Rationality vs success

I was whining to my girlfriend about how Barack Obama is ignoring the advice of economists who predicted the financial crisis (video), and she said it sounded incredible to her, because he struck her as a rational individual.

That got me thinking about how rational you can be and still be wildly successful. My hypothesis is that in order to become among the very best in the world at something competitive like politics or sports, you have to have a certain ability to eschew rationality when the odds are against you. You have to be willing to gamble a little, to take a few risks.

I’m going to use Obama as an example here, but only to illustrate my point. This post isn’t about him.

Logically, even deciding to run for president of the United States is a very big gamble even for a member of the ethnic majority. There are going to be a whole bunch of guys in the running, several of them will be very skilled and experienced, and chances are many of them are going to be richer than you are. Under those circumstances, putting down the kind of money and effort to even get a campaign off the ground is a huge gamble. At worst, you could end up embarrassed, broke and politically friendless.

In an ideal society, the leaders would be the persons with the best rational decision making ability in matters of economics, foreign relations and crisis management. They’d be the kind of people who could explain to you which scientific theories are most prevalent in their chosen field, and point out the weaknesses and strengths of each theory. In western society, those people are professors, CFOs, company leaders and researchers. They aren’t politicians.

In today’s entertainment-saturated world, where most young people have the attention span of a goldfish and an inflated confidence in their own limited knowledge, successful politicians are the persons with the best connections, the most charisma, the most determination and the strongest political convictions. They are workhorses and charmers, not intellectuals. They are people with the willingness to put rationality and personal beliefs aside in favour of mass appeal.

The best proof of this is that there has yet to be an agnostic or atheist candidate in the US. The US population is highly religious, so the politicians have to claim belief in superstitious nonsense in order to even be considered at all. Not even religious moderates pretend to believe in the crazy stuff, yet if a presidential candidate was honest and said “I think certain passages in the bible are bullshit”, then his campaign would probably crash and burn soon after.

Barack Obama could be the best president that could logically have been elected in our current circumstances. I’m just not convinced that’s good enough.

Down with democracy

There’s a famous quote by Winston Churchill that goes “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”

Because let’s face it, the average voter is a dope. That’s why the tallest guy with the best hair almost always wins an election. That’s why US presidents have to pander to religious zealots. That’s why a dumb argument that fits into a catchphrase always beats a good argument that needs some explanation. That’s why dancing on the Ellen Degeneres show is important. That’s why political jokes get elected. I know people who voted for a communist candidate because she “seemed nice and sociable on TV”.

So what’s the alternative you ask?
Communism would be nice if it wasn’t for that nasty little thing they call human nature.
Benevolent dictatorship would be great if power didn’t corrupt.
But in the real world, I think the best solution is a move towards meritocracy. A meritocracy is a society centred on the concept of competence. The person with the best track record gets the assignment. Of course, it would have to be a slow, bit-by-bit process, but I think we would all be better off for it. A reasonable starting point would be a more highly qualified democratic system. For example, there ought to be some mandatory testing before a person is allowed to vote. Sounds terrible? We’re already forbidding minors from voting, even though tons of 17 year-olds are smarter than their parents.

The voting test should be taken on the spot at the voting booth, and should be built around verifiable and non-biased data, such as “which of the following political parties has the largest proposed budget for infrastructure?”. If you wanted to be soft about it, you could even make it a sliding-scale system, where 0 correct answers gives you a voting power of 0.5 while 100% correct answers entitles you to a voting power of 1.

One effect of moving closer to a meritocracy is that it increases competition. Competition always brings out the best in concepts and technologies. The hottest fires make the hardest iron. Many of the most groundbreaking technologies in history started out as military projects. Everything from the jet engine to nuclear power to the Internet. Because of this, meritocracies historically a wildly successful. The largest empire in known history was a meritocracy.

A negative effect of a meritocracy is that it would put an increased premium on deceptive presentation and claiming credit for the accomplishments of others. To counter this, one of the requirements for a working meritocracy would have to be a strict paradigm of transparency for those in office. Transparency is almost always a good thing. As a rule, the more secretive a government is the more oppressive it is.

The benefits of meritocracy are many, but one thing in particular sticks out to me: it’s the most effective. The USA is the most meritocratic of the western democracies, and consequently the most powerful. But even the US has a long way to go. In today’s western political systems, class and loyalty mean so much that they often overshadow competence. If you doubt that, welcome back from your 8-year trip to Antarctica..

Power to the proficient!