From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 15:41:47 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>...
>
>While I like demarchy (it is a great example of how a democracy doesn't
>have to look like the current system) I really wonder if that IQ
>selection would be advantageous. The core strength of a demarchy is that
>it provides a less biased sample of citizens to represent than the
>current crop of highly self-selected people. Some biasing measures are
>likely necessary to make the system workable, like only using citizens
>that want to participate, but what does high IQ correlate with? It
>mainly correlates with academic achievement, and while I would love to
>have more well educated politicians it is worth remembering that
>academic achievement is no evidence for sanity or competence. I would
>rather believe that it is better to have a spread of ways of thinking
>and good decision support (IMHO the biggest unsolved problem of
>demarchy).
>...
>
I feel that a random selection process would improve over our current
lot of candidates. Perhaps random selection of five candidates, and
then electoral choice between them. The current system selects in favor
of power-mad psychotics. (That may be a too extreme phraseology, but
the bias is clearly in that direction from the population mean.)
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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