[bjhoops1]

A couple of thoughts:

1) A hard upper limit on the intellectual capacity of an individual human being does not directly necessitate a corresponding limit to the capacity of humanity as a whole. There are now reliable means of preserving past knowledge and experience, and population growth means more minds are available to ponder difficult problems.

Interestingly, this is somewhat analogous to where we are today in computer hardware - an individual processor's power is limited, but large gains are yet to be made by adding more processors, and storage of information is increasingly exponentially.

These kinds of gains are not linear as you would expect from an increase in processors' speed, but they are gains nonetheless.

2) Even if you do assume that the individual human's finite capacity does imply an upper limit on human progress, it is still possible for progress to increase indefinitely; the gains will merely be increasingly marginal.

I agree that the idea that progress is an inevitable force of nature is completely false. It is a goal, not a natural force. I personally don't know anyone who actually believes this though, so I feel like this is something of a strawman.

[Joeri]

The capacity to aggregate the capabilities of individual humans is greatly improved, but the way we vote has not been adapted accordingly.

All voting systems currently assume the capability of a voter to aggregate all the knowledge in the world into asingle rational decision. This is impossible, one person can never know enough to rationally vote on anyone or anything.

We need a whole different kind of democracy, one which aggregates individual knowledge instead of reducing it to insignificance. I don't know what it should look like, but i do know i've not seen it yet.

[bjhoops1]

Interesting observation. I completely agree that as the amount of information needed to be synthesized to understand any issue multiplies exponentially, the capacity of an individual voter to grasp all of the necessary information is quickly exceeded. So people resort to shortcuts, voting based off of quick proxies for true discernment such as party affiliation or ideology.

I would even say that ideology can be considered as little more than a shortcut, a cache if you will of information and answers to tricky problems. Unfortunately, most people's "cache" never actually expires and they go to their grave still holding to hopelessly outdated data.

[ef4]

You've just described the difference between central planning and markets. The biggest reason markets work is that they aggregate knowledge and propagate it throughout a society.

(Granted, there's plenty to criticize about the implementation of real markets. But if one wants to design a system for intelligently aggregating individual knowledge into globally beneficial outcomes, markets are the place to start.)