Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

I'm afraid that at this time of night I can't think of a better response to you than my first thought, which was of course: "Fuck right off."

People are protesting because their country has completely screwed them over and ruined their chances of making a decent life for themselves. Myself included: A Level educated from a good school, living in an area where it should be easy to find a job, yet I can't get a bloody thing (and I'm far from being the only one here) and I'm going to come out of higher education in three years time with £27000 debt, if I get the chance to go at all.

What we need is a government that's willing to come down like a ton of bricks on banks and companies who are acting irresponsibly, dodging taxes, and paying themselves inordinate sums of money as "bonuses", and start giving something back to the public who they're supposed to be serving.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Ok now how does this system deal with corruption? Corruption is inevitable, but the system needs to have a good defence mechanism against it. What you described is far too vague, it's a good idea but it isn't as simple as "You do this, I do that, we all get together for a circle jerk every now and then, and the public can watch". While I do agree with the idea, corruption is the reason so many governments fail in the first place.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

When possible their recommendations are peer reviewed by their respective fields of study. The peer review process has worked for academia for a few hundred years now. Any attempts to corrupt the system would be hard to get past a group of people who understand the issue just as well as everyone else.

The whole system would keep people who have no idea what they are talking on on issues out of the discussion. I do agree with the tea party on some issues and OWS on others. However both groups are full of people who don't know what they are talking about.

The best example of my system in recent memory was the bi-partisan debt panel which was commonly referred to as 'the gang of 6'. They worked out an excellent plan to fix the US debt problem, social security, and Medicare. Several of the members strongly disagreed on parts of the plan, but they backed them because they were the best ideas.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

The problem with just saying that the experts will rule is that whoever gets to decide who the experts are becomes the next closest thing to god.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Maybe lobbying and political parties should be illegal. They have too much influence on politicians.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Assuming those people are incorruptible, I think you may be right.

So if someone doesn't understand the discussion at hand, they're cast away, they get no say in what goes, their voices not even heard? The fewer people in control the worse, that's why these things go down hill. The fewer people who understand the problem the worse it is, they can take advantage of it much easier. Instead of casting away those who don't understand it, maybe taking time to enlighten them would be a better idea?

Great to see it worked.

It's worse than the current system they use. Instead of letting everyone vote, only certain people can vote for the leader they think is the most knowledgeable on the subject.

Of course, that's if I'm understanding this correctly, there wasn't much of an explanation beyond "experts vote for experts". Even if the general populace have a say, what good is it when they don't understand what is going on?

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

The peer review system has called out people on their biases quite often.

Also it is hard to corrupt thousands of people vs the 635 that are in congress today.

Blame congress and president as a whole, not the 6 people who came up with the plan. The gang of 6 sent the plan to Obama and congress. Both said no to it because it had things they hated.

If they want to get their voices heard on a particular subject they will seek formal education in said subject. If they get to the point where their voice counts for something at least I can know they are not retarded unlike the voting public out there today.

Better than a popularity contest where people like Perry and Cain compete to be the most popular. At least I know the people who are running things don't have a case of the downs.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Not necessarily, no.

The minute you make education required for something beyond the practical ends to which the knowledge can be put, quality nosedives. Because while you can pay people to teach you, you won't be checking to make sure that what you're being taught has any real use - and you won't find it out later on if the knowledge is never tested. That's just not why you're really there; you're there to get a degree, not to learn anything worthwhile. University's been going that way for a while in the West - you need a degree to do jobs for which there's no practical use for the knowledge contained in the degree. You can have an excellent degree grade and be a moron who just recites lists.

You stand a very good chance, if we enact your proposal, of ending up with a system where people have to know about the works of Confucianism and crap like that in order to serve in your government. As China did with their own civil service exams. The mass of over-educated people with pointless educations eventually got so bad there that they had among the most destructive civil wars that have ever been seen. The most destructive revolt of the 19th century, the Taiping revolt, was led by a school teacher, Hong Xiuquan. Who, after failing the civil service exams, hallucinated that god told him he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and had to rid China of demons. It took 14 years to put his rebellion, the "Heavenly Kingdom", down and cost tens of millions of lives - and he could do it largely because of the fractures in the empire's structure that resulted from having lots of disillusioned over-'educated' people floating around.

Arguably a far more serious problem, in terms of China's strength, was that by the time you got around to Daoguang in the closing days of the Qing dynasty, education had become so separated from the concerns of ruling that you just couldn't GET good help. Even the top of the crop, otherwise intelligent, diligent people - like Lin Zexu - failed to make proper use of even the most trivial of resources that could have saved their bacon.

We already (back in the West, and modern times) teach most subjects as the history of X rather than actually teaching people to do X. You just sort of pick up a few tips and tricks (if you're lucky) that are useful for publishing stuff when you're doing post-grad as far as actually learning to do your subject. We're not far off the point where education becomes totally irrelevant for anything beyond getting your foot in the door. Having a degree, even being a widely published professor, is no guarantee of good sense. Especially when your job security relies on the number of papers you publish.

And there are other parallels with Imperial China - they too enjoyed a period of almost unchallenged martial and economy prosperity. From the Chinese point of view the history of the world was the history of the Mandate of Heaven (by which they justified their rule) and that of the, 'ten thousand subservient [other] nations.'

You talk of peer review - well peer review has not solved the problem. There are thousands of papers published every year with absolutely no redeeming value. Research is funded to support particular points of view with methodological tricks.... And very few people will pay you to find things wrong - (which is much of the true business of rationality; any idiot can generate a hypothesis and find evidence for it - that's not the hard bit.)

The person selecting the experts might be a complete and utter moron who just selects random professors that publish a lot of cookie-cutter papers. (Who he thinks are good simply on the grounds they agree with him.) However, even if he's not, that's no guarantee that his predecessors won't be. The original rulers of China when they set up their system of exams for government office were incredibly competent - and it still went utterly tits up.

If you're going to look at academic elitism as a model for leadership you have to look at historical examples of how it's failed. Not just how it has succeeded.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Is this a democracy you're trying to explain, because it sounds like the exact opposite. The general public doesn't have the time to learn half the things about how a country works - that's why the PEOPLE can elect someone who does! If you don't let people have a say because they don't understand, you're narrowing it down to a select few people who do have a say.

What you're proposing is an Oligarchy, a system where the elite (or in your case the few who are educated) have the say in what goes. Which is basically tyranny. And few people in America would want that, but I guess that's what you're getting at isn't it?


[Nemmerle's Post]

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

They've gotten a new gov't under Mario Monti, which includes 0 politicians and a whole bunch of technocrats; people who, in theory, know what to do and are experts in certain domains. I wouldn't be surprised if Draconian measures would be included in his reign, since they're pretty much in large debts.

Italy has become on par with Greece because of Berlusconi's non-chalant and non-adequate leadership. Now, if Italy leaves that much beloved "broken countries" group, then it'll mean that Monti's tactics have worked and that technocrats make better rulers than politicians. This is without including possibilites of corruption etc... This would also be a clear message for us: kick them unable politicians out and give some more posts to technocrats.