https://www.econlib.org/the-one-big-fact-that-overawes-all-doubts/ It would be unfair to grabquote this as "Thus, my Myth of the Rational Voter ... uses deeply flawed intellectual methods, and holds a wide range of absurd views" but it would still improve on the original https://tinyurl.com/44pafaz4
@henryfarrell
Whenever I waste time on Twitter and see the trolling blue check responses there, it does create doubts in me about the competence as voters of some folk at least, heh. That's mere anecdote of course, but the book 'Myth of the Rational Voter' does seem to me like it addresses that kind of concern and brings a lot of compelling statistics to bear, even if its conclusions are highly overstated.
(e.g. it seems to me that democracy in practice only needs a few people to be paying attention to each big issue as long they talk to each other and know who they trust. But that kind of collective social process is often invisible to right-libertarians.)
@gabe our lengthy response to it is linked at the end of that post.
@henryfarrell
The discussion of adversarial collaboration and its uses reminds me of an activity I facilitated this week at a philosophy meetup. Two volunteers with quite divergent views agreed to discuss under the following rules:
• They took turns proposing statements that they thought the other person would agree with. Each turn, the other person first clearly indicated whether or not they agreed, then they moved on to a natural discussion for a little while explaining themselves and asking questions.
• When they found a statement they both accepted, they wrote it down on a shared piece of paper as one of their points of agreement. The goal of this discussion was to get as many interesting & valuable statements on the list as possible.
I wanted to see whether this could lead to greater convergence of opinion in philosophy than we normally see. It did not! As an observer I was disappointed. But the volunteers, in contrast, said it was wonderful and insisted on doing it again next time.
Despite the dearth of interesting & valuable points of agreement, it appears the process of thinking together was qualitatively different than trying to be persuasive about one's own view. We didn't test this method on political arguments but I'm keen to do so soon.
