A computer scientist considers democracy

Garbage In. Garbage Out.

If you input bad data into the computer you get bad results, even if the computer program calculates it perfectly.

Trigoboff, then

Today's blog post is an edited dialog with  Michael Trigoboff, a computer science professor.  He used to look hippy-wild; now he looks straight. He used to be easily defined as a liberal; now he works in the middle of the hothouse of cutting edge woke social justice equity activism--Portland Community College--and he is resisting its illiberalism and demand for conformity.

He commented on yesterday's post. I had observed that Rand Paul claimed the 2020 election in Wisconsin was stolen because it included legally cast and counted votes from the "wrong sort of people"--urban Blacks. I considered that a shocking revelation of anti-democratic thinking.

Michael Trigoboff commented:

Democracy is an attempt to extract high-quality decisions from large masses of low-quality components.

We hope that voters will care about and be informed about the issues. How is the quality of electoral decisions affected by including voters who are so unmotivated that you literally have to chase them down, put the ballots in their hands, and then put the ballots in the mailbox for them? How much attention have they paid to any of the important issues?

Things like “motor voter“ are just a way to empower a different set of political elites, ones aligned with the Democratic Party. Some people (I.e. Democrats) think this is a good idea, for obvious reasons. But casting these schemes as “the essence of democracy“ is just the latest political propaganda from a particular faction.

I told him I might use that in a blog post and asked for clarification. I wrote:

Democracy seeks to reflect the consent of the governed.  There are protections against bad decisions in the fact that states can chart their own path, protections of minority rights and protections of individuals in the bill of rights. It presumes that the majority is sometimes wrong.

 

The attraction of a Chinese-style authoritarian government is that well-informed people make decisions. This means that they have the metric system and good infrastructure decisions, but it also means that the governing elite needs to suppress dissent because the credibility of the leaders is diminished when things work out poorly. It doesn’t self-correct easily.

 

Anyhow, you aren't dead wrong. But I do think your comment reflects the point of view of a person whose life experience and position puts him among the “elite.” That makes you smart, but it doesn’t make you right and it most certainly doesn’t mean your decisions are popular

 

Trigoboff responded:

In computer science, there are error correction codes like Hamming Codes. Error correcting codes can detect these flipped bits and flip them back to what they should have been.

The subject area of error detection and correction covers how to get correct results despite the presence of faulty hardware components, faulty data transmission, etc.

Trigoboff, recent

The space shuttle, for instance, was operated by three computers running in parallel. As long as they all agreed, the shuttle did what they commanded. If one of them disagreed with the other two, that one was dropped out of the decision process and a fourth identical computer was swapped in. If there was no agreement at all between the three computers, they were all dropped and a different computer running software written by a different company stepped in and took over.

You can look at an election as a decision process involving a large number of components (voters). Some of those components are likely to be faulty or of otherwise low-quality. Can we design that decision process to produce high-quality results despite those low-quality components?

Looked at that way, working hard to include even lower quality components (voters who are less-informed, less-motivated, etc,) is not going to improve the quality of the decisions made by the electorate. It will just lead to an electorate even more susceptible to disinformation and manipulation.

Which is not to say that I am a supporter of Chinese authoritarianism. I am definitely not, and I am probably more likely than most of your readers to be in favor of defending the independence of Taiwan with military force if that's what it takes.

Science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote a book called Starship Troopers. It describes a future history in which "the disorders" happened, and society broke down to the point where the military had to take over. The military institutes a new system of democracy in which only military veterans have the right to vote because only military veterans give enough of a rip about the survival of their society to be willing to put their lives on the line. I kind of like that idea, even though I wouldn't get to vote under that system.

I am not necessarily advocating for that particular system, but I think at this point in our country's history we are not asking enough of our citizens. When you have to chase people down and hand them the ballot and then “help them vote” (presumably the “right way,” according to the helper) and collect the ballot from them so that all they need to do is not die during the process (although perhaps not even that), I think we are not asking enough. People tend not to value things that are just handed to them.

I am not saying these things because I am "elite." I am saying them because I value competence and excellence and hard work. I say what I think is right, and I don't worry a lot about whether that will make me or my thoughts popular. Alfred Wegener was not popular, and his theory of continental drift was widely derided for decades, until conclusive proof of it emerged in the 1960s. But he was competent and excellent, and he was right. I would rather have been him than all of his critics put together.

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[Note: In tomorrow's blog post I will share my thoughts about the supposed "wisdom of crowds" as it relates to investment pricing. Spoiler alert: I think the premise is crazy.]