You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.

As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.

I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.

Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.

If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.

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pc86 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly.

I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.

	▲	DrScientist 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote. However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble. So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time. This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.

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graemep an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.

	▲	DrScientist an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently. Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question. Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another. Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.