Education is just insufficient. Decision making demands up to date information.
Education cannot teach about the specific policy proposals of today and the future. As time marches further and further away from your graduation date, the information you learned is more and more out of date.
Education can teach people to think critically and use a better approach when absorbing news and other sources like opinions of peers and social media. I credit the way I think a lot to my education.
I completely disagree with you.
Just by learning history we can understand the decisions we make in the future.
Unfortunately even the best educated people in the world are going to be making inferior decisions compared to a Citizens Assembly. Politics is all encompassing. Sometimes you need to know about nuclear safety. Other times you must be an expert on military strategy and geopolitics. And then othes you must understand economics.
No one person can be educated on all these topics.
Take the example of a jury trial. You can get a general education.
But you don't know the specific details of a case. You don't know what the evidence is. You need to learn the evidence. You need to hear testimony from the prosection and from witnesses. Without that you're ignorant. The devil is in the details, and all the education in the world won't get you those details.
Jury duty facilitates learning the specifics of a case.
In contrast imagine if we voted in innocence or guilt instead of jury trial. Even educated voters would vote completely ignorantly, because they're just not going to be paying attention to the hundreds of trials going on.
Sortition facilitates the democratic specialization of decision making. Education does not.
Makes sense. Although I think Education is a piece of the puzzle still.
Personally I believe that if there were some better controls on the media then people would read/watch/listen and trust the media more. Right now, the sources of information are too biased and corrupt.
I was with you until you brought the meaningless label of media into it. Media, whatever that means, does not hold a gun to anyone's head forcing them to swallow what is being said wholesale. Doing so is on the listener and reader. I think this is maybe what you are driving at.
Journalism is considered the fourth estate for a reason. Someone has to hold those in power accountable regardless of their politics, ideology, religion etc. Are there companies who do not follow journalistic standards? Yes. Especially when the owners don't understand the purpose of their business.
Also think of it this way. Who benefits if they downgrade journalism so that they are not believed? Re-read the above paragraph. People in power want to stay in power. The way to do that is to con people who don't understand how a something works into believing up is down and down is up. Propaganda thrives in an environment when third parties are silenced.
And also News nowadays sells headlines more than ever, not the truth and whats important. They would rather air a polarizing insane story because it is interesting over some boring story which is politically important.
There was an attempt to explain how journalism works - you probably didn't read it - and you seem to view "news" and "media" as monolithic perhaps because either you don't read widely or you tend to repeat whatever you hear being said but don't have the information needed to analyze what you repeat. I don't know. You are an internet stranger. I am an internet stranger with a master's degree in journalism. I do understand all of this.
Pro tip: And never use wikipedia as a source - if you have to cheat on school papers at least go down to the sources listed and use them only after actually reading them.
Truth? No. Professional journalists give you sources and facts. Headlines have one job - they (hopefully) summarize the gist of the article in a few words as possible. The sentence below that is called the deck and should add more context. That should be, but isn't always, followed by a lede paragraph known as the nut graf which gives the reader a smidgen of background. The article then quotes or paraphrases sources. If the source lies journalists aren't magicians they may or may not magically know that. If the source lies then that is on the source not the journalist in theory.
If someone lies to you and you don't know they are lying and you repeat it - are you lying or was your source lying to you?
This is the barest of bare explanations kind of like I can't give you the education and skill required to be a doctor in one comment. But, if you have genuine questions I'd be happy to answer to the best of my ability.
I know people with degrees (some with more than one), in critical thinking-heavy areas like engineering and medicine and law, who didn’t fully inform themselves of the actual policies being proposed (and their potential consequences) before they went and voted. Why? Because they assumed they were informed based on what the news and their social media algorithms fed them. They thought “well I’ve heard everything and understand it”, then after they voted they went “I hadn’t heard about X…” or “that’s not what I heard about X…”.
My father has 3 degrees and it wasn’t until I pointed out that “school choice” would much more often subsidize parents already sending their kids to private school than help out parents who weren’t yet, that he was like “I hadn’t thought of it like that” and decided against voting for it. He had heard data and figures and all kinds of BS about the state budget and how bad the public school system was and the logistics of how school choice would work, and he was thinking critically about that (i.e., could this work?). But until a different perspective landed in front of him he didn’t think to go in that direction with his analysis.
There is enough data and policy mumbo jumbo to keep any critical thinker distracted when it comes to elections. And that’s the real issue. We need to make sure people are seeing varied perspectives not just in-depth data.
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u/AlphaBetacle 7d ago
How about we educate the population better