User:Athenidas/sandbox

Article Evaluation
I am evaluating the article on Deliberative Democracy. This article is an interesting one.

Voice
The article maintains a strong, but definitely neutral voice on the topic at hand. There are obviously parts of the article that aren't hard to be neutral about; somethings just do not have any natural tendency towards controversy. However, there are parts in which a writer who isn't careful could reasonably have themselves espousing their own views. When the "Strengths and Weaknesses" section arose, I anticipated that risk coming to fruition. But I was wrong. The section focused on critical perspectives for and against this form of democracy. The section often has phrases like this one: "A claimed failure of most theories of deliberative democracy is that they do not address the problems of voting." Something like this makes it clear that this is not the view of the author, though the author of the article would do better to clarify who has made the claim. In general, this article has the encyclopedic voice that it should.

Week 8/Spring Break Blog
Gathering sources for the Wikipedia article has proven pretty difficult because it's harder than I thought it would be to find sources that directly talk to meritocracy in more recent times, presumably because people argue for or against democracy typically on the accepted values of the system as they currently stand, and many forms of noocracy aren't really entertained. I find that especially interesting because most modern forms of democracy are essentially noocracies. They do not begin as such, and aren't exactly framed as such, but systems like the USA's are especially keen on the people who can prove that they have the most experience being the ones to make decisions, and many policies in place propagate the immense power of few elite groups in the country.

Noocracy Article Contribution
I will be working on the article Noocracy.

Criticisms of Noocracy
(The current noocracy article mentions that there exist arguments against noocracy similar to those against other meritocratic system, but neither clarifies those arguments nor cites them. Here, I will make a similar argument, but correct those failings. I also edited the existing first paragraph of the "Criticisms" section, to make it more cohesive and clearer.)

Criticisms of noocracy in all its forms - including technocracy, meritocracy, and epistocracy (the focus of Jason Brennan's oft-cited book) - range from support of direct democracy instead to proposed alterations to our consideration of representation in democracy. Professor Hélène Landemore, while arguing for representatives to effectively enact legislation important to the polity, criticizes conceptions of representation that aim especially to remove the people from the process of making decisions, and thereby nullify their political power. Noocracy, especially as it is conceived in Jason Brennan's Against Democracy, aims specifically to separate the people from the decision on the basis of the immensely superior knowledge of officials who will presumably make superior decisions to laypeople.

Noocracy also receives criticism for its claims to efficacy. Brennan writes that one of the many reasons that common people cannot be trusted to make decisions for the state is because reasoning is commonly motivated, and, therefore, people decide what policies to support based on their connection to those proposing and supporting the measures, not based on what's most effective. He contrasts real people with the ultra-reasonable vulcan that he mentions throughout the book. That vulcan reflects Plato's philosopher king and, in a more realistic sense, the academic elites whom Michael Yong satirized in his essay The Rise of the Meritocracy. Modern political theorists don't necessarily denounce a biased viewpoint in politics, however, though those biases are not written about as they are commonly considered. Professor Landemore utilizes the existence of cognitive diversity to argue that any group of people that represents great diversity in their approaches to problem-solving (cognition) is more likely to succeed than groups that do not. She further illustrates her point by employing the example of a New Haven task force made up of private citizens of many careers, politicians, and police who needed to reduce crime on a bridge without lighting, and they all used different aspects of their experiences to discover the solution that was to install solar lamps on the bridge. That solution has proven effective, with not a single mugging reported there since the lamp installation as of November 2010. Her argument lies mainly in the refutation of noocratic principles, for they do not utilize the increased problem solving skill of of a diverse pool, when the political system because as debate between elites alone, and not a debate between the whole polity.

Jason Brennan's epistocracy, specifically, is at odds what is commonly considered the supreme form of gevernment - democracy - and with certain criteria for democracies that theorists have proposed. Robert Dahl's Polyarchy sets out certain rules for democracies that govern many people and the rights that the citizens must be granted. His demand that the government not discriminatorily heed the preferences of full members of the polity is abridged by Brennan's "restricted suffrage" and "plural voting" schemes of epistocracy. In the eight chapter of his book, Brennan posits a system of graduated voting power that gives people more votes based on established levels of education achieved, with the amount of additional votes granted to a hypothetical citizen increasing at each level, from turning sixteen to completing high school, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and so forth. Dahl wrote, however, that any democracy that rules over a large group of people must accept and validate "alternative sources of information." Granting the full powers of citizenship based on a system like formal education attainment does not account for the other ways that people can consume information, is the commonly cited argument, and still eschews consideration for the uneducated within a group.

To some theorists, noocracy is built on a fantasy that will uphold current structures of elite power, while maintaining its inefficacy. Writing for the New Yorker, Caleb Crain notes that there's little to say that the vulcans that Brennan exalt actually exist. Crain mentions a study that appears in Brennan's book that shows that even those who have proven that they have superb skills in mathematics do not employ those skills if their use threatens their already-held political belief. While Brennan utilized that study to demonstrate how deeply rooted political tribalism is in all people, Crain drew on this study to question the very nature of an epistocratic body that can make policy with a greater regard to knowledge and truth than the ordinary citizen can. The only way to correct for that seems, to many, to be to widen the circle of deliberation (as discussed above) because policy decisions that were made with more input and approval from the people last longer and even garner the agreement of the experts. To further illustrate that experts, too, are flawed, Cairn enumerates some of the expert-endorsed political decisions that he has deemed failures in recent years: "invading Iraq, having a single European currency, grinding subprime mortgages into the sausage known as collateralized debt obligations." With the contention around the reasoning for those political decisions, political theorist David Estlund posited what he considered to be one of the prime arguments against epistocracy - bias in choosing voters. His fear was that the method by which voters, and voters' quantity of votes, was chosen might be biased in a way that people had not been able to identify and could not, therefore, rectify. Even the aspects of the modes of selecting voters that are known cause many theorists concern, as both Brennan and Cairn note that the majority of poor black women would be excluded from the enfranchised polity and risk seeing their needs represented even less than they currently are.