David Deutsch: disagreement

Transcript context

…You have a delegated monitor with the coalition, right? With a coalition, say in the Netherlands (which is richer than the United Kingdom), you typically have coalition governments. Some parties in the coalition are delegated monitors of the other parties. Parties are better informed than voters. Isn’t that a better Popperian mechanism for error correction? No. [chuckles] If we’re looking at particular cases, we’re going to get bogged down in what you attribute to what, because we’re not doing experiments with these things. We don’t have a control group. We don’t have an agreed-upon method of deciding what is being tested. And then we test different things at different times, and never under the same conditions. I was going to say that the first-past-the-post system has the defect that occasionally it produces coalitions, and that is disastrous. We’ve been unlucky the past, like, two or three elections, especially after one of the governments instituted constitutional reforms, like Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which exacerbated the problems when they did occur. But I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think it’s a good argument that political parties know more, because in a coalition, the energy of political negotiations or political arguments — what politicians talk to each other about in the bar, in the corridor, in between the sessions — is all about form. It’s about what to offer a party so that it will join the coalition. It makes the smaller parties more powerful than the leading two parties. It causes a proliferation of parties. The worst example is Israel, which — not by coincidence — has got the most proportional system in the world. The fact that they ever get anything done at all and are very effective in emergencies, I have no explanation for. If I was religious, I would just put it down to the intervention of the Almighty. It’s not the political system. Sorry, it’s not the electoral system. There might be some things in the inexplicit political system that are responsible, but I don’t know enough about it. How would you improve error correction mechanisms in the world of science — Western science?…

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