I find this article poorly argued, and committing serious errors and fallacies at multiple levels.
The worst single problem is that it's based on a simplistic model of the political system which is too distant from reality to be useful. This is basically the same objection that I had to the recent "Politics as Charity" post: the assumption that government policy is determined by elected politicians in a way that can be actively and predictably influenced by voters is outright false in the great majority of cases. Sticking to this unrealistic model cannot lead to an accurate understanding of the modern political systems, let alone to any useful practical guidelines for interacting with them.
Moreover, nearly all concrete claims, examples, and hypotheticals in the article are written in a very imprecise and inaccurate way that sounds superficially sensible and plausible, but cannot stand to any real scrutiny. Just a few examples:
"Whether a budget is good or bad depends on how well its author can distinguish between efficient and inefficient spending..." This ignores the crucial problem of incentives. The ability of the "author" (note the vagueness -- w
You seem to be working under the assumption that contentious policy issues represent questions of fact, that smarter, more rational people are likely to get right. What if they represent questions of value?
So, if I understand you, questions like abortion, drug laws, and gay marriage are controversial questions of values and dominate political debate, but are really unimportant. But issues like gun control are questions of fact. So, we should choose politicians who pledge to listen to the experts on this kind of question?
I can understand the desire for an appeal to technocracy on technical questions, but I recall the last time I decided to simply trust the people with the best information rather than trusting my own instincts. It was on the existence of a WMD threat in Iraq.
To be honest, I have to consider myself better as a judge of technical issues like AGW, taxation, and military spending than as a judge of the intelligence, integrity, and rationality of politicians.
The existence of articles on Google which contain the keywords "Saddam syria wmd" isn't enough to establish that Saddam gave all his WMD to Syria.
The articles you Googled are from WorldNetDaily (a news source with a "US conservative perspective"), a New York tabloid, a news aggregator, and a right wing blog. Of course, it would be wrong to dismiss them based on my assumptions about the possible bias of the sources, but on reading them they don't provide much evidence for what you are asserting.
The first three state that various people (a Syrian defector, some US military officials and an Israeli general) claim that it happened (based on ambiguous evidence including sightings of convoys going into Syria). It's not hard to see that a defector and a general from a country that was about to attack the Syrian nuclear programme might have been strongly motivated to make Syria look bad.
The Hot Air article (the only one published after 2006) quotes a Washington Times reporter quoting a 2004 Washington Times interview with a general saying that Iraq dispersed "documentation and materials". It then concludes this must refer to WMD, although it could refer to res...
Before I reply, let's just look at the phrase "WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction" and think for a while. Maybe we should taboo the phrase "WMD".
Was it supposed to be bad for Saddam to have certain objects merely because they were regulated under the Chemical Weapons Convention, or because of their actual potential for harm?
The justification for the war was that Iraq could give dangerous things to terrorists. Or possibly fire them into Israel. It was the actual potential for harm that was the problem.
Rusty shells with traces of sarin degradation products on them might legally be regulated as chemical weapons, but if they have no practical potential to be used to cause harm, they are hardly relevant to the discussion. Especially because they were left over from the 80s, when it is already well known that Iraq had chemical weapons.
Saddam: Hi Osama, in order that you might meet our common objectives, I'm gifting you with several tonnes of scrap metal I dug up. It might have some sarin or related breakdown products, in unknown amounts. All you have to do is smuggle it into the US, find a way to extract the toxic stuff, and disperse it evenly into the subw...
I believe that one point MacGyver unfolded a paperclip to disarm a WMD. Clearly you should do your best to minimize WMDs so no one needs to do that.
Which really has absolutely nothing to do with my original implicit complaint, which was that my national leaders misled me.
They didn't say "We need to invade Iraq because the Iraqis have not properly decommissioned tactical chemical weapons left over from the War with Iran. It is our duty to the environmental safety of the Iraqi public to go in there and make sure that those corroding artillery shells are safely destroyed."
If a policy question is a question of fact, it never becomes a talking point; it's just silently resolved and forgotten.
Is that true? I've seen plenty of vicious political battles (with policy implications) fought over questions of fact (even easy questions), and plenty of incorrect "facts" linger as talking points long after the right answer has become evident.
I believe OP is correct that voting on issues leads to affective death spirals. But the idea that we can vote on character presupposes a population composed soley of rational, non-party-affiliated politicians; and it furthermore presupposes that rational politicians will agree on value issues, which I believe is not at all the case.
Would you vote for Sarah Palin if you thought she had a good character? Would you be more likely to vote for her if you thought she was extremely competent at getting things done?
I would prefer, in decreasing order of preference:
We've got warring notions of "competence."
You're talking about the "competence" to achieve one's political aims; the ability to get laws passed, for example, or to administer programs. This is bad in the hands of one's political enemies -- it is not good when Nazis are "competent" at genocide.
The OP is talking about the "competence" to achieve those goals where everyone is in rough consensus -- we all want GDP growth, but the most competent politician is the one who's best at getting it. This is usually less a matter of being good at getting laws passed, and more a matter of judging the efficacy of policies against the real world.
This kind of "competence" at non-controversial goals is universally a good thing. Nobody wants the trains not to run on time. The question is, would you prefer a politician who's competent at non-controversial goals, or a politician who's on your side in the controversies?
Unfortunately, this strategy is wrong, and the result is inferior leadership, polarization into camps and never-ending arguments. Instead, voters should be encouraged to vote based on the qualifications that matter: their intelligence, their rationality, their integrity, and their ability to judge character.
It's very hard to judge the character/intelligence/etc. in someone you know very well, it's impossible in people who you only know from TV interviews. If you think you can do this, the most likely explanation is that you're suffering from overconfidence bias.
Yes, you can attempt to use proxies like standardized tests, but
I won't vote this way, for two reasons:
Nevertheless, upvoted, because it is an important position and well argued. I do wish that more moderates voted for competence rather than a mild preference on issues, but that's not realy my place.
What does a politician who advances to the point of being able to make decisive choices most favour? Getting their policies across? Yes, but I would argue generally by the time politician makes it to a place where they can enact their policies, they might have one or two they're willing to risk losing that power for -- if you're lucky! Generally enacting good decisions comes second to ensuring you'll get back in next time.
If a politician highly values re-election, and retaining power, then voting on the basis of intelligence, rationality, etc is unlikely to result in the best decisions being made policy wise. Instead it is likely to result in the best decisions being made to increase that politician's popularity, or otherwise result in the greatest chance of re-election. In this case, intelligence and rationality can easily become tools that actually distort that politician from making good policy decisions, because he or she can easily see the outcome of them.
For example, take a look at drug policy. To ther best of my knowledge, all evidence points that illegalising substances does little to reduce their use, and instead wastes taxpayer money, increases the power of organised cri...
If an issue really is contentious, then a voter without specific inside knowledge should not expect their opinion to be more accurate than chance.
And your evidence for this grand model of all politics is... ?
Don't waste time talking about abortion, gun control, taxation, health care, military spending, drug laws, gay marriage, or any other contentious political issue, unless that issue is actually going to be on an upcoming ballot that you are going to vote on directly.
Isn't that far too restrictive? If the office you're electing has little or no influence on such matters, then sure. But if you're electing a member of your Parliament who's going to vote on national politics for the next several years - well, even if an issue isn't being talked about right now, there's a strong chance he'll get to vote on it during his term, not to mention contributing to deciding whether it gets talked about at all.
If issue X is absolutely critical to you, to the exclusion of anything else, you'll even want to vote and support a complete moron who agrees with you over any number of geniuses who disagree (assuming issue X is a value judgment, otherwise such a scenario should lead you to strongly question your position on X).
Now, this is basically the very point you're making - that the more we prioritise issues the more we incentivise dumb parroting - but my counterpoint is that you can't just dismi...
The heart of the problem is not how we vote for officials - it's that we vote for officials, instead of getting to vote on issues.
Americans are proud of being "governed by the people", yet a citizen has no effective way to have any influence on any particular issue! If it's very important to me to promote gay rights or environmental responsibility, I'm supposed to vote for a Democrat? How effective is that?
We need to ditch representative democracy if we want democracy. (The next question is whether we want democracy.)
I think "One person, one vote" is to blame, not democracy in general. A different voting system should be developed that weighs how much people care about a particular issue, and how much they know about it.
To weigh how much people care about an issue, you could:
To weigh how much people know about an issue, you could:
There's an assumption here and in some of the comments that everyone who is intelligent and honest will necessarily have much the same views on all political issues.
Looking at the real world, if that's true then hardly anyone can be intelligent and honest. Who will you vote for if the most intelligent and honest politician on offer thinks you should be put up against the wall and shot? You talk about politicians making the "right" decision, but what that is depends as much on what the goal is as on what actions will lead towards it.
If you vote a...
Another voting strategy which a lot of people seem to follow is to vote for the incumbent if things are going well and for the challenger if things are going badly. It doesn't do a great job at picking out the right politicians, but it does a pretty good job of giving politicians the right incentives. Incumbents can increase their chances of getting reelected by making things go as well as possible.
I think you should usually vote for a party, not a person. The individual candidate's character and political views are usually less important than the letter next to their name.
If you want to predict what a politician will do in office, their political party is usually the most informative piece of information that you have. You have a lot more relevant information about the political parties than you do about the specific individuals who are running for office, and you're usually better off relying on that party information.
Legislators usually vote wit...
This was in fact the founders' original idea for how the republic should function. It turned into issue based politics as soon as Washington stepped down, and in fact much earlier. It would be instructive to look at why this happened.
There is one thing I'd like to add, which I thought was implicit but which the feedback so far indicates wasn't.
If an issue has smart people on one side and stupid people on the other, then taking the wrong side is overwhelming evidence that a politician is stupid, and therefore unqualified. For example, it would be wrong to vote for a politician who was a creationist, regardless of their other qualifications, because there aren't any smart and sane creationists. But this isn't really a controversial issue, in the sense that I meant it - the overwhelming m...
jimrandomh:
For example, it would be wrong to vote for a politician who was a creationist, regardless of their other qualifications, because there aren't any smart and sane creationists.
I have a question for you and all the other people who agree with this statement. Let's say you're looking for someone to fill a very demanding leadership position in a business. Whom would you rather appoint:
A Mormon who professes belief in the literal truth of both the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and thus fails the above test of smarts and sanity, but whose resume features an impressive track record of relevant professional accomplishments, and who is known for an extraordinary ability for getting things done and completing projects that seem impossibly difficult. (You will find a significant number of people that fit this description in real life.)
An average Less Wrong member. (Who will presumably pass all these little litmus tests of "rationality" with flying colors.)
If the answer is (1), do you believe that the same conclusion cannot be extended to at least some political leadership positions? If not, why exactly?
(I also second Relsqui's earlier comment on this issue.)
Over a couple of posts of yours, I have seen a tendency towards judgmental hyperbole, and also towards dividing the world into "smart" and "stupid," which I don't agree with and which puts me off of the ideas you present with them.
there aren't any smart and sane creationists
I'm not remotely a creationist and I rolled my eyes at this. Are there any strong rationalists who have carefully examined the evidence and weighed the probabilities and remain creationists? I doubt it. Does that exclude all people who are smart and sane? Of course not. You're doing almost exactly the thing your post argues against: picking one issue and ignoring any other factors that might contribute to a person's intelligence. Being wrong about one thing doesn't make someone a dribbling moron, nor crazy. If you really believe there exist no smart creationists, you may be spending too much time with people who are very much like you, and not enough with people who are very unlike you but whom you still respect. Reading Fox News as a Democrat (or the equivalent for your political stance) doesn't count; that's just justifying your superiority complex to yourself.
(Edited to clarify last sentence.)
jimrandomh:
If an issue has smart people on one side and stupid people on the other, then taking the wrong side is overwhelming evidence that a politician is stupid, and therefore unqualified.
Trouble is, there are lots of historical examples when the level of smarts on one side of an issue was noticeably higher, but in retrospect, it turned out that the intellectuals' favored position was frightfully deluded. For example, just look at the enormous popularity of Marxism among Western intellectuals two generations ago.
The basic problem is that intellectuals care much more about the status-signaling aspects of their opinions than the common folk, so even if they have more information and higher intellectual abilities, their incentives to bias their views for the sake of appearing enlightened and affiliated with high-status positions and individuals are also greater. (As Orwell commented about some ideological positions that were fashionable in his time: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.")
I can't identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong
I'm reading The Rational Optimist at the moment which has a few examples.
Malthusian ideas about impending starvation or resource exhaustion due to population growth have been popular with intellectuals for a long time but particularly so in the last 100 years. Paul Ehrlich is a well known example. He famously lost his bet with economist Julian Simon on resource scarcity. His prediction in The Population Bomb in 1968 that India would never feed itself was proved wrong that same year. These ideas were generally widely held in intellectual circles (and still are) but there is a long track record of specific predictions relating to these theories that have proved wrong.
Another case that springs to mind: it looks increasingly likely that the mainstream advice on diet as embodied in things like the USDA food guide pyramid was deeply flawed. The dominant theory in the intellectual establishment regarding the relationship between fat, cholesterol and heart disease also looks pretty shaky in light of new research and evidence.
I'd also argue that the inte...
JoshuaZ:
I can't identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong, and even then, that's an example where the general public in many areas also had a fair bit of support for that view.
Well, on any issue, there will be both intellectuals and non-intellectuals on all sides in some numbers. We can only observe how particular opinions correlate with various measures of intellectual status, and how prevalent they are among people who are in the upper strata by these measures. Marxism is a good example of an unsound belief (or rather a whole complex of beliefs) that was popular among intellectuals because its basic unsoundness is no longer seriously disputable. Other significant examples from the last hundred years are unfortunately a subject of at least some ongoing controversy; most of that period is still within living memory, after all.
Still, some examples that, in my view, should not be controversial given the present state of knowledge are various highbrow economic theories that managed to lead their intellectual fans into fallacies even deeper than those of the naive folk economics, the views of hu...
I can't identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong
Opposition to nuclear power?
OK, but apart from Marxism, nuclear power, coercive eugenics, Christianity, psychoanalysis, and the respective importance of nature and nurture - when has the intellectual establishment ever been an unreliable guide to finding truth?
I don't think worrying about nuclear war during the Cold War constituted either "crying wolf" or worrying prematurely. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Able Archer 83 exercise (a year after "The Fate of the Earth" was published), and various false alert incidents could have resulted in nuclear war, and I'm not sure why anyone who opposed nuclear weapons at the time would be "embarrassed" in the light of what we now know.
I don't think an existential risk has to be a certainty for it to be worth taking seriously.
In the US, concerns about some technology risks like EMP attacks and nuclear terrorism are still taken seriously, even though these are probably unlikely to happen and the damage would be much less severe than a nuclear war.
(Incidentally, I'm not actually sure what is wrong with coercive eugenics in the general sense. If for example we have the technology to ensure that some very bad alleles are not passed on (such as those for Huntington's disease), I'm not convinced that we shouldn't require screening or mandatory in vitro for people with the alleles. This may be one reason this example didn't occur to me. However, I suspect that discussion of this issue in any detail could be potentially quite mind-killing given unfortunate historical connections and related issues.)
The historical meaning of the term is problematic partly because it wasn't based on actual gene testing - I doubt they even tried to sort out whether someone's low IQ was inheritable or caused by, say, poor nutrition - and partly because it was, and still in some cases would be, very subjective in terms of what traits are considered undesirable. How many of us wouldn't be here if there'd been genetic tests for autism/aspergers or ADD or other neurodifferences developed before we were born?
Yes, and there's been a fair bit of controversy in the "deaf community" over whether they should engage in selection for deaf children. See for example this article.
This post involves politics, but in a way that I think is sufficient to avoid mind-killing properties: it can't be easily matched up with any party, candidate, or entrenched position, and it's at the "meta" level.
Nevertheless, I notice some people downvoting it. I notice that the first of these downvotes was less than a minute after it was posted, which isn't long enough to have actually read it. Is meta-politics a mind killer, too? It ought not to be.
Possible mind-killing property: you are telling people to give up on their sides. That means that no matter what people's identities are, you're attacking them.
For example, I feel strongly about issues such as creationism not being taught in classrooms and gay rights. I can easily imagine that someone went to harvard and got a 4.0 but is still completely "backwards" about these issues. While I happen to believe that I could make a rational argument about it, fundamentally it makes me ANGRY to hear you saying that these contentious issues that are affected by the people I vote for are unimportant, and that my opinions are not better than chance at predicting their answers accurately.
tl;dr you're still mind-killing pretty hard.
If people suck so badly at judging whether going to war in Afghanistan is a good idea that they might as well flip a coin, how do you expect them to be able to meaningfully judge the integrity of intelligence of a politician?
Except for veteran officers and military historians, almost nobody has any experience that is even remotely relevant to predicting the outcome of a war. But nearly everyone needs, in everyday life, to figure out if they're talking to a moron or a genius, to a crook or a saint; granted, they may not be good at it, but it's something they have definitely tried, at least in school.
Which is, after all, half of the whole argument for representative instead of direct democracy (the other half being logistics).
This article contains a good point, which is that arguments about facts are overwhelmed by arguments about values. If you really want the government to use economic policy to optimize for average welfare, you could do well by electing an official who knows economics better than you do. If you really want to minimize the amount of crime-related harm, you could do well by electing an official who knows more about the effectiveness of gun-control laws than you do.
But if you really just care about your right to own a gun or living in a gun-free neighborhood, you would be better served by focusing on that issue. It's not reasonable to expect that a smart politician will share your values.
I think a much better solution to the general problem is: design and implement mechanisms, don't elect politicians / lobby for rules / argue with people. Analyzing a mechanism doesn't seem to be a mind-killer anywhere near as much as discussing outcomes. For example, it's much easier to talk rationally about prediction markets as methods for information aggregation than to talk about what the results of their predictions would be.
For example, two people might have opposite opinions on global warming, one thinking it will be slower than the IPCC says, one...
From what I've heard, Nixon was one of America's smartest presidents and Jimmy Carter was a man of great personal integrity. Herbert Hoover was also a brilliant and extremely well qualified individual. Yet, I'm no fan of any of these presidents as they all, in my opinion, governed somewhat more poorly than average for US presidents. Looking at other examples, I don't see any significant pattern amongst presidents who governed well.
In contrast, I think presidents and other politicians who held my values (in hindsight) governed well (according to my own valu...
I disagree at multiple levels. The primary objection is that there are some issues which are connected to qualifications at a deep level. And I'm going to take the risk of delving slightly into mind-killing subjects and use actual examples, and try to balance by using examples from across the political spectrum:
Example 1) A politician who is a young earth creationist and makes arguments against evolution that are so bad that they are listed by major creationist organizations as arguments that creationists should not use has demonstrated that they are deep...
I'm reacting against OP's recommendations especially strongly today, on account of just having read the reader reviews for this book trying to exhonerate Joseph McCarthy yesterday.
Note that the people writing reviews who are sympathetic to McCarthy characterize him as noble, American, and patriotic. People with different values will consider different people to have good characters. It's not surprising that political parties align with ideas on what constitutes good character. Politicians already run more on character than on issues. This is the problem, not the solution.
And be sure to notice whenever they to ignore the question and answer a different one instead; that means they couldn't answer the original question.
Interacting with the media 101: when they ask you a question that sounds confused, they're probably just asking you to explain the obvious thing (that they don't understand) - so ignore their question and explain that. My point is that this isn't as good of an indicator as you think it is since politicians, almost by definition, already know how to deal with the media.
On the other hand, this bit of media wisdom is supposed to be for a scientist explaining her work to the media, so maybe politicians don't do this at all.
One small correction:
"that is, we tend to emphasize evidence that candidates we like are qualified, and ignore evidence that candidates we don't like aren't qualified."
The last part of this sentence should probably be "that candidates we don't like are(!) qualified."
Upvoted, but I think this is nearly impossible in practice. Also, there are certain issues (such as abortion) that otherwise perfectly rational politicians will behave irrationally about, which puts an upper limit on the effectiveness of focusing on intelligence rather than issues. If the issue that the politician is being irrational about is extremely important (like the economy) then this method can easily lead you astray.
Is "I won't vote for a politician who says he doesn't believe in evolution" a reasonable heuristic?
I think a much better solution to the general problem is: design and implement mechanisms, don't elect politicians / lobby for rules / argue with people. Analyzing a mechanism doesn't seem to be a mind-killer anywhere near as much as discussing outcomes. For example, it's much easier to talk rationally about prediction markets as methods for information aggregation than to talk about what the results of their predictions would be.
For example, two people might have opposite opinions on global warming, one thinking it will be slower than the IPCC says, one thinking it will be faster. Yet they could agree based on a rational analysis that prediction markets will be more accurate than giant global committees like the IPCC, while each expecting the market to validate their view. Contemplation of abstract mechanisms doesn't invoke tribal politics. At least, until the mechanism has started spitting out answers...
I can't agree with this idea. The point of government IS to come up with solutions to potential problems (other governments, crime, paying for "public goods", expanding the freedom of the individual pledging loyalty to the government, protection from the "state of nature"), through a variety of tools, including coercion. The government exist not in and of itself, but exist to produce certain "outcomes" which will favor or harm specific interests.
If we can't talk about what a future government is actually going to do, then what's the point of changing to it?
In the United States and other countries, we elect our leaders. Each individual voter chooses some criteria by which to decide who they vote for, and the aggregate result of all those criteria determines who gets to lead. The public narrative overwhelmingly supports one strategy for deciding between politicians: look up their positions on important and contentious issues, and vote for the one you agree with. Unfortunately, this strategy is wrong, and the result is inferior leadership, polarization into camps and never-ending arguments. Instead, voters should be encouraged to vote based on the qualifications that matter: their intelligence, their rationality, their integrity, and their ability to judge character.
If an issue really is contentious, then a voter without specific inside knowledge should not expect their opinion to be more accurate than chance. If everyone votes based on a few contentious issues, then politicians have a powerful incentive to lie about their stance on those issues. But the real problem is, most of the important things that a politician does have nothing to do with the controversies at all. Whether a budget is good or bad depends on how well its author can distinguish between efficient and inefficient spending, over many small projects and expenditures that will never be reviewed by the voters, and not on the total amount taxed or spent. Whether a regulation is good or bad depends on how well its author can predict the effects and engineer the small details for optimal effect, and not on whether it is more or less strict overall. Whether foreign policies succeed or fail depends on how well the diplomats negotiate, and not on any strategy that could be determined years earlier before the election.
Voters know a lot less about governance than the politicians who study it full time, and sometimes, that leads them to incorrect conclusions. This can force politicians to choose between making the right decision, based on inside knowledge or on complexities that voters wouldn't understand, and making the wrong decision to please voters. It is not possible to know how much should be taxed or spent without studying the current budget in detail. It is not possible to know how banks should be regulated without spending years studying economics. In theory, experts can spread the correct answers to these questions in the media. But neither the media nor the public can tell right answers from wrong ones, and sometimes even the experts and the media have insufficient information. It is not possible to know how much money should be spent on defense without reading classified military intelligence briefings. It is not possible to know which foreign policies will work without talking to foreign leaders.
Instead of looking at positions, look for signs that indicate their skills. Hearing them speak is good, but only when they're forced to improvise and not reading someone else's words from a teleprompter - ie, interviews, not speeches. And be sure to notice whenever they seem to ignore the question and answer a different one instead; that means they couldn't answer the original question. Look up each candidate's alma matter and GPA, if available. If they've held office before, try to find out how much corruption there was under them, and how much of it was pre-existing.
Unfortunately, actually determining how qualified a candidate is can be extremely difficult, we are likely to fall prey to confirmation bias - that is, we tend to emphasize evidence that candidates we like are qualified, and ignore evidence that candidates we don't like aren't qualified. This is especially likely to occur when the information we do have is in a form such that it can't easily be compared. For example, if candidate A held an office and successfully reduced corruption, and candidate B held a similar office but failed to do so, then we should strongly favor candidate A; but what usually happens is that we only have one side of the comparison. For example, it may be that candidate A successfully reduced corruption, but candidate B led a department which didn't have much corruption to begin with, or which was never inspected by journalists closely enough to determine what effect candidate B had. In order to defend against this bias, we should decide how significant a piece of evidence would be before we hear which candidates they apply to.
We should also try to blind ourselves to information that we know will bias us. Unfortunately, the media makes this very difficult; nearly every description of a political candidate will also mention their political party, and this is the one fact we most need to avoid! We need information sources that provide what's actually relevant, and hide what's biasing and irrelevant. We should encourage politicians to take standardized tests and publish their scores. We have sites that help compare politicians' stances on issues; we should encourage those same sites to also provide GPAs and name alma matters, link to interview transcripts, and collect blinded expert opinions on the level of understanding those transcripts display.
Finally, encouraging voters to pay attention to contentious issues encourages affective death spirals, which lead to petty strife and never-ending arguments. Suppose someone starts with a slight preference for party A over party B, and starts studying political issues. They will have a slight preference for sources that favor party A, and party A's positions. Then, when an issue is too close to decide on its merits, they don't acknowledge that; instead, they adopt whichever position their party prefers. Then they go back to compare the parties, and find that party A agrees with them much more than party B does (since their previous information was biased that way), and and strengthen their preference for A over B. In the next iteration, they switch to information sources that agree with their new position, and which are slightly more biased. After enough iterations of this, voters can end up believing that they are informed and impartial, and that party B eats kittens.
Don't waste time arguing about issues which already have entrenched positions, with intelligent people on both sides, unless the issue is actually going to be on an upcoming ballot that you are going to vote on directly. If you're voting on politicians, talk about the politicians themselves - their integrity, their intelligence, and their rationality. That's what really matters, and that's what should win your support.