an ideal epistocracy would know that on some issues, democracies make better decisions. On those issues, it would consult with and defer to democratic opinion. Similarly, an ideal democracy would know that on some issues, epistocracies make better decisions. On those issues, it would consult with and defer to epistocratic opinion. Accordingly, under ideal conditions, epistocracy and democracy perform equally well.
That is Jason Brennan, paraphrasing theKling indifference theorem. Both Brennan and I were responding to Helene Landemore, who claims that democratic voting should lead to better outcomes than elite decision-making. In my comment, I said that “The whole issue boils down to who is more over-confident. If the people are over-confident, then you may want decisions made by the elite. If the elite are over-confident, then you may want decisions made by the people.” I go on to raise the Hayekian point that the elite are likely to be over-confident and hence markets are to be preferred.
I found Brennan’s most devastating criticism to be this:
If one can show that citizens are systematically mistaken, this is bad news for all three a priori defenses of democracy. If citizens are systematically mistaken, then by definition their errors are not randomly distributed, and so the so-called miracle of aggregation does not occur….According to the Jury Theorem, if citizens’ mean competence is less than 0.5, the probability that democracy will get the wrong answer approaches 1…citizens so not have cognitive diversity–they instead share the same incorrect model of the world–and so the Hong-Page Theorem does not apply.
In the real world, we do not observe direct democracy. Some people think that if we did, we would like the results.
I doubt that direct democracy is feasible. For example, we know that poll results depend on how questions are worded. So who will decide how questions are worded in a direct democracy? If it is a small group of experts, then that sort of defeats the point of direct democracy. So before people vote on a question, they have to vote on the wording of the question. And before they can do that, they have to vote on the wording of the question of how to word the question. etc.
If you can think you can solve the question-wording problem, then go on to deal with the “who decides which questions get voted on” problem.