[FFmpeg-devel] Intelligence vs Education and Democracy (was: [VOTE] drop support for using libav* compiled with mingw/cygwin in msvc)

Attila Kinali attila
Wed Feb 27 11:35:49 CET 2008


On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:54:30 +0000
M?ns Rullg?rd <mans at mansr.com> wrote:

> > I can not say that i agree or disagree here, just that i have some
> > doubt. Also the word "intelligent" is a little vague, what is intelligence?
> > I think that the word "educated" fits better.
> 
> Educated implies intelligent, while the converse is not true.  An
> intelligent person is able to make rational decisions without being
> educated.  Education is nothing but a convenience.

I beg to differ. Education and intelligence are IMHO orthogonal.
You can be very well educated, know a lot of things, but fail
at drawing conclusions from this knowledge (ie be the typical
university student who has just learnt various things from books,
but has no clue what they mean). All the same you can be very
intelligent, but have know knowledge whatsoever.

> When faced with a decision, it need not be immediately obvious to all
> involved, due to factors such as differing background knowledge, which
> alternative is the better.  If a vote is held, people are forced to
> make a choice, even if they have insufficient information available to
> make the best one (by whatever metric).  This essentially introduces a
> random element in the decision making process.  A thorough discussion
> allows people to consider aspects they may have been previously
> unaware of, and entirely new solutions may be discovered.  If memory
> serves, such things happen regularly around here.

Actually consensus is my prefered way of making decissions. Unfortunately
it requires that everyone involved has a similar goal, similar knowledge
(ie the fields of knowledge shouldn't be disjoint), is able to
learn from each other and accept different point of views.

This makes creating a consensus among larger groups very challenging
if not impossible (confer also "Dunbars number").

> The less information the voting population has, the more random the
> outcome will be.  An extreme example is that of a modern country,
> where people on average have limited access to accurate information,
> while being bombarded with propaganda (the situation is worst among
> members of parliament).  This results in almost completely random
> decisions being made, and instead of the steady progress we like to
> imagine our society making, we get something best described as
> Brownian motion.  The situation is further worsened by the fact that
> the population rarely shares a common goal.

That's the reason why modern democracies do not work anyomre.
It was very hard to be up to date on the various issues in
a country in the past, mostly because it was hard to get
the information. But these days it's nearly impossible to
have a good overview over most of the issues within a country
because there is so much information that it is impossible
to "process" all of it.

I'm not sure what would be the best form of goverment in
the modern enviroment, but it is definitly not democracy.
 
> >> Who wants to join me in founding the Kingdom of FFmpeg?
> >
> > We all do, but we lack land and the ability to defend it. without these
> > 2 the local police would end our rule quite quickly. ;)
> 
> I was thinking Oded would be able to supply some weapons, and we have
> a terrorist of our own as well. ;-)

Said terrorist suggests that we should get our weapons from the US and the
european countries. All are more or less known to sell weapons to anyone
who might fight someone who they dont like.

				Attila Kinali

-- 
Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters,
But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst!
                         -- Deed of Morred




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