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[silverspawn]

Primaries are only intended for party members, and most people aren't party members. Different states have different ways of enforcing this and some states allow you to vote in a primary without having to disclose your party membership, but generally voting in one at least locks you out of voting in the other one.

If the argument is that if people from both parties equally voted in both primaries, then I agree that this would give better results. But I think that introduces a bias toward moderates since Democrats will prefer less extreme Republicans and Republicans less extreme Democrats. A bias toward moderates is probably good, but you would get this effect even if no one is actually a moderate(!), so it seems less democratic to me rather than more.

[silverspawn]

Well, you can't credibly accuse me of holding beliefs just because they sound nice to my aesthetic sensibilities. I defend a lot of concepts that feel unpleasant to me, and I think I should have a pretty well established track record of doing that. For example, I think abortion is pretty disgusting, and I have put in active effort to make it easier for people to get abortions in Finland (by convincing my party to support a citizens' initiative, which I actually take full credit for because nobody else was doing it, so I went through our political program to find stuff to justify it with even though there's nothing there about abortion specifically and then I proposed the idea and posted my justifications and it ended up getting done).

(So if I'm not supposed to bring up this topic anymore because it's bad manners that's fine, but since you brought up this case, I'm assuming it's okay to respond.)

I suspect this is not a counter-example. I completely grant you that you find abortions disgusting. But imagine that you were the kind of person who oppressed -- or even didn't support -- other people's liberties wrt to something they're doing to themselves (ignoring the whole baby dimension for the moment). Doesn't this feel even worse? I.e., is this a case of going against your aesthetic, or just a case of one aesthetic (personal freedom, not being a hypocrite) overruling another (abortion is gross)?

[Awaclus]

If the argument is that if people from both parties equally voted in both primaries, then I agree that this would give better results. But I think that introduces a bias toward moderates since Democrats will prefer less extreme Republicans and Republicans less extreme Democrats. A bias toward moderates is probably good, but you would get this effect even if no one is actually a moderate(!), so it seems less democratic to me rather than more.

That's not my argument, on the contrary I think it's actually kind of insane that it is legal and technically possible in some states to vote in the primary of a party you aren't a member in (even if this goes against the intent of the system). My argument is simply that the system is currently very far from democratic, since a non-representative sample of like less than 15% of the population gets to choose the entire set of de facto viable presidential candidates. I'm not implicitly suggesting a solution to that problem, I'm just pointing out that the problem exists.

[silverspawn]

I agree with this, but I don't think that constitutes a defense of Demcoracy given that I think we can say for sure that Trump would still be the nominee if 100% of Republicans voted

[Awaclus]

I suspect this is not a counter-example. I completely grant you that you find abortions disgusting. But imagine that you were the kind of person who oppressed -- or even didn't support -- other people's liberties wrt to something they're doing to themselves (ignoring the whole baby dimension for the moment). Doesn't this feel even worse? I.e., is this a case of going against your aesthetic, or just a case of one aesthetic (personal freedom, not being a hypocrite) overruling another (abortion is gross)?

It's fine to make this point. You might be correct that I am partially motivated by not wanting to be a hypocrite, but I claim that I am mainly motivated by the knowledge that people still get abortions when abortions are illegal, and that's even worse than getting them legally. I am completely happy to oppress people's liberty to ride a car without a seatbelt, because it's just objectively stupid and banning it solves a lot of the social awkwardness problem where everyone wants to use a seatbelt but nobody wants to look silly being the only one with a seatbelt, so everyone is waiting for someone else to do it first and then nobody does it.

[Awaclus]

I agree with this, but I don't think that constitutes a defense of Demcoracy given that I think we can say for sure that Trump would still be the nominee if 100% of Republicans voted

The main problem I have there is not that Republicans aren't voting, it's that Republicans get to decide 50% of the candidates and Democrats get to decide the other 50% even though Republicans and Democrats combined are a minority of the population.

[Awaclus]

Like, I'm completely fine with Trump being a candidate, clearly a substantial % of people want him to be the president so in a functional democracy, he gets to run. But he shouldn't be 50% of the candidates, he should be more like 10% of the candidates.

[silverspawn]

I suspect this is not a counter-example. I completely grant you that you find abortions disgusting. But imagine that you were the kind of person who oppressed -- or even didn't support -- other people's liberties wrt to something they're doing to themselves (ignoring the whole baby dimension for the moment). Doesn't this feel even worse? I.e., is this a case of going against your aesthetic, or just a case of one aesthetic (personal freedom, not being a hypocrite) overruling another (abortion is gross)?

It's fine to make this point. You might be correct that I am partially motivated by not wanting to be a hypocrite, but I claim that I am mainly motivated by the knowledge that people still get abortions when abortions are illegal, and that's even worse than getting them legally. I am completely happy to oppress people's liberty to ride a car without a seatbelt, because it's just objectively stupid and banning it solves a lot of the social awkwardness problem where everyone wants to use a seatbelt but nobody wants to look silly being the only one with a seatbelt, so everyone is waiting for someone else to do it first and then nobody does it.

Well I have no rebuttal here, except that the emotional component is much weaker than in the democracy example. Being active in politics with as little trust for people as I have would be tough.

Forgot to respond to this, which is really important:

it's based on a principle we know works phenomenally well

Correct me if I'm wrong; I'm assuming this relies on a lot of people contributing a very small signal  amidst a lot of noise which, in aggregate, is a lot of signal, and since noise mostly cancels out, that yields a good aggregate decision or guess.

If so, this works as long as the decision of each person is, in fact, signal + noise. If it's signal + X with X not randomly distributed, it doesn't work. And that's the case with democracy; people's opinions aren't a little bit of rational assessment plus randomness; they're a little bit of rational assessment plus randomness plus partisan BS, and partisan BS doesn't cancel out. So when you aggregate all that, you get a total signal mostly made out partisan BS.

It works if the collective decision is signal + noise. Partisan bS cancels out with opposite partisan bS.

I took noise to mean that it's symmetrically distributed. I don't think that's the case for partisan bs, also I think the signal is too small.

I'd now like to take 2020 as an example with Andrew Yang but I'm not sure you actually agree with me that he was the best candidate. (Although his policy views are extremely similar to mine and according to the quiz we took some time ago, mine are quite similar to yours, so by transitivity he should be close to you?) Anyway, assuming I can make the argument, correct me if I can't, well Yang got 2% of the vote, and I think a good chunk of that was people liking his vibe. So the signal seems pretty small. In fact I think Yang did a uniquely good job running a campaign, trying genuinely new things and such, and still he got only 2%.

[segura]

The fundamentals of political ideology are really pretty simple.

People on the right care more about natural order and hierarchies, so whoever has a position of power due to tradition (conservative), supposed superior skills (liberal), gender or race (facist) deserves to have more power. Inequality is naturalized.

People on the left are for a more egalitarian, democratic society. As Faust has pointed out, this include non-government spheres like workplace democracy. I am no Marxist but I respect Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist, for always pointing out how crazy it is that we accept authoritarian workplaces. We don’t even consider the alternative to our Western system of representatives who are not bound by the will of the represented, namely council delegates who are bound.
I life in a country where proclaiming that Öcalan (the guy who founded a political ideology that led to the currently arguably most democratic political entity in the world, Rojava) is a decent guy is considered to be an act of terrorism.

In other words, anarcho-capitalism wears the veil of formal democracy, considers this to be end of history, ignores the actual increase of inequality of wealth and power and clouds the actual paths towards a more democratic life.

[Awaclus]

I'd now like to take 2020 as an example with Andrew Yang but I'm not sure you actually agree with me that he was the best candidate. (Although his policy views are extremely similar to mine and according to the quiz we took some time ago, mine are quite similar to yours, so by transitivity he should be close to you?) Anyway, assuming I can make the argument, correct me if I can't, well Yang got 2% of the vote, and I think a good chunk of that was people liking his vibe. So the signal seems pretty small. In fact I think Yang did a uniquely good job running a campaign, trying genuinely new things and such, and still he got only 2%.

I think it's plausible he would have been my favorite candidate if I had been interested in following US politics at that time, but it could have been Sanders or Biden too. Someone on Finnish Twitter mapped all the major candidates to Finnish political parties in 2019 or 2020 and he mapped Yang to the Pirate Party, so I guess that's a good sign, but also the president's most important job by far has to do with foreign policy and I'm actually pretty satisfied with Biden there.

[Awaclus]

But also under a perfect democracy, I bet a lot of Yang's good ideas would be getting implemented.

[Awaclus]

(I know that is a convenient answer that can counter basically any criticisms of democracy that are based on actual data, but it kind of deserves to be that convenient because all the data we have really is of limited relevance because it's all from imperfect democracies)

[silverspawn]

But also under a perfect democracy, I bet a lot of Yang's good ideas would be getting implemented.

Why/How?

[Awaclus]

But also under a perfect democracy, I bet a lot of Yang's good ideas would be getting implemented.

Why/How?

Focusing on UBI because that's the biggest thing I remember from him.

1) There are many countries where the majority already supports UBI according to polls:

https://www.allianceparty.org/brown_welcomes_poll_showing_majority_support_universal_basic_income_in_northern_ireland
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/42976-eurotrack-would-europeans-support-universal-basic-
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/universal-basic-income-supported-by-a-majority-of-british-public/
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/512099-poll-majority-of-voters-now-say-the-government-should-have-a/ (there are also polls showing slightly less support than opposition for UBI from the US, so this particular result should be taken with a grain of salt, but either way it's already popular enough that at least the UBI supporters could easily negotiate about something else to get it passed)

2) If any of the countries above had a perfect democracy and got UBI implemented and it had good results, this would make the population in more hesitant countries gain more confidence that UBI works.

3) E.g. under the RNG parliament model, the idea is that the random people would listen to experts and have access to the best possible information before making any decisions. This obviously wouldn't stop some people from believing that people who can't make a living on their own don't deserve humane living conditions etc, but it would clear up a lot of the common misconceptions.

[faust]

I don't think there is any simple story of how macro politics evolves. I also don't think that anyone meaningfully controls the big picture. E.g., no one in Germany caused or planned the war in Ukraine, no one controlled how people reacted to all the refugees; it just hit the country and then people reacted in the ways they reacted. It's just a big ugly mess.

Well, the rich definitely have more influence over policy than the poor; there are several studies on this (for the US / for Europe).

[silverspawn]

[UBI case]

Ok, say I buy this. What about more difficult issues, like being pro nuclear energy? Not a popular position among democrats afaik. Would a true democracy do anything here? (Admittedly, I don't know what precise policies he proposed, but there was something about research into a new kind of reactor afair)

[faust]

[UBI case]

Ok, say I buy this. What about more difficult issues, like being pro nuclear energy? Not a popular position among democrats afaik. Would a true democracy do anything here? (Admittedly, I don't know what precise policies he proposed, but there was something about research into a new kind of reactor afair)

I am not sure where you are headed with this question. It's unclear where this policy would go. Currently the people are slightly in favor of nuclear energy, but this fluctuates over time.

But it should also be clear that even in a perfect democracy, decisions are not magically always correct. (It's debatable whether being pro nuclear energy is correct, but whatever. We can substitute the topic for GMO foods, where I think the popular opinion tends to diverge more clearly from scientific findings.) It's just that results can be expected to be better, but for controversial topics there is still work in convincing people that remains to be done.

[silverspawn]

I'm generally trying to get a better sense of how "more democracy" -> "better policies" in a way that isn't already true for the system in the USA or in Germany

[silverspawn]

I notice that if the general argument is "a lot of good ideas poll well, even if it's not all of them" this sounds like an argument for more direct democracy rather than representative democracy

[faust]

I notice that if the general argument is "a lot of good ideas poll well, even if it's not all of them" this sounds like an argument for more direct democracy rather than representative democracy

Well, direct democracy is more democracy than representative democracy.

My argument is that the current system does not actually succeed in translating the preferences of the general populus into policies. It does to a larger extent translate the preferences of the wealthy into policies. You are using the lack of implementation of these good policies as a deficiency of democracy, but the above shows that it is rather a result of a deficiency in democracy.

In a similar vein, good results have been achieved by councils of randomly selected citizens (see e.g. here or here), but those prescriptions are unfortunately not binding.

[Awaclus]

I notice that if the general argument is "a lot of good ideas poll well, even if it's not all of them" this sounds like an argument for more direct democracy rather than representative democracy

That is true, but there are also arguments against direct democracy (e.g. most people have other things to worry about and can't spend a lot of time figuring out what policies are good, organizing a large scale vote every time the government needs to make a decision is slow and ridiculously expensive, etc) that RNG parliament addresses.

My argument is that the current system does not actually succeed in translating the preferences of the general populus into policies. It does to a larger extent translate the preferences of the wealthy into policies.

This is true, and more generally, any disproportionately influential people and organizations.

[Awaclus]

And yeah, there are good ideas that don't poll well. I don't think you can implement a system that gets those ideas done reliably without also getting a lot of bad ideas done.

[Awaclus]

The problem with polls about things like energy, the budget, etc is that you can poll people about an individual part of a big picture, but what's really getting decided is the whole big picture. Many people want to say no to nuclear power when they don't have to make any tradeoffs, but they would still use nuclear power if they were given the responsibility to decide how much energy in total should get generated and where it should come from.

[silverspawn]

And yeah, there are good ideas that don't poll well. I don't think you can implement a system that gets those ideas done reliably without also getting a lot of bad ideas done.

You definitely could. Just make me a dictator and done!

[Awaclus]

And yeah, there are good ideas that don't poll well. I don't think you can implement a system that gets those ideas done reliably without also getting a lot of bad ideas done.

You definitely could. Just make me a dictator and done!

You would get rid of democracy though, and that would be a bad idea.