Choices

TBOF P. 344

"we judge such criteria, along with their actual or proposed political institutions, according to how well they promote the removal of bad rulers and policies."

p. 345

"The esscence of democratic decision making is not the choice made by the system at elections, but the ideas created between elections."

"[voters] are attempting, fallibly, to explain the world and thereby improve it."

DD gives way too much credit to 'voters' here. The fraction of voters that can look beyond parochial concerns is vanishingly small; and the means of manipulating them ever more effective. According to DD, knowledge is a form if information that, once embedded in a physical environment, tends to make itself remain so. Bad explanations may spread more readily then good explanations by taking advantage of hard-wired parochial schemas. 

p. 346 "It does not make sense to include everyone's favoured policies, or parts of them, in the new decidion; what is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent rheir entenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas."

p. 349

"The plurality votign system almost always produces situations in which a small change in the vote produces a large change (in the same direction!) in who forms a government... the idea that representative government depends on proportionate representation in the legeslature is unequivivocally a mistake."

p. 351 

"...human beings will never disagree any less than they do now, and that's a very good thing."

DD earlier described several mini-enlightenments that were snuffed out; the fact that this one has lasted much longer does not mean it can't be.

p. 352

"Good policies are hard to vary, and therefore conflicting policies are discrete and cannot be arbitrarily mixed."

That's the centerpiece of his (suprising, to me) argument for plurality voting. It seems this choice is taken among common voting systems only; surely there are better methods yet.

A critical issue in social-choice theory, which he ignores, is that public preferences are irrelevant, because almost nobody has the knowledge to recognize good explanations. 

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