Are you claiming expertise in computing or non-computing topics? HN tends to be - as we might expect - quite good at computers and bad/average [0] at everything else.
I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics.
[0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.
Democracies function on the notion that most people have no idea what they're talking about, and vote randomly. The few who do know what they're talking about will all vote the same way, so most of the time the right answer will prevail.
There are a lot of problems with that assumption. Thus far it seems to work out better than the alternatives, but we'll have to see if that continues to hold.
I don’t think that’s true. I’m pretty sure the hope is that people are reasonably well informed. And anyway, we’re voting on representatives, not specific issues, for the most part. (I mean clearly referenda exist, but they aren’t the main thing). Or we’re voting on matters of preference, in which case the populace is essentially correct whatever their decision.
Yes, but false reporting isn't coming from just one side is it, it's something all sides can participate in. The way the education system is right now along with societal expectations, people are going to be misinformed rather than admitting to be uninformed.
In the absolute sense yes, but this thread was framed in comparison to undemocratic systems. The media aren't biased in the direction of making their host country worse off, so their biases aren't negative in that sense. We'd get better outcomes if people in the public discourse held themselves to higher standards; but their low standards don't stop the tendency of marginal voters to bias on rational decision making.
The media aren't biased in the direction of making their host country worse off
i don't believe that. at least western media are biased towards majority and conservative views and for profit entities, ignoring or even suppressing minorities and that is making us worse off.
Conservative views are things that worked in the past though. For profit entities are all dedicated to satisfying the needs and wants of people and are part of society too. >90% of all the gains since the industrial revolution came from for-profit entities so it is a stretch to say they are biased in favour of making things worse. Minorities are, by definition, not a group that includes most people so things can get really brutal for them before it starts hurting the greater society.
These are all biases that may be politically undesirable to you (the corporate media are basically the vanguard of class warfare, so they should be undesirable to a bunch of people), but they aren't biased in the direction of making things worse at the highest level of abstraction. A rising tide benefits all ships.
That is indeed one of the problems I mentioned in the last paragraph. We are stressing the limits of how much misinformation democracy can handle. We might well be over it.
> HN tends to be - as we might expect - quite good at computers and bad/average [0] at everything else.
Who's we? I don't expect that at all. "computers" is such a broad subject, with countless areas of specialty, and in my experience HN commenters are often, all too often, quite ignorant of my particular areas of specialty, though that doesn't stop them from overconfidentally asserting falsehoods about those subjects.
I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics.
[0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.