I think it's a ;pretty safe bet that just about every reasonably well-informed person on this planet today has heard some variation or another of the thesis that the majority of voters in any democracy are typically so stupid and/or poorly informed that the general "will of the people" is of dubious value.
To me, that argument, when more fully expressed, usually suffers from the naive belief that some other form of selecting leaders is not just as often bad in practice for most people as is a majority vote. I mean, you might at least sometimes get more competent leaders that way,. but those leaders tend to be much more obligated to consider the will of the few people who selected them than they are obligated to consider the will of majority of the people.
For instance, who can reasonably believe that a Stalin pays attention to a broader constituency than a Bush, an Obama, or even a Trump?
Of course, the notion that the majority should rule is in any significant way actually better than any other system of selecting leaders is so heavily called into question by the sciences that you would still quite obviously need to be an all-out, full throttle ahead, no brakes of any kind, raving imbecile to dispute it.
I, of course, am precisely that imbecile.
Or, if you absolutely insist I must be honest here (and therefore insist I have so much less fun, you insufferable Puritan party-pooper), I am of the tentatively held opinion that majority rule might be meaningfully asserted in a certain qualified way as perhaps the better system.
Bummer. So boring!
Anyway, maybe the best path to explaining my reasoning is to start with W. Edwards Deming's habit of introducing his graduate level courses in statistics with a simple experiment. Deming was a once famous quality control expert and management consultant with a background in mathematical physics. He would perform the same experiment on the first day of every graduate course he taught, and with (according to him) no significant variation in the results.
On a table in front of the students, where everyone was sure to get a good look at it, Deming would place a large glass jar filled with black and white marbles of equal size. He would then ask the students to carefully study the jar for a few minutes, after which he would have them write down their most confident guesses about how many marbles were in the jar (of both colors combined), and then submit those guesses to him.
Now, Deming claimed something all of us might expect: The guesses were more or less "all over the board". But the really fascinating part came next. He would then have a couple student volunteers calculate the average number of marbles, based on all of the individual guesses. The "arithmetic mean", if you wish to be more precise.
According to Deming, it never once failed that the average was within 5% of the actual number of marbles.
To emphasize, the group as a whole, typically about 30 or so students, was always more accurate as a group than all but a few of the students were as individuals.
Now, I might risk confusing you when I say that I don't think the experiment by itself means much to whether or not democracies are actually actually better ways to select leaders than other systems of government. I suppose I could grandly argue, if I wanted to, that the experiment somehow demonstrates that people in concert are better judges of reality than most individuals are alone. But though Deming himself understood that to be a logical implication of his experiments, if given a certain set of circumstances, I do not buy that democratic elections necessarily approach those circumstances. In current practice, they simply don't.
So what's the take-away here?
I would suggest at least two things. First, that the experiment can be lumped in with various lines of evidence that taken together might strongly lead us to conclude it is possible for groups to cancel out the effects of human and individual biases and errors in reasoning and judgement.
Of course, the most notable example of that effect is, not Deming's experiment, but the success of the sciences in discovering reliably predictable facts. That is, an important -- or perhaps even key -- part of the remarkable success of the sciences lies in the checks that peer-review gives to human and individual biases and errors in reasoning and judgement.
Now, the second take-away might be a little more difficult to see the full value of. It's this: A key condition of Deming's experiment is that everyone gets a clear and "honest" look at the jar before guessing anything. While I think that's easily seen as important, it might not be as easily seen just how important it is. In my opinion, it's actually vital. I do not believe the group average would consistently come within 5% of the actual number of marbles if that condition were much changed by partial or inherently misleading views of the jar.
So would those two take-aways, even if both were perfectly true, have much practical relevance to democracy?
I think we could easily go off-base here if we are not very careful in drawing any conclusions, even tentatively held conclusions. But I believe this much, at least, is safe to say: The most crucial point of those two facts is most likely something along these lines: The accuracy of the information available to an electorate cannot be over-valued, and even conversely: the dangers of too little, misleading, or false information are great enough to warrant all or any ways of ameliorating those dangers that do not in themselves pose a greater risk to democracy than the actual dangers themselves.
In sum, I think democracies should deploy and institutionalize every reasonably safe means of increasing the accuracy of information presented to the electorate, and they should also deploy and institutionalize every reasonably safe means of reducing the inaccuracy of information presented to the electorate.
In other words, I am assuming here than even an "imperfect" or merely partial increase in the accuracy of information, or an imperfect or merely partial decrease in the inaccuracy of information would still be worth going for it.
Can anyone say that their own or other democracies have done all they reasonably can do to realize either or both of those two goals?
To me, that argument, when more fully expressed, usually suffers from the naive belief that some other form of selecting leaders is not just as often bad in practice for most people as is a majority vote. I mean, you might at least sometimes get more competent leaders that way,. but those leaders tend to be much more obligated to consider the will of the few people who selected them than they are obligated to consider the will of majority of the people.
For instance, who can reasonably believe that a Stalin pays attention to a broader constituency than a Bush, an Obama, or even a Trump?
Of course, the notion that the majority should rule is in any significant way actually better than any other system of selecting leaders is so heavily called into question by the sciences that you would still quite obviously need to be an all-out, full throttle ahead, no brakes of any kind, raving imbecile to dispute it.
I, of course, am precisely that imbecile.
Or, if you absolutely insist I must be honest here (and therefore insist I have so much less fun, you insufferable Puritan party-pooper), I am of the tentatively held opinion that majority rule might be meaningfully asserted in a certain qualified way as perhaps the better system.
Bummer. So boring!
Anyway, maybe the best path to explaining my reasoning is to start with W. Edwards Deming's habit of introducing his graduate level courses in statistics with a simple experiment. Deming was a once famous quality control expert and management consultant with a background in mathematical physics. He would perform the same experiment on the first day of every graduate course he taught, and with (according to him) no significant variation in the results.
On a table in front of the students, where everyone was sure to get a good look at it, Deming would place a large glass jar filled with black and white marbles of equal size. He would then ask the students to carefully study the jar for a few minutes, after which he would have them write down their most confident guesses about how many marbles were in the jar (of both colors combined), and then submit those guesses to him.
Now, Deming claimed something all of us might expect: The guesses were more or less "all over the board". But the really fascinating part came next. He would then have a couple student volunteers calculate the average number of marbles, based on all of the individual guesses. The "arithmetic mean", if you wish to be more precise.
According to Deming, it never once failed that the average was within 5% of the actual number of marbles.
To emphasize, the group as a whole, typically about 30 or so students, was always more accurate as a group than all but a few of the students were as individuals.
Now, I might risk confusing you when I say that I don't think the experiment by itself means much to whether or not democracies are actually actually better ways to select leaders than other systems of government. I suppose I could grandly argue, if I wanted to, that the experiment somehow demonstrates that people in concert are better judges of reality than most individuals are alone. But though Deming himself understood that to be a logical implication of his experiments, if given a certain set of circumstances, I do not buy that democratic elections necessarily approach those circumstances. In current practice, they simply don't.
So what's the take-away here?
I would suggest at least two things. First, that the experiment can be lumped in with various lines of evidence that taken together might strongly lead us to conclude it is possible for groups to cancel out the effects of human and individual biases and errors in reasoning and judgement.
Of course, the most notable example of that effect is, not Deming's experiment, but the success of the sciences in discovering reliably predictable facts. That is, an important -- or perhaps even key -- part of the remarkable success of the sciences lies in the checks that peer-review gives to human and individual biases and errors in reasoning and judgement.
Now, the second take-away might be a little more difficult to see the full value of. It's this: A key condition of Deming's experiment is that everyone gets a clear and "honest" look at the jar before guessing anything. While I think that's easily seen as important, it might not be as easily seen just how important it is. In my opinion, it's actually vital. I do not believe the group average would consistently come within 5% of the actual number of marbles if that condition were much changed by partial or inherently misleading views of the jar.
So would those two take-aways, even if both were perfectly true, have much practical relevance to democracy?
I think we could easily go off-base here if we are not very careful in drawing any conclusions, even tentatively held conclusions. But I believe this much, at least, is safe to say: The most crucial point of those two facts is most likely something along these lines: The accuracy of the information available to an electorate cannot be over-valued, and even conversely: the dangers of too little, misleading, or false information are great enough to warrant all or any ways of ameliorating those dangers that do not in themselves pose a greater risk to democracy than the actual dangers themselves.
In sum, I think democracies should deploy and institutionalize every reasonably safe means of increasing the accuracy of information presented to the electorate, and they should also deploy and institutionalize every reasonably safe means of reducing the inaccuracy of information presented to the electorate.
In other words, I am assuming here than even an "imperfect" or merely partial increase in the accuracy of information, or an imperfect or merely partial decrease in the inaccuracy of information would still be worth going for it.
Can anyone say that their own or other democracies have done all they reasonably can do to realize either or both of those two goals?
