00:00:00.000 Hello, welcome to Topcast episode 32, part 2 of the chapter on choices.
00:00:27.120 In the last episode, David was describing how certain mathematicians and other people were disappointed
00:00:34.880 by the way in which certain supposedly rational systems would sometimes throw up paradoxes
00:00:39.960 problems and things they didn't want the system to have.
00:00:43.280 In other words, they bemoaned the fact that logic could cause problems.
00:00:48.400 They wished that logic wasn't so, that logic didn't cause these issues that they thought
00:00:53.960 were inherently problematic inside of these certain democratic systems, so let's just
00:00:58.680 dive straight into what David has to say about that.
00:01:02.880 We need something better to wish for, something that is not incompatible with logic,
00:01:10.280 It is the basic condition for a political system to be capable of making sustained progress.
00:01:15.360 Pop is criterion that the system facilitates the removal of bad policies and bad governments
00:01:22.160 What entails abandoning who should rule as a criterion for judging political systems?
00:01:27.600 The entire controversy about important rules and all other issues in social choice theory
00:01:31.840 has traditionally been framed by all concerned in terms of who should rule.
00:01:36.360 What is the right number of seats for each state or for each political party?
00:01:39.640 What does the group, presumed entitled to rule over its subgroups and individuals, want?
00:01:45.040 And what institutions will get it what it wants?
00:01:49.240 Okay, pause their my reflection. Now I'm going to go to what Poppy himself wrote about
00:01:56.920 And it's really a timeless point to make, actually.
00:02:00.680 Even if it's particularly relevant right now as I'm speaking in 2020, I don't mention
00:02:05.480 much at all typically in any of these podcasts or videos that I do.
00:02:10.000 Anything about current events, I attempt to try and avoid current events because I'd
00:02:14.520 like this series to stand for itself at the time and not be talking about parochial issues
00:02:23.280 So hopefully no matter when you're listening to this, maybe someone's listening to this
00:02:26.640 right now in 2025, 2030, things will still make sense to you, nothing will be out of context
00:02:34.560 Now all of that said, I'm going to allow myself one gratuitous mention of current events.
00:02:40.040 And that is about the fact that there is a vast number of people as there always would
00:02:44.240 be after any election, a vast number of people in the United States and elsewhere who regret
00:02:50.200 who the president is right now, President Trump.
00:02:53.280 And they've been calling not just for a change of president, but a change in the system
00:03:01.440 At first they were calling for the electoral college, the way in which the president
00:03:06.440 is elected to be utterly upended, changed, thrown out and replaced with something else.
00:03:11.960 But just yesterday, interestingly enough, a suggestion was put forward that a bipartisan
00:03:17.400 committee, that seems fair, doesn't it, bipartisan, a bipartisan committee be established
00:03:22.280 that will be able to vet and veto candidates for the presidency before they ever stood
00:03:28.800 In other words, an unelected panel deciding who would be a fit and proper person to stand
00:03:36.560 So this is to say that there's something deficient with the process that exists right now
00:03:40.600 according to these people, that I think if you've committed certain crimes, you can't stand
00:03:46.120 for elected office, including for the presidency.
00:03:49.600 The fact that the media is supposed to have some responsibility in trying to find out about
00:03:54.640 the background of these people that run for high office, whatever the case.
00:03:58.480 Some people are very unhappy with President Trump and so they want to change the system
00:04:03.280 so that a president Trump's style person can never again be elected.
00:04:07.880 In many ways, none of this debate is particularly new.
00:04:12.400 Ever since democracy was invented, people have lost elections and so blamed the system
00:04:21.000 It's the system or the stupidity of the voter that is the error, not their policies.
00:04:26.200 Now they may be right, there may be a flaw in the system, perhaps voters who are voting
00:04:31.800 in ignorance of what actually the policies happen to be.
00:04:35.440 So they might be right in some ways, but as a criticism, it's a poor one because it can
00:04:39.960 always be thrust forth whenever anyone loses an election.
00:04:44.560 It's rather like a football team losing a match and then blaming not merely the referee
00:04:52.480 If only there was a by team committee who could decide who was a fit and proper person
00:04:57.640 to play for either side, then we could have fair football games.
00:05:02.200 And it should be telling if the losing football team consistently complains that the rules themselves,
00:05:09.720 Now this doesn't really happen that often, of course the analogy fails in certain ways.
00:05:13.880 However, if your first response upon losing an election or being on the side of the person
00:05:20.440 who lost is to blame the system, then that should be revealing and it should give you
00:05:25.240 pause about what's motivating you apart from just the fact that you lost.
00:05:30.240 Now I'll put it up on the screen, but on Twitter, David Deutsch commented in 2018 that
00:05:38.600 He wrote in response to someone who said we live in an age of darkness and a lot of people
00:05:42.160 talking about this, that Trump out in some ways ushering in a new age of darkness.
00:05:48.120 David disagreed with just the general, he wasn't talking about Trump in any way, I don't
00:05:55.080 think, but he did say quote, we are not living in an age of darkness.
00:05:59.680 Not in an age of hyperbole, end quote, perhaps the most hyperbolic thing one can say of
00:06:05.800 their political opponents, certainly these days is that they are Nazis.
00:06:10.120 Godwin's law is the notion that this happens inevitably in online discussions.
00:06:15.000 Of course, Godwin's law is no law actually, it's just a funny reproach of how to behave
00:06:21.800 But the Trump is Hitler trope, it's no joke to some people it seems.
00:06:26.320 Some really do need to understand the history of Hitler and how he is categorically
00:06:33.360 Some really do need to understand that there is no actual parallel here between Trump
00:06:40.000 It's a ridiculous criticism to make, but it's being made more and more fervently for
00:06:46.760 Initially, Hitler had checks on his power under German law, but he violated them over and
00:06:53.760 For example, in the night of the long knives, and soon after that in 1934, Germany's
00:06:58.040 president Hindenburg died and Hitler simply declared himself head of both the state and
00:07:03.120 the government and thus an absolute tyrant in Germany.
00:07:07.520 Trump does not, as Hitler did at the time, have a private army.
00:07:11.280 He has not assassinated his political rivals and he has not dissolved or absorbed the powers
00:07:16.720 of either the Congress, the Senate or the Supreme Court.
00:07:20.360 This hyperbole nonetheless continues each side, caricatures the other to some extent
00:07:27.320 President Trump himself, of course, is a figure that has not always helped to clarify
00:07:30.480 things, speaking of hyperbole, he speaks in the most hyperbolic terms that we generally
00:07:40.400 Everything is the biggest or the best or the greatest.
00:07:42.400 Now, of course, in some cases, in the case of the US in particular, it's quite right
00:07:46.720 to talk about them being the biggest and the best and the greatest.
00:07:49.840 But when President Trump claims elections that have not yet been held might be rigged,
00:07:57.800 It tends to undermine institutions and it's just as bad a sin as claiming we need to change
00:08:06.800 Trump hasn't even lost yet, but he's setting things up so that if he loses, he can say,
00:08:11.400 well, the system was the thing that was flawed.
00:08:14.200 So again, systems might be flawed, but the solution is not to suggest that the entire system
00:08:19.400 is altogether bad, but rather it's to identify the precise error that you think is there
00:08:25.880 in the system and to propose a policy to correct it.
00:08:31.360 In the case of democracy, how can it be improved?
00:08:34.440 How can we come to identify errors in a democratic system and correct them?
00:08:38.320 Well, let's take a deeper dive into that very question through what Popper had to say on
00:08:45.400 His article can be found here in the economist and you should read the whole thing yourself.
00:08:50.600 It was first published in 1988 and then it was published again just before the last presidential
00:08:59.720 As the economist says here and I'll just read the introduction to the article says, quote,
00:09:07.360 the first book in English by Professor Sir Carl Popper was accepted for publication in London
00:09:13.480 while Hitler's bombs were falling and was published in 1945 under the title The Open Society
00:09:21.960 The book was well received, but in this article Sir Carl questions whether his central
00:09:27.520 theory of democracy, which he does not characterize as the rule of the people, has been understood
00:09:34.200 So what Popper's going to do here is to re-imagine, re-explain what democracy actually means.
00:09:42.960 It doesn't matter that prior to Popper, people thought that democracy was about solving
00:09:49.320 the who should rule question and about the rule of the many and all this kind of stuff.
00:09:55.920 In the same way that when people tried to understand what science was and thought that
00:10:01.720 it was about empiricism, it was about observing and deriving from those observations,
00:10:07.800 the laws of nature, despite the fact that that's what people thought science was and
00:10:11.800 what some people still think science is today or that what science amounts to is repeatedly
00:10:17.440 observing things and extracting from those, the laws of nature by extrapolation.
00:10:22.680 It doesn't matter that that's what people think distinguishes science from non-science.
00:10:26.720 If some people think the difference between science and non-science is that in science
00:10:31.160 you use a method of induction and you repeatedly observe things, fine trends and then extrapolate
00:10:40.040 It doesn't matter that they think that that's what distinguishes science from everything
00:10:44.680 Science is distinguished from other things by the criterion of demarcation that popper figured
00:10:50.480 out which is a falsification, testability, being able to experimentally test your hypotheses.
00:10:56.320 This is what separates science from non-science and as David Deutsch refined further,
00:11:01.840 although testable theories are a dime a dozen, what we're really looking for is hard to
00:11:06.280 vary explanations of the physical world and part of the hard to vary features of theories
00:11:12.560 about physical reality is their experimental testability.
00:11:18.400 What that's got to do with this is just because many people think that democracy is about
00:11:23.360 the rule of many people, poppers about to explain, that's not really what it's about.
00:11:28.000 That's not the essential characteristic of democracy nor why we should hope to have democracy
00:11:36.520 So let me read from the article, I won't be reading it all and just as with the beginning
00:11:41.640 of infinity I'll let you know when I'm cutting bits out so you might want to go to the
00:11:47.040 I'll put the link in the description and up there on the screen there's also what
00:11:54.000 That's the article you're looking for, popper rights.
00:11:57.560 My theory of democracy is very simple and easy for everybody to understand but it's fundamental
00:12:02.200 problem is so different from the age-old theory of democracy which everybody takes for granted
00:12:06.880 that it seems that this difference has not been grasped just because of the simplicity
00:12:11.880 It avoids high sounding abstract words like rule, freedom, and reason.
00:12:16.600 I do believe in freedom and reason but I do not think that one can construct a simple
00:12:20.920 practical and fruitful theory in these terms, they are too abstract and too prone to
00:12:25.920 be misused and of course nothing whatever can be gained by their definition.
00:12:30.840 Because they're my reflection on this, that's seen a quanon, an essential component
00:12:36.640 if we excuse the irony of saying that, of popers approach to philosophy.
00:12:41.560 Getting caught up in definitions is a losing game and it is the game played by so many
00:12:46.280 other philosophers, the linguistic philosophers, which is to say most philosophers today
00:12:51.320 and see the last chapter of the beginning of infinity for more about that.
00:12:55.960 Moving on and popper rights, quote, this article is divided into three main parts.
00:13:00.800 The first sets out briefly what may be called the classical theory of democracy, the theory
00:13:07.440 The second is a brief sketch of my more realistic theory, the third is in the main and outline
00:13:12.120 of some practical applications of my theory in reply to the question, what practical difference
00:13:17.080 does this new theory make, and then pop it goes into the first part, the classical theory.
00:13:23.640 The classical theory is in brief the theory that democracy is the rule of the people
00:13:28.560 and that the people have a right to rule, for the claim that the people have this right,
00:13:34.640 However, it will not be necessary for me to enter into these reasons here.
00:13:38.320 Instead, I will briefly examine some of the historical background of the theory and some
00:13:43.400 Plato was the first theoretician to make a system out of the distinctions between what
00:13:47.560 he regarded as the main forms of the city state.
00:13:51.520 According to the number of rulers he distinguished between, number one, a monarchy, the rule
00:13:56.840 of one good man and tyranny, the distorted form of monarchy, two, the aristocracy, the rule
00:14:03.640 of a few good man, and oligarchy its distorted form, and three democracy, the rule of the
00:14:09.640 many of all the people, democracy did not have two forms, for the many always formed a
00:14:15.240 rabble, and so democracy was distorted in itself, pause there just mere reflecting on that.
00:14:21.480 So Plato didn't like democracy, he argued in the republic which some of us had to suffer
00:14:26.120 through at university, he argued for philosopher kings, educated people who were justly
00:14:32.080 and rightly rule over the masses who couldn't be trusted with power, okay, let's keep going.
00:14:38.560 Popper writes, quote, if one looks more closely at this classification, and if one asks
00:14:43.880 oneself what problem was at the back of Plato's mind, then one finds that the following
00:14:48.400 underlay not only Plato's classification and theory, but also those of everybody else,
00:14:53.280 from Plato to Karl Marx and beyond, the fundamental problem has always been, who should rule
00:14:59.440 One of my main points will be that this problem must be replaced by a totally different
00:15:04.120 Plato's answer was simple and naive, the best should rule.
00:15:08.160 If possible the best of all alone, next choice, the best few, the aristocrats, but certainly
00:15:14.000 not the many, the rabble, the demos, the Athenian practice had been even before Plato's
00:15:19.440 birth precisely the opposite, the people, the demos, should rule.
00:15:23.280 All important political decisions such as war and peace were made by the assembly of all
00:15:28.640 This is now called direct democracy, but we must never forget that the citizens formed
00:15:33.120 a minority of the inhabitants, even of the natives.
00:15:36.440 From the point of view here adopted, the important thing is that in practice the Athenian
00:15:40.840 Democrats regarded their democracy as the alternative to tyranny, to arbitrary rule.
00:15:45.680 In fact, they knew well that a popular leader might be invested with tyrannical powers
00:15:49.680 by a popular vote, so they knew that a popular vote may be wrong-headed, even in the most
00:15:55.960 The institution of us ostracism recognizes, the ostracized person was banned as a matter
00:16:00.440 of precaution only, he was neither tried nor regarded as guilty, the Athenians were right,
00:16:06.000 decisions arrived that democratically, and even the powers conveyed upon the government
00:16:13.080 It is hard, if not impossible, to construct a constitution that safeguards against mistakes.
00:16:18.320 This is one of the strongest reasons for founding the idea of democracy upon the principle
00:16:22.240 of avoiding tyranny rather than upon a divine or morally legitimate right of the people
00:16:29.080 I'll pause down my reflection, so that's really important.
00:16:31.400 This is why the American Constitution, the British tradition is held up as being a form
00:16:35.960 of excellence in governing because it attempts to avoid tyrants.
00:16:40.840 It's not perfect, but it's a way of trying to ensure that no one single person has so
00:16:46.680 much power as to be able to become a tyrant of everyone else.
00:16:50.760 This therefore is the idea of checks and balances.
00:16:53.800 So democracy, regarded as the rule of the many, can make mistakes, but as we will come
00:16:59.000 to see, democracy in the Perperian sense is a system for correcting errors.
00:17:04.240 If we consider democracy wrongly as the who should rule question, then if it has
00:17:08.640 privacy, what we have and what Plato correctly identified as a problem is my rule.
00:17:14.640 For example, people could democratically vote away their rights, or democratically vote
00:17:21.320 And on that view, some of us argue that freedom or free markets or capitalism, liberty,
00:17:25.800 whatever you want to call it, is morally prior to that kind of democracy.
00:17:31.000 And that means we need certain things, we should call them rights, that cannot be voted
00:17:35.240 away by any government, they are prior to the government.
00:17:38.880 And to protect such things, a constitution is required and courts are needed to arbitrate.
00:17:44.040 The rule of the many may be the best system, except for all those others that have been
00:17:47.440 tried from time to time, but it cannot be an absolute ruler.
00:17:51.640 For then, it would be a kind of tyranny, with no protections for minorities.
00:17:56.280 And now I'm skipping a bit and Popper goes through all the ways in which the who should
00:18:01.520 rule question has repeatedly come up over the years in the British tradition.
00:18:09.280 And he writes, after me skipping a couple of paragraphs, quote, Karl Marx, who was not a
00:18:14.960 British politician, was still dominated by the old platonic problem, which he saw as who should
00:18:21.120 The good or the bad, the workers or the capitalists.
00:18:23.760 And even those who rejected the state altogether, in the name of freedom, could not free
00:18:28.200 themselves from the fetters of a misconceived old problem.
00:18:32.040 For they call themselves anarchists, that is, opponents of all forms of rule.
00:18:37.040 One can sympathise with their unsuccessful attempt to get away from the old problem, who
00:18:40.960 should rule, on to part two, which Popper calls a more realistic theory, quote, in the
00:18:47.760 open society and its enemies, I suggested that an entirely new problem should be recognised
00:18:52.680 as the fundamental problem of a rational political theory.
00:18:56.240 The new problem, as distinct from the old who should rule, can be formulated as follows.
00:19:01.680 How is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed,
00:19:12.960 The new problem with respect to democracy, as distinct from the old who should rule question,
00:19:23.240 How is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed,
00:19:32.080 This, in contrast to the old question, is a thoroughly practical, almost technical problem.
00:19:38.120 And the modern so-called democracies are all good examples of practical solutions to this
00:19:42.560 problem, even though they were not consciously designed with this problem in mind.
00:19:47.720 For they all adopt what is the simplest solution to the new problem, that is, the principle
00:19:52.000 that the government can be dismissed by a majority vote.
00:19:55.280 In theory, however, these modern democracies are still based on the old problem, and on
00:19:59.960 the completely impractical ideology that it is the people, the whole adult population who
00:20:04.760 are, or should by rights be, the real and ultimate and only legitimate rulers.
00:20:09.880 But of course, nowhere do the people actually rule.
00:20:13.720 It is the governments that rule, and unfortunately also bureaucrats, our civil servants,
00:20:18.160 or our uncivil masters as Winston Churchill called them, whom it is difficult, if not
00:20:22.800 impossible, to make accountable for their actions, pause their my reflection.
00:20:27.760 Yes, controversially, sometimes I make noises like this myself, that the bureaucrats,
00:20:34.680 and again, I'm allowing myself in this episode to be a little bit parochial, a little bit
00:20:39.640 contemporary, and remind people that in 2020, we had a coronavirus, where bureaucrats
00:20:46.040 became far more powerful, seemingly than they had been, certainly, in my lifetime anyway.
00:20:53.160 But chief health officers and their deputies were the people who were getting up in front
00:20:58.080 of the Demos each and every day, and informing us of new restrictions, almost by feet,
00:21:07.320 and the politicians were, at least in the place that I occupy in New South Wales and
00:21:14.560 Victoria, in Australia, there seemed to be very little resistance, and this concerned
00:21:20.360 me, it concerned me because, as Popper says there, it is difficult, if not impossible,
00:21:28.720 They aren't accountable, so if they make a mistake, apparently it goes to the politician
00:21:34.160 The politician could always turn around and say, well, I was just following the expert
00:21:36.880 advice of the chief bureaucrat, of the chief scientist, of the chief health officer.
00:21:42.360 So it's not my fault, what would you want me to do, not take the advice of the expert?
00:21:47.040 But the expert can always say, well, I was just giving the best advice I had at the time.
00:21:51.080 It's ultimately the politician's decision as to whether or not they enact this policy
00:21:55.600 So here we have a violation of what I would regard as a violation of Popper's criterion.
00:22:03.360 Other than me, going on a tirade, let me continue to read Popper's article, quote, what are
00:22:09.080 the consequences of this simple and practical theory of government?
00:22:12.560 My way of putting the problem, and my simple solution, do not of course clash with the
00:22:16.400 practice of Western democracies, such as the unwritten constitution of Britain.
00:22:20.920 And the many written constitutions, which took the British Parliament more or lesses
00:22:25.560 It is this practice, and not their theory, which my theory, my problem and its solution,
00:22:31.720 And for this reason, I think that I may call it a theory of democracy, even though it is
00:22:36.080 emphatically not a theory of the rule of the people, but rather the rule of law that
00:22:40.840 postulates the bloodless dismissal of the government by a majority vote.
00:22:45.200 My theory easily avoids the paradoxes and difficulties of the whole theory.
00:22:49.560 For instance, such problems as what has to be done if ever the people vote to establish
00:22:54.920 Of course, this is not likely to happen if the vote is free, but it has happened.
00:23:00.720 Most constitutions in fact require far more than a majority vote to amend or change constitutional
00:23:06.120 And thus would demand perhaps a two-thirds or even a three-quarters qualified majority
00:23:12.200 But this demand shows that they provide for such a change, and at the same time they did
00:23:16.720 not conform to the principle that the unqualified majority will is the ultimate source of power.
00:23:21.600 But the people, through a majority vote, are entitled to rule.
00:23:25.360 All these theoretical difficulties are avoided if one abandons the question who should rule
00:23:29.240 and replaces it by the new and practical problem.
00:23:32.360 How can we best avoid situations in which a bad ruler causes too much harm?
00:23:37.800 When we say that the best solution known to us is a constitution that allows a majority
00:23:42.080 vote to dismiss the government, then we do not say that the majority vote will always be
00:23:46.720 We do not even say that it will usually be right.
00:23:49.000 We say only that this very imperfect procedure is the best so far invented.
00:23:53.920 Winston Churchill once said jokingly that democracy is the worst form of government, with
00:23:57.560 the exception of all other known forms of government.
00:24:01.920 Somebody who has ever lived under another form of government, that is under a dictatorship,
00:24:05.440 which cannot be removed without bloodshed, will know that a democracy, imperfect though
00:24:09.040 it is, is worth fighting for, and I believe worth dying for.
00:24:13.160 This however, is only my personal conviction, I should regard it as wrong to try and persuade
00:24:18.280 We could base our whole theory on this, that there are only two alternatives known to
00:24:21.600 us, either a dictatorship or some form of democracy.
00:24:25.200 And we did not base our choice on the goodness of democracy, which may be doubtful, but
00:24:29.240 solely on the evilness of a dictatorship, which is certain.
00:24:33.400 Not only because the dictator is bound to make use of his power, but because a dictator,
00:24:37.800 even if he were benevolent, would rob all others of their responsibility, and thus of
00:24:44.480 This is a sufficient basis for deciding in favour of democracy.
00:24:47.680 That is, a rule of law that enables us to get rid of the government.
00:24:51.520 No majority, however large, ought to be qualified to abandon this rule of law.
00:24:55.960 And pause there, pop it then goes into a lengthy discussion of proportional representation,
00:25:04.720 which is what David talks about in the beginning of the infinity.
00:25:10.520 And so instead of reading that part, I'm going to skip all the way to where Papa talks
00:25:15.440 He's just criticized the idea of minority government, in other words, governments that are
00:25:20.840 made up of coalitions, and we've talked about the problem of coalitions and compromises
00:25:26.880 So it's better to have a majority government who can be held accountable for the policies
00:25:32.800 And so when they fail, they can be held responsible for that, and they can take accountability
00:25:37.120 So this is why majority government is better than coalitions, where people can all say,
00:25:41.680 I'm not responsible for this bad policy because it's a compromise, and I have to agree
00:25:45.640 with these people over here that I don't particularly like, but in order to form government,
00:25:48.800 we have to compromise, but the compromise wasn't my idea.
00:25:51.040 I wanted to do this other different policy over there.
00:25:53.680 Okay, so having established a majority rule is better, let's read what Papa has to say
00:25:58.120 about the two party system and he writes, quote, in order to make a majority government
00:26:02.960 probable, we need something approaching a two party system, as in Britain and the United
00:26:08.120 Since the existence of the practice of proportional representation makes such a possibility
00:26:12.320 hard to attain, I suggest that in the interests of parliamentary responsibility, we should
00:26:17.560 resist the perhaps tempting idea that democracy demands proportional representation.
00:26:22.240 Instead, we should strive for a two party system, or at least for an approximation to
00:26:26.160 it, for such a system encourages a continual process of self criticism by the two parties.
00:26:32.360 Such a view will, however, provoke frequently voiced objections to the two party system
00:26:36.120 that merit examination, a two party system suppresses the formation of other parties.
00:26:41.640 This is correct, but considerable changes are apparent within the two major parties in Britain
00:26:47.840 So the repression need not be a denial of flexibility.
00:26:51.640 The point is that, in a two party system, the defeated party is liable to take an electoral
00:26:58.360 So it may look for an internal reform of its aims, which is an ideological reform.
00:27:02.720 If the party is defeated twice in succession, or even three times, the search for new ideas
00:27:07.880 may become frantic, which obviously is a healthy development.
00:27:11.600 This is likely to happen, even if the loss of votes was not very great.
00:27:15.760 Under a system with many parties, and with coalitions, this is not likely to happen, especially
00:27:20.480 when the loss of votes is small, both the party bosses and the electorate are inclined
00:27:26.400 They regarded as part of the game, since none of the parties had clear responsibilities.
00:27:35.000 If you are not clearly responsible, you as the leader or you as the party for a particular
00:27:39.480 policy that fails, then you can always revert back to saying, well, let's actually
00:27:44.960 try my policy, even if you don't have power to get your policy in.
00:27:48.800 So it just becomes this vicious cycle of compromise and refusing to take responsibility,
00:27:54.240 coming up with another compromise, refusing to take responsibility, and so on.
00:27:57.560 And so I'll just finish with the final paragraph that Papa wrote in this article, quote,
00:28:04.200 it is also said, a two party system is incompatible with the idea of an open society,
00:28:09.120 with the openness for new ideas, and with the idea of pluralism, reply.
00:28:14.040 Both Britain and the United States are very open to new ideas.
00:28:17.440 Great openness would, of course, be self-defeating, as would be complete freedom.
00:28:21.680 Also, cultural openness and political openness are two different things.
00:28:26.160 And more important even than opening wider and wider the political debate may be a proper
00:28:30.320 attitude towards the political day of judgment.
00:28:33.960 Okay, so now let's segue from Papa straight to David Deutsch in the beginning of infinity.
00:28:40.680 And David writes, so let us reconsider collective decision making in terms of Papa's criterion
00:28:46.880 instead, instead of wandering earnestly, which of the self-evident yet mutually inconsistent
00:28:52.560 criteria are fairness, representativeness, and so on are the most self-evident, so that
00:28:58.920 We judge such criteria, along with all other actual proposed political institutions, according
00:29:03.840 to how well they promote the removal of bad rules and bad policies.
00:29:08.840 To do this, they must embody traditions of peaceful, critical discussion, of rulers, policies,
00:29:16.680 In this view, any interpretation of the democratic process is merely a way of consulting
00:29:21.400 the people to find out who should rule or what policies to implement misses the point
00:29:27.240 An election does not play the same role in a rational society as consulting an oracle
00:29:30.760 or a priest, or obeying orders from the king did in earlier societies.
00:29:34.960 The essence of democratic decision making is not the choice made by the system at elections,
00:29:41.880 And elections are merely one of the many institutions whose function is to allow such
00:29:45.120 ideas to be created, tested, modified, and rejected.
00:29:48.920 The voters are not a fount of wisdom from which the right policies can be empirically
00:29:53.400 They are attempting, fallible, to explain the world and thereby improve it.
00:29:57.760 They are, both individually and collectively, seeking the truth, or should be, if they
00:30:03.080 And they ease an objective truth of the matter.
00:30:05.560 Problems are soluble, society is not a zero-sum game.
00:30:08.800 The civilization of the Enlightenment did not get where it is today by cleverly sharing
00:30:12.720 out the wealth, votes, or anything else that was in dispute when it began.
00:30:16.440 It got here by creating ex-neilio, in particular.
00:30:19.840 What voters are doing in elections is not synthesising a decision of a superbeing society.
00:30:24.800 They are choosing which experiments are to be attempted next.
00:30:28.040 And principally, which are to be abandoned because there is no longer a good explanation
00:30:33.400 The politicians and their policies are those experiments.
00:30:38.160 When one uses no-go theorem such as arrows, to model real decision making, one has
00:30:42.440 to assume, quite unrealistically, that none of the decision makers in the group is able
00:30:46.960 to persuade the others to modify their preferences or to create new preferences that are
00:30:53.240 The realistic case is that neither the preferences nor the options need be the same at
00:30:56.920 the end of the decision making process as they were at the beginning.
00:31:03.880 And so this, in a nutshell, is, that's why the traditional way of thinking about decision
00:31:08.120 making as selecting among existing options is completely false.
00:31:12.840 People being creative as they go through the decision making process are going to improve
00:31:18.080 the theories they have on offer, the choices they have before them.
00:31:21.960 They're going to freely create new knowledge, freely choose, freely bring into their will,
00:31:32.360 They're the thing in the universe, which, if you had to explain, how was that choice
00:31:36.040 arrived at, it was the fact that that person or that committee or that group of people
00:31:43.720 It wasn't an outworking of the laws of physics, although the laws of physics were still
00:31:50.240 The real causal explanation comes down to a creative agent, namely a person or a group of
00:31:57.440 I'm skipping a number of paragraphs here and I'm going straight to the section on
00:32:01.640 proportional representation because, oh, this is something we avoided in the copyrightical
00:32:07.000 and David writes about this quote, proportional representation is often defended on the grounds
00:32:12.840 that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies for compromises and malgums
00:32:18.480 of the policies of the contributors have an undeservedly high reputation.
00:32:23.600 Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally as I have
00:32:29.000 If a policy is no one's idea of what will work, then why should it work?
00:32:34.520 The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails,
00:32:40.640 no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it.
00:32:44.040 Thus, compromise policies shield with the underlying explanations which do at least seem
00:32:48.680 good to some faction from being criticized and abandoned.
00:32:52.760 The system used to elect members of the legislature of most countries in the British political
00:32:56.480 tradition is that each district or constituency in the country is entitled to one seat
00:33:02.840 And that seat goes to the candidate with the largest number of votes in that district.
00:33:06.200 This is called the plurality voting system, plurality meaning largest number of votes,
00:33:11.840 often called the first-past-post system because there is no prize for any runner-up and
00:33:16.160 no second round of voting, both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake
00:33:24.080 Equality voting typically over-represents the two largest parties compared with the proportion
00:33:29.960 Moreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox and is even capable of bringing
00:33:34.400 one party to power when another has received far more votes in total.
00:33:38.320 Poor semi-reflection precisely what happened with the 2016 election and people were so
00:33:42.680 upset with the electoral college because although the loser, Hillary Clinton, got the largest
00:33:47.920 number of votes overall, the system, the electoral college system, actually enabled Donald
00:33:57.600 These features are often cited as arguments against plurality voting and in favor of a
00:34:01.560 more proportional system either literal proportional representation or other schemes such
00:34:05.840 as transferable vote systems and runoff systems which have the effect of making the representation
00:34:10.360 of voters in the legislature more proportional.
00:34:13.040 However, under pop as criterion, that is all in significant in comparison with the greater
00:34:17.320 effectiveness of plurality voting at removing bad governments and policies.
00:34:22.960 Let me trace the mechanism of that advantage more explicitly.
00:34:26.840 Following a plurality voting election, the usual outcome is that the party with the largest
00:34:31.120 total number of votes has an overall majority in the legislature and therefore takes
00:34:36.640 Although losing parties are removed entirely from power, this is rare under proportional
00:34:40.920 representation because some of the parties in the old coalition are usually needed in the
00:34:46.960 Consequently, the logic of plurality is that politicians and political parties have little
00:34:51.240 chance of gaining any share in power unless they can persuade a substantial proportion
00:34:57.720 That gives all parties the incentive to find better explanations or at least to convince
00:35:03.800 For if they fail, they will be relegated to palaces if at the next election.
00:35:08.400 Poor semi-reflection, so that's what it's all about.
00:35:10.480 If we have coalitions, if we have 10 parties that have to come together and share power
00:35:15.440 in order to form government, then at the next election, not all of them will be voted
00:35:19.880 out only some and we could expect that some of them will retain power and therefore
00:35:25.920 So even though a vast number of people might want to remove those politicians from power,
00:35:31.080 in fact a majority might want to remove them from power, they won't be removed from
00:35:36.560 If the party with the greatest number of votes still only has 10% of the votes because
00:35:41.120 there are 20 plus parties and all the other parties have 5% or less of the vote, this is
00:35:46.840 It means that even if 90% of people haven't voted for the party that gets the most number
00:35:51.080 of votes, now we 10% of the votes, we can't get rid of that party from power because
00:35:55.200 it will just continue to have this minority of people who continue to vote for it.
00:36:00.600 This is why coalitions are bad, why compromises are bad, why the ability to remove bad policies,
00:36:07.600 bad politicians, politicians you don't want is the criterion of a democratic system.
00:36:13.680 If you can't get rid of that bad government or that those bad people in power because
00:36:18.920 they've only got 10% of the vote, this is a violation of proper criterion that needs
00:36:23.560 to be easy to remove these people if the majority disagree with them, but these systems
00:36:29.760 that are not a plurality voting system, that are proportional voting systems are a violation.
00:36:34.440 It's not to say the plurality system is perfect or even good, as Popper would say.
00:36:39.160 It's just that it's better than any of the other systems that are out there.
00:36:42.280 All the other systems that are out there, there are knock down criticisms of them and that's
00:36:47.240 why we should defend two party systems, first past the post-13, skipping a little bit
00:36:52.400 and David writes, under a proportional system small changes in public opinion seldom account
00:36:58.120 for anything and power can easily shift in the opposite direction to public opinion.
00:37:01.960 What counts most is the changes in the opinion of the leader of the third largest party.
00:37:06.720 This shield's not only that leader, but most of the incumbent politicians and policies
00:37:13.160 They are more often removed by losing support within their own party or by shifting alliances
00:37:17.120 between parties, so in that respect the system badly fails Popper's criterion.
00:37:21.800 Under plurality voting it is the other way around.
00:37:24.200 The all or nothing nature of the constituency elections and the consequent low representational
00:37:28.360 small parties makes the overall outcome sensitive to small changes in opinion.
00:37:32.720 When there is a small shift in opinion, away from the ruling party, it is usually in real
00:37:39.360 Under proportional representation, there are strong incentives for the system's characteristic
00:37:43.240 unfairness to persist or to become worse over time.
00:37:45.920 For example, if a small faction defects from a large party, it may then end up with more
00:37:50.160 chance of having its policies tried out than it would if its supporters had remained
00:37:55.080 This results in a proliferation of small parties in the legislature, which in turn increases
00:37:58.960 the necessity for coalitions, including coalitions with the smaller parties, which further
00:38:05.200 In Israel, the country with the world's most proportional electoral system, this effect
00:38:09.040 has been so severe that the time of writing, even the two largest parties combined, cannot
00:38:15.800 And yet under that system, which is sacrificed all other considerations in favor of the
00:38:19.880 supposed fairness of proportionality, even proportionality itself is not always achieved.
00:38:24.680 In the election of 1992, the right wing parties as a whole received a majority of the
00:38:30.360 But the left wing ones had a majority of the seats.
00:38:32.480 This was because I had a proportion of the fringe parties that failed to reach the threshold
00:38:39.200 In contrast, the error correction attributes of the plurality voting system have a tendency
00:38:43.000 to avoid the paradoxes to which the system is theoretically prone, and quickly to undo
00:38:49.240 Because all those incentives are the other way around.
00:38:51.400 For instance, in the Canadian province of Manitoba in 1926, the Conservative Party received
00:38:56.040 more than twice as many votes as any other party.
00:38:58.960 But one none of the 17 seats allocated as that province.
00:39:01.880 As a result, it lost power in the National Parliament, despite having received the most votes
00:39:07.320 And yet, even in that rare, extreme case, the disproportionateness between the two main
00:39:12.920 parties' representations in Parliament was not that great.
00:39:15.840 The average liberal voter received 1.31 times as many members of Parliament as the average
00:39:23.760 In the following election, the Conservative Party again had the largest number of votes
00:39:26.400 nationally, but this time, that gave it an overall majority in Parliament.
00:39:30.400 It's voted to increase by 3% of the electorate, but its representation increased by 17%
00:39:35.400 of the total number of seats, bringing the party's share of seats back into rough proportionality
00:39:40.280 and satisfying proper criterion with flying colours.
00:39:43.680 OK, skipping more about voting systems, and just getting into some political philosophy
00:39:50.240 here, and David Wright's insight, we did not consider it surprising that a community
00:39:55.360 of scientists with different initial hopes and expectations continually in dispute about
00:40:00.040 their rival theories gradually coming to near unanimous agreement over a steady stream
00:40:07.560 It is not surprising, because in their case, there are observable facts that they can
00:40:13.680 They converge with each other on any given issue, because they are all converging on the
00:40:19.760 In politics, it is customary to be cynical about that sort of convergence being possible.
00:40:26.160 Throughout the West, a great deal of philosophical knowledge that is now a day is taken
00:40:31.320 Say that slavery is an abomination, or that women should be free to go out to work, or
00:40:34.960 that all topies should be legal, or that promotion in the armed forces should not depend
00:40:38.680 on skin color, was highly controversial, only a matter of decades ago.
00:40:42.360 And originally, the opposite positions were taken for granted.
00:40:45.680 A successful truth-seeking system works its way towards broad consensus or near unanimity.
00:40:51.120 The one state of public opinion that is not subject to decision-theoretic paradoxes and where
00:40:57.880 So convergence in the broad consensus over time is made possible by the fact that all concerned
00:41:02.360 are gradually eliminating errors in their positions and converging on objective truths, facilitating
00:41:08.520 And meeting Papa's criterion, as well as possible, is more important than which of two
00:41:12.440 contending factors with near-equal support gets its way out of particular election, pause
00:41:17.800 This is one of the most contentious parts of what might be called realist philosophy in
00:41:23.240 Many people are realist when it comes to science, but not necessarily realist when it
00:41:28.120 That there is a best thing to want that there is an objective good out there.
00:41:32.080 Religious people are often moral realists in that sense.
00:41:34.560 They believe there's an objective difference between good and bad, and there is an objective
00:41:38.480 good that we should strive for, but when you get to politics, even some people who
00:41:42.400 would endorse that notion don't necessarily think that in politics that there's an objective
00:41:46.720 good that we could be searching for, but this is an argument that in fact there is because
00:41:50.840 people tend to converge on certain political opinions that either two might have been regarded
00:41:59.600 We're going to see in the next chapter which is on beauty and aesthetics that there's
00:42:06.560 And so a realist is someone who thinks there's an objectivity to just about everything.
00:42:11.120 Okay, so I'm skipping a little bit and getting just to the last paragraph.
00:42:16.800 And David Wright's apportionment systems, electoral systems, and other institutions of human
00:42:21.560 cooperation were for the most part designed or evolved to cope with day-to-day controversy
00:42:26.480 to cobble together ways of proceeding without violence despite intense disagreement about
00:42:32.800 The best of them succeeded as well as they do because they have often unintentionally implemented
00:42:40.160 Consequently, coping with controversy in the present has become merely a means to an end.
00:42:45.240 The purpose of deferring to the majority in democratic systems should be to approach unanimity
00:42:49.920 in the future by giving all concerned the incentive to abandon bad ideas and to conjecture
00:42:57.480 Creatively changing the options is what allows people in real life to cooperate in ways
00:43:01.320 that no-go-theorems seem to say are impossible, and it is what allows individual minds
00:43:08.240 The growth of the body of knowledge about which there is unanimous agreement does not
00:43:14.960 On the contrary, human beings will never disagree any less than they do now.
00:43:20.720 If those institutions do, as they seem to, fulfill the hope that it is possible for
00:43:26.880 changes to be for the better on balance, then human life can improve without limit as we
00:43:32.400 advance from misconception to ever better misconception.
00:43:43.080 Rather than saying moving from explanation to ever better explanation or from theory to
00:43:49.520 ever better theory or from policy to better policy, he has said there what he has said in
00:43:53.520 other places, it will be better if we all just recognize that everything that we think
00:43:58.000 is our best idea right now is nonetheless a misconception.
00:44:01.560 And so we are moving from misconception to better misconception all the time.
00:44:06.000 And this idea too that even though disagreements can be intense at any given parochial
00:44:12.040 moment in time, we can expect that even if a democratic vote is very, very close.
00:44:19.200 And we might think that 49% of people, or you know, 49.9% of people or whatever number
00:44:25.960 you'd like to have less than 50% of people are the losers and therefore fail to convince
00:44:32.200 the rest of society of their ideas and fail to be convinced themselves.
00:44:37.920 And so it seems like we have this irreconcilable difference, nonetheless, over time, people
00:44:43.040 can use their creative minds to, in their own minds, by their own lights, come to be persuaded.
00:44:50.840 And therefore we come to a certain amount of unanimity in society.
00:44:57.320 We come to all agree that certain things are good things, slavery is bad, raising our
00:45:02.960 children in a certain way is good, respecting reason and logic is better than deferring
00:45:10.680 But in time, people can be persuaded of the objective good.
00:45:15.360 So at this time, right now, in 2020, there are a number of elections coming up in my country
00:45:23.000 I hope that people read this chapter, no matter what side of the political debate they're
00:45:27.040 on, to come to understand which systems are more or less democratic, what ways in which
00:45:33.720 we might improve decision-making ourselves personally or as a society.
00:45:39.160 And one simple rule of thumb is, is this change that you're suggesting going to make it
00:45:49.000 And if we've got committees of non-elected officials making decisions and those officials
00:45:54.160 can't be easily removed by the voters, then that's an undemocratic system.
00:46:00.240 And in your own life, if you're confronted with some kind of challenge and you've got
00:46:03.640 a number of choices before you, don't think that you simply have to choose, that there's
00:46:08.280 this false dichotomy, there are only these two things, these two ways forward that you
00:46:12.800 It's a feature of Popper's philosophy, David Deutsches philosophy, that there's always a third
00:46:19.800 You can creatively come up with the third way, in fact, that really is your purpose as
00:46:24.200 a human being, to creatively come up with better options in your own life and perhaps better
00:46:33.440 And next time, we're on to perhaps the most controversial of all the chapters that exist
00:46:39.920 in the book, many of them are controversial, of course, not controversial in a bad way,
00:46:43.560 controversial in the way of making you think that what you have up until now thought
00:46:47.880 was the right thing to think, in fact, is flawed in some way.
00:46:52.560 And this idea that there is an objectivity to aesthetics is certainly something that today
00:46:57.800 needs to be defended and David has a really interesting way of talking about, is there
00:47:05.160 Is there a way of actually trying to come up with a criterion for beauty attractiveness
00:47:18.880 As always, thank you to everyone on Patreon who's been supporting me.
00:47:21.920 We've got a couple more Patreons right now, and anyone who'd like to give the PayPal
00:47:26.800 donation, please know that it's accepted with great gratitude, especially right now.
