As for me, I would not condone populist outcomes that harm the integrity, freedom, safety & other ‘basic’ rights etc. of others (you know, the sort of stuff that’s in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I happen agree with the ‘morality’ in that document. (interestingly, a few islamic scholars don’t, I am led to believe).

As to your question about who is the asking the cavemen. Answer: their wives, of course!

Most of the number crunching and ideas seems to be going into beating the financial markets with hedge funds, derivatives etc. This is now turning into financial dysfunctionality with fund managers chasing their tail by everyone ending up in a zerosum game. The total value of the market is not changing but the players are getting billions for their efforts. Perhaps the latest subprime crisis couls s

I feel that Nishizaki is correct mostly because morality does not largely develop with what you can be taught from a book .. (Although books can serve as actors to point you in a direction) Teach them about democracy? I don’t see how this can be viewed without a condescending tone. Taxi Driver, do you feel that teaching people about democracy is a precursor to allowing popular approval? Nishizaki provides a much more forgiving analysis and it doesn’t seem to be argued from a base that has shaped our mistakes with populism here in the West.

I’m sure there are population parameters that can affect the concensus of the group. If you asked a group of cavemen to move a rock, they would not come up with a wheel(barrow), let alone a bulldozer.I don’t think anyone has claimed that crowds can come up with new inventions. With crowds, however, you benefit from tacit information (info that’s already there, including ‘experience’). Ask one caveman and he might suggest to lift the rock with his bare hands; ask enough cavemen and you’ll probably find the best solution that caveman technology can provide (cantilevers?). Information dissemination is not a problem when you have a diverse enough crowd. The info will ‘rise to the top’.

But to relate all this back to 2008 Thailand: I would rather have a leader selected by a crowd, than a leader selected by a bunch of white haired privy councillors. Some individuals may think they ‘know better’ than others, but their decision(s) do not provide a systematically superior outcome.

Grasshopper: I’d like to be able to answer your question, but I think we need to agree on a definition of ‘populism’. If you mean populism in a negative sense (e.g. Pauline Hanson’s populism appealing to a group/class of people to target another) then education might be an answer. If you mean populism as nothing more than ‘popular’ then I don’t see there needs to be any alternative.

In the context of EMH these people would be considered irrational, and EMH assumes all stock market participants are rational (i.e. they take into account all known information).

But I think I know what you’re getting at: I think you meant ‘ignorant of information they should have known’, right? For example smokers who keep on smoking despite the warning labels on the pack; or, as I’m sure you’re implying, dumb rural folk who vote for Thaksin?

You know I don’t subscribe to that view. Smokers might be chemically addicted to Nicotine, but voters aren’t ‘addicted’ to populist policies.

[i]Grasshopper: “What if the doctors truth is able to be more expressed than anyone else?” — I think its part & parcel of the package (i.e. normal) that some may be able to hog the airwaves more than others (sort of like what I’m doing right now on NM ), but I think the crowd is able to discern it. Otherwise we’d all use the same brand of shampoo!

I don’t think that whatever is popular is necessarily good, but I make that judgement from an individual perspective, based on my own moral compass which may or may not be the same as others’. I have the right to tell others that I believe whatever is popular is grotesque (Paris Hilton, Britney Spiers etc) but that does not necessarily mean I’m the right one and everyone else is wrong. There are universal truths (1+1 =2, perhaps even E=MC2) and there are opinions (Paris is grotesque).[/i]

But how individual are individuals? We’re all influenced by a culture of popularity. Perhaps morality will be popular one year? That wouldn’t be good either. The grotesque could just be ’sharing guilt with blood spilled in accordance with the dow jones’, does your moral compass find itself in that guilt? Perhaps it should, but then it doesnt because it is really too difficult, so one justifies another angle ‘well I didn’t want it to be this way, I never voted for them in our democracy’, and so the crowd of people adopt an armchair democracy attitude. The armchair conscientious objectors. I would find it tremendously sad if Thailand adopted our style of democracy (the archetype of ‘developed’ with statistical correctness) to lose it’s own developed sense of right and wrong.

I wanted to know your opinion on what an alternative ingredient to populism in democracy would be, but I didn’t articulate it very well. Is there one?

As Srithanonchai illustrates with anecdotal evidence, your suggestion that a group of 40 randomly selected people from a population will be better informed than any single expert can be incorrect. But as someone who deals with statistics, I’m sure you will brush that off as a possible but not significant nor likely case.

However, besides all the practical arguments against what you’ve brought up, I think there can also be a theoretical limitation to your idea, as Ladyboy and nganadeeleg have bought up with regards to the dissemination of information. Surely, there must also be population parameters that can affect what the consensus of the group? For instance, the amalgamation of 40 randomly selected experts in a particular field should produce a more accurate result than 40 randomly selected non-experts? Furthermore, the examples you gave (jellybeans, weight) were cases where members of the group could have given any number. Specific to medicine, how would a group of 40 non experts diagnose a condition that would never have heard of before?

Ladyboy, your suggestion reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s short story, The Final Question. It is all about the numbers these days and I think it is absolutely rational for humanity to move into a statistics-oriented world. Already, the think tanks and governments are geared more and more towards number crunching but there is a staggering lack of comprehension with what to do with the numbers. It would be interesting to see what would happen if statisticians and computer scientists led the world.