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Comment by bokonist | Hacker News Reader

I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour.

That's been the case for the majority of human history. It's mostly the case now. Most non-religious, progressive thinking people, don't actually think through most issues for themselves. They believe in institutions - academia, NPR, etc. Most people believe what they do about nutrition for instance, not from reading studies themselves, but through accredited officials (PHD's) as interpreted by the NYTimes.

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I'm not sure whether you're particularly referring to media bias and dumbed-down science journalism, which is certainly an issue, but the general practice of 'trusting an expert' seems sound to me - the effort required to become an expert yourself in every field that affects you would be incredible, whilst trusting someone else who has that expert knowledge to translate into layman's terms for you is more efficient.

This is essentially just society optimizing itself through specification - just have 1 person become the nutrition expert and do all the tests and experimentation, and then they can share that knowledge with the rest. Whilst the nutritionist is busy, that leaves others free to invent fusion power and quantum computing.

This phenomenon, also called "rational ignorance" by economists, is a problem for democracies. Not every person has the time to become an expert on everything, but they still vote on it.

I wonder how many people would be happy to "delegate their vote" if there was some officially supported way of doing it.

This would be an interesting way of reimagining representative democracy in the digital age. Why should we bother limiting ourselves to a fixed number of representatives? Let everyone vote on everything _but_ let people choose to assign their vote to someone else.

Rather than electing representatives, I'd choose someone whose intellect and experience I trust, and delegate my voting rights to them. They'd become my representative. When someone accumulated enough other people's votes, they'd reach the political stature of people like senators.

I would like to be able to delegate my vote on particular subjects to particular people. That way I don't have to worry if an economist I respect has a restrictive idea of gay rights or something like that, I can just pick a trustworthy delegate for each topic. A computer can ask me to break conflicts where it appears that a particular law should go to two different delegates.

But that is how it works. I delegate my vote to my MP, and they vote on my behalf in Parliament.

Only if the candidate you voted for won. If they didn't they're still the representative of your constituency, but not in any politically meaningful sense your representative.

Something closer to moultano's proposal would be a running referendum on everything, where you can choose to revocably delegate your vote (revocable as in you can remove the delegation, not reverse the vote).

But even an MP I didn't vote for, I can still write to, or show up at their constituents meeting or whatever. They're still going to pay attention, a) they don't know how I voted anyway and b) they want my vote next time!

And when someone accumulates over 50% of other people's votes, they'd become dictator.

The obvious solution is to abolish democracy and set up a specialized class of governors.

Nearly all institutions are run primarily for their own benefit. We often forget this when we receive their products/information/services. Sometimes, we're lucky enough to receive correct information or things that don't harm us. Trusting an expert is a good idea as you say, but trusting an expert whose opinion has been normalized by an institution is quite dangerous. It's less dangerous if you fully understand the motives of the institution, but with today's treacherous institutions, even most people in the institution are unaware of the motives and their consequences.

I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying it's the case now.

One of the issues with nutrition is that there is so much conflicting advice to wade through. Even if you do get down to the science it can still be unclear what you should follow.

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