Post
by CorvusCorax » Thu Apr 04, 2019 2:59 am
The problem with democracy in general and direct democracy in particular is that, while everyone is entitled to an oppinion and the right to vote, not everyone is capable of forming qualified oppinion.
On the contrary, experts with the knowledge and insight to form a qualified oppinion often are a minority, while the uninformed masses are easily manipulated by means of propaganda, targeted misinformation, FUD and polemism.
As such the system can easily be attacked by an adversarial agent with sufficient outreach, using low level stimulants including strong emotions such as fear, to trick a majority into misinformed oppinions, leading to non-justifyable voting outcomes.
This affects all mass voting be it direct ( Brexit ) or indirect ( US presidential election, Turkey, etc... )
Augmentation or widespread personal communication devices with tight interconnections ( aka social networks ) with unfiltered information flow make a society more vulnerable to such attacks than one with a more centralised information flow through redacted media.
The seemingly trivial solution, employed by China and others, to censor information flow is introducing a worse problem: A single point of failure through which an attacker can use the existing censorship infrastructure to manipulate the population arbitrarily, not just by injecting misleading propaganda but simultaneously surpressing the truth.
An ideal solution would be to limit voting only to individuals that have an informed oppinion, such as
- sufficient education and background knowledge on the topic
- sufficient intelligence and capacity to forsee the consequences
- sufficient access to relevant and acvurate information
However on many topics such groups of individuals would not represent the population well, as education and access to information is often strongly corelated with social status and sometimes racial- or immigration background. As such selfishness could lead such groups into making decisions that benefit themselves but not the majority of the population.
Similar can already be seen in political professions in representative forms of Democracy, where party members available as electable representatives do not actually represent the population but merely a political elite vulnerable to Bribary and influence from various lobbyists.
Maybe the best form of government would be a benevolent dictator in form of an artificial construct , designed in such a way to enforce the benefit of the many over the benefit of few at the expense of the majority.
Humans, history has shown repeatedly, cannot be trusted with this kind of power.
Now I sit back and wait to hear the bits and pieces of the rest of the story. 
... just sort of ... with her Space Poodles train of thought. 
Yet, I have a good idea she has important info about the other side and what it may have done and/or going to do. 
and pizza places 
with little or no trouble.
)