(January 11, 2017 at 11:59 am)CapnAwesome Wrote: I wonder if you are familiar with the concept of 'collective wisdom.' It's a fact that if you have a jar of jelly beans and have people guess, when you average out the guesses of large number of people, it comes out very close to the real number. Another good example is that when people play chess collectively, ie if 100,000 random people vote on what move to do, they play chess at a grandmaster level.
https://www.diplomacy.edu/resources/book...marter-few
That's why even when individuals make it seem like democracy is just a collection of dumbshits making decisions, it works very well.
I disagree. Sorry, but I don't understand how that could work (I only read a few lines from the article). If people just guess, then that's basically just as people throwing dices. And if one guy throws one dice and decides on that, or he throws the dice a dozen of times and averages out, or a bunch of people throw the dice, I don't see how there could be a difference among them, how the odds could change for the better.
The way I see it, democracy can improve a country as best as the average citizen can. You may have brilliant and extremely competent people in a country, but since the best make up less than 5%, they have little to no chance to make a difference - the average people make up 60-90% of the people and they think differently. (and yes, the average people can be idiots)
To make an alegory:
Let's say there is a cat in a room, and the cat needs a surgery because of a health problem.
You select 20 people (1->20), who have a knowledge about surgering a cat, like this:
1,2 - "what's that a cat?"
3->6 - "Yeah, I know what a cat is. What is surgery?"
7->14 - ordinary people who know what surgery is and what a cat is, but have no idea how to treat a cat.
15->18 - inexperienced veterinarians and ordinary medics.
19,20 - experienced veterinarians, who can do surgery on cats.
Now you go to each in his turn and present him the problem - the symptoms the cat experiences. And you give each a piece of paper and tell him "write there what you think should be done, and if it needs a surgery, how it should be done."
Then you pick the notes from everyone, average out the result, or find the most common response.
In this scenario, what chances do you think the cat has to be healed?
That's quite how democracy works. And yes, if such an experiment were to be attempted by hundreds of groups, I suppose some of them would be able to heal the cat.
