We’re never going to see IQ tests or any other kind of test as a requirement for voting, but one thing we perhaps can do is to put to rest the idea that uninformed voting is a virtue. Right now there is a certain shame associated with not voting. Some people just aren’t interested in politics, and there shouldn’t be anything wrong with that. If you’re not the kind of person who likes to keep up to date with things, fine, don’t vote. Voting stupid is far worse than not voting at all.
Yeah it’s amazing. There is a pit thread going right now where a poster is unable to understand what qualifies as a fact or opinion. If there are facts that show he’s wrong, the wrong belief is just an opinion. And opinions are subjective.
Debater01: The Sun revolves around the Earth.
Debater02: No it doesn’t, here is astronomical data showing you’re wrong.
Debater01: We just have different opinions.
Aaarrgh!!!1
Are you expecting to be in that top 25%?
My view: anyone dumb enough to believe this would yield a sound system of government is automatically disqualified from voting.
It’s not for nothing that William F. Buckley, Jr. - a man considerably higher in the intellectual food chain than the average bear - once wrote that he’d sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone directory than by the two thousand faculty members at Harvard University.
Buckley went to Yale, I’ll let you draw your own conclusion there.
Yes, I’m aware that Buckley went to Yale. The book that made him famous, God and Man at Yale, describes the experience. Are you suggesting that he would have been any happier being governed by the faculty of Yale? Or that he only said that out of a sense of intramural rivalry? His point, clearly, was that academicians, despite their intellect and schooling, are woefully ill equipped to govern given the ivory-tower nature of their experience.
You’re absolutely right. So we want the top 25%, but not the top 5%.
Never, you say? Not even in, say, a million years of future human history? That is a very presumptuous statement. I can claim that, exactly 759.3 years from now, the only people eligible to vote in present-day Utah will be those possessing three ovaries, two penises, and a mane of magenta fur. You would have no more rational basis for disputing that then I would for claiming it in the first place.
The point is, the future is entirely unpredictable. We can attempt to change it, but we can never offer definitive statements about it.
I have no expectations. If I am not intelligent enough to enter the top quartile, then I will calmly accept the fact that I am obviously not fit to choose our leaders. After all, how can a less intelligent person make a logical choice among more intelligent persons? That is akin to asking frogs to decide political outcomes.
You have led a remarkably sheltered life if you’ve never seen intelligent people make bad choices, or less-than-brilliant folks do really good things.
Why would anyone expect facts to change someone’s opinion?
For example, my opinion might be that steak is better than turkey. Someone might present me with fact after fact about how turkey is better for the environment, cheaper, healthier, keeps longer, etc… I still think steak is better, because I value the flavor more than those other things.
Or say, I believe I ought to be able to own any gun I want. You can present as many facts about accidental deaths, crime, whatever… I’d rather put up with all those problems than lose that freedom.
Or what if I say no one except the police and military should have firearms. No matter what facts about crime or tyranny, you throw at me, I would still value safety and peace of mind more than what little freedom i gave up.
I don’t see why facts would or should matter when it comes to opinion.
now if I said 2+2=5… and you showed me that, in fact, it equals 4, and i still said 5… Now that would be depressing.
One historically successful strategy is to find what you believe to be true, set up a bloody-minded power structure, & reeducate &/or kill those who disagree. I’m not convinced this is less efficacious for those who are closer to truth than for those further from it.
Put it another way:
If, say, Flying Spaghetti Monster fundies are willing to kill for their beliefs, & Pink Unicorn liberals are not, many would say that the fundies are afraid of being challenged, while Pink Unicorn liberals expect the truth will out in the light of reason. But your cited study implies that the truth will not out, & history indicates that dogma can endure for centuries. So we all have reason to fear dissent & the rise of what we believe to be evil & foolishness.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster fundie who claims that he kills for his beliefs because he is sure of them also believes that the Pink Unicorn liberal’s unwillingness to kill for belief is a sign of lack of belief. And he mistakes certainty for an indicator of reliability. Well, we may know like Socrates that we are uncertain, & that certainty can be false; but perhaps we need a certain dollop of certainty, with red blades to strenghten it.
Thoughts/ejaculations in horror?
but… you… just… 
Yes, but if your opinion was that steak is a better building material for houses than wood, we can pretty much show you why your “opinion” is wrong.
But if your belief was that you shoot guns in order to get bullets into women to impregnate them, we could show you that your belief was factually unsupported.
Look, if I said to you that I don’t like dogs because they destroyed the earth 4000 years ago and enslaved us all, a situation that continues to this day, mind you, even tho most people don’t know it because they’re being mind controlled all day long by the Irish Setters 2 blocks over from my house, you wouldn’t think that facts matter at all when it comes to my opinion? You’d think it was as valid and rational as any other opinion?
The point is not changing opinions by excluding the stupid, but rather having fewer available stupid opinions in the first place. For example, all of the opinions except the last one in that grouping can be held by an intelligent person. The last one cannot. As long as we can exclude the “2+2=5” opinion, we’re already making great progress.
Let’s bring it closer to home. In the US, you get a lot of really stupid political opinions, mostly among the nutty right-wingers. For example, there is a widespread idea that somehow the government can cut nearly all taxes, keep funding the same programs that it currently funds, AND slash the deficit, all at the same time. This is quite obviously a moronic opinion, since it violates all kinds of economic rules. By excluding the stupid, we should be able to exclude most adherents of this idea, since smart people are unlikely to be fooled by this fuzzy tea-bagger math.
I guess I agree with your first point, and I’m not sure what opinions they were testing in the originally quoted article. Most opinions that are seriously being debated seem to be more of a difference of values and world-view than faulty facts.
I’m losing your logic in the second paragraph. I am not aware of any uncontested facts that show lowering a tax rate would automatically lower tax revenue. I’ve seen predictions, but I doubt any economic model could precisely predict what the outcome of a tax-cut would be. I guess I am talking more about indisputable facts. “since it violates all kinds of economic rules” would not seem to be an indisputable fact.
Did you read the OP? Just my opinion, but that’s seems like a good idea before posting.
What scares me is the right’s war on the educated. They bring forward people like Bush II and Sarah Palin, and ridicule Obama and Clinton for their advanced education. Even Newt Gingritch called intellectuals “public enemy number one” when Clinton was in office.
And how many times have you heard Limbaugh and now Beck call Universities “indoctrination centers”?
I think that you’re misreading the article linked to in the OP. The point is not that if you give people the facts on a particular issue the proportion of people who disbelieve those facts will increase. That’s not the case. This article is talking about issues where there are already two well-entrenched sides, each of which passionately believes their own case. (There will also be people who haven’t made up their minds, and there will be people on each side who believe in that side of the issue but aren’t passionately devoted to their sides.) Suppose then that the passionate believers on each side have a set of “facts” that they use to support their opinions.
Now suppose you show the passionate believers on one side that their “facts” are wrong. What will happen is that they will mostly not change their opinions. They often will accept those facts, but they will create a more complicated set of beliefs which take them in account but which, they will say, still supports their beliefs. Furthermore, I suspect this is true even if you show both sides that the “facts” that each side believes in are incorrect. The passionate supporters on each side will either disbelieve you or will incorporate these new facts into a more complicated argument for their side.
Passionate believers seldom change their opinions. Facts are only useful for changing the opinions of people who haven’t made up their mind or who are only mild supporters of a belief. They are also useful for changing the opinions of young people who haven’t yet come to a decision about what they believe. As has been said, you don’t change the opinions of people who are stuck in wrong beliefs. You wait until they die and are replaced with people who are willing to look at the facts.
In issues with passionate supporters, I believe that there is never a point where the percentages of supporters makes a sudden lurch and the issue gets resolved quickly. In such issues, it’s always a matter of decades for the issue to get resolved. Each year the percentage of people believing in one side will change by one or two percent. It will take a long time for a major shift in the opinion on any major issue. Get used to it.