Tag Archives: democracy

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Mar ’12)

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Once again, I’m sacrificing verbosity for sheer quantity of science-related links. Here goes:

  • I notice that despite that my very liberal political sympathies, many of my posts have been showing a markedly anti-democratic bias. This article from LiveScience is a good demonstration of why democracy is inherently flawed: most people aren’t smart enough to judge the competence of other people. The article cites research by a Cornell University psychology which shows that not only are people incompetent at judging the competence of other people in fields in which they are not an expert, they are ignorant about their own incompetence. As the familiar anecdote goes, most people, if asked to rate their personal ability in a particular field, will give themselves an above-average rating. This poses obvious problems for democracies which in theory rely on elections to help us pick the most qualified leader. But as always, the Churchill dictum that democracy is the worst form of government, except all of the others, remains true. Such findings don’t invalidate that. They merely remind us that natural and inalienable human rights should never be contravened even by a democratic majority and that direct rule through referendums is probably a bad idea.
  • I remember when mixing descriptions between senses, like hearing a color or feeling a smell, was just a literary flourish but as this article from The Economist points out, not only do synaesthetes exist, but most people probably have cross-modal associations of this sort without being consciously aware of it. In this case, researchers from Oxford University asked volunteers to describe different smells and tastes in terms of music, and there turns out to be a surprisingly correlation in how people associate the same type of smell or taste with the same pitch or even specific musical instrument.
  • This doesn’t count as a science article in that sense of news coverage of a recently published scientific paper. It’s a blog post by a statistics expert but I’ve come to like his blog very much so here it is. This one is an analysis of the relationship between changes in the availability of pornography and perceived social effects. The upshot is that increased availability of pornography has no detrimental effect on anti-social behavior. Japan for example, which many now know for its widespread availability of violent pornography, went from almost no porn to lots of porn within a short of period time, actually reports a decrease in sexual crime. It’s worth noting that increasing availability of porn reduces sexual crimes only and has no effect on other crimes. Watching porn does seem to induce some sociological changes, such as reported happiness in marriages among different types of couples, but I’ll leave it up to the reader to read the report in full and judge if it’s good or bad.
  • Another year, another species of early hominid discovered. This article, also from LiveScience, covers fossils of heretofore unknown species discovered in China. Daubed the “Red Deer Cave People”, they are unusual in that they have a combination of both modern and archaic anatomical features and seemed to have coexisted with modern humans in the earliest age of agriculture up to around 11,000 years ago.
  • Finally, an evolutionary psychology article. I just love them, both for what they reveal about cognition and for how they drive a certain class of intellectual bonkers. This one comes from ScienceDaily and talks about how communities of chimpanzees seem to have police officers of their own. These take the form of respected and senior members of the community who intervene as a third-party in disputes.
Politics

Electoral fraud in Russia, claims the election winner

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If I were really snarky, I’d headline this post with a title like “In Soviet Russia, election frauds you!” Electoral frauds in Russia aren’t particularly shocking news, especially in Russia, but how often do you see it being claimed by the winner rather than the loser? Yet this is exactly what happened when a first time candidate for Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia, Anton Chumachenko, claimed that his victory was due to electoral fraud and that his opponent should have won instead.

Of course, the really tragic part is that the party seems to be doing everything it can to downplay the announcement and stall investigations. From the article in The Washington Post:

Chumachenko has provided evidence to the court and urged it to transfer his mandate to Vishnevsky. A ruling is pending. Meanwhile, prosecutors have sought to examine the original ballots. Election officials say they were damaged when a water pipe burst, an explanation that has been used before in Russia to stall investigations into election irregularities.

“We have very smart pipes,” Chumachenko said with a grin. “They know exactly where to leak.”

I post this because I think it jives well with my point about democracies. They’re the best form of government there is, but simply holding elections, even if they were free and fair which this one obviously was not, is not enough to qualify a country to be called a democracy. Yet repressive governments are fearful enough that they go to great lengths to show that they are democratic. Which is why we should all be ever ready to condemn them when they are not.

Politics

Jackie Chan joins in the anti-democracy bandwagon

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Just a bit of news that popped up over the weekend:

Action star Jackie Chan said Saturday he’s not sure if a free society is a good thing for China and that he’s starting to think “we Chinese need to be controlled.”

Chan’s comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders in China’s southern island province of Hainan.

The 55-year-old Hong Kong actor was participating in a panel at the annual Boao Forum when he was asked to discuss censorship and restrictions on filmmakers in China. He expanded his comments to include society.

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

Chan added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

And of course the predictable backlash from Hong Kong and Taiwan:

“He’s insulted the Chinese people. Chinese people aren’t pets,” Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator Leung Kwok-hung told The Associated Press. “Chinese society needs a democratic system to protect human rights and rule of law.”

Another lawmaker, Albert Ho, called the comments “racist,” adding: “People around the world are running their own countries. Why can’t Chinese do the same?”

…

In democratically self-ruled Taiwan, which split from mainland China during a civil war in 1949, legislator Huang Wei-che said Chan himself “has enjoyed freedom and democracy and has reaped the economic benefits of capitalism. But he has yet to grasp the true meaning of freedom and democracy.”

My wife’s first reaction was to say that he’s an uneducated idiot prone to make shallow comments. Someone on QT3 commented that he’s actually illiterate and needs people to read his scripts to him, but I don’t know how true that it. Anyway it’s clear enough that he’s an airhead who only gets attention due to the gigantic soapbox he gets from his superstardom, but I still wish someone famous from the Chinese entertainment world would be brave enough to speak out on behalf of democracy and freedom.

Politics

Rethinking democracy

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One thing that often irks me is when seemingly reasonable and well-educated people who hold liberal values actually choose to decry democracy. Their argument is that ordinary people are too uneducated, too narrow minded, and generally too stupid to be trusted with the power to ultimately determine the course of government. A good example of this kind of thinking can be found in this post on Fool’s Mountain, found via Jed Yoong:

In the big picture: what should be the purpose of governments? Should government be limited to providing a set of processes and institutions that normatively allocate power within a society or should government take a lead role of establishing a vision of a common good and leading the charge to execute that vision of the common good?

My tendency (and many Chinese on this board) is to believe the second. “So what if you are democratic,” we ‘d say. What is the proof that it guarantees better governance or social stability?

Many of us have reservation about the democratic process because “good” democracy seems to depend on a lot of stars aligning. The media has to be fair and objective to generate good public debates. The people have to be educated enough, well fed enough, and to care enough about the political process to participate in the political process. The people need to also have a healthy sense of social awareness and public duty to exercise their political power judiciously for the good of their country – not just for themselves.

Obviously this is a straw man argument. No proponent of democracy claims that it “guarantees” better governance or social stability. As the blog author himself notes, the very same argument can even more easily be applied towards authoritarian forms of government. Surely by now there should be no need to quote Churchill’s dictum that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Still one line criticism of democracy does have some merit, but it applies not to the principle of democracy itself but in how governments choose to implement a system of governance and then call it a democracy. As this book review in The Economist reminds us, simply holding elections doesn’t automatically make your government a democratic one. Elections are a necessary but not a sufficient condition towards the establishment of a healthy democracy. For starters, the elections need to be genuinely free and fair, with all political parties having equal rights to make their appeals and arguments to voters as they see fit. Furthermore, the power of any elected government needs to be constrained by a robust system of  checks and balances.

Finally, I agree with the view that until a country has successfully undergone a peaceful and orderly transition of power from one political party to another at least once to prove that all of mechanisms of government are functioning, that country cannot truly be called a democracy. Unfortunately, this rules out most Southeast Asian countries including Malaysia. One of the ironies of the region is that of all the countries in this part of the world, it is Indonesia, known as one of the longest lived dictatorships in the world under Suharto, that is now considered the healthiest and most exemplary democracy.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (February ’09)

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I’ve only noted one science article of any interest this month. Perhaps the financial crisis is taking its toll on scientific research as well? This one is from The Economist and covers how social animals make collective decisions. One study by Christian List of the London School of Economics and Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex examined how bees choose a site to migrate to and start a new nest. As described, scouts are sent out to find suitable locations and when they get back they perform the bees’ infamous waggle dance to tell the rest of the hive what they’ve found out. The longer the dance goes on, the better the site. The entire hive needs to sort out which site is the best one and make a collective decision to move the queen and the worker bees to it.

The scientists found that the hive manages to make extremely reliable decisions even though there are only minor differences in quality between the sites. In order to find out how they did this, they created a computer model to simulate the results from different variables. They found that two aspects of their decision-making process were crucial towards correctly determining the best course of action: one, freely sharing information between the scouts and the rest of the hive and two, the independence of other bees to confirm the scouts’ findings by following their routes, checking out the site for themselves and then confirming the results to the rest of the hive by performing waggle dances of their own.

The implications for human behavior are obvious, though I think that the attempt by The Economist to link this to the theories of the 18th-century philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, who believed that decisions taken collectively by a large group of people are more likely than those taken by a select few, is a bit of a stretch.

Politics

The Tibet Question

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Tibet has been in the news for two weeks now so I thought I should probably write a post about it. I’ve abstained from it thus far because it’s hard to write intelligently about what is undoubtedly a complicated situation with which I’m not very familiar and I’ve already had an argument with my wife over it. As someone with liberal views, it’s no surprise that I broadly sympathize with the Tibetans’ cause. I believe firmly in the principles of democracy and self-determination and strongly feel that no population should be forced to be ruled by what is essentially an undemocratic and unrepresentative government. Whatever progress China has made in the past few decades, there is no doubt that China is not a democracy and its government does not rule with the mandate of its people.

On the other hand, the historical evidence is that before communist China essentially annexed Tibet in the 1950s, Tibet suffered under an even more brutal dictatorial regime under the Dalai Lamas who ruled the country as priest-kings, so it’s arguable that the PRC has actually improved the quality of life for the average Tibetan by taking over their country, even if they don’t like to admit. In the same vein, the current troubles in Tibet is not a popular uprising against the PRC government but appears to consist of riots and acts of violence against the Han population in Tibet. There is no excuse for the disgruntled Tibetans’ taking out their frustrations on civilians even if it’s unclear what else it is they could do to gain international sympathy for their plight.

Continue reading The Tibet Question →

Politics

After the Malaysian Election

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Before the elections, I expressed some doubt about the governing experience of the opposition parties, especially the DAP, and unfortunately, it seems that I’m being proved right. The opposition so-called Barisan Rakyat has shown a crack just days after winning historic gains in the election when DAP leader Lim Kit Siang publicly spoke on behalf of the DAP Central Executive Committee to state that they disagreed with the decision of the Regent of Perak Raja Dr Nazrin Shah to appoint Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin of PAS as Menteri Besar of Perak and even called for the DAP to boycott the swearing in ceremony. Their grounds for doing so is that PAS won the fewest number of seats in Perak and that they would be happy to accept either DAP’s or PKR’s candidate for the post instead.

This is a ridiculous stand to take when even Ngeh Koo Ham, the DAP candidate for the post, had already stated that all three candidates from the DAP, PKR and PAS would accept whichever one of them that the Regent picked to be Menteri Besar and that all three parties would cooperate to govern the state properly. It looks like Lim Kit Siang is determined to make a liar out of his Perak state party chief. Predictably, MCA Perak state chief Ong Ka Chuan is trying to widen the crack as much as he can by saying that if DAP allows a PAS member to become Menteri Besar, they would be betraying the trust of the Chinese who voted for them.

Continue reading After the Malaysian Election →