For one thing, it tells me whether they’re a liar.
Which means they’re untrustworthy. Which means they fail your test, as well as mine.
How do you intend to judge whether a stranger is trustworthy, if what that person does is kept secret from you?
– And I think you’re confusing positions with details of bills. If I call a plumber and tell them my sink’s not draining, and they respond by saying that they’re going to take my sink away entirely, or by telling me that sinks are supposed to not drain, or by saying that it doesn’t matter if my house floods because someone else will make money by flooding it: that’s the sort of comparison I’m talking about.
Great, and once you address my earlier points then that becomes relevant. But if…
You’re not a good nor qualified judge.
They shouldn’t be making promises.
The majority don’t check and simply believe what they’re told by more influential people.
More influential people - like you - do check and, with the information, can force honesty out of the political types via #3. They outvote you. You lose.
Then it doesn’t matter. Yes, it makes you personally sad if you lose your ability to police the politicians. But between knowing what my congressperson is doing and getting good results, I care a lot more about the latter. And the only way to get that is by letting them do their job.
Let’s say that we set up a system where the only way to get ahead is to lie. Not only will honesty fail to advance you, it will actively harm you for having made the attempt.
So how many honest folk will make the attempt? Damn few. Maybe you get a few crazy idealists to join up and they are able to shout out in Congress from the sides, voting with devout passion for what they believe. And, at the end of the day, none of what they wanted happens because they’re a minority and because they’re clearly delusional idiots.
You now have the satisfaction of having someone vote in accordance with your wishes and who is honest. They’re accomplishing nothing. The dishonest folk are the ones making all of the rules and they’re sidelining your guy. If your guy ever happened to get into power, he’d likely be doing the wrong things because he’s a crazy idealist.
How is any of that useful?
Your satisfaction and your preferred methodology is not a useful metric. Good outcomes is the only useful metric.
First, let me note that I’ve already answered that in this thread but, let me ask you how would you do that? Don’t just say, “Well, obviously we can’t do that.” Without actually trying to think about it.
I think it can be done and done better than your method.
You want to give your bank account number and babysitting duties for your 4 year old to someone. What steps do you follow, to try and make your best guess about who to hire? Would it be to ask them to vote on legislative policy, and then check whether they voted the way that you’d told them to do, a few years later? I bet that you can do better than that.
Okay so, let’s say that we have two politicians and one says, “It is our duty to care for asylum seekers! They aren’t criminals! They aren’t terrorists! They’re people in need!” And the other one says, “We can’t shoulder the burden! They’re uneducated drains on our society who went country shopping for the best deal and are suckering us!”
Neither of these is a solution and neither indicates an interest in looking at the question with an unprejudiced, discerning eye. Yeah, one is “keep the sink” and the other is “toss the sink” and you might say that the former - in the case of dealing with a clog - is better. But the original issue was, “My sink is clogged”. If you’re satisfied with the answer, “Let’s keep the sink”, then I’d vote that you’ve been successfully gaslit to such an extent that you feel like that somehow makes sense as an answer. “Let’s keep the sink” is not a reasonable nor sane position, even if it’s closer to the right one.
Imagine a world where the question isn’t whether to keep or toss the sink, it’s whether to replace it for $200 on return for a 20 year lifespan or fix it for $25 and it will probably need fixing again next year. I’d vote that, that’s a step in the right direction.
The size of modern nations means there are always major conflicts between different regions, sectors, industries, classes, and more. There is no easy way to reconcile these conflicts, because these conflicts are based on different interests. Local bike manufacturers may want a tariff to keep out competition; consumers might prefer to purchase the cheaper bike wherever it comes from. Those local manufacturers employ workers. So, is a tariff a good idea or a bad idea? It depends. No “expert” can resolve that question. What a democratic system might do is not come up with the “best” solution" but ensure that everyone’s interest is represented equally and a consensus is reached. Of course, none of our systems are designed to do that, but the idea that political issues have a “right” answer that good people will agree on is not as obvious as it may seem.
Can you point me to it, please? All I saw was something vague about
Lots of people can look like they’re listening when they have no intention of doing anything in accordance with what they’re listening to. ETA: And there’s no way to tell whether they’re willing to change or discard the law as feedback seems to make more reasonable if there’s no way to tell whether they voted to change or to discard the law!
Of course I wouldn’t ask them to go get elected and then vote on legislative policy. And I wouldn’t ask the legislator about their babysitting experience, either.
I’d ask the babysitter and the financial person for references. Preferably references from people who I knew well enough to judge the trustworthiness of, if such were available. And I’d check on the references – in order to find out whether they’d actually done what they said they had done. Did they take care of other people’s small children properly? Have other people trusted them financially? And if so – what were the results?
I most certainly wouldn’t hire somebody who said “I’ve been babysitting for four years now but I’m not going to let you find out whether I showed up on time, paid attention to the kid(s), beat up the kid(s), or otherwise let you find out how I performed! All you need to know is that I smiled at the other babysitters nicely.”
I wasn’t thinking “Let’s keep the sink” but “let’s have a functioning sink in the house.” And I’m not hiring the plumber who says “you don’t need a sink in the house at all”, no matter how good they are at looking like they’re listening to people. The one who investigates the situation and says “you need a new sink” and shows me the parts that warrant that decision – that one I’ll hire; or the one who shoves a longer snake than I’ve got down the drain and fixes it; or the one who replaces part of the drain if that’s what’s needed – but all of that isn’t the same thing as “you don’t need a sink”. And even that isn’t the same as the person who, once in the house, steals the sink and while at it the TV, the car, and the dog. It’s the last one who you want to leave us wide open to – because if it’s forbidden to let anyone know who took the sink, the TV, the car, and the dog: somebody’s gonna.
The person who says “it’s our duty to care for asylum seekers” then needs to have, or to get, a plan for how to do that – and they need to know that work will be needed. The details of the work may change. But the person who says it’s our duty to care for them is working from an entirely different basis than the person who says “we mustn’t take any of them in.”
It’s perfectly possible that both of these people are assholes otherwise who think there’s no need to work out repurcussions of either of those actions and mitigations of the negative portions thereof. But it’s not going to help the matter if there’s no way to tell whether the person who made all those “duty to care” speeches voted for “close the borders absolutely and throw out by force anybody who managed to get in, no matter what their reasons and/or other behavior.”
And now, it’s impractical for most of us to do that directly and to do so in a way that avoids the influence of professional influencers (talking heads, lobbyists, etc.)
We want to be able to interview references, to directly ask the candidate questions, to be able to run a background check on them, etc. A million of us can’t all do that at the same time. Most of the million of us aren’t smart enough to ask the right questions nor double-check the person in the right way.
The technocracy movement was formed on exactly that basis. A number of intellects after WWI proposed a scientific, expert-guided system of government to replace the muddleheaded monarchies that had lead humanity into insanity. The Great Depression similarly caused people to doubt current systems and led to a revival of interest, although it foundered because most people blamed experts for not foreseeing that disaster. And with the personal issues of the founder.
Nevertheless, the tenets of technocracy left their fingerprints all over science fiction, which had an overmixture of libertarians and engineers. Both groups have continued to advocate for something one might call soft-core technocracy, as in solving the climate crisis with geoengineering or putting humans onto other planets or using AI to cure basically everything, the “right” answer for the world.
The rest of the political universe would agree that virtually no major problems have one “right” answer and that a variety of interests - especially minority and niche groups today - must be considered. Sorting through those usually contradictory needs is a vastly harder task than proposing a single global answer. There’s probably not a politician on the planet who has the expertise to sort answers on one major problem, let alone thousands. There’s also probably not a voter on the planet who has this expertise either. It’s the blind leading the blind.
Nevertheless, again, politics is a profession. In all professions, people get better with experience. Some good laws get passed. Some good programs are funded. Some people benefit directly and indirectly. History tells us that the politicians who find these answers are generally those who have this political experience. Surgeons go through years of schooling, internships, residencies, and - effectively - apprenticeships to older surgeons before they are allowed to operate on patients. Heck, baseball players go through the same grind to get to the major leagues. This kind of pathway is near universal. That we don’t expect this from politicians is sheer insanity. That we think a lifetime* in office is somehow a mark against a politician is also insane. Better politicians will come from starting people in low-level local jobs and letting the best ones move upward, just as with everything else in society.
*Yes, people can stay too long and get too old for their jobs. So? This is also true for surgeons and baseball players and everything else.
To take an example, if you ask a doctor what to do about the pandemic then he might say, “Practice social isolation, get vaccinated, etc.” If you ask an economist, they’ll note that this advice - taken literally - would lead to the death of everyone in the country because you can’t farm, produce food, produce electricity, etc. staying at home and refusing to talk to anyone. Psychiatrists might note that social isolation would lead to raised suicide rates and, plausibly, at a higher rate than deaths expected by the virus. The head of the military might point out that while everyone’s focused on the disease and trying to figure out the supply chain issues, a rogue nation could jump in and take advantage of the situation.
At the end of the day, you need someone who’s in there talking to as many folks as possible, doing their best to understand all of the different expert viewpoints, and trying to find a least-worst path through it all.
That person doesn’t need to be an expert in any particular field, they just need to be reasonably bright, willing to sit down and listen to everyone, willing to balance interests, and able to make decisions when options are put before him.
Whether a person has that sort of personality is what we’re meant to be evaluating, not whether they believe in Capitalism or Socialism. If they’ve got a strong opinion, they’re ineligible for the job. It’s like hiring a guy to be a judge who has come right out saying that he’ll vote guilty on any male with long hair and any female with short. That’s not your judge-to-be.
Thus my concern that the nation-state is an inappropriate model for organizing people and economies in any useful, democratic, sustainable way.
And thus, in regard to Exapno’s note on sci-fi and technocracy, and despite my love of canals (a big part of the Technocratic scheme) my affection for the anti-technocratic sci-fi novella by Eric Frank Russell, And Then There Were None. And my fervent wish that a fraction of the money used in wars and arms race were spent on developing new ideas about small-scale, federated democratic communities.
We’re talking past each other. I wasn’t saying that I want to check a politician’s references the same way I’d check a babysitter’s. I was saying that I want to check on how they’ve been doing the job.
If I’m not allowed to know how they voted, I have no way to check on how they’ve been doing the job.
Is that a really incomplete way of doing so? Sure; but at the scale we’re on, it’s what I’ve got. Yes, it’s impractical for me to read and study all the thousands of pages they’re voting on and the even more thousands of pages of info that went into that. It’s even more impractical for me to be in the room and in earshot when Senator MyState buttonholes Senator Holdout and either talks them into changing their mind or encourages them to keep being Senator Holdout. But at least I can find out how they voted.
“Hello Mr. Politician. I see that there was a bill about X. Can you tell me about X, what research you did to come to an opinion on X, what that lead you to decide, what you did to accomplish your goal, and why you think that X passed/failed?”
But the politician is only going to answer, honestly, if he feels like he’s empowered to do so. That’s as much on you as it is on him. If he’s not really allowed to have his own opinion - because you already know everything and he’s wrong if his view isn’t exactly what you want it to be - then it’s not really useful to ask the question.
The formats that we have for dealing with our politicians doesn’t allow that. We come in with an answer in our heads already because we checked their record and their record is wrong if it’s not the one we expected. Or, more often, we didn’t check and it’s wrong if he’s endorsed by Tucker Carlson/Rachel Maddow or right if he is and all that informational, factual nonsense is just BS wonkery that only fools the pencil necks.
We don’t set ourselves into an environment like a powerpoint presentation. There’s no opportunity nor interest to let the guy go through the whole story, lay it all out, and make the argument. We don’t put him in front of people who are reasonable enough to listen to it and care what he says. Some of that stuff might be sensitive and really can’t be spoken in an open, recorded format.
Now, I’m fine with giving a small panel of a half dozen people the voting record of a politician so that they have information to quiz him on. But, in general, that information should be confidential. Making it public and easily accessible just increases corruption, graft, and malicious interference.
One step at a time, I’d say. And there are experiments and organizations and communities and just neighbours doing lots of it all the time, as people always have.
I would say the opposite: if that sort of information is privileged, that alone makes it the target for the corrupters. It would leak out one way or another, so better to make sure it isn’t privileged to a select (by whom?) group of insiders (qualified and chosen how?). Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Besides, if someone is elected to represent you and your interests (and paid from your taxes to do so), then you as an elector must be entitled to see whether or not what they’re doing meets your expectations.
Do you seriously think they’re going to have that conversation with any significant number of their constituents? How would they have the time? I’ll get a form letter from an aide, only vaguely addressing the issue I asked about. At most, I may get a short statement at a town hall; carefully designed to piss off as few constituents as possible.
And how am I to tell whether they lied about “what they did to accomplish your goal” if I have no way to tell whether they voted in contradiction to the pretty speech they’re giving me, or that they posted on their web site?
– I don’t think there’s any way either of us is going to convince the other. I’m probably going to drop out of this part of the conversation.