Occam’s Razor test – pick option (1) or option (2):
[ol]
[li]The concerned citizens have done a careful and systematic analysis of government operations and the government budget and identified significant areas of inefficiency for which they have recommended specific strategies for remediation that they would like to see addressed before seeking tax increases, or[/li][li]The rubes would prefer not to pay taxes[/li][/ol]
“Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. The study of personality focuses on two broad areas: One is understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics, such as sociability or irritability. The other is understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole.”
Personality is not knowledge or profession.
It’s already been decided in my proposition; Someone with a rational temperament.
Defined precisely how?
I’m not sure why people keep pointing out particular examples of people who might fit the description of a rational temperament; As if these people don’t already get a vote. I could easily find examples of people who’s vote would get taken away, but it’s just not very useful to list off single people in nations of hundreds of millions.
If you have a small commune, it becomes pretty clear who has serious leadership potential and who doesn’t. At the national level, we are talking about simultaneously assessing thousands or even millions of people equally and fairly. How would you ever do that with something as vague as personality? Sure, you could come up with some sort of multiple-choice personality test, but the “correct” answers would show up online within weeks. “Q: I believe that innocent people are almost never convicted of crimes that they did not commit. A: STRONGLY AGREE. Q: I would oppose an increase in my taxes for the purpose of waging a war overseas. A: STRONGLY DISAGREE.”
Ad hominem.
Also, we’re not talking about a cabinet of a few people. There would still be millions of people voting. You won’t be able to list real world examples because it has never been attempted. This works both for and against my argument.
Name some people whose vote would get taken away, and describe the personality test you used to come to the conclusion.
There is already science in the field of personality psychology. Some people are convinced by it, while others reject it as pseudoscience. Regardless, it’s assumed that you can observe some people happen to be much more considerate of logic and evidence as a way of processing information and forming opinions. If you don’t think this is due to personality differences, then we don’t have anything further to discuss; That’s just where our opinions diverge.
You should be able to agree that people who are more easily moved by logic and evidence will more often come to conclusions grounded in logic and evidence than people who are not as moved by logic and evidence. If personality is one metric that determines whether you are more likely to come to these conclusions, then eliminating personalities that are less likely to rely on logic and evidence from an equation should result in more conclusions based on logic and evidence.
This strikes me as utterly hilarious, and quite indicative of the problem with your idea.
I’ll revise that: I could list off names of people who would probably lose their vote based off my own observations. This would be, as I previously stated, as useless as people trying to name names of people who would probably keep their vote based of off other people’s observations.
It’s useless either way.
Some people’s opinions are the problem with my idea?
The problem with your idea is that you have this nebulous concept of “rational” or “intellectual” that you cannot define other than some sort of you know it when you see it description, you can’t say who would define it, or even if personality science is real or pseudo. You know that it isn’t IQ and it isn’t education, though you link it to STEM fields, you won’t name anyone who has it or doesn’t have it, you can’t come up with how it would be measured, but boy howdy! It’s a swell idea!
It’s not leadership potential. You’re just shrinking the number of voters. You don’t need to be a good leader to cast a ballot.
I agree that a personality test given to students may be a terrible idea. I just gave it as an example. Pen and paper may not be the best technology for something like this, or it may never be possible to outweigh the inaccuracy/corruption that would stem from any test.
I personally subscribe to Carl Jung’s theories on personality. All the types are clearly distinguished from other types. Not everyone agrees with his theories, or other theories, on personality, so I was hoping not to exclude people who didn’t.
It is assumed that reasoning using logic and evidence will tend to lead towards conclusions based on the same.
If people at least think that personality has an affect on one’s preference for reasoning using logic and evidence, then they should believe that more excluding of personalities that don’t prefer that reasoning will tend to lead towards more rational conclusions.
People will not only vote for what they believe will work, however, but what will benefit them, so it is important that these personalities occupy a wide-range of demographics.
For me, until you figure out how to define and measure “rationality,” discussing what you would do with it and how you would discriminate against people for not having it is putting the cart before the horse. Would a country work better if X where X is actually undefined? I don’t know.
The Contemporary Logic plan can only be achieved by violent revolution. In order to see how it would work, we should look at historical precedent where more intellectual rulers replaced relative rubes, and see how that worked. As Ibn Warraq has pointed out – not well.
Putting aside examples like Iran and the communist revolutions, look at the history of Thailand over the past three years. A reasonable interpretation is that the intellectual elite was unwilling to accept the electoral verdict of the less-washed masses, resulting in a coup. How else can your plan be achieved? The majority is not going to give up its rights voluntarily.
I’m not sure this is really a great comparison. For one, gender studies tends to revolve around the notion of societal change and awareness – it’s more or less a goal to propagate the ideas and theories discussed to the populous at large. Second, I don’t really liken C++ to, say, patriarchy theory. C++ is closer to, say, reading a text through a specific feminist lens; it’s a tool, and while STEM types will frequently (and wrongly) disparage such notions, they’re not really going to discuss the minutiae of using a anarcha-feminist lens when analyzing the cultural impact of fiction.
And plenty of uninformed people do argue STEM concepts: evolution, internet regulations, global warming, whether they be gender studies types or otherwise. I’ve seen some pretty silly feminist critiques of boolean logic (though that’s a cheap shot since you can find someone with a silly opinion of anything). I had an English teacher who claimed that the theory of gravity was exactly as good as any other explanation for why we don’t float because there is no objective reality and all scientific work is ultimately just a reflection of cultural bias.
I think there’s a lot of mutual misunderstanding between “both” sides (though I really don’t accept the strict dichotomy, it’s more fluid than that). Neither side is necessarily worse, and the misunderstandings can be harmful in very different ways. Both sides can also be poor at communicating their ideas to outsiders to varying degrees (though I think this is true of academics regardless of their field).
All that aside, the OP’s idea is an ill defined trainwreck waiting to happen. For one, rationality isn’t something you can even really agree on. It’s valid to state that a rational agent would do what’s in their self interest, but given that you can’t do an exhaustive search of every potential future state of the universe you’ll never know the correct answer. It’s also valid to state that maybe we don’t want people who solely act in their best self interest and maybe act altruistically, but again, what actions constitute that?
I think a lot of the US’ problems stem from the dichotomy the two party system and (effectively) popular vote presidency system sets up. It’s much harder to vote for a candidate you actually like in such a system. Certainly proportional systems aren’t perfect, but they appear to react rationally and support a breadth of perspectives and rational discourse more often than the system we have that puts so much burden on individual politicians to play, manipulate, and pander to their direct constituents.
“Logic and evidence” isn’t foolproof. You also have to accept that sometimes evidence-based methods might suck because of people being reactionary. A perfectly sound plan could fail, not because it was a bad plan, but because so many people were convinced it was bad they (consciously or not) undermined it. Ideas, plans, concepts, and people don’t always succeed on their merits and you can’t force it to happen. You can’t control for all factors.
I agree that our current state is perhaps a bit too faith based and reactionary, but it’s not like there’s any class of people without biases, or always able to admit they’re wrong. Hell, scientists can have massive egos and stage petty, passive aggressive political attacks on their completely correct competitors. I’ve heard a story of a physics conference where the mediator for a panel held up a conference for 45 minutes over time badgering the presenter with questions because he perceived the presenter’s work as an attack on his own. And made up for the “lost time” by giving the other presenters until break only 15 minutes to talk including questions (spoiler: all the other presenters were from the same lab).
Your argument is essentially “let’s only let perfect people vote.” I mean, sure, cool, agreed. Where are we going to find them? Because, as far as I can tell, the definition of “rational people” I see most often is “those I agree with, or I think I could persuade to agree with me.” This actually works great in fields like Artificial Intelligence because computers are so dumb anything that seems like something I’d do is fucking genius, but it’s pretty useless for people.
It could probably only be achieved by violent revolution. Less likely would be a totalitarian government’s decree. People willingly giving up their right to vote is more or less impossible.
Those examples seemed forced. A small aristocracy/ dictatorship is a far cry from the millions of people who would be voting from different demographics. It’s not the same as a select few holding onto power.