Strong Opinions @marksbirch

yancey:

“In experiments where a minority of fish was trained to swim toward a yellow target, and a majority toward a blue target, the minority swayed the whole group more than 80 percent of the time. Then the researchers added “uninformed” fish to the mix, and a curious thing happened. “Adding those individuals dramatically changes the outcome of group decision-making,” [study author Iain Couzin] said. “They inhibit the minority and support the majority view, and this allows the majority to be heard and that view to dominate.” … “We thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of interesting,’” Couzin said, “because you don’t normally think that adding uninformed individuals to decision-making processes would have that sort of democratizing effect.””

- “Why a Democracy Needs Uninformed People” (Miller-McCune)

Could we possibly have at present a more uninformed public?  If recent reports on the level of proficiency in US civics by the American populace is any indication, our nation is already pretty uninformed.  For example, a Newsweek poll of 1,000 US citizens found the following:

29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War​. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

I am not sure it behooves us to have an even more ignorant and dull-witted public given the characters that have been elected to office.  Washington DC, for example, elected as mayor on multiple occasion a crack addict and criminal.  But given the fact that the majority of the public is living in a fantasy world, it is no surprise that politicians pander to and exploit the whims of the public.  In a CNN poll earlier in the year, exposed the vast sea of ignorance in government budget discussions and fiscal policy:

even though 71 percent of voters want smaller government, vast majorities oppose cuts to Medicare (81 percent), Social Security (78 percent), and Medicaid (70 percent).

Therefore, while this study sounds like an interesting fish experiment, we need to be extremely careful when ascribing human decision making to the whims of nature and animal instinctual behavior.  Outside of the fact that this is published in Science (which is pop-science trash) and the study’s author is an evolutionary biologist (historically susceptible to confirmation bias), human behavior is both highly predictable yet maddeningly erratic and irrational.  We can act with altruism and greed, love and hate, loyalty and treachery all in the same breath.  Fishes and other animals act as they do because they have to.  Human do not and have a choice in the matter.

There are a lot of ways to improve democracy in this country.  Let’s not make the mistake however of thinking we need more uniformed people in the process.