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WetnessPensive t1_jaagiqj wrote

Reply to comment by colintbowers in The world should be governed by people with intellectual thought and people should listen by New-Shop-7539

We have studies that show that what passes for "democracies" are in fact highly anti democratic (in the sense that the laws they pass overwhelmingly favor a oligarchic minority, and uphold an exclusionary regime of property rights). So that's not really a good example.

The OP's post made me think of some kind of Star Trek future. Or maybe you could have an education system in which a computer selects the smartest people in various fields, and then randomly selects a group of them to lead for a set time, upon which they're replaced by another random selection.

You can even combine this with things like citizen's assemblies, or forms of participatory democracy. ie, the Big Brain Geniuses meet with randomly-chosen citizens to work on legislation, and if convinced by the Big Brain Geniuses, the citizens rubber stamp the legislation and push it up the chain to be enacted as law. This creates a kind of check on authoritarianism or on the Big Brain Geniuses steamrolling the populace.

And actually, some of this stuff has been tried in various countries to good effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette). What typically stands in the way of these methods being implemented is the usual thing: moneyed interests.

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colintbowers t1_jaau3tt wrote

I'm not really making an argument here for whether Democracy is good or bad. I'm just saying it is an example of a hierarchical structure, where the people making decisions at the top are supposed to be better suited to that role than everyone else, which is exactly what OP was after. I guess my purpose in posting was to try and highlight the difficulty in setting up such a system on a large scale. Who chooses what "wisest" is? How do you measure it? The system of voting just happens to be the most successful thing we've tried so far (at large scales). You've offered some alternatives which perhaps could work better, but they've never been tested at scale, so we don't really know. Who are your Big Brain Geniuses? How do we choose them? How do we avoid the roles being captured by bad faith actors? There are plenty of really smart people who are assholes, and plenty of people who perform poorly in standardized testing, yet are full of kindness and compassion.

Also I totally agree that Democracy doesn't work so well in some countries. For example, I think a failing of the US-style Democracy is that not everyone votes (unlike, say, Australia, where it is compulsory), but I didn't want to get into that as it is somewhat orthogonal to the original post.

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