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Re: Math and the electoral college's virtue
Posted:
Nov 14, 2000 8:23 PM
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> > Hi All,
> >
> > Long, long ago (about 50 years) I read a science fiction story wherein a
> > computer selected a single individual and he would decide the election.
> (I
> > don't remember if the computer used intelligent or random selection ---
I
> > believe the individual was the "most" representative of the population.)
> > The guy was nervous, of course, and didn't sleep well. A government
> > official came by and asked him what he thought of the price of eggs,
etc.
> > Alas, I remember not the story title, author, or outcome,
>
> It's a classical Isaac Asimov story (1955). Called "Franchise" ,IIRC, it
is
> the story of one Normal Muller, selected by Multivac as the typical
elector,
> indeed. At the end, from his answers to the official questionnary , the
huge
> computer deduces what would be the result of the election, but , of
course,
> the guy is not allowed to know his own "vote" before the official
> publication of the results.
Interesting, do you think that's where Douglas Adams got the idea for the
"real" president of the Galaxy in the Hitchhiker series? (For those of you
who haven't read it, it turns out the real president of the galaxy is a
slightly mad old guy living on a rainy planet in the middle of nowhere who
talks to his cat, government officials come and ask him questions and
government policy is decided on his answers. ) Probably not, but it's a
similar idea.
Dan Goodman
p.s. the Isaac Asimov story isn't that much like my random democracy idea,
because the vote is effectively made by Multivac, I haven't read the story
but I'm sure this is the idea. The whole point of the random democracy idea
is to get rid of the fiction of a "best" government that "most represents"
the views of the populace, as this is an unattainable ideal (cf. Arrow's
paper "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare" in the Journal of
Political Economy volume 58 issue 4), and to replace it with a government
that is statistically unbiased.
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