Which is more effective?
Moderators: Calilasseia, ADParker
Xerographica wrote:Here's a list of books...
The Origin Of Species
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
The Handmaid’s Tale
A Tale of Two Cities
50 Shades of Grey
Principia
The Bible
War and Peace
A Theory of Justice
The Cat in the Hat
The Wealth of Nations
The Hunger Games
Imagine if this list was sorted by a bunch of college students. One group of students would use voting to rank the books while another group would use spending. To be clear, the spenders wouldn’t be buying the books, they would simply be using their money to express and quantify their love for each book. All the money they spent would be used to crowdfund this experiment.
How differently would the voters and the spenders sort the books? In theory, the voters would elevate the trash while the spenders would elevate the treasure. This would perfectly explain the exact problem with Google, Youtube, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Medium and all the other sites where content is ranked by voting. Democracy is a major obstacle to the maximally beneficial evolution of society and its creations. Of course I might be wrong.
Evidence is something that all reasonable people expect. Reasonable people expect medicine to be supported by evidence. Reasonable people expect executions to be supported by evidence. Reasonable people expect evolution to be supported by evidence. Reasonable people expect love to be supported by evidence. Reasonable people expect important things to be supported by evidence. So when it comes to democracy... where are all the reasonable people? Where's the expectation for evidence that voting is more effective than spending?
Reasonable people expect executions to be supported by evidence.
Pebble wrote:I don't think anyone here feels democracy is a good system, rather the least worse. Further it is not based on no evidence, rather the evidence is limited e.g. considerable work on the superiority of collective decision making.
Pebble wrote:Potential issues with 'spending' as a metric are: those with spare cash have an advantage, those with the strongest beliefs (e.g. pressure groups) have an advantage and can also 'buy' the support of others directly.
Pebble wrote:There may be others, so I would suggest the first thing you need to do is design, carry out and report on experiments that tests your hypothesis - clearly the 'gold standard' will require work.
Xerographica wrote:How differently would the voters and the spenders sort the books? In theory, the voters would elevate the trash while the spenders would elevate the treasure.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
Xerographica wrote:Pebble wrote:I don't think anyone here feels democracy is a good system, rather the least worse. Further it is not based on no evidence, rather the evidence is limited e.g. considerable work on the superiority of collective decision making.
If you perceive that democracy (using voting to rank things) is the least worst system, then you obviously must believe that it's better than the market (using spending to rank things). However, as far as I know, there isn't any evidence that this is truly the case.
surreptitious57 wrote:The best system is not democracy but meritocracy which probably has never been tried as it is quite Utopian in principle
Thomas Eshuis wrote:Democracy is the least unfair system that I am aware of. It's not perfect, but it's the best we currently have.
Thomas Eshuis wrote:Now with regards to your argument/analogy:
1. Books are a matter of taste not objective facts.
Thomas Eshuis wrote:2. This means you have no objective basis to assert that one way would elevate trash and the other treasures. Especially since you haven't even properly defined what 'trash' or 'treasures' refers to exactly.
Thomas Eshuis wrote:3. You haven't justified your assertion that voters would elevate trash and spenders treasure.
Thomas Eshuis wrote:4.Reasonable people expect executions to be supported by evidence.
Reasonable people wouldn't accept executions.
surreptitious57 wrote:I have never heard of reasonable people wanting evidence for love
If a woman told us that she loved flowers, and we saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in her "love" for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love. - Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Xerographica wrote:Like you pointed out... trash and treasure are subjective, so it would be pointless for me to try and define them. But if voting puts Harry Potter at the top, while spending puts Adam Smith or Charles Darwin at the top, then this is something you should seriously consider before endorsing voting as the best way to elect presidents.
Thommo wrote:It seems the Quran and the bible do rather well, along with good ol' mass murdering Chairman Mao, while the great works of laissez-faire capitalism and poor old Adam Smith lag way, way behind on the sales stakes.
Xerographica wrote:Timmy is a ten year old who loves Harry Potter. Frank is a fifty year old who loves Adam Smith. In a democracy, Timmy and Frank will have equal influence on the rankings of Potter and Smith. In a buying market though, Timmy will have more influence than Frank, given that all of Smith's works are freely available online. But what about in a ranking market? Chances are good that Frank will outspend Timmy.
Xerographica wrote:With a buying market, Timmy pulls on the rope but Frank does not because Smith's work is freely available. It's a really different story with the ranking market. In this case they both pull on the rope, but Frank pulls harder than Timmy. How much harder does he pull? That's a good question.
Xerographica wrote:Now, if I argue that Timmy should be allowed to vote, then you'll probably disagree.
Xerographica wrote:Imagine that we tweak the OP book sorting experiment. We get rid of the voting and compare the spending results of college students versus professors. How differently would the two groups rank the books?
Xerographica wrote:Let's increase the granularity and break the college students down according to their year. Would we see any trends? Would seniors rank the Bible higher or lower than freshmen? It would be very problematic if we didn't see any trends.
Xerographica wrote:This experiment would essentially allow us to grade that college. If there wasn't a steep upward trend for the Wealth of Nations, then personally I would give that college a very low grade.
Calilasseia wrote:Anyone who thinks money is superior to critical thinking and acting thereupon, has come to the wrong forum.
It is different with primitive man, and with the amoeba. Here there is no critical attitude, and so it happens more often than not that natural selection eliminates a mistaken hypothesis or expectation by eliminating those organisms which hold it, or believe in it. So we can say that the critical or rational method consists in letting our hypotheses die in our stead: it is a case of exosomatic evolution. — Karl Popper, Of Clouds and Clocks
If I am standing quietly, without making any movement, then (according to the physiologists) my muscles are constantly at work, contracting and relaxing in an almost random fashion, but controlled, without my being aware of it, by error-elimination so that every little deviation from my posture is almost at once corrected. So I am kept standing, quietly, by more or less the same method by which an automatic pilot keeps an aircraft steadily on its course. — Karl Popper, Of Clouds and Clocks
It is thus that the private interests and passions of individuals naturally dispose them to turn their stocks towards the employments which in ordinary cases are most advantageous to the society. But if from this natural preference they should turn too much of it towards those employments, the fall of profit in them and the rise of it in all others immediately dispose them to alter this faulty distribution. Without any intervention of law, therefore, the private interests and passions of men naturally lead them to divide and distribute the stock of every society among all the different employments carried on in it as nearly as possible in the proportion which is most agreeable to the interest of the whole society. — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
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