serenity wrote:By action of the Law of Unintended Consequences, your suggestion for Selective Suffrage by IQ is also Selective Suffrage by Social Class, despite your assertion that money doesn’t make a difference to intelligence – or is it that intelligence doesn’t make a difference to income? Is that what you would like to see?
It looks like intelligence makes a difference to income. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be biased by someone's social status at birth, and everyone would have equal opportunity. Even so, it looks like more intelligent people just tend to go into different professions than less intelligent people, which is exactly what I'd expect. In fact if they didn't, it'd be a huge waste of talent.
jez9999 wrote: I think the top 20% making the decisions would make for a much better decision-making process, so the politicians didn't have to pander to the tabloid press.
Have you assumed that the newspapers read by the upper social classes; such as The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Guardian; do not also push a biased agenda that politicians pander to, in their political reporting?
Not to make too sweeping a generalization, The Telegraph is probably read by people who think they're intelligent, but are really just conservative and privileged. Under my system, they'd lose power unless they could put up or shut up in terms of actual intelligence.
In general, I don't think these rags are as biased or populist or downright idiotic as The Sun, The Daily Mail, or The Express. Frankly. I'd cut the last lot out of the decision making process in a second, and so should anyone who wants good governance.
jez9999 wrote: The 'hardcoding' of the test into a constitution should prevent totalitarianism. Nobody could ever reduce the ruling class to a small elite; it must remain at something like 1/5 of the population.
“Hardcoding into a constitution” will never stop a determined politician from overturning the whole of the constitution. A politician elected to serve the minority (your top 20%) of a population – oh, just call Godwin on me now, you know where that line of argument ends up…
I dunno... if you also added that when a politician tried to change the content of the test, it was the people's duty to raise up in armed revolution against them personally (military and police included), they would be terrified of changing it; as it should be.
jez9999 wrote: if one's defining fairness as being an equal voice for everyone, regardless of intelligence, why is that automatically a good thing? Indeed, you quite often hear people celebrating various groups' lack of representation - prisoners, the BNP, communists, etc. It's done openly in parliament.
Does a parliamentarian concerned with self-interest celebrating the lack of representation amongst various groups make disenfranchisement of certain groups of people "right", then?
Not in itself, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make. I was trying to point out that people who claim to support universal suffrage at the moment are generally hypocrites who simultaneously celebrate (say) BNP voters' lack of representation.
People vote on the information they have – if they do not have enough information, they may well not have the knowledge that they are lacking information (I know what I know, I don’t know what I don’t know).
They vote on self-interest – but their view of what is in their interest and their view of what the situtation really is are often dissonant.
Intelligent people should at least be able to be certain when they *don't* have enough information, even if they can't be certain that they do. That in itself is a step up. You have people right now voting on gut instinct, or (barf) who their dad/granddad traditionally voted for.
Your selective suffrage idea has already been explored in fiction, and taken to its ultimate limit. In 1956, Isaac Asimov wrote "Franchise," a story about a future in which one voter decides elections. Every four years, one voter is picked to be hooked up to a computer called "Multivac." After hours of questions and analysis, the computer uses the person's responses to determine election winners.
Please explain to me how this is taking my idea to its ultimate limit.
jez9999 wrote: I don't agree with everything the UN says; they think banning cannabis is a good idea.
[…]
We still have a population in the UK who are too stupid to vote for a small improvement in the electoral system. We still have a population who, by and large, put up with a government who have Victorian attitudes to drugs and euthanasia. We still have a population who aren't really that serious about enacting green policies to prevent manmade climate change. We still have a population who see no real problem in an unelected House of Lords, containing people who are there because their faith in an invisible friend is strong.
OK. So your chosen attitudes to drug use, the electoral system, euthanasia, AGW and religion are, by your implicit and explicit assertions, the intelligent, the not stupid, choices.
Perhaps you might like to find out the social class (and hence the IQ) of those who are the church-goers, the proponents of pro-Life policies, the anti-drug (alcohol and nicotine as well as the illegal ones) campaigners, the arguers for more rigorous and transparent GW science, those who did not vote for AV because the real goal is PR…
Your Suffrage by IQ is Suffrage by Social Class – you would do well to find out the policies held by the higher social classes before assuming that your proposal would result in “better” policies. These are the people who have reached their level of satisfaction, who have had choices in their education and their careers, who like their level of social stability.
They tend to be the groups of people who can afford to make mitigating choices if a political policy is not to their liking.
Well, I think your assertions are as unfounded as mine. I suspect that people who are churchgoers are less intelligent (not UNintelligent, but not at the top either), for example.
This guy comes across as very intelligent to me, and despite religious indoctrination as a child, he managed to outgrow it because his own mind refused to accept the incongruities.
serenity wrote:jez9999 wrote:Are you saying an Islamic fanatic's vote should carry the same weight as a calm scientist's?
Yes.
But even under your Selective Suffrage an Islamic fanatic with an IQ in the top 20% would have a vote... with the same weight as a calm scientist's vote.
Islamic extremists may be well-educated, but I'd be very interested if many of them fall into the top 20% in sheer intelligence. At some point I'd expect them to be able to realize their beliefs were so utterly unfounded in evidence that they had to reject them.
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