The biggest problem is not education of the politicians IMO, but corruption and nepotism. Solving that is not a question of better education, but of will, or of giving the right incentives. — ChatteringMonkey
A government can be fair, anti-nepotic, and still incompetent through sheer ignorance. This seems like a separable problem. — Kenosha Kid
We live in a time when demagogues rule far more than actual leaders. And they have been placed there because of a representative democracy using psychological warfare, propaganda and advertising. In some cases even manipulating people through targeted advertising. The corruption of democracy we've seen in the last couple of decades has become a big problem for the type of system it's supposed to be. With enough resources, you could actually rule a nation as a dictator by manipulating the democratic system behind the curtain, like a wizard of Oz.
Most of this has to do with the politicians being interested in power, rather than knowledge and leadership. The motivations for becoming a politician often starts out with a will to change something and quickly descends into becoming a struggle for power instead. Like a video game where the goal of the game is drowned in meaningless tasks to the point where the game's initial goal becomes meaningless. — Christoffer
I think rather than educating the powers that be, would it not be simpler to disqualify uneducated people from executive posts? E.g. the chancellor must hold a doctorate in economics, etc.? — Kenosha Kid
Can't say I really like it, because it's a bit elitist only allowing certain diploma's. And licenses are also always reviewed by people who can be corrupted... which means you're probably just shifting the problem, while creating additional red tape. — ChatteringMonkey
The biggest problem is not education of the politicians IMO, but corruption and nepotism. Solving that is not a question of better education, but of will, or of giving the right incentives. — ChatteringMonkey
Yeah but competence is irrelevant if they are not fair, anti-nepotic etc... so it seems like something you'd want to tackle first. — ChatteringMonkey
In essence: You don't educate yourself and then chose to become a politician, you chose to become a politician and then educate yourself. — Christoffer
Your suggestions don't seem practical to me. I prefer making voting mandatory because I think it leads towards more moderate leaders, radicals are likely to be a greater percentage of option voting. Polling already exists and I'm not sure what's different about your proposal for it. — Judaka
You aren't really addressing the major flaws in democracy, we already know we're going to have incompetent politicians. They get voted in as opposed to getting in by merit and whether they keep their jobs isn't necessarily based on whether they do a good job or not. It's a complicated job on top of that, having a degree in philosophy or psychology isn't even likely to help even a little bit. — Judaka
None of this seems directly related to education. Rather, the problem seems to be one of virtue. The people that are successful in politics aren't the people we might want as leaders. That suggests to me that we need to change the mechanism behind success in politics to be more in line with our goals. — Echarmion
It sounds like a Noocracy, and it would be difficult to call it Democracy because it excludes people from the political process and denies them power based on their education and certification. — NOS4A2
Politics would becomes a debate between elites, none of which would be representative of the general polity. — NOS4A2
Personally I’d much rather vote for someone picked randomly from the phone book than to be led by some over-educated, certified politician. — NOS4A2
I don't see how education after election avoids the problem you ascribe to disqualification. — Kenosha Kid
whereas a meritocracy would favour the privileged. — Kenosha Kid
What does an elected official do, government-wise, between being elected and graduating? — Kenosha Kid
However, I think that the requirement of education can A) make people who have that ambition only to reach power either give up their attempts and quit — Christoffer
B) reprogram them into proper praxis and reduce such primary goals. — Christoffer
I also think that because it's not only about education but how debates in parliament are handled, they wouldn't be able to survive such fact-based scrutiny. How can someone who doesn't apply their education survive debates with the fact-checker? They would be humiliated in parliament if they have attempted to bypass the praxis of parliament. — Christoffer
Requiring several years of study might dissuade some people. But then the higher positions in politics tend to be taken up by older people anyways. Most people need to travel up through various local and minor posts before they reach the spotlight, and there is frequently a lot of not at all glamorous work involved. So I am not sure whether people who want power but are unwilling to put in the effort are actually all that common in politics. Sure you have populists which get catapulted up out of nowhere, but it's not clear yet whether that will be a major feature of democracies going forward. — Echarmion
I am very sceptical of that line of thinking. It feel like it could easily go the other way, too. A form of modern aristocracy forming around these courses where people are socialised as part of an elite. There is already arguably a problem with certain prestigious universities forming networks of contacts that lift people into high places regardless of their skills. — Echarmion
I think that changes to the way that debates and policy decisions work is, in general, the right approach to the problem. The problem with any neutral element of a parliament is, of course, how it is controlled. It's easy to imagine a "fact checker" neutered by onerous requirements to establish a "fact", or debate simply avoiding concrete proposals that are subject to checking. — Echarmion
maybe it's too easy to convince a politician to vote for some lobbyists proposal — Echarmion
Are you elected as soon as you chose to become a politician? — Christoffer
Earlier you said you don't need to be educated to be a politician, only to be elected, so the election appeared to be the crucial point, not the career move. The fact that the degree might be funded by the politician's party also suggests that. — Kenosha Kid
But I guess you mean that if a politician wishes to stand for election, he or she cannot do so without the requisite education level. In other words, they are disqualified. — Kenosha Kid
What your idea (putting aside things like limiting the degree to philosophy and such) really does, in addition, is to provide a framework for politicians to get free degrees if they're ambitious. I'd rather they get them because that field is what they're driven by. — Kenosha Kid
I'd still prefer the woman specialising in law to be a specialist in law, the man specialising in economics to be a specialist in economics. Nothing against philosophy graduates, but, to follow your own analogy, I'd rather my surgeon have a medical doctorate than a two-two in philosophy. — Kenosha Kid
Doctors don't just get an education, they have to pass exams that show their competency, then they need to do internships and then if they got past all that then they still need to do their job at least somewhat competently or they'll lose their licence. You can't compare what it takes to become a doctor with what it takes to complete a philosophy course. — Judaka
I mean it's just silliness to begin with to say that a philosophy or history course will even help being a politician in the first place. One can't really compare that with studying medicine to practice medicine. — Judaka
Anyway, yes I am pretty certain that none of your suggestions will help, I think most of them already exist. Trump is fact-checked all the time by the media and his supporters don't care, why does putting a fact-checker in parliament make any difference. — Judaka
The politician licence is a waste of time, none of those classes you suggested are likely to help a politician do their jobs better and I don't think that the problem with democracy is lack of education for politicians in the first place. — Judaka
Politicians already debate issues in parliament, they debate on the media, they debate in elections, how much more debating do we need. — Judaka
Your suggestions are either redundant or superfluous and really I think you've failed to address real problems in representative democracy in the first place. I think mandatory voting alone would probably stop many of the totally unqualified people who are getting elected recently. — Judaka
Debating through philosophical scrutiny, fact-checked, unbiased and without fallacies, is not at all close to what we see at the moment. The level of debates at the moment is a mud-throwing spectacle, not proper debate. I think that people have normalized political debate into the mud-throwing spectacle and forgot that debates should lead to some informed place of knowledge. If we had philosophical rules of conduct to these debates, they would look very very different. — Christoffer
I don't think that the demagogues you're talking about would be changed by this course, I don't think that the already educated people who wanted to get into politics would need the course. I don't think any of the things you listed to be studied would actually help somebody getting into politics. — Judaka
the morons who got elected are still going to get elected and they're still going to be morons. — Judaka
I don't know what kind of fact-checker you're talking about, someone with complete authority to tell people to stfu if they say something wrong? — Judaka
I'm not sure how it's different from normal fact-checkers. — Judaka
The thing is that with the Trump debates, for example, not only was it broadly criticised that he made stuff up but also that he changed his opinions and that his answers to questions were vague and nobody knew what his actual policies were or how he planned to do what he said he'd do. Not only did it not matter but they ended up giving him so much coverage that it ended up just helping him become more popular. — Judaka
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets by because basically as far as the left is concerned the intentions justify the means. She has no clue what she's talking about but it simply doesn't matter to people. All of this is already out in the open and I don't know what you're planning to differently, it seems like you just want to strongarm voters. — Judaka
I don't share your respect for philosophy either, I don't assume practitioners of philosophy are rational, intelligent thinkers. — Judaka
Discussions on this forum are filled with fallacies and few here have any fucking clue about the facts. In my experience, philosophers are the worst when it comes to facts because they think complex questions can be answered with baseless theories and morality. — Judaka
So what I don't really understand is how epistemic democracy is different from media fact-checking. Are you proposing that someone is tasked with telling politicians in parilament how to speak, how to argue, to shut up when they're wrong and correct them etc? — Judaka
Philosophy, the broad spectrum of it, actually incorporate areas that are needed for political praxis. You get the knowledge in dialectics and how to form arguments in debates free of biases and fallacies. You learn the complexities of subjects that are key to political decisions. You learn important ideas that are the groundwork for political laws and legislations. — Christoffer
Yes, but these are a philosopher's ideas of what's most important which, unsurprisingly, bend toward philosophy more than pragmatic skills of governance. — Kenosha Kid
Isn't the neutral approach the philosophical approach? You can't have philosophical praxis without the demand of an undbiased dialectic approach. — Christoffer
I'm trying to focus parliamentary politics into philosophical praxis so that the incompetent mud throwing that can be witnessed in many parliaments today disappears in favor of better dialectic scrutiny. — Christoffer
You've proposed a 3-4 year degree split into several large topics, you have to be realistic about how deep they're getting into those topics. People from this course are not going to be on the level of career philosophers and psychologists or experts on history as a result of this course. How can a 3-4 year course on so many topics be advanced in these topics? — Judaka
So what you're giving these politicians is just an introduction to topics which don't really have anything to do with being a politician. — Judaka
Why are you acting like people coming out of this degree are going to be experts in these topics? — Judaka
Not only are they not going to be remotely competent but I don't think they're even slightly better off than before they began this course. — Judaka
Demagogues would still exist as politicians still need to get voted in and they aren't suddenly experts on all topics related to the economy, industries, infrastructure, history, geopolitics, budgets, taxation, foreign nations, policing and any other topic they might speak on or be responsible for. — Judaka
I'm also unconvinced by the fact-checker and the main reason why is that I'm not sure that this fact-checker wouldn't just get into arguments. Alternatively, this person has absolute authority and just sin bins people. — Judaka
You say biases and fallacies aren't allowed but I don't know, I'm sceptical. Aren't you at all scared by the fact-checker? If they aren't satisfied with your argument then you're just sent out of parliament or not allowed to speak? — Judaka
I don't really have any faith in what is essentially less than an undergraduate philosophy student, I don't expect an increase in how informed they are on things or that they'll be impressively logical or even good debaters. I have no idea where your self-assurance on this is coming from. The licence is just a waste of peoples' time, not really making things worse or better. — Judaka
Suggesting that a philosophy degree is the best way to derive great economic policy is like suggesting someone learn Latin if they plan to move to Spain. Yes, you'll learn lots about some of the underpinnings, but you'll not have expertise, and most of what you'll learn will be irrelevant. Would you accept a heart transplant from a biologist? — Kenosha Kid
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