Human Beings Too Dumb for Democracy

Science Says...

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

I don't really think the the constitution guarantees the best possible candidate or policy, do you?  I think that, rather, democracy ensures that "the people" actually have a say in running the government that must, of necessity, rule them.  So, having started with a false premise, lets see where this little exercise is nonsense leads...

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries. 

So their saying that if people are not as smart as Einstein they are unable to appreciate the strangeness  of the two theories of Relativity,Quantum Mechanics, and how they both help explain the world, and yet are in conflict and are still insufficient to completely explain the cosmos?  I daresay there are a lot of physicist out there who might disagree.

He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as "above average" — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]

 Umm, pot, meet kettle! A little introspection and humility might be in order here.

We're just as undiscerning about the skills of others as about ourselves. "To the extent that you are incompetent, you are a worse judge of incompetence in other people," Dunning said. In one study, the researchers asked students to grade quizzes that tested for grammar skill. "We found that students who had done worse on the test itself gave more inaccurate grades to other students." Essentially, they didn't recognize the correct answer even when they saw it.

The reason for this disconnect is simple: "If you have gaps in your knowledge in a given area, then you’re not in a position to assess your own gaps or the gaps of others," Dunning said. Strangely though, in these experiments, people tend to readily and accurately agree on who the worst performers are, while failing to recognize the best performers.  The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise.

A single measurement does not make a good estimate of a mean either.  The strength of democracy is that many people, many of them admittedly ordinary, evaluate and decide a matter to best serve their own interests.  Indeed, there is no guarantee that they will come to the right decision, but it will be the decision that satisfies the greatest number of people.  Mistakes are made.  Sometimes they get rectified.

Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger's theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters' own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.

Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."

There you have; they proved it with a model. Fritz's Second and Third Laws of Science:

2) All models are wrong.  The only question is how much and in what direction.

3) You can predict the direction of the error of the model from the biases of the modeler with a high order of probablility.   I'm sure the modelers think they can pick leaders and policies just fine.

 Although, given the current Administration and Congress, the theory does have some merit.

Article found at Instapundit.