Q: Is the result of broad listening the will of the people? (Isn’t it not the will of the people?)

A: First of all, I feel that you are not observing reality correctly in the first place when you think that “the will of the people” exists.

In particular, to think that “the will of the people” exists as if it were the will of a single person is a mistake that misrepresents a group of people as if they were a single person.


from Why Politics Fails

  • When one person’s opinion is considered a vector, “everyone’s opinion” is a set of vectors and cannot be considered the same vector as one person’s opinion because it has a distribution spread that is not a single point

I think JAPAN CHOICE did a good job in choosing the phrase “public opinion map”.

  • It’s not a “map of public opinion,” and it shouldn’t be called “visualization of public opinion,” it should be called “visualization of opinion groups.”
  • This does not mean that there is a “will of the people,” but that there are people with diverse opinions.
    • A cluster is “a group of people who have similar opinions”.

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/æ°‘æ„ăŻć­˜ćœšă—ăȘい using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.