Whose vote is more informed: The book-smart or the street-smart?

[Animal]

Let's assume that popular vote isn't working, due to media bias. Now, let's pretend there's a test determining who can vote and who can't, or weighing each vote depending on certain criteria.

What should the criteria be? Book smarts or street smarts? Or some combination thereof?
If you were working to write this legislation, how would you approach this?

Note that I posted this in "psychology and philosophy" because I consider it a timeless question about humanity, not strictly a current or political issue.

[Mahat]

[Animal]

I love your answer <3 and I agree so much that even experts just know a few facets. This is why the most important battle we have now is to encourage people to listen to each other instead of picking sides. For all my yapping about 'libtards' etc, most of my closest friends are liberal and I love them to pieces and respect their minds and outlooks. Each of them (you too) has areas of expertise and some less so. Me, I'm not an 'expert' when it comes to politics though I may understand a bit more about the health industry - through experience and from knowing doctors including big names at the forefront of the Lyme fight etc. Being Se lead I learn the most through people and experience. This is what makes it sink in and from there, I check wider sources and I'm able to put them in context. But it's hard for me to contextualize impersonal information about things that 'don't exist" in my world, like for instance the ongoing wars in the middle east. I have always been open to anyone else's perspective on that, especially soldiers who have fought there or people who have lived there, but really anyone who has researched more than I have. I understand my own intellectual strengths and weaknesses, so I don't presume that I'll ever be an expert on that particular thing, therefore I don't feel right really commenting or having an opinion on it. The most I can say is "don't kill civilians..duh."

[Mahat]

Absolutely on needing to listen to each other. Just to add, I think administering a test for competency is a horrible since it'll favor one type of competency to the exclusion of other types of competencies. The test would be a horrible measure of validity. Unfortunately our education system does not equip us with critical thinking skills and a well-rounded education on our political system. Why would they? They need us to be smart enough to keep the machine going but not too smart to question the foundations of it and its mechanisms.

[Animal]

Yep, if everyone pays taxes then everyone should be represented. That was the founding principle of the nation anyway.. "No taxation without representation." For all the problems USA has now, the Constitution was a brilliant document. I know it wasn't perfect but the idea behind it was solid. But that's USA. In terms of universal principles and whether it's good to have some people voting and not others... that's a different question... but I still think it's better if all citizens have a say. There are realistic things that poor and sick people know, which educated people don't know. All of those voices need to at least have the option to speak.

[Melancholia]

I think the book-smart vote may be more informed just like the education major may be more informed, but the street-smart person (like a non-educated mother with 4 children, to keep the comparison going) has enough actual life experience to say, "Hey, this is what we ACTUALLY need."

But on the flipside, the book-smart person may be more well informed candidates and laws, while the street-smart person is probably less research oriented and more apt to vote based on promises (I'm thinking of Middle America feeling completely unrepresented, hence the ease with which they gave their loyalty to Trump).

Either way, I think many sort of intelligence/knowledge based system for voting is HORRIBLY classist and anti-democratic. Putting those kinds of restrictions on voting is essentially eugenics...to which I am vehemently opposed.

[Animal]

I agree. It was more a theoretical in order to address the other question.

[Animal]

Hannah

I am not at all convinced that truly street-smart people vote for promises. Look how many intellectuals voted for Obama, who had very little prior experience and whose past was all hidden in the shadows aside from his friendship with a terrorist -- but they voted on the promise of "Hope and Change." With Trump, the people who voted him appreciated his long, public history in business and they felt that a business man could get things done. The original presidents were just ordinary people who went back to their jobs in business or whatever, after their term was served. Now, we have seasoned politicians who work their way up by making promises to people and paying them back, so their promises to the citizens mean nothing; it's all about special interest groups to collect votes. Trump didn't have this because he didn't work his way up , had his own money and didn't owe anyone anything. So he was the only candidate in a while who wasn't running on SO MANY promises to special interest groups (I'm not saying he had none), but was instead running on his own business skills so he could save tons of money during the election process.

As a street smart bunch, the people I know could see that the guy might have lost some and won some, like any business man who takes risks, but overall he had a lot of experience running things IN THE REAL WORLD, which meant it's likely he'd run things in such a way that was efficient and effective. Street smart people also understand what it's like to have special deals with everyone, because we may have dabbled with this stuff ourselves to increase our own opportunities, and we understand that rich people don't need to do this as much because they can back themselves. The fact that Trump spent so little money on campaigning is also important to those who are street smart because we see that he's not wasteful, he played the MSM against itself by saying ridiculous things they would play on repeat so it was free advertising for him... etc. There's a book written on how he saved so much money, but those books existed already, showing how he does business. So, street smart people have their eye on this.

Therefore the idea that he has "no experience" is beyond absurd. Obama truly had little experience - his experience as a community organizer was not particularly impressive and his school records were missing. In real real real real reality, not media jabber or "educated articles," Obama's past was occluded from us, so we don't know what else he had done, though we can infer some things by knowing about his friendships with Bill Ayers, secret meetings with Soros, etc.

So intellectual people were willing to overlook his real shadowy life of lies and his lack of any experience to prove his worth doing something in particular, and instead voted for the promise of having a black president and the promise of hope and change. He also knew how to speak intelligently and moved even me to tears with his speeches, even though I knew most of it was a lie. But I can respect the art of excellent speaking. I also respect the art of being likeable, even if manipulative, because it's something I suck at. It really is a great skill.

But street smart people can see this eloquent sack of lies has gotten by using fancy words and smooth talk - but is completely full of shit and has nothing backing him up. We can also see that the media saying Trump has "no experience" is a lie, because we've heard his name "doing things" in the background of our lives since the day we were born. And now he is in office, actually doing things, really good things. The results are showing in unemployment being lower, black unemployment being lower than ever, positive conversations developing with North Korea, the economy being undeniably better, and so much more; and these street smart people are saying "We don't care if he hates some group or speaks stupidly, we want to see stuff getting done that helps our family." "Since Trump got in office I got options for health care that I lost during Obamacare, 3 people in my family got a job and my stocks are up." This is pragmatic thinking.

Of course there is more to life than pragmatic thinking, and there is something to be said for flowery moving speeches and making us look intelligent to other nations. But that is useless if there is a web of promises to special interest groups while, on the part of attending to the citizens who pay taxes to keep him in office, nothing is getting done.

Street smart people didn't vote for Trump based on promises. They voted on his past experience in business. One complaint the left had was that Trump was unclear about what he was going to do and it seemed to change moment to moment. Meanwhile Trump made it clear that he's going to ask his experienced advisors for direction, which is like... not allowed to be said during election campaign. But it is pragmatic to outsource to someone who has experience in a particular area. So this answer struck the middle America as being "honest." The only promises he made were "build the wall" and "make America great again." But this type of slogan isn't what moves street smart people in particular.

The Ivory tower elite votes for promises, words, eloquence and uppity intellectualism that reminds them of themselves and feels worthy of being in a class with them. No experience is necessary but words will move them to heaven. This is how Obama got into office.

[SnatchYourWeave]

I think the more well-informed is the street smart person because they'll likely go by common sense and common sense is a stronger indicator for assessing reality. The intelligentsia is removed from reality and has abandoned the people by being silent and letting irrationality ravage and destroy the country. They propagate ideology that is anti-life and urge everyone to vote for empty and abstract promises. I'm almost wholly against so-called "pundits" and "intellectuals" because they have retreated to the abstract world where nothing can be accounted for and no real consequence is felt by their idealistic decision making. Obama is an NF. Overall, intuitive types, especially NFs want to live in a dream world, sell dreams and buy dreams. The rest of us have to make do with their delusional and suffocating policies. Gun ho to get up on the podium and wax poetic abstract concepts such as racism and bank on victim culture but when shit hits the fan that everyone will be negatively effected, no one will admit their part and blame shifts to someone or something totally unrelated (like Trump).

[inkreservoir]

I feel like the idea of "book smartness" is kind of goofy honestly. Like - the quality of what you're learning matters, and if your education isn't informed by the real world and people's actual experiences, especially when it comes to politics, then it isn't worth much. I don't personally have a lot of life experience and I'm fine with saying that. I got my master's and bachelor degrees in gender studies and could've gone on to do a PhD if I wanted to, and while I learned a lot in my program, a lot of it was devoted specifically to identifying how the work done in academia's ivory tower is frequently out of touch, dehumanizing, and actively harmful. If you're learning about politics and social issues and all the talk is theoretical and derived from lab reports and not people's actual testimonies and experiences then what you've learned isn't worth much.

Especially when it comes to how to address issues affecting marginalized people this is the case. You see people falling back on biased anthropological and psychological studies, and lab-grown solutions, to offer "solutions" or make statements about marginalized people that actually make things worse. One example of this is the discussion of "at risk" people. A connection is made between poverty and stealing, and then poor people are deemed "at risk" for stealing, and a bunch of money gets invested into programs to discourage poor people from participating in crime. These studies are done with a bias - there's already an implicit association between poverty and crime and so studies take an approach that's informed by confirmation bias (for eg, a study in 2008 actually found that people with family incomes over 70k are 30% more likely to steal from any store than people with family incomes under 20k - this raises questions about the validity of drawing a link between "stealing" and "poverty" which pretty much exists because it "makes sense"). The resulting programs that address the issue seek to provide psychological support and preventative measures to poor people, having deemed them as a population that is predisposed to stealing, without actually getting input from people in poverty about what kind of response they actually want (if any! many marginalized people don't trust government intervention and with good reason, preferring grassroots methods of dealing with issues like mutual aid groups)

A lot of people go to school for many years and end up totally clueless if not downright harmful. The emphasis in the academy on quantitative analysis frequently leaves out people's own actual words and experiences, and treat people who actually go through the issue being discussed as "too biased" to be trusted on that issue or to know what it would take to address it well. The ones who are closest to the situation are considered incompetent to understand it by virtue of their proximity. It makes no sense and it only serves the people who can/want to get past all the gatekeeping, the ones who are considered rational and objective enough to be worth listening to.

If you're "book smart" and your books have little basis in reality you probably aren't that smart.

Politicians on the left are plagued by this. They don't talk to people who actually deal with the issues they claim to have the solutions for, and then they spend their entire campaign posturing about how they're so smart and don't make an effort to connect with the ones they supposedly represent. And then they're scandalized when they're punished for their arrogance.

[inkreservoir]

Re: the question of whose vote is more informed, honestly I struggle to answer this bc I think most of these political candidates suck and I'm not sure I can identify who's voting "better" under these circumstances. I'm Muslim and Palestinian so a lot of Trump's decisions have been actively harmful to people like me and to my family (though honestly not much more so than past politicians and in many cases much less than others); that said, I understand his appeal and I think the fact he's able to reach so many people is due directly in part to the left's abject failure to connect with those same people. I don't want to perpetuate the myth that Trump's voters are all marginalized people - many extremely wealthy and privileged people voted for Trump as well, and much of the alt-right consists of "book smart" people who pat themselves on the back for intellectual superiority. White supremacy as an ideology has many roots in "science" and the idea that white people win the survival of the fittest race and thus are naturally entitled to power over others. The left benefits from the marginalizing narrative that white supremacy is the domain of poor white southerners and they use intellectual posturing over Trump's accessible language and "irrational" voters to ignore this history and to ignore that plenty of "smart" people (as the left understands them - I.e. intellectual academic folks) also supported Trump for reasons that are way, way worse than the reasons people in poverty voted for Trump. They would rather be buddies with academic white supremacists than with poor white southerners.

Trump's reasons for appealing to marginalized people are many and the left's disconnect and arrogance is punishing. Trump's language is accessible. He's open about his intentions. He follows through quickly on the things he says he will do. All of these are absent from Democrats - they care about looking smart and dignified, they obfuscate their actions because their actions are actually frequently harmful to the people they claim to serve, and they're slow to fulfill promises because a lot of the time they don't have any intention to fulfill promises. They're unforgiving and disrespectful, and marginalize the people they should be consulting with instead of trying to collaborate or even just win them over. Even Bernie Sanders, who probably comes closest to trying to connect with real people on the left, didn't bother going to Alabama to campaign. Why would people trust those who snub them to care about and represent their interests?

[Animal]

Wow, inkreservoir - I'm really impressed by your nuanced view of the Trump situation. Especially considering your own leanings. I really agree with everything you said.

[inkreservoir]

Animal ?????