from Hacker News

Study: People think undermining democracy is ok if others do it first

by m-watson on 5/23/23, 8:16 PM with 18 comments

• by simple-thoughts on 5/23/23, 11:54 PM

  I don’t know what is meant by democracy here. I wish articles like this one would define what they are talking about. It’s definitely not “rule by the people” since if the people elect what is considered non democratic leaders or vote for non democratic policies, that is not considered democratic. While unelected judges, bureaucrats, and other agents of the state who enforce unpopular policies are considered democratic if those policies are so called democratic ones.

• by rektide on 5/23/23, 8:20 PM

  What are good examples of reinforcing democracy? What acts build belief? What examples strongly affirm?

  It's so hard when a couple bricks taken away can crumble faith. Having a larger frame, where we don't catastrophize bad incidents, where we are resilient against bad examples & keep going, is a damnably hard ask.

• by m-watson on 5/23/23, 8:21 PM

  Here is their OSF page that has a download to the paper (and more).

  https://osf.io/npa9x/

  Edit: and here is a commentary piece on Nature from the lead author: https://socialsciences.nature.com/posts/why-voters-who-value...

• by hunglee2 on 5/23/23, 8:31 PM

  Democracy is the will of the people, if the people decide that it's time for an upgrade, that itself is an example of democracy. Remember that in ancient Greece, the birthplace of the idea, they never held it as sacrosanct and frequently oscillated between different political systems, essentially A/B testing them for the needs of the time. Its just a system - we should prepared iterate on it