Please poke holes in this (was Re: Optimal location of world capital)

In article <4e24s39r4sui37krbvbv50f6crni7vm6s5@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Joy Beeson  <jbeeson@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 08:36:58 -0800 (PST), Hardcowded@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>
>> What city would be the best choice as
>> capital of an imagined utopian world state where all nations are equal?
>
>Why does such a world need a capital?  


	Speaking of decentralized decision-making processes:

	I was toying with a world-setting and being annoyed with the 
frequency with which aristocratic and vanguard governments turn up 
SF (1) I was thinking about extremer forms of democracies than we 
have. I remembered Bass's megajuries and then a paper on how many of
our supposedly conscious decisions get made before we are aware of them
with the rational we use apparently an afterthought to sup****t the 
decisions we've already made. 

	People don't like jury duty because it eats up time but suppose
there was some way to use the pre-conscious decision making capacity of
the entire population in such a way that whatever triggers the conscious
awareness of a decision is never triggered? People could be taking an
active part in the governance of their nation without being aware of 
it at all.

	The badly fleshed out idea I had is that this comes out of a 
commonly used user interface, and that anyone who is using such an 
interface might be donating a small and unnoticed bit of brain power
to the State. Originally I was thinking just reactions to polls but
that gives a lot of power to the poll makers. Instead, they've 
harnessed the awesome power of "somehow" to create the collective 
preconscious, something that lets most of the people play an active
role in how their nation is run without it being a particular 
inconvenience.

	How many different failure modes can you see? Monsters from the 
ID, obviously, problems with diverting too much of a given person's
brain activity, unfair weighting to people's responses, hideous 
feedback processes (where the CP's decisions are not just bad but 
make it more likely that future decisions will be bad in the same
way but louder) all come to mind.

	I'm assumign that this isn't the only way decisions are 
made, obviously, and that it wasn't imposed all at once but grew
from a smaller polity in which it worked. 



1: I reserve the right to hunt, cook and eat anyone who turns this into
a discussion of the inevitability of aristos and vanguards in the future,
under the usual provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 
-- 
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll
(For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-****rt, cup and tote-bag needs)