[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 Unfortunately, most people's "cache" never actually expires and they go to their grave still holding to hopelessly outdated data.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.)