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pc86today at 11:44 AM2 repliesview on HN

Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly.

I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.


Replies

jodrellblanktoday at 12:52 PM

If I follow your comment, then a politician who is elected based on how they look while eating a bacon sandwich[1] is better at synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal because they are a politician?

(i.e. Politicians are selected from average people, often on things like appearance, charm, charisma, voice, snappiness, being less-bad than the other candidates, standing for the voter's preferred party, etc. not based on intelligence or systems thinking; so why would they be better reasoning about 3rd order effects than average people? And they are elected on short terms, so why would they be more interested in spending time trying than others?).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...

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DrScientisttoday at 12:01 PM

A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote.

However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.

So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.

This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.

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