At 11:06 AM 1/18/00 -0500, Robert wrote:
>We are back again to the problem of "should uninformed voters
>be allowed to vote?". Now -- to push on this idea a little
>from an Extropian standpoint, most of us would strongly agree
>with the one-man-one-vote principle. But, "rationally" can
>you make an argument that this will result in the best government
>when the people are either educated by "sound bites" or not at
>all? One might look more at something like the judicial system
Funny, this very topic came up in a class last night (a class in which I
introduced transhumanism). My vote is for replacing the current system with
a working Foresight Exchange (ideas futures). I suppose you can still have
one-warm-human-body/one vote, but you'd be voting for representatives who
would have to take into account the results of the Foresight Exchange. Any
ideas on how, constitutionally, you could force the representatives to use
the Exchange results in their legislation? If we could get the idea futures
process widely accepted, it would tend to put pressure on legislators to
follow it (especially if you could easily go on the web and check a
representatives voting record against the ideas market's recommendations).
But it would be good if there were a way of compelling reps to follow
this--and a good democratic argument can be made that this would mean a
more pure form of democracy in the sense of following the informed will of
the people. (Given how much Americans love to gamble, I suspect that
participation rates would be higher than we see in many elections too.)
Onward!
Max
Max More, Ph.D.
President, Extropy Institute. www.extropy.org
CEO, MoreLogic Solutions. www.maxmore.com
max@maxmore.com or more@extropy.org
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