True, but that doesn't actually establish that voters understand how it works. IIRC, they've only had it for a short time, so there's not much of a track record to establish that voters are casting votes in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and desires.
It's vital that a democratic nation fully understands the method they use to elect representatives. People need to understand how their vote maps to a preference, and how their votes are tallied to determine who wins and who doesn't.
If a significant share of the electorate does not understand the vote tallying process and expects an outcome different from the one that actually resulted from counting the votes, you will get accusations of vote fraud and election tampering.
1) Americans don't understand progressive tax because they are constantly being bombarded with information as to what it means. If you watch Fox news daily you will have a misunderstanding on the matter. Take care to make generalizations when you see things like knowledge differences divided between party lines. People aren't different, but the information they get is.
2) Many social choice experts advocate for cardinal systems over ordinal. Approval is quite popular due to its simplicity and effectiveness while Star or Score improve on alignment but all of these are substantially better than the current system. Cardinal has the advantage in the tabulation being that you do not need multiple elections (exception of Star, which is strictly 2 elections), and you can do a parallelized reduce sum tabulation. So algorithmically it is easy to understand (sum columns/candidates, pick largest total: argmax(column sum)). That has implications for transparency and election security. Some people are convinced these methods are harder for people to understand but I'd refer you back to point 1 and add that we're also very used to these systems as we're currently using a cardinal voting system on HN.
What do you think the main difference in people is? Biological? Because I'm saying environmental. I'm not sure why you reference Schindler. Certainly there is a distribution and I'm not claiming people are clones (I don't think you are either). So outliers aren't proof of anything, to either argument.
I'm going to use freighted language and examples for brevity. Readers, please be generous; I'm doing conservatism because it's the topic on hand, but this applies equally to progressivism.
A meme is the fundamental unit of transmissible culture - a catchy tune, laying napkins on the lunch table, the concept of punishment for wrongdoers. Memes are hosted in sentient minds.
A baby's first memes come from its parents. Subsequently, from family, babysitters, toys, telly, other children, books.
Memes are virulent to different degrees. An earworm is very infectious, but greeting people with "howdie doodie" is not particularly so.
A meme may fade away from a host in time, or be displaced by another meme, or last a long time in the host's mind.
Individuals are more or less susceptible to any given meme. This is influenced by the memes they have already. Some memes reinforce each other, and are often found together and transmitted together - for example, the meme for belief in god tends to cohabit with the meme for prayer, and we observe them being transmitted together.
The belief in a holy text tends to confer resistance to displacement on proximate memes such as the belief in a personal deity, and also tends to cause the host to expend effort on transmitting the meme complex. These meme complexes are self-sustaining.
We might expect meme complexes that include dogma to confer great tenacity on accompanying memes. Good luck convincing a fundie that the earth is old; their memes inoculate them against arguments.
So we have the fox news complex: initial infection is through mild right-wing memes, affect the host's behaviour, and increase susceptibility to secondary infections such as "election was stolen" or "9/11 was an inside job".
Someone with a very strong base set of memes, such as critical thinking or compassion, is much less susceptible to all the constituent memes of the fox complex. But someone with a weak base meme type - say, consumerism and apathy to books - is more easily infected.
I'm not aware of any research in this field. Do please improve my understanding!
While I think at the broader level you are correct in mechanism I'm unconvinced that this is how it works in reality. There are too many examples of ideas spreading like wildfire far faster than people die out. Ideas that people hold with high passion. An example might be same-sex marriage where we see a larger rate of increase in support post legalization[0]. While younger generations have higher initial support, all generations increase in their support. 30% in the 00's and 60% today for the 55+ age group. That can't be due to the transfer of 35-55's because their baseline was only 40% in the 00's.
Remember that Dawkins use the analogy of a virus, not of an inheritable disease. Certainly you are correct in part as there are analogies to inheritable diseases with thought but it's also important to remember how quickly these mutate and that the mutation does not occur at inheritance like this is a game of telephone (in some way it is, but I hope that was clear). Moreso, things are mutating faster than ever. Religion is a great example of this, as it is a highly inheritable belief, yet the rate at which interpretations of a religious text has changed has changed much quicker than before. That's because, unsurprisingly, the interpretations are a reflection of ourselves and our times are changing faster than ever.
I don't know how old you are, but I do remember a time before Fox news and before the 24hr news cycle. They first took off around 9/11 and then gained many more during the financial crisis. I grew up in a Fox family and unlike my many liberal friends (which I am undoubtedly left), I will occasionally watch such shows like Bill O'Riley, Hanity, or Tucker. Why? Because they are well scripted programs that exploit the aforementioned principles. It helps me prepare for the nonsense my dad says during holidays. There's two points here which I'll rely on inference for as I'm already writing a lot. The first is about how they can rapidly change long held beliefs (e.g. Russians are the bad guys) and the second is about how this exercise let's me interrupt my dad (and uncle and BIL) and tell them exactly what they are about to say.
Everyone can be manipulated, including you and me. We're being constantly manipulated and not always by intentional forces (more often unintentionally). Dawkin's viral theory is a great place to start but like viruses you have to understand that there's a much more complex and intricate system involved that creates a large array of effects and you're not wrong that there are both genetic and environmental predisposition that makes a virus worse for some than others. But the same goes for the reproduction rate as well as mutation rate. The truth is that you can convince fundies that the Earth is old. I know this because I am an example. I know this because the rate of people like me is not just increasing, but accelerating. Apples fall a lot further from the tree than they used to, not because the laws of physics changed, but because the geography did. So either you believe that I'm (and others) are an exception to the rule or that there is an underlying mechanism that allows this to happen. The former does not have explanatory power for the increase, let alone the acceleration.
Yes, viruses are a very useful concept. Ideas propagate in ways that put us in mind of epidemiology.
Genotype is, broadly speaking, determined at birth. But our set of memes is in flux to a greater or lesser degree. That degree is the topic at hand; why are some more susceptible than others? I'm floating the idea that it's due to the ideas you already have at the time. That's why I brought up that some ideas confer resistance to certain other ideas.
Imagine instead a bacterium that is invaded by a variety of retroviruses, each of which change its DNA. Some of those DNA changes might increase our decrease resistance to some other retroviruses.
It's clear that strict logical consistency is not a necessary condition. Perhaps we could explore what "emotional consistency" might mean. It feels correct for me to say that when a person encounters an idea, the idea creates logical and emotional associations to other ideas that they hold, and that if the emotions reinforce the person's self-image, they will tend to adopt the new idea and incorporate it into their world-view. But I'm making this up - don't ask me to defend any of this!
