[Jtsummers]

[NB: Not an opinion on Brexit]

To say that Brexit is democracy in action, you're suggesting that that alone makes it a good thing. Democracy in action has gotten us many terrible things as well. Democracy, in this form, is mob rule. If the mob is well-informed, it can go well. When the mob is not, it can go very badly.

[zo1]

>"If the mob is well-informed, it can go well. When the mob is not, it can go very badly."

That only applies if you have some sort of arbiter to decide whether or not the "mob" is informed. And if you do that, you might as well have a dictatorship, as the arbiter can decide which side s/he thinks is well informed. Or rather, they could decide that groups X,Y and Z are not informed, therefore they aren't allowed to vote.

I know you may not be suggesting that explicitly, but that is the type of thing that I would argue follows from your line of thinking.

[sevenless]

Are you saying that objective fact and truth is equivalent to a dictatorship?

Are anti-vaxxers living in a dictatorship because we don't give their claims equal weight to those of doctors and scientists?

[zo1]

You mentioned that the decision made is a good one if the mob is well informed, and bad if they are not. Or, rather you said something along the lines that it is "Not True Democracy" if the majority are not well-informed.

Making a statement such as "this was not democracy because the voters were not informed" carries a lot of implications. If it wasn't democracy, then the result isn't valid. If the result isn't valid, then you have to concede that you want to disregard certain peoples' vote based on the fact that they were not well-informed.

You then have to deconstruct that as to what it means to be informed, and who get's to decide that. Ultimately, someone/something has to make the call about who gets to vote, or whether that vote counts.

As much as I dislike/disagree with Democracy, one person = one vote is a line that is clearly drawn in most circumstances. It removes ambiguity, arbitration and interpretation. As soon as you open up the can of worms regarding "voting based on how informed" one is, then you have a huge slew of problems that I believe will very quickly lead to the realization that either you accept tyranny by the few, or the informed; or that democracy is not a moral and fair system.

[therealjumbo]

Are you implying that a vote for Brexit is equivalent to being an anti-vaxxer?

[sevenless]

Not equivalent but comparable in certain ways. The claim I am responding to is that the entire concept of "expertise" is equivalent to a dictatorship.

[Jtsummers]

That doesn't follow at all, and it isn't the consequence of my line of thinking. The arbiter can be time itself. An entity which makes a bad decision can see its bad decision played out over time by various measures. A failing economy, an increase in crime rates, an increase in poverty rates, an increase in some categories of diseases or diseases becoming pandemic or endemic that should be containable and treatable. A good decision, with measurably positive indicators, can similarly be discerned.

Of course, the vast majority of nation-level decisions will result in more of a mixed bag of positive and negative indicators. Take, for instance, tax cuts. They aren't uniformly good or bad. To a certain level, they free up capital for people to spend (a form of democratic decision making, I don't believe markets are magical like some, but they are generally efficient and effective). Beyond that level, though, they remove capital for the government to spend on things the people (or someone depending on the type of government) has decided it needs to be spent on and drives up national debt, or curtails national spending which may have other negative consequences (reduced average level of education of the populace, reduced access to essentials like medical care, poor preparation for emergencies, etc.).

What I actually want is what we (in the US) ostensibly have. A democratic (the -ic is important) republic with a form of representative democracy. Our votes determine who represents us. Those individuals are tasked with making decisions based on various calculi (risk analysis, economic models, legal constraints and obligations, etc.). I do not want anyone to lose their vote, nor does my comment imply that. Universal suffrage is a good thing, giving everyone an opportunity, ignorant or informed, to have a voice. [EDIT: What I do not want is mob rule. There's a reason the legislature in the US was divided into the Senate and the House. The House offered a risk of mob rule, but the great opportunity for the people's voices to be heard. The Senate balanced this by giving unbalanced-by-population representation to each state. This acts as a measure of restraint against mob rule.]

[Sidenote: Can we abandon "s/he" and similar constructs? If the intention is to be more gender-equitable, switch to truly gender neutral terms like the singular-they, or one. S/he remains constrained to the binary system that, presently, is becoming outmoded. Not only that, but it's an awkward construct that is not easily voiced. An article posted here, I think, earlier in the week had attempted another sort of gender-balanced approach by alternating he and she in each paragraph while speaking about theoretical persons. The problem was this: the post was about a singular, theoretical person and it appeared as if the person was swapping genders each paragraph. What's more, the story didn't make sense because it was technically about two different people when it was intended to be about one.]

[matwood]

So anytime the mob goes against my wishes it was clearly uninformed :)

[Jtsummers]

No. You and your sibling seem to be thinking along the same lines.

When the mob goes against your wishes you've been overruled. But when the mob (or any entity) makes a decision that results in harm to itself, that was a bad decision. Decision-by-mob is incredibly amenable to this consequence.

Mobs are too easily swayed by rhetoric, appeals to emotion (particularly fear and anger, see the practical lynch mob calling for Clinton's imprisonment at the RNC). We do not permit mob rule in the US for this reason. We created a democratic republic to provide the majority a voice, but to temper it in a way that it would (theoretically) be harder for it to trample on the minority.

EDIT:

Further. I didn't say that it going against my views made it good or bad. I just said when a mob makes a bad decision it tends to go very bad. We're human. We're irrational. It's very hard to set aside our egos. If we make a bad decision, we too often see it through to the bitter end rather than cut our losses. When that decision is made by 100 million people, what's the consequence when it turns out poorly? The vast majority of those people stick with the bad idea. They don't just stick with it, they fight for it. They won't say, "Oops, we goofed. This was a bad idea and we need to change course." They'll say, "Let's stick with it and see if it gets better next year." They may even outright deny the failure of the plan they've chosen.

By removing majority rule, but not to the extreme your sibling suggests I was arguing for with a dictatorship (similar issue, dictator makes a bad decision, we have to kill them to get rid of them). See my paragraph 3. It's not a solved problem. It's not the only solution. But it is a solution, and it works pretty well. We balance the mob against a strong minority voice.

[DefaultUserHN]

I say we setup an institution of well-informed individuals to make decisions for us. We can call them the Ministry of Truth.