Direct Democracy?

[nihilistcat]

Not a fan of direct democracy, as wisdom is not additive.  Its maximum is that of the wisest person in a particular group.  Adding naughts will never produce a sum.

Boru

I was all into this shit back in the occupy days (I was pretty heavily involved here in NYC). My little affinity group was centered on finding ways to make consensus decision making work. In my experience, Americans are too individualistic for pure consensus to work.

However, I did read studies that show consensus decision making groups can produce better decisions than the most intelligent and qualified member of the group (making the decision independently), but these studies were in the context of consensus decision making at companies, where you have an element of authoritarianism to keep the group focused and civilized (e.g. if you're the disruptive type who can't play well with others, you get fired).

So while wisdom may not be additive, having diverse input in group decision making really does help, because often even the most intelligent member of the group will lack experiences that other group members bring to the table, which are relevant in the context of the issue being decided. You could have a PhD in physics from the research department at the table, making decisions germane to the research group, but he or she may have no experience with the administrative side of things. So having an administrative clerk at the table will be helpful (because no matter how great your work product, if you don't know how to get it through the red tape efficiently, you may miss a deadline or some shit). 

Point is, there's really no linear rule that holds true in all cases, except a few laws of nature like entropy or whatever (although humans really like nice and neat sounding bright line rules)

Like, sometimes we need to raise taxes (like now), sometimes we need to lower taxes. Sometimes we need fiscal discipline, sometimes we need a Keynesian stimulus. Connecting ideology or one line maxims to things as fluid and non-linear as decision making or economics or whatever ... really limits our thinking.