You can never win with the masses. They will always be wrong, for as long as they demand to organize themselves in collectives.
The Internet is essentially the mass of masses. Extrapolate the audience averaging effect in the popular game show
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire:
"But there’s a third option: You can use your “Ask-the-Audience" life line. You can poll the entire studio audience on the four possible answers, and their responses are instantaneously assembled into a bar graph. Invariably, this graph shows one overwhelming choice, and with rare exceptions the audience is right. “I’ll trust the audience,” you tell Regis. “Final answer.”
Good move. But why? No person in the audience is any more likely than you to know where grapes come from, yet the collective intelligence of the group is almost always a better bet than your best guess. Psychologists are very interested in this perplexing statistical phenomenon. If the crowd is always wiser than any individual, what does that say about the way knowledge is stored and arranged in our minds? And can it help us make better choices, even beyond game shows?
...
That’s actually what Vul and Pashler found when they ran the experiment. As reported in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, the average of two guesses for any individual participant was better than either guess alone, regardless of the time between guesses. So polling the “crowd within” does indeed yield a statistically more accurate answer. What’s more, this internal crowd gets more independent-minded with time: Contestants who were asked to second-guess themselves three weeks later benefited even more by averaging their two guesses than did those who second-guessed themselves immediately. The psychologists speculate that the cognitive pull of the original answer loses its power and allows more mental flexibility over time."
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/06/polling-crowd-within.cfm@vokain You have probably seen this already, but in case not: enjoy!
BBC - The Code - The Wisdom of the Crowd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HUPS. Interesting how every single block size limit poll, since the first one in Feb 2013, has had majority support for the increase.
I assume both of you are smart guys.
So why do you commit this blatantly obvious category error of equating collective intelligence to the misalignment of priorities in the
Iron Law of Political Economics?
I just can't fathom how you can't see that is proximately analogous (in terms of shared versus independent self-interest) to equating ant colonies to
Tasmanian devils.
Let me translate that Iron Law into a form that is more easily appreciated:
Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups and simultaneously distributed via debt to the population wherein each self-interested individual has the incentive to maximize his/her parasitic extraction from the collective, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population (and often obfuscated and easily ignored as charged to the future generation in the form of debt).
This general model has consequences. Here are some of them:
Political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from.
The equilibrium state of a regulatory agency is to have been captured by the entities it is supposed to regulate.
The only important class distinction in any advanced democracy is between those who are net producers of tax revenues and those who are net consumers of them.
Corruption is not the exceptional condition of politics, it is the normal one.
P.S. I have tried my best to teach this concept but it seems after 1000s of posts in the Economic Devastation and other threads, I still can't get readers to acknowledge that collective organization of humans suffers from a misalignment of priorities. That humans have big brains or that collective intelligence of humans is higher than for solitary humans is irrelevant.
