36,518,100 voters are called today to vote, for the second time in six months, a new government. The seats of a dozen provinces will determine this 26-J the changes with respect to 20-D . We should all exercise our right to vote, however are we really aware of what we are voting for?
We start from the assumption that the majority of the people are not sufficiently informed about the electoral program they are voting for. And even if it were, such information is likely skewed by cognitive defects in the voter’s brain .
Even those who claim to be better informed or more reflective tend only to use more complex and difficult-to-refute arguments to defend their own cognitive biases.
The brain is not designed to evaluate large amounts of information objectively, so any type of democracy is doomed to such biases. Even those who claim to be better informed or more reflective tend only to use more complex and difficult-to-refute arguments to defend their own cognitive biases .
I know very educated people who speak nonsense, but of course, how can I be sure that perhaps it seems nonsense to me because I am uneducated? It is difficult for me to imagine someone who knows everything and to a sufficient degree, so manipulation or simple rhetoric can easily slip through the cracks of ignorance.
That is why science is not based on the one-man evaluation of a subject, but on presenting it to a community and having it gut it from top to bottom, because science assumes that scientists are not to be trusted. From the process of looking for errors in others, in a kind of Linus’s Law, a certain coherence emerges.
Conveniently managed groups take advantage of this dynamic to create things that seem impossible in theory, like Wikipedia or Linux. Collaboration 2.0 , liquid democracy and others perhaps, in that sense, offer me more guarantees than traditional democracy, but not many more.
Perhaps our effort should be aimed at designing algorithms that decide the most efficient management of our problems. If a Skynet- type artificial intelligence appears that considers it appropriate to eliminate the human species, then it will not seem like such a good idea, but until that happens, technology has been revealed as a much more reliable way to perform many tasks that seemed exclusive to being. human.
For example, data mining is making it possible to improve all procedures in the health field. The first steps in this area are being taken by artificial neural networks, such as those already used by the Mayo Clinic to assess whether patients suffer from endocarditis, a type of heart infection.
For its part, the supercomputer WATSON uses the technique of machine learning to study medicine. Wall Street is also beginning to be invaded by computers seeking quantitative analysis and correlations. A company founded in 2010 by Stanford University legal and computer experts, Lex Machina , is already capable of executing computer analyzes that predict the outcome of patent lawsuits in different contexts .
Faced with this automation process that makes it clear how fallible the human being is, shouldn’t we start to consider a democratic system that would correct human lapses?