Equality by lot

Rory Stewart’s Long History of Ignorance

Followers of this site will be intrigued to know what I think is a really first-rate radio documentary from Rory Stewart, which reframes knowledge in a Socratic or Confucian way, which is to say, starting from our vast ignorance both before and after we learn all we can. There are six episodes with the fourth on politics where Rory bangs the sortition drum pretty loud. You can click through to the whole series on this link or to the sortition episode by clicking the image below or the mp3 file which I’ve also appended below.

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Filed under: Sortition |

3 Responses

1. 

   el_gallo_azul, on July 13, 2024 at 11:48 pm said:

   Nice one. Thanks for posting about this podcast episode, Nicholas. I downloaded the entire series, but I’ll listen to this episode first.

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2. 

   Yoram Gat, on July 15, 2024 at 6:23 am said:

   Since Stewart’s topic is ignorance, the framing is perhaps inevitable, but it seems much more straightforward to explain bad policy by talking about a conflict of interests between the politicians and the public than by implying that politicians are suffering from some sort of incurable ignorance as Stewart seems to be doing. We have no problem talking about decision makers exploiting their power for their own interests when the topic is foreign “dictators”. But when it comes to our own “democratically elected” politicians, such ideas must not, cannot, be mentioned.

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3. 

   keithsutherland, on July 15, 2024 at 12:28 pm said:

   Yoram, I do think you should try not to see everything through your doctrinal prism. Sure, interests are important, but that doesn’t rule out epistemic considerations. I very much enjoyed the podcast and it was encouraging that our own Nick Gruen played such a leading role.

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