[extropy-chat] Enlightenment and the election

[Hal Finney]

I agree with Greg that much of the rhetoric in response to the election
is exaggerated.  The fact is that the vote was 51 to 48 percent.  A tiny
shift would have allowed the Democrats to win.  Majority vote elections
amplify small differences in the vote when parties are nearly balanced
in their numbers.

This was not an enormous turn to the right by the U.S.  It was a small
change, part of a slight rightward trend in the country.  In fact, it
may not have been a change at all, but rather the result of a much more
vigorous get-out-the-vote campaign by the Republicans, who were determined
to match Democratic grass-root organizational efforts this year.

I suspect that there are institutional factors which tend to push
parties close to the 50-50 split in two-party systems.  A party which
had a much lower percentage would soften its views in order to become
more appealing and start playing a role in the process.  A party with a
larger percentage doesn't need so many supporters and so can afford to
become more ideological.  Because of such factors, the American system
will always tend to be around 50-50, and so slight changes in the popular
opinion can produce dramatic differences in election outcomes.

Democracy is an OK system of government, but it does have some major flaws
as an institution.  There is little motivation for the average person to
vote wisely.  Normally his vote makes no difference in national elections,
and in the extremely remote chance that it does turn out to matter,
most of the benefits of a wise vote accrue to other people than the voter.

We discussed that study here a couple of weeks ago where they showed
how deluded Bush supporters were about various facts relating to Iraq.
That is exactly what would be expected given our propensity for self-
deception and the fact that politics is a social activity.  The only
potentially misleading part of the study was the implication that
supporters of other ideological positions don't have their own blind
spots.  We all tend to be deluded about politics, because there is no
incentive to be correct.

This is where Robin Hanson's Futarchy concept seems to have great
potential, http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html .  In Futarchy, people are
directly rewarded for informing themselves about the facts.  They can
predict the future more accurately and win more money.  I'd like to
see us start to use a system like this in some specific policy areas.
The increasing attention to betting markets in the recent election could
set the stage for this next step.

Hal