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Robin Hanson's avatar

Boris and Arne, Boris' calculation also suggests great tolerated inequality of political power.

Paul, it seems clear to me most understand and don't care, but a survey to clarify would be fine.

William and Chuck, you lost me completely.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Robin Hanson writes "Or consider the horror many express at Bryan Caplan's suggestion to give more votes to the better educated. These might give you the impression that we are quite averse to political inequality."

I think you'd be much closer to the mark if you compared the intense negative reaction to David Friedman's proposals for letting the market sort out policy questions, or various milder broad negative reactions to various forms of people choosing policy by "voting with their feet"; those attitudes seem closer to an ideal of everyone having an inalienable share of coercive political power, and the proposals they oppose seem like a much closer parallel to decision markets.

One doesn't need to romance the idea of everyone having a right to impose majority rule in a district to intensely dislike the idea of giving more votes to the well-educated. Legally-mandated credentialism schemes in general, and voter qualification schemes in particular, have nasty theoretical instabilities that have an even nastier habit of showing up in the real world. I'm skeptical that having the government appoint a Predictor Certification Board and jailing any non-certified predictors would improve prediction quality; does that suggest to you that I'm motivated by a dream that no consensus be arrived at without giving equal weight to every uninformed person's opinion?

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