A review of Jason Brennan's book, Against Democracy, which describes three archetypes in the political population: hobbits, hooligans, and Vulcans. Click the link to read more about them. For a more in-depth discussion by the author (and where I came across it the first time), see http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-176-jason-brennan-on-against-democracy.html (transcript available in PDF and Word formats). The book goes on to present an alternative to democracy, an "epistocracy", rule by the knowers. It sounds lovely, but is probably unworkable in practice for a whole host of reasons. But maybe the whole framework doesn't need to be thrown out. The particular part I want to discuss is the hobbit/hooligan/Vulcan model. I think that's potentially a very useful model of the political population. So the first question is, is the model complete (enough). Obviously there's going to be some hybridization -- the low-info barely-voter who analyzes what they have passionately/dispassionately, the partisan who has issues they don't care enough about to hate the other side enough to not see their point -- but I'm curious if the model can be usefully expanded. Relatedly, is there a test that can easily determine the difference between a hooligan that claims to be a Vulcan, and an actual Vulcan? And I don't think it's particularly wrong of Brennan to want the Vulcans to vote more than the hooligans or hobbits. Second question: absent a too-riggable-for-practicality civics test, are there other incentives that could be offered to discourage the hooligans and hobbits, and encourage the Vulcans?
A quick skim makes the scheme sound like another attempt for a self-defined elite to put themselves in charge. Will devote more time to it after work tonite, see if there's merit in there someplace.
What the fuck is with the righties and "elites", anyways? I mean, who among the left here gives off an elitist attitude vs that displayed by those on the right? Even philosophically... the leftist end goals are generally based in egalitarianism and equity, pretty much the opposite of elitism. Conservatives, otoh, seem quite in love with hierarchy and social control.
My default reaction about any topic is leave people the fuck alone insofar as they aren't fucking with someone else's space. Government (fed) should stay the fuck out of things, except where it's clearly needed. Even our constitution was written to say that, though it could be chicken/egg and the source of my deeply-felt instincts. The 'elites' in my lexicon want to fix things for people because they feel government is uniquely situated to solve problems (that often do not even exist), and that *they* are uniquely suited -since they read or wrote a policy paper on a topic or something- to administrate the problem solving (for a slight fee). Elites don't think they know better, they know they know better. The masses are a bunch of sheep that need direction. Only 'educated' or 'informed' people should be allowed to participate in democracy for many of them. You can tell elites because they often wear sandals. [Or sniff their own farts, for a modernized SP version.]
As the review points out, any nonpartisan attempt to assign "bonus points" to certain groups for being Smart Enough To Vote is doomed at this point, because we're just too partisan nowadays. But I do find the division of voters into the three groups interesting and a valid model for consideration.
Honestly, rule by the knowers just feels to me like it would come down to Congress writ large, with voting citizens assigned to different committees that would specialize in voting on particular issues or things that would disproportionately affect particular populations, that sort of thing. And maybe, if you could get such a system up and going, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. As it is, when I vote for a senator (for example), I'm implicitly expected to look at the candidates, take into account their personal qualities as well as their stances on five hundred different issues, weighted according to importance, and cast a single vote for a single person. Corruption aside, that's kind of a ridiculous system.
The "Hobbits, hooligans and Vulcans" division is interesting as a framework for analyzing voter behavior, though basically useless otherwise. Defining them in practical terms is an interesting challenge. I think the majority of U.S. citizens are probably Hobbits, just because if they weren't, more of them would vote. Among those who do vote, Hobbits are probably the ones who are telling polltakers they disapprove of Congress and then voting in droves for the incumbent from their district; they are probably also the most susceptible to "a pox on both their houses" tactics where shitbags like Trump don't actually deny their disgustingness and just try to gaslight voters into thinking "well, they're both equally bad." Hooligans and Vulcans are harder. I have a friend who votes almost exclusively Republican, and also votes almost exclusively on abortion (she's pro-life). She will dismiss any candidate or argument that isn't pro-life out of hand. Theoretically, if I understand right, that's a Hooligan tendency. However, she is a VERY thoughtful and analytical person. Her response to candidates may seem knee-jerk, but in reality, she has analyzed the range of issues in modern American politics and, through a completely logical thought process, determined that that issue is important enough to her that she will make it her litmus test. So I would classify her as a Vulcan.
I bet nearly everybody who bothers to listen to only the first few minutes will conclude that, naturally, they themselves are Vulcans . . . I like his point about the dignity we imbue the right to vote, how it isn't "written into the fabric of the universe" that the ability to vote is what it means to be a full and equal member of society. Not sure whether I agree 100%, or if it is something that could feasibly be changed about our own society where the right to vote is so ingrained. Brennan's ideas aren't the same sort of epistocracy I've read from others: It's a really important difference, and one that would probably require quite a solid list of things the government may not do to people regardless of elections - an even clearer Bill of Rights that the electorate must fully understand. . . . . . I've been re-reading cognitive development and the mental milestones children go through, correcting inaccurate reasoning to get a better understanding of the world: things like how a baby thinks a toy covered by a blanket has ceased to exist, but a little older and they have object permanence. Or slightly later, the theory of mind: show a small child a bag of skittles and ask her what's inside, and she'll say "Skittles". Open the bag and show that it's actually full of pennies, then close the bag and bring in another child. Ask the first: what does little Billy think is in the bag, and a child with a theory of mind will say "Skittles" and a child without will say "pennies" - because they haven't mentally developed enough to understand that other people have a different understanding of the world. And I have read about psychologists toying with the idea that there continue to be 'milestones' or other markers of a more advanced understanding of the world, and that some people just miss some of them even if they can go off to be generally normal members of society. Things like understanding trade-offs: how changing the threshold for determining a disease might lead to more cases being treated, but might also lead to more false-positives getting needless interventions. Another proposed 'milestone' is the recognition that people who have different beliefs about the world than I do aren't necessarily evil or stupid. This obviously comes up in a lot of political discussions, and leads to nothing more than people talking over each other and nothing much getting resolved. Such as when, for example, catastrophic anthropomorphic climate change environmentalists decry catastrophic anthropomorphic climate change skeptics as being influenced by "big oil" or when those skeptics accuse environmentalists of wanting to kill off millions of poor people who couldn't survive with the environmentalists' restrictions. A related mature mental operation is the ability to recognize that "arguments are not soldiers" - the "arguments are soldiers" idea says that once you've picked an ideological side, you must support all the arguments of that side. To me this seems obviously untrue, but still I've seen over and over again how people would write essay after essay criticizing Obama's economic policies, pulling in complex ideas about Keynes and Hayek et al. only to be shot down by people saying that the authors don't like Obama because they're racists and/or birthers. But maybe the problem with taking this 'milestone' idea to this level is that by pointing out someone's mental-developmental deficiencies exhibited in their arguments, you're not really showing off your own advanced reasoning skills - you've only just found an erudite-sounding way of calling them stupid.
Well yeah, that's why I asked the related question - how can you tell the difference? It's easy to devise a test that gives no false hooligans. There's the quiz about the NPS pictures of the inauguration asking which one had more people -- no Vulcan would ever answer that saying Trump's inauguration had more -- but that only takes care of the hooligans on the Rep side, and even then not all of them. But a test that gives no false Vulcans is harder.
I thought of it like that Grossman article about sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs - of course most people reading it would like to think of themselves as sheepdogs whether they have justification or not. Brennan did say that it wouldn't require a perfect test to determine the 'Vulcans' from the rest, but I think even a barely-adequate test would be show-stoppingly controversial. But he did seem to suggest at the end that maybe there aren't any Vulcans after all.
A test to determine who can vote, sure, but I just want to make sure I actually am a Vulcan rather than a hooligan.
