In society

Transit (2)

November 16, 2007 George Satarov

In the previous article, we formulated the problem generated by the elections: no matter what argument in favor of them is, it turns out that counterarguments against the elections are easily confirmed by historical examples. To get out of this intellectual maze, you will need to consider two more important arguments for the pros.

The most advanced people say: elections (honest, of course) provide competition between politicians (parties). And as a result of competition, the quality of politicians should grow (not confirmed), and politicians themselves should work more and more for citizens (the overall growth with episodic exceptions is confirmed). In other words, competition does not ensure improvement of the personal qualities of politicians, but contributes to the growth of the quality of their political services not at the expense of personal qualities, but due to the need to improve the quality of services due to competition. Exactly the same as this happens in the competitive market of goods and services. Compare, for example, televisions about forty years ago and current; Or mobile phones, or laundry. And so on.

But an important question arises: what provides competition itself? To answer this question, we turn to a completely different area where competition is the basis of everything: interest, growth of results, etc. This is sports competitions. We see clearly how the results of athletes grow over time, the weight of weightlifting rods is growing, and the technique of gymnasts or football players is being improved. All this is provided by competition. And what provides this competition? And here it is clear: in sports, the most important thing is the unpredictability of the results, the unpredictability of the winners. When, for any reason, the result is predictable-either due to the deliberate inequality of competitors, or by virtue of the contractual fraud of the competition participants, both the results and interest in the competition inevitably fall. Only the uncertainty of the result prompts athletes to look for new opportunities to defeat the former winners, which leads to the improvement of athletes and their achievements.

And now the last question about competition: what provides, supports the unpredictability of the result, without which sport loses its meaning for both fans and athletes? The answer is known: reasonable rules and their strict performance. Reasonable rules of sports competitions can be divided into four groups. The first group of rules concerns the game itself, its content. Simply put, it should be interesting. For example, in some games the balance between attack and defense should be observed. We saw how, for example, in volleyball, the rules of the game were sometimes modified precisely due to the restoration of such a balance, when the improvement of the attack depreciated the entertainment of the game - as opposed to this, the possibility of strengthening the block by transferring the hand for the dividing line designated by the mesh.

The second group of rules refers to the relative equality of competing forces. Weight categories are introduced in boxing, in the football of the league, etc. And the third group of rules contributes to dynamics, updating the composition of competitors. Anyone has the opportunity to fight at their own skill level and move to the next level under conditions agreed upon by the rules. If barriers to such an ascent will be too high, this will lead to the degradation of competition at the upper levels and, therefore, to a deterioration in skill and results.

The fourth group of rules is aimed at observing the honesty of competition. It consists of restrictions and sanctions. For example, the techniques of boxing or karate are not applicable on the football field. Everyone is prohibited by the use of a pharmaceutical strengthening of their abilities (doping), in order, among other things, not to turn sports competition into a chemical Olympiad. Violators are punished up to the exception of the competition.

You can easily find parallels between sports and elections, as well as between the relevant groups of rules in both areas. For example, too high requirements for the number of parties, a high barrier barrier (seven percent) for a party entering the Duma, etc. They form an excessively high barrier to enter the field of political competitions, which distorts competition and ensures the fall of the quality of those parties that themselves protected by this barrier.

I hope that I have given the parallel between sports and the elections have not humiliated anyone, neither athletes, nor deputies. After all, it must be understood that the unpredictability of the result is fraught with both strategic advantages and minuses. For example, no one, even the most worthy, is not safe from accidental defeat.

Meanwhile, such an important property of elections as the unpredictability of the result has one fundamental consequence. No one counted on him, inventing and improving the elections. This happened by itself. So it happens in life. For example, anthropologists argue that writing was invented by priests to communicate with the gods (ancestors). And only later did her stunning additional opportunities be clarified, which we use at this time.

To understand this important property of the elections that make them so necessary, I will start with an ethnographic example that I read from the American researcher David Stark. He describes one ritual that is common among the North America Indians:

“Every evening during the hunting season, Nskapi Indians, who lived on the Labrador Peninsula, holding a canadian deer Caribu over the fire, determined where to go for the game tomorrow. Considering the traces of soot on it, the shaman pointed out the hunters to the hunting group. ”

Talking about this ritual in different student audiences, I systematically asked the question: why is it needed? The correct answer was extremely rare. Then I asked a leading question: “And what will happen if a revolution occurs in the scab tribe and the main hunter comes to power, motivating the overthrow of the shaman with the next argument:

- Boys! Stop listening to this old talker! Remember, the last time we failed a huge deer at the lower stream? Therefore, you have to go hunting only there all the time! Down with the shaman!

Here the students immediately guessed what was at stake. At first they said that after such a revolution the tribe would die out. And then, as a rule, they reached the correct explanation of the meaning of the ritual. Again I convey the word to Stark:

“Thus, the Nskapi Indians introduced an element of chance into their actions, which allowed to avoid the pressure of short -term rationality, which forces us to assume that the best way to find game is tomorrow is to look in the same place where it was found today. Every day, studying the traces left by a sole hood on the shoulder blade, they could avoid the “closure” trap at the first successes: the luck, achieved in the short term, would have turned into the extermination of the Karibu deer in the district and thereby reduced the probability of subsequent hunting. ”

An even more accurate interpretation of these, at first glance, strange reasoning, gives mathematics. There is such a beautiful mathematical discipline - the theory of games. And it has one fundamental theorem. She claims the following: if you play a game with some opponent and he uses a random strategy to choose your moves, then no deterministic, rational strategy can win with random. In other words, only a random strategy is optimal against a random strategy. Intelligence, calculating rational moves, can only be opposed to other intelligence. Accident can only be opposed to accident.

The question is, with what accident the hunters of the Naskapi tribe do do? After all, there is experience, skill, habits of animals, paths leading to a watering house! That's right. But their task is to bring home any meat of any animals that turn up. All the living creatures of the surrounding forest in combination, its behavior, movement are fundamentally unpredictable.

For the future is fundamentally unpredictable. We can easily predict that after Tuesday there will be a medium. But already with the weather for tomorrow is more difficult. And ten days ahead? Will the marriage between Petya and Dasha be successful? And what will happen to the government reform? Can a party of “good wishes” implement its program? Worse, any social efforts are fraught with the fact that the wonderful English sociologist Anthony Hiddens called “unintentional consequences” that we can never foresee to the end. Not only because we do not have the fullness of the information, but also because these consequences are fundamentally unpredictable, as the movements of all animals in the forest surrounding the Indians Scapapi. Moreover, our social actions change the social order surrounding us, and the distant consequences of our intervention in the social order are unpredictable.

Our whole life is a constant game with the future. With the future fundamentally unpredictable. Therefore, the whole history of human civilization combines rational attempts to play with the future and random strategies. The ancient Greeks tried to appoint the rulers of their policies with the help of lots (remember Aristotle?). The ancient commanders before campaigns systematically turned to fortunetellers. It is clear that they (fortuneteller) knew little about the enemy forces, about his tactics and strategy, about the place of a possible clash, about the weather at the time of the clash. They simply wondered like the shaman of the Naskapi tribe, that is, they generated an accidental decision, contrasting with an accidental unpredictable future a random decision -making strategy. For many centuries in many cultures, random court decisions have been practiced; A typical example is a judicial duel. And today toys for managers: you twist such a toy, and it stops on one of the free answers: “Act”, “Cool”, “Time on vacation”, “Do you need this?” etc.

The programs offered by politicians and parties to the voters are similar to possible directions for the search for prey for the Naskapi tribe hunters, which the shaman discovers on the deer Caribu. Only these are possible directions of our path to the future: where and what to go with. There is no rational exhaustive argument that allows you to make the best choice between different quite reasonable programs. The set of arguments and counterarguments is not limited. An attempt to find an absolute decision can lead to a situation where the decision is not made at all. And we resort to a random solution, which is implemented using the election procedure.

The result of the elections is not defined in advance, although each voter can vote quite rationally (ideal situation), because many rational justifications of his choice are practically inexhaustible; The transition of a particular voter from one alleged decision to another, no less rational; There are unpredictable many circumstances that may impede someone to come to the polling station, and someone will be encouraged to cancel the former completely rational decision not to vote at all. In short, the unpredictability of the election result is not a consequence of the presence or absence of rationality in the adoption of individual decisions, but a consequence of the unpredictability of the interaction of a huge set of individual decisions, which affect the innumerable diverse circumstances.

I can imagine how many indignant counterarguments have accumulated in your end to this text! Many of them are already familiar to me. Some new ones will certainly appear on the forum. Someone rejoices: Satarov discredits the election! Take your time. We will discuss all this in the next article, because the considerations proposed by me are extremely important for our subsequent reasoning and attempts to forecast.

Yes, you know what is interesting! When I talked about the ritual of Knskapi in the same audience, a man came up to me after the lecture and said that they have a similar ritual among hunters in Siberia: fortune -telling the trace of the ermine. And yet, if ideas about the role of randomness in our life, set forth in this article, seemed interesting to someone, you can learn more about them on the Internet on the website of the Indem Foundation at the address: www.indem.ru (section “Favorites”).

Author - President of the Indem Foundation

To be continued