[jfengel]

The whole gist of democracy is to start with the assumption that people are immoral and anti-productive. But if we pit them against each other, half of the immoral people will cancel out the other half. It takes only a tiny fraction of informed, intelligent people all arriving at the same solution (because it's correct) to nudge the result in the right way, most of the time.

It would be nice for that to work, because it means that you don't have to overcome the automatic argument of "I'm not immoral and anti-productive, you're immoral and anti-productive". You never have to tell anybody they're wrong or bad. You only have to tell them that they're not in the majority, which is an objective statement.

It would similarly be nice if we could have an objective but blame-free way to resolve the meta-question of electing representatives. Or at least, to have people say to their own partisans, "Hey, this is obviously unfair, could we tone it down a bit?" But the reply is always "If we don't do this unfair thing, the other people will do MORE unfair things, and then it will get even worse".