If you don't mind, could you elaborate on your opinion further ?
IMO power users in democracy (lobbyists, influencers and special interest groups) will always have more leverage unless the population is educated and informed enough to be skeptical to not associate with an identity or ideology.
The recurrence of such groups throughout history seems to indicate that this hasn't become part of our collective knowledge yet and I doubt if we will ever learn. Maybe the sense of collective identity is part of human nature.
> This feels like a Unix poweruser telling grandma why she doesn’t need Dropbox.
If you meant to imply that the "Unix poweruser" is likely to make a weak argument through misapplication their own narrow expertise to a domain outside of that expertise, I agree. If you mean that Unix powerusers as a group so regularly missapply their narrow expertise that I can't even take on faith that they're picturing a human being when they utter the word "grandma", I agree.
But then I don't understand the analogy to what you call a "fairly strong" case against the desirability of democracy. If you're unfamiliar with U.S. democracy from local to federal level, you should instead be assuming the OP wrote potentially true but incomplete (and, therefore, misleading) set of statements about a domain outside of whatever their narrow expertise happens to be.
For example, there are a lot of local and municipal governments in the U.S. where elections are non-partisan. That is, elected officials don't belong to or get funding from political parties. Further, the "advocacy" groups in these areas are ones that typically organize citizens on the local or regional level to serve the community's needs.
If you run the numbers on those voting districts you'll quickly realize that individual citizens there have a considerable amount of power to affect the conditions of the town or county where they live. A lot of those decisions aren't subject to outside manipulation and are mostly bound by a citizen's time, energy, and ability to persuade others of their position.
What I just wrote is completely compatible with what Merrill wrote. But the important point is that you didn't intuit it from reading their post.
vsskanth|6 years ago
IMO power users in democracy (lobbyists, influencers and special interest groups) will always have more leverage unless the population is educated and informed enough to be skeptical to not associate with an identity or ideology.
The recurrence of such groups throughout history seems to indicate that this hasn't become part of our collective knowledge yet and I doubt if we will ever learn. Maybe the sense of collective identity is part of human nature.
jancsika|6 years ago
If you meant to imply that the "Unix poweruser" is likely to make a weak argument through misapplication their own narrow expertise to a domain outside of that expertise, I agree. If you mean that Unix powerusers as a group so regularly missapply their narrow expertise that I can't even take on faith that they're picturing a human being when they utter the word "grandma", I agree.
But then I don't understand the analogy to what you call a "fairly strong" case against the desirability of democracy. If you're unfamiliar with U.S. democracy from local to federal level, you should instead be assuming the OP wrote potentially true but incomplete (and, therefore, misleading) set of statements about a domain outside of whatever their narrow expertise happens to be.
For example, there are a lot of local and municipal governments in the U.S. where elections are non-partisan. That is, elected officials don't belong to or get funding from political parties. Further, the "advocacy" groups in these areas are ones that typically organize citizens on the local or regional level to serve the community's needs.
If you run the numbers on those voting districts you'll quickly realize that individual citizens there have a considerable amount of power to affect the conditions of the town or county where they live. A lot of those decisions aren't subject to outside manipulation and are mostly bound by a citizen's time, energy, and ability to persuade others of their position.
What I just wrote is completely compatible with what Merrill wrote. But the important point is that you didn't intuit it from reading their post.