Imagine a company had a team of sales people, who were assigned to sales regions that varied in their promise and difficulty of sales. The people assigned to easy rich regions tended to have high sales, while those assigned to poor difficult regions tended to have low sales. And such sales figures were used to decide compensation, raises, promotions, etc.
I used the word criminal to refer to organizations and people who violate the (moral) rights of other (innocent) people. There is no reason governments should get special-magic-fairy-dust status when evaluating their behavior, relative to other human behavior. If I dislike your lifestyle, and I choose to kidnap you and put you in a cage for 5 years for it, even though you didn't violate the rights of other innocent people, I'm a criminal. If you disagree, you're a crazy psychopath not worth talking to. If you think governments should get special-magic-fairy-dust status when they do this, you're still a crazy psychopth not worth talking to. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, this entire discussion is obsolete. I won't respond further.
You use the adjective "criminal" as if it was some unambiguous property divorced from human opinion. More egregiously, it seems you think your own opinion about what is criminal and what is not are unassailable truth. It may feel good to be right while everybody else is wrong, but I'm pretty sure it is useless in advancing anything you would actually want in the world, including understanding what is going on in other people's heads even as they imprison you for stuff that you magically *know* is not criminal. YMMV.
I think you're conflating two distinct propositions. One is that it's fairly predictable there will be some criminal organization structures and they will parasitize society to a degree. And yes, this is true, and yes, we should want those structures to be limited by some kinds of rules in their conduct rather than totally unpredictable.
But the other proposition is that those criminal organizations are legitimate and the people who defend themselves are morally blameworthy. If a violent goon wants to kidnap you and keep you in a cage for the next 5 years because they don't like your behavior, even though you violated no one's rights, and you kill the violent goon in self-defense, it's NOT moral for the rest of society to say "Fuck you evil criminal for resisting arrest! You should have followed the rules!" (while the mafia bosses are enjoying fancy dinners with fawning propagandists who signal-boost their bullshit in mainstream media)
The answer seems incredibly obvious to me: no one wants their vote "corrected" by anonymous bean counters. Brennans scheme is on a par with using leaves for money
Someones going to run things, and they will set the rules the rest of us follow and enforce those rules with force. So we will be run by a mafia. The question is, if we can get that mafia to follow some rules, what are some that we might prefer?
The answer is very simple and very sad: the sales system does not include rewards for making the sales system more efficient, so it defaults towards inertia. The problem is not people vehemently opposing CGPA calculation modifications; the problem is just that making institutional changes is very hard, and so it never gets done. You yourself, in fact, as an academic, are rewarded professionally and nonprofessionally for pointing out flaws in the system, and you do so - but even though you're a tenured professor at a Univeristy with lots of other like-minded such professors, you have yet to successfully lobby faculty. I submit this is not because it is impossible, but because you would not be rewarded for the long and hard journey through the institutions it would require. That, or you would immediately recognize that there are people with vested interests in maintaining the unfairness of the current system, like professors of easier classes, who have a natural veto.
(No one else has managed to do this lobbying either, so this is as much an indictment of them as you, but alas)
I agree that the sales and GPA examples are examples of unfairness, and so do many organisations who do correct these things. Most people just don't see the electoral situation of counting all votes equally as unfair.
Fairness is a matter of perspective. If you think of voting as a method of averaging information to make decisions as correct as possible, then depending on how the calculations are carried out, the adjustments might seem fair and reasonable. If you think of voting as an equal right, then adjusting people's votes after the fact seems like a form of corruption.
Regarding 'unfair' evaluations; for GPA, it is generally assumed that minor variations will come out in the wash. There is typically some form of scaling for 'hard' courses, either a curve or or some post-hoc adjustment. For sales, the best territories are usually doled out to the most experienced or otherwise best performing sales people, for which the results of the 'unfair' evaluation are (at least part of) the reward.
As for the questionnaire; Uh, no. This just moves the problems of 'literacy' questions to a different level. Who decides what the 'correct' answers are and what those answers mean? Also, how do you sample that 500? If it is just a random sample, it will overwhelmingly favor cities over rural.
Every additional level of complication in a political system provides the potentiality of an exploitable vulnerability.
Presumably some people don't want to correct for blatant unfairness because doing so would generate cognitive dissonance and psychological discomfort. Most people (~85% ?) claim and believe they are routinely or always fair in their dealings with others. If someone corrects for unfairness, that usually amounts to a self-admission that their belief in their own fairness was wrong for the matter at hand. The feelings would probably tend to be worse if the unfairness was blatant compared to correcting for a more subtle or nuanced unfairness.
"I’m not sure what to call it, but there’s something deep and important to understand here, on why we often don’t want to correct when we can for blatant unfairness."This statement strikes me as similar to the position of the social justice movement regarding the unfairness of existing social structures over different peoples. There are plenty of people who resist social justice arguments, often for terrible reasons. Why do some people not want to correct for blatant unfairness?
I can see nothing disenfranchising in what is proposed. What do you see as disenfranchising?
On a related topic, I've been disenfranchised from every large radical right politics I have tried to engage with since 2016. America's radical right no longer tolerates facts, truths or sound reasoning when any of it is too inconvenient. I've been cancelled (banned or blocked) at eight big sites so far, including Breitbart, The Federalist, Daily Wire, Town Hall, r/conservative, Daily Signal and The American Thinker. Guess that goes hand-in-hand with the Republican Party's RINO hunting. It has largely worked to get ideological cleansing accomplished.
This it sounds like moving in the right direction. I would love to see this tried for a couple of election cycles in a few states, say two blue, two red and 1 or 2 purple, assuming there are any purple any more.
What has a lot of personal appeal is something like the Australian system of mandatory voting. The evidence I've seen so far suggests that (i) it weakens extremism and strengthens centrism or non-extremism, (ii) slightly or modestly increases voter knowledge, and (iii) greatly increases voter participation.
To ward off the usual knee jerk objection, mandatory voting does not mean voting or anyone or anything a person does not want to vote for. It means getting a ballot and properly turning it in, even if it is left completely blank with no votes for anyone and/or anything.
My preference would be a progressive, non-trivial tax penalty for non-excused, non-voting.
Nothing in the proposed voting method involves experts. The 500 people are chosen at random.
If you are suggesting that voting in general is a bad way to decide things, then how does it matter if you have a plain vote, or the proposed adjusted vote preceded by 500 random people voting on some aspect of the adjustment?
And they could overwhelmingly vote that Einstein was factually wrong. See https://skepticalinquirer.o... plus "“It would not have required one hundred authors to prove me wrong; one would have been enough.” Basically, there is a fundamental problem with establishing "truth" via votes by supposed experts.
From the perspective of the voter who fails the test, I'm not sure it matters whether the vote is thrown out or altered, it's still not what they want.
I used the word criminal to refer to organizations and people who violate the (moral) rights of other (innocent) people. There is no reason governments should get special-magic-fairy-dust status when evaluating their behavior, relative to other human behavior. If I dislike your lifestyle, and I choose to kidnap you and put you in a cage for 5 years for it, even though you didn't violate the rights of other innocent people, I'm a criminal. If you disagree, you're a crazy psychopath not worth talking to. If you think governments should get special-magic-fairy-dust status when they do this, you're still a crazy psychopth not worth talking to. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, this entire discussion is obsolete. I won't respond further.
You use the adjective "criminal" as if it was some unambiguous property divorced from human opinion. More egregiously, it seems you think your own opinion about what is criminal and what is not are unassailable truth. It may feel good to be right while everybody else is wrong, but I'm pretty sure it is useless in advancing anything you would actually want in the world, including understanding what is going on in other people's heads even as they imprison you for stuff that you magically *know* is not criminal. YMMV.
I think you're conflating two distinct propositions. One is that it's fairly predictable there will be some criminal organization structures and they will parasitize society to a degree. And yes, this is true, and yes, we should want those structures to be limited by some kinds of rules in their conduct rather than totally unpredictable.
But the other proposition is that those criminal organizations are legitimate and the people who defend themselves are morally blameworthy. If a violent goon wants to kidnap you and keep you in a cage for the next 5 years because they don't like your behavior, even though you violated no one's rights, and you kill the violent goon in self-defense, it's NOT moral for the rest of society to say "Fuck you evil criminal for resisting arrest! You should have followed the rules!" (while the mafia bosses are enjoying fancy dinners with fawning propagandists who signal-boost their bullshit in mainstream media)
The answer seems incredibly obvious to me: no one wants their vote "corrected" by anonymous bean counters. Brennans scheme is on a par with using leaves for money
Someones going to run things, and they will set the rules the rest of us follow and enforce those rules with force. So we will be run by a mafia. The question is, if we can get that mafia to follow some rules, what are some that we might prefer?
The answer is very simple and very sad: the sales system does not include rewards for making the sales system more efficient, so it defaults towards inertia. The problem is not people vehemently opposing CGPA calculation modifications; the problem is just that making institutional changes is very hard, and so it never gets done. You yourself, in fact, as an academic, are rewarded professionally and nonprofessionally for pointing out flaws in the system, and you do so - but even though you're a tenured professor at a Univeristy with lots of other like-minded such professors, you have yet to successfully lobby faculty. I submit this is not because it is impossible, but because you would not be rewarded for the long and hard journey through the institutions it would require. That, or you would immediately recognize that there are people with vested interests in maintaining the unfairness of the current system, like professors of easier classes, who have a natural veto.
(No one else has managed to do this lobbying either, so this is as much an indictment of them as you, but alas)
I agree that the sales and GPA examples are examples of unfairness, and so do many organisations who do correct these things. Most people just don't see the electoral situation of counting all votes equally as unfair.
Fairness is a matter of perspective. If you think of voting as a method of averaging information to make decisions as correct as possible, then depending on how the calculations are carried out, the adjustments might seem fair and reasonable. If you think of voting as an equal right, then adjusting people's votes after the fact seems like a form of corruption.
Regarding 'unfair' evaluations; for GPA, it is generally assumed that minor variations will come out in the wash. There is typically some form of scaling for 'hard' courses, either a curve or or some post-hoc adjustment. For sales, the best territories are usually doled out to the most experienced or otherwise best performing sales people, for which the results of the 'unfair' evaluation are (at least part of) the reward.
As for the questionnaire; Uh, no. This just moves the problems of 'literacy' questions to a different level. Who decides what the 'correct' answers are and what those answers mean? Also, how do you sample that 500? If it is just a random sample, it will overwhelmingly favor cities over rural.
Every additional level of complication in a political system provides the potentiality of an exploitable vulnerability.
Presumably some people don't want to correct for blatant unfairness because doing so would generate cognitive dissonance and psychological discomfort. Most people (~85% ?) claim and believe they are routinely or always fair in their dealings with others. If someone corrects for unfairness, that usually amounts to a self-admission that their belief in their own fairness was wrong for the matter at hand. The feelings would probably tend to be worse if the unfairness was blatant compared to correcting for a more subtle or nuanced unfairness.
"I’m not sure what to call it, but there’s something deep and important to understand here, on why we often don’t want to correct when we can for blatant unfairness."This statement strikes me as similar to the position of the social justice movement regarding the unfairness of existing social structures over different peoples. There are plenty of people who resist social justice arguments, often for terrible reasons. Why do some people not want to correct for blatant unfairness?
I can see nothing disenfranchising in what is proposed. What do you see as disenfranchising?
On a related topic, I've been disenfranchised from every large radical right politics I have tried to engage with since 2016. America's radical right no longer tolerates facts, truths or sound reasoning when any of it is too inconvenient. I've been cancelled (banned or blocked) at eight big sites so far, including Breitbart, The Federalist, Daily Wire, Town Hall, r/conservative, Daily Signal and The American Thinker. Guess that goes hand-in-hand with the Republican Party's RINO hunting. It has largely worked to get ideological cleansing accomplished.
This it sounds like moving in the right direction. I would love to see this tried for a couple of election cycles in a few states, say two blue, two red and 1 or 2 purple, assuming there are any purple any more.
What has a lot of personal appeal is something like the Australian system of mandatory voting. The evidence I've seen so far suggests that (i) it weakens extremism and strengthens centrism or non-extremism, (ii) slightly or modestly increases voter knowledge, and (iii) greatly increases voter participation.
To ward off the usual knee jerk objection, mandatory voting does not mean voting or anyone or anything a person does not want to vote for. It means getting a ballot and properly turning it in, even if it is left completely blank with no votes for anyone and/or anything.
My preference would be a progressive, non-trivial tax penalty for non-excused, non-voting.
Yes. I should have put <sarcasm> </sarcasm> mark up.
Nothing in the proposed voting method involves experts. The 500 people are chosen at random.
If you are suggesting that voting in general is a bad way to decide things, then how does it matter if you have a plain vote, or the proposed adjusted vote preceded by 500 random people voting on some aspect of the adjustment?
And they could overwhelmingly vote that Einstein was factually wrong. See https://skepticalinquirer.o... plus "“It would not have required one hundred authors to prove me wrong; one would have been enough.” Basically, there is a fundamental problem with establishing "truth" via votes by supposed experts.
From the perspective of the voter who fails the test, I'm not sure it matters whether the vote is thrown out or altered, it's still not what they want.