Discover more from Overcoming Bias
I wrote:
To the extent that some [voters] have a natural tendency to believe whatever the majority of ads they hear on such topics tell them, such shallow folks are in effect offering to believe whatever the most monetarily-eager advertisers want them to believe. For such shallow folks, money-wise the loud can indeed drown out the less loud. …
If corporations are silenced … not only would that hinder non-shallow voters from getting info from corporations, the total distortion by shallow voters is not obviously reduced! … Mechanically, it would be straightforward to limit the franchise by age, income, IQ, education, knowledge test scores, etc. … Shallowness can vary with person, topic, and context. If it is rare, we can ignore it, but it is more common than not we need to seriously revise who can vote on what.
Now shallow voters, who just believe whatever a majority of ads say, are probably not a big problem. After all, campaign spending seems remarkably ineffective. But we could benefit from better informed and more attentive voters, so it’s worth considering reforms to get that. Reducing who can vote is only one of many options:
Juries – randomly select a small jury of voters to participate in each election. Each juror chosen would know they have a much better chance of making a difference, and so would pay more attention.
Rotation – rotate voters across years and offices, so that they do not always vote on everything. This would also focus voter attention because they would know they made more of a difference.
Topic – divide policies into topics, and let each voter pick their specialty topic. Votes among topic specialists would somehow set policy on that topic.
Jury Foremen – randomly group citizens in each neighborhood into juries of thirteen, and have each jury, well in advance, elect a foreman to vote in the general election. They’d elect smart foremen, little constrained on how to vote.
More ideas?
Why are all those folks, so very concerned that firms with free speech might manipulate shallow voters, so uninterested in these options?
Shallow Voter Cures
Good points, Robin. I've long thought about this topic of how to get better governance be getting rid of the problems that democracy creates. Not being a political scientist, I might be going over well known ground, but it seems obvious to me that democracy has the huge benefit of eliminating extreme civil unrest. People riot and revolt when they want change but can't make it happen, so they get angry. The more people feel like they are in control the less likely they are to cause extreme civil unrest (any free society will always have visible unrest because some people are going to try to gain status by being outsiders).
What I've thought would be a good system is something akin to what China does nominally, even though in practice their governmental process is far more controlled from the top than what they want to make it appear. At the local level, people elect representatives who have the job of voting for them. The few hundred people in a village pick someone to represent them at higher levels of government. From there on up it's the job of the representatives to vote for higher level representatives (think congressmen), who in turn elect the top representatives (PM, cabinet positions). And those people have the job of controlling the civil service indirectly by setting policy and forcing out high-level administrators who are acting in ways opposed to what the representatives want.
Not that it really happens this way, but it seems like a pretty good system to me: you just have to pick someone who you think would vote the way you would if you had time to really think about the issues, and then pass the job up to someone who will dedicate the time necessary to make that decision.
Just my arm chair thoughts on political reform.
It's easier for people to think of prohibition as something government is supposed to do. Outlawing spending on X seems like a normal kind of law. You can't murder, steal, put lead in paint, or pay more than $x for ads with a candidates name in within 6 months of an election.
It's hard to consider changing the way votes are counted as a normal kind of law. (and It probably would require a constitutional amendment) So it's a big scary change.