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

In article <fptluk$koi$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Andrew Plotkin  <erkyrath@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>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.


	That was a plot point with Bass' megajuries: extremely large 
juries seemed to be more likely to go for the death penalty, since
responsibility was smeared out over so many people.
-- 
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)