From:
Joseph Hammer <parrhesiajoe(at)gmail.com>
To:
wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Sent: Thursday, 8
October, 2009 10:26:37
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.