thumb up” or “thumb down” feedback to the government. But if you ask them about the specific steps that should be taken to make them better fed, etc., many of the popular suggestions will be quite insane.
For example, people can have a legitimate complaint about healthcare being inaccessible for them, and yet the suggestion many would propose will be something like “government should spend more money on homeopathy and spiritual healing, and should definitely stop vaccination and other evil unnatural things”.
This seems inevitable to some degree. We can’t realistically expect that everyone will be an expert on everything. And we want to allow feedback such as “the experts are hurting us, and we want that to stop”, but we don’t really want the non-experts to micro-manage the experts.
The traditional solution is to give people only the “thumb up/down” kind of feedback. For example, in capitalism, you can choose to buy or not to buy a certain kind of product or service, but you can’t e.g. go to a restaurant and demand that they start cooking meals according to your recipe, no matter how good that recipe sounds to you. But you can start your own restaurant that will cook according to your recipes, and then the customers will vote on the result.
Even this approach has many problems, because some things seem good in short term, but are harmful in long term, and these often get a “thumb up” from the non-experts. The more tasty food can be less healthy. The economic problems or successes of today may be a consequence of things that the previous government did.
The problem with democracy is externalities. People who vote for stupid things don’t only hurt themselves; they equally hurt their neighbors. It would be better to set up things in a way that when people insist on doing the wrong thing, they hurt themselves more than they hurt the others. But this itself is a subject to voting, and many people oppose it.
...shortly, I am worried that this would allow democratic micro-management, i.e. the rule of stupid.
That said, I am not sure what is the optimal level of democracy, but I am suspicious of the assumption that more is necessarily better.
For example, people can have a legitimate complaint about healthcare being inaccessible for them, and yet the suggestion many would propose will be something like “government should spend more money on homeopathy and spiritual healing, and should definitely stop vaccination and other evil unnatural things”.
Yes. This brings to mind a general piece of wisdom for startups collecting product feedback: that feedback expressing painpoints/emotion is valuable, whereas feedback expressing implementation/solutions is not.
The ideal direct-democratic system, I think, would do this: dividing comments like “My cost of living is too high” (valuable) from “Taxes need to go down because my cost of living is too high” (possibly, but an incomplete extrapolation).
This parsing seems possible in principle. I could imagine a system where feedback per person is capped, which would incentivize people to express the core of their issues rather than extraneous solution details (unless they happen to be solution-level experts).
feedback expressing painpoints/emotion is valuable, whereas feedback expressing implementation/solutions is not.
Yep. Or, let’s say that the kind of feedback that provides solutions is worthless 99% of time. Because it is possible in principle to provide a good advice, it’s just that most people do not have the necessary qualification and experience but may be overconfident about their qualification.
I find it ironical that popular wisdom seems to go the other way round, and “constructive criticism” is praised as the right thing to do. Which just doesn’t make sense; for example I can say that a meal tastes bad, even if I don’t know how to cook; or I can complain about pain without being able to cure it.
My problem with democracy is that most people are stupid. More precisely, they are relatively good at saying whether they are happy or unhappy, starving or fed, etc. They can give a relatively reliable “thumb up” or “thumb down” feedback to the government. But if you ask them about the specific steps that should be taken to make them better fed, etc., many of the popular suggestions will be quite insane.
For example, people can have a legitimate complaint about healthcare being inaccessible for them, and yet the suggestion many would propose will be something like “government should spend more money on homeopathy and spiritual healing, and should definitely stop vaccination and other evil unnatural things”.
This seems inevitable to some degree. We can’t realistically expect that everyone will be an expert on everything. And we want to allow feedback such as “the experts are hurting us, and we want that to stop”, but we don’t really want the non-experts to micro-manage the experts.
The traditional solution is to give people only the “thumb up/down” kind of feedback. For example, in capitalism, you can choose to buy or not to buy a certain kind of product or service, but you can’t e.g. go to a restaurant and demand that they start cooking meals according to your recipe, no matter how good that recipe sounds to you. But you can start your own restaurant that will cook according to your recipes, and then the customers will vote on the result.
Even this approach has many problems, because some things seem good in short term, but are harmful in long term, and these often get a “thumb up” from the non-experts. The more tasty food can be less healthy. The economic problems or successes of today may be a consequence of things that the previous government did.
The problem with democracy is externalities. People who vote for stupid things don’t only hurt themselves; they equally hurt their neighbors. It would be better to set up things in a way that when people insist on doing the wrong thing, they hurt themselves more than they hurt the others. But this itself is a subject to voting, and many people oppose it.
...shortly, I am worried that this would allow democratic micro-management, i.e. the rule of stupid.
That said, I am not sure what is the optimal level of democracy, but I am suspicious of the assumption that more is necessarily better.
Yes. This brings to mind a general piece of wisdom for startups collecting product feedback: that feedback expressing painpoints/emotion is valuable, whereas feedback expressing implementation/solutions is not.
The ideal direct-democratic system, I think, would do this: dividing comments like “My cost of living is too high” (valuable) from “Taxes need to go down because my cost of living is too high” (possibly, but an incomplete extrapolation).
This parsing seems possible in principle. I could imagine a system where feedback per person is capped, which would incentivize people to express the core of their issues rather than extraneous solution details (unless they happen to be solution-level experts).
Yep. Or, let’s say that the kind of feedback that provides solutions is worthless 99% of time. Because it is possible in principle to provide a good advice, it’s just that most people do not have the necessary qualification and experience but may be overconfident about their qualification.
I find it ironical that popular wisdom seems to go the other way round, and “constructive criticism” is praised as the right thing to do. Which just doesn’t make sense; for example I can say that a meal tastes bad, even if I don’t know how to cook; or I can complain about pain without being able to cure it.