alt Hacker NewsI'm going off democracy, at least how it is currently implemented. It is proving far too easy to pervert.
It turns out that the people will vote for some terrible things in order to get that one petty little thing a given candidate promises and they want, or because they don't like something specific about the other candidate(s). And of course many may later say “well, I didn't vote for that” when they quite demonstrably did.
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> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
The measure is the number of votes. "What shall we have for dinner" measures things, there's no target in a "curry vs pizza vs thai" poll, and it doesn't really matter, the target is a nice night in with a film.
However with politics, getting power is the goal, thus the number of votes is thus the target, and thus its not good at measuring what the country actually wants, just who can best get the most votes.
This isn't new, but modern brainwashing allows manipulation at a scale hitherto unseen.
Well, the politicians learned how to game the system well. Now people need to learn how to game the politicians. A formal verification process of pre-election promises would be a good start.