[46756e]

I feel like saying "discussion is bad because it brings mediocre minds" to a discussion is a bit gatekeep-y. That applies to every discussion.

That being said though, I do agree somewhat with the premise that "democracy is great because anyone can vote, but it is terrible because anyone can vote."

It sucks when some field becomes political, because the attitude around it changes from "lets listen to the experts" to "it is my God-given right to have an opinion on it regardless if I understand the issue."

[rsj_hn]

The problem with "listening to the experts" is that at some point people figure out that the experts are very easy to bribe/intimidate/silence. So if we hand over the reigns of the nation to experts, then that's basically ceding our decision making to whoever can best organize to control the most experts. Don't think that academia and the tenure process aren't rife with groupthink, forbidden thoughts and positions, etc. And it's hard to find a group of people with less integrity than researchers chasing grants or academics trying to get tenure. Today, universities are the places where freedom of thought and expression are most suppressed, and groupthink runs rampant. Academics are under the thumbs of administrators and terrified of angry student groups. Researchers are sometimes afraid of being physically attacked if they espouse the wrong opinion. This is not who you want to hand control of society over to.

So there is really no substitute for wisdom and intelligence. A foolish population is going to make foolish choices and a wise population will make wise choices. Both science and politics are downstream of culture.