@john wilkes booth
i am gonna try to answer you, but i'm drunk. so i might have to come back tomorrow for a re-try.
"even if the algorithm for picking the articles is perfect at getting a balanced mix, the algorithm for selecting people to vote can't be nearly as balanced without being flawed. let's face it, some people are better at solving problems than others. just doing a random survey only gives you the most common opinion, not necessarily the right answer."
that's true. think about taking a piss. if you are a complete moron, and you ask me how to take a piss, i tell you. you may not believe me, so you go online and ask yahoo. yahoo harvests many answers for you, and despite all that, you still decide that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, thus you piss down your leg in the general direction of the ground. after all this, your pants are wet and your shoes are wet and the pretty-much-all-of you reeks like urine and nobody wants to talk to you. so you say to yourself "maybe i should've taken those things i read about pissing a little more seriously, cuz this sucks."
what i mean by this is that when people's level of comfort is challenged by the decisions they make, they will - more than likely - become more sponge-like in their learning process. the problem is not that the masses are idiots. it's that they aren't expected to make decisions, so they don't have to practice making them.
it's kind of like an honour system, wherein the lies being told have a direct affect on the liar. so, they/we don't really need to be tested. it's in our best interest to try really hard at getting this right. it might not seem effective to start, but if you keep letting people piss on themselves and reeking like piss, they will eventually learn to take the act of pissing a little more seriously.
"plus, even if they did read the several random articles which were balanced for bias through a neutral algorithm, this won't necessarily cancel out whatever initial bias they already have prior to even being selected for that issue. everyone has some sort of ideological bias that will honestly effect how they interpret and side with the various articles. which still makes this bottom-up solution susceptible to interest groups lobbying support with widespread propaganda campaigns."
i tend to disagree with the effect of singular individuals' biases on the whole. this system can't really be lobbied because the articles/research papers are sent out at random. there is no worth to a particular author's contribution in terms of how much distribution it will get. so, katy perry, the leader in rank on twitter, gets no more airplay than barack obama or Joe Blow working the convenience store. the people chosen to vote aren't even given all the same articles. when you have massive amounts of people - 7 billion of them - randomizing everything WILL show you the majority vote. after some time of a society working in this manner, i would expect to see people WANTING to know all about what they're voting on. the brain is a lot like a muscle group. train it and it gets stronger. if all you have to do to "get by" in life (which many people limit themselves to for various reasons) is punch in at a factory and hit the e-stop every time your robot burps, then that might be all you do. especially if all you want to do is snowboard in the winter and waterski in the summer. it's easy. but if, on the other hand, the survival of your species depended on the intellectual participation of every individual on the planet (and the result might just be overall abundance) you might find yourself pushing yourself a little harder than what it takes to run a steel press or run a cash register at a grocery store. so many jobs are mundane and could be done by robots. the people doing these jobs aren't thinking about working. they've trained their bodies to react to all the possible variables and are thinking about other things. all day long. so many people. what they're doing is so easy, they don't even have to think about it. is that satisfying? would these people object to the enlivening nature of participation? doubtful.
i'm a drummer. a good one. non-drummers see me play and claim that they could never do it. it's as though it simply doesn't occur to them that learning how to use a bass drum pedal involves learning how to sit in such a way that when you use your right foot - normally used for balance - to hit that pedal, you have to use muscle groups in your torso to ensure that your face doesn't hit your rack tom. we learn and get better. i didn't know how to play what most people think is a beat for a year after i picked up sticks. rudiments. basics. begin with developing the muscle memory. the syllables. speaking comes later.
"i do like what you say about the answers are in the population and we just have to figure out how to pull them out, but what if the better answer that we find is not the more popular answer and a lot of people are mislead by the hangups i mentioned above? do the people interpreting the data have the authority to override the popular consensus and select the more effective answer? cause if so then the system in question really ceases to represent the idea of a democracy to me."
there really wouldn't be any people interpreting the numbers, per se. at least i don't think so. the numbers are just plain numbers. a 51-49 win is a win. period. i mean, i don't have everything worked out, so i guess some room for interruptions might be possible. but, i kinda thought that into the idea. if something like this went live, the first thing we could do with it is create a basic model, and then let the users redesign that model into something most people agree is a usable tool. it's own evolution would be hardwired into it.
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