Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
In what direction do you expect such a policy to shift the election outcome, and why?
In my experience, restrict-voting-to-the-educated proposals mostly come from right-wingers, though I would be unsurprised myself if the effects of such a proposal would end up favouring Democrats.
It is, of course, possible that someone might sincerely, for principled reasons, support a reform that would harm their own side.
(My opinion is that these proposals are misguided - they inevitably hand a huge amount of power over to whoever it is who gets to decide the criteria for voting. I can understand the intuitive appeal of the idea that you should understand the political system and have a basic ability to analyse problems before you can make a choice about it, but in practice I don't think it can be fairly implemented. Moreover, I also tend to think that interests often matter in voting more than intelligence does. I don't expect insert-stupid-demographic-here to be more capable of analysing problems than insert-smart-demographic-here. I do expect, however, the stupid demographic to be more motivated to vote for their own interests than people outside that demographic, and so their voting forces politicians to take that demographic's interests seriously. There is a cut-off below which people are too intellectually handicapped to vote (e.g. someone with dementia, someone with severe development retardation, etc.), and I'd agree with excluding those people, but I don't think that illiteracy, lack of English proficiency, an IQ of 80, etc., should be disqualifiers.)
(In this particular case I think it's interesting that IntoTheWind's screening test is about English language proficiency. I assume he intends it as a proxy for mental acuity in general, but I think its main effects would be to exclude people with low English ability and people with small vocabularies. I might suggest that verbal agility, though, is a skill that one associates more with educated demographics that skew left, so it might not have the effect he wants.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link