The Intelligentsia Problem

Hi! Happy Friday!

The US and the World governments have an intelligentsia problem that has long been predicted so often that it is a trope in speculative science fiction.

What has gotten lost amidst all of the demagoguery,  sensationalism, click-bait hate and histrionics that is Donald Trump has been Trump's complete and total incompetence. The odds of Trump succeeding at being President are exactly the same as the Infinite Monkey Theorem:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Or, as John Oliver stated, the odds of Trump being successful are the same as a wombat successfully piloting an airplane.

There is a lot of punditry that could splayed here. For example, people assume that a billionaire must be competent because a billionaire has a billion dollars. To which one can easily point to any lottery ticket winner. George Bush Jr. and Donald Trump were both lottery winners in life's accident of birth lottery. Being rich has absolutely no correlation with competence but people think it does.

But Irreni World Scale is not about punditry, instead, Irreni is about solutions.

The problem is Intelligentsia

Intelligentsia is a problem and the problem is best captured by a quote from William F. Buckley Jr.:

I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
-William F. Buckley Jr.

Would anyone hire a plumber to perform brain surgery on themselves? That's the problem with Buckely's thinking, and Republican voter thinking today. The travesty here is that Buckley's education was Yale, equal to Harvard.  This is called cognitive dissonance. It is also called a lack of self-awareness. We need political competence and education the same way Buckley used political education and competence to make a career out of criticizing political education and competence.

The intelligentsia problem is a fundamental problem in Democracy today. Republicans don't trust intelligentsia precisely for the same reason Buckley didn't: they are perceived as all liberals even though they are not. George Bush Jr. was a guy you could have a beer with. Al Gore was seen as too intellectual, even though his grades in college were average. Were either one of the really competent?

There is no mechanism for testing competence for office. Imagine, though, if members of Congress and the Senate had to pass competency tests in order to get elected and then also to re-qualify annually to stay elected. We wouldn't need term limits. I'm convinced 100% of members in Congress today couldn't pass any test.

Competency testing could solve the intelligentsia problem because conservatives would pass the test same as liberals, thus breaking the misconception with Republican voters the intelligentsia are all liberal.

So why don't we test for competence? Why didn't the founders of the US provide for competency testing as a qualification for office? The short answer is that the testing itself would become political. For example, imagine religious questions being added to competency tests. Religious people would claim that these questions are for moral and character competency. Ugh. Who would make the test?

The future Intelligentsia, Irreni solution is teams as governments

I'm currently in the process of writing a book describing the Irreni World Scale government platform and have yet to write the chapter on teams as governments. I need to introduce the concept here. The best intelligentsia solution is for us to all mingle together, whether we want too or not.

I'll be brief and tease out in one paragraph about how mingling in Irreni works. Irreni turns power on its head and starts authority using government of teams, not the Federal government. Team sizes are initially pegged to be 30 people where this number is subject to experimentation. Irreni World Scale has a single, Federal, world-wide government with a sole power; the power to determine the members of these small government teams using a recipe of dependency and productivity, talented and untalented, low-to-high intelligence, and so on. Why determine the make-up rather than self-selected groups? Because the systemic problem with social groups today is birds of a feather flock together. As a consequence people with negative social problems such as drug addiction get outcast from the community at large today into prisons and streets. With respect  the intelligentsia problem the liberal intelligent people flock to the Ivy-league college towns or Silicon Valley. The liberals have amassed in cities that are not represented at all in the US Constitution and these cities have come to be much larger than any State in the Union when the Union was originally conceived. Birds of a feather flock together needs to be broken up. Irreni World Scale does that by ensuring all walks of life get mixed together. Now, how the small government teams are orchestrated so as  to build teams-of-teams is for another day, you'll just have to wait for the book.

The now Intelligentsia solution is national competency tests

Irreni World Scale will take a couple of hundred years to complete. We need solutions now.

It would be nice if we could use competency tests for the likes of being President so that we don't ever again have a wombat fly this plane.

But how?

The solution is two-fold:

1. Direct democracy voting to approve competency tests.
2. Applying national competency tests in the same device that delivers the results publicly.

Direct democracy used today for legislation like ballot measures is a tragedy and anathema to the very objectives desired. It's for the children, the bond measure is always for the children.

However, Internet-age, direct democracy for non-legislation purposes is a huge opportunity being missed today.

For example, have you ever asked yourself why are we still polling when we could all just fill out forms on the Internet? Why not just have people fill out surveys on the Internet? Why indeed. I imagine the answer to that question is the exact same answer that applies to many of our political problems today: money.

The upshot is that Irreni World Scale does provide a direct democracy solution that can be implemented immediately: the Vote Bank using the Device of Loving Life (DOLL). The DOLL is simply a government smart phone given to everyone with a vote-bank application.  Everyone having a DOLL empowers everyone voting to use the Vote Bank; which is software that flips voting on its head. Instead of casting a vote on a single day and having the vote counted, one deposits a vote permanently. For example, the day after a Presidential election then a vote for the next President in four-years is deposited immediately, available to be changed any time until election day. No reason to take polls if the data is real. No reason to get out the vote because votes are on deposit.

Depositing votes is a mighty powerful tool. However, before using this novel idea we test. The plan for Irreni is to test out direct-deposit votes for other political purposes such as replacing polling.

We can use the vote bank today for our little intelligentsia problem. The intelligentsia solution is to create competing competency tests that we can vote on now using direct democracy for choosing the tests to be given. The test with the most votes wins. The tests would be administered on the DOLL and the results  made public via the DOLL immediately, no media or other intermediary. No monkey business. :-)

Solutions, not punditry

Solutions are what we need today. That's what Irreni World Scale brings to the table.

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!