Take Me To Your Lizard

Every time there’s an election, I think of Douglas Adams’ brilliant exchange between Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent in So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish:

“They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”

Unfortunately this is the problem we face every time we have a chance to vote in our little imperfect system of representative democracy. We look at the options available to us, and usually they aren’t that great: Other than actually being active in the leadership of a party it’s very hard to use your vote to say “I like this part of your policy but not that one.” The same party that agrees with your standpoint on fascism may very well also have ridiculous misconceptions about how mathematics work in terms of introducing backdoors to encrypted communications, just to give a recent example from Sweden.

On the other hand, direct democracy, which might overcome this specific problem of representative democracy, comes with its own issues, as explained by Terry Pratchett in The Fifth Elephant:

“Vimes had once discussed the Ephebian idea of ‘democracy’ with Carrot, and had been rather interested in the idea that everyone had a vote until he found out that while he, Vimes, would have a vote, there was no way in the rules that anyone could prevent Nobby Nobbs from having one as well. Vimes could see the flaw there straight away.”

I find some level of solace in the statistical findings that large groups of people tend to be less wrong than the average individual, but it would be nice if our democratic system could be improved using the idea of the “surprisingly popular” result. In other words, if the system could be amended to give larger weight to the vote of actual experts.

In the meantime, let’s try to avoid having the wrong lizard get in…