idc what you think about the efficacy of democracy as a system but it's weird to take its existence/preservation as a terminal value
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the argument for democracy was always that it was robust against certain classes of failure cases, that it on the whole delivered the best outcomes without the worst pitfalls
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that is not that it was perfect but that it was the best you could do on a particular tradeoff surface
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(I'm using "democracy" as shorthand for the american federal system you know what I mean)
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eg so much of the system is "let's actively make this work worse to prevent accumulation of power because a malicious or incompetent autocrat is an unacceptable risk"
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but systems aren't eternal, and one of the biggest factors in their rise and fall is technology
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the kind of 18th century western european autocrat the framers were trying to design against did not exist a few centuries earlier
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the best argument I've seen for abolishing the electoral college is that the whole swing state dynamic vastly reduces the leverage needed to flip a presidential election
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unfortunately this is never sincere because all pro/anti-popular vote election arguments are proxies for "I want (rurals/urbans) to have more power"
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but whatever. it's still a good argument, and one that recognizes the situation on the ground has changed as a result of technology
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likewise arguments for expanding franchise, direct election of senators, etc were partly moral but partly technological, that people were overall better informed than in previous eras
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and thus it was safe and reasonable to throw off fetters placed on the voting mechanic very specifically to guard against public insanity or foolishness
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what so much of the discourse about facebook/cambridge analytica/muh russians/etc misses is that maybe this speaks to a failure of the system to remain robust
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if it is possible to accurately predict a voter's decision and to craft messaging to change that decision from basic demographic information and a five-dimensional personality test
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maybe entrusting decisionmaking authority to them in the first place is something worth considering the merits of
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End of conversation
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