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

Here, James Nicoll <jdnicoll@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>         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?

All those pre-conscious decisions are based on consciously
assimilating all the context and background first. Which is the
time-consuming part of the jury process. But I don't think you want to
skip it.

Also, you get a society in which it's guaranteed that nobody can be
held responsible for the major decisions. I suspect you'd be better
off hiring Ming the Merciless as your country's CEO.

--Z (I tried to work haruspicy into this post somehow, but couldn't quite)

-- 
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
*
If the Bush administration hasn't thrown you in military prison
without trial, it's for one reason: they don't feel like it. Not
because of the Fifth Amendment.