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02350: Re: [WDDM] Weighted voting

From: Joseph Hammer <parrhesiajoe(at)gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 02:26:37 -0700
Subject: Re: [WDDM] Weighted voting

I would tend to agree with Hamid and Jim.

The American Medical Association is a great case study for this issue. They have more knowledge about the medical industry than the average individual, but that is not necessarily a good thing. It would be good if the motivation of the actors was the unbiased betterment of mankind. This is folly. No person can recognize the extent of his or her own bias. History tends to exonerate the idea that any group who possesses superior knowledge will use the information asymmetry to enrich themselves rather than society in general.

I strongly believe in the "one person, one vote" principal. If forced to compare the relative effects of ignorance and power consolodation, it might be a toss up. However, we will have ignorance through bias in any category of man. What is in our power to prevent is the consolodation of power. Wise kings start wars... uneducated peasants seldom think it worth the cost in blood.

In most decisions of governance, it is ethical principals rather than specific knowledge that should drive our legislation.

Plus, most people with "education" in a field will claim the ability to make better decisions. This education is market driven, and not motivated by truth unless the market rewards accurate, unbiased information.

Take economics, for example. The biggest employer of economists is the Federal Reserve. Like the alchemists of old, these rascally intellectuals buy into a completely fictitious notion... that you can create money from thin air... or out of lead, as the alchemists believed. In the heyday of alchemy, many scholarly types insisted that the layman, who doubted the wisdom of the alchemists, was unrefined and uneducated. A college cannot attract many students to a class that says, "Alchemy is bullshit" or "The best monetary policy is non-intervention by the state" or "None of these sophisticated economic models that we teach you have ever actually worked". All of these notions would kill the entire fields of curriculum.

Plus, over a three-year period ending in October 1994, the Fed awarded 305 contracts to 209 professors worth a total of $3 million. Wow... that's about 15k per professor.

Plus, to get tenure, you must publish. One critical way the Fed exerts control on academic economists is through its relationships with the field's gatekeepers. For instance, at the Journal of Monetary Economics, a must-publish venue for rising economists, more than half of the editorial board members are currently on the Fed payroll -- and the rest have been in the past.

"Knowledge" is easily perverted by self interest. The assumption that individual scholar can make better decisions is wholly dependent on the subject of inquiry and the incentives to mislead.

If the subject of inquiry is highly technical, then I agree with Hamid. It is in the best interest of society to hire one or more researchers to investigate the topic. There are many ways to make this work well, but there are far more ways to screw it up... like letting representatives choose the investigators (unless we structure incentives to reward politicians for effective, honest choices... a far cry from the current situation).

We need the knowledge, but we need to guard against interested dogma, and letting intellectuals have more say is, like Jim said, manipulable.

Parrhesia

- Vanity is hemlock to those who seek truth. Be careful what you consume.


On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 7:12 PM, <Lata Gouveia> wrote:
Hi all,

Do you agree that people who have more knowledge about a topic should have more say in a decision about that topic?

Lata
http://citizenmundi.wordpress.com/raw-initiatives/



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