Cultural Diversity

Cultural diversity may be an important aspect in improving the decision making of direct models of democracy. The corollary is that conformist societies may not benefit from direct democracy to the same degree.
According to Surowiecki the four key criteria for wise crowds are:

1. Diversity of opinion based on private information
2. Independence from the opinions of others
3. Decentralised knowledge
4. Aggregation - a mechanism for turning individual judgements into collective decisions

Interactive Democracy does some of this, but the degree of private information, independence and decentralised knowledge is effected by the extent of the public debate. If the debate is broken into separate discussions, perhaps fostered within diverse communities, informed from separate sources, whether by personal experience or diverse media, ID is more likely to be a success. Nevertheless, it will always be more diverse than a Parliamentary, representative system.

Aggregating Diverse Views

According to James Surowiecki in "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few", the aggregating of diverse views is an important principle for solving cognition problems (co-ordination and co-operation problems are also effectively solved by crowds). In the book he describes many examples, from estimating the number of sweets in a jar to guessing the location of a stranded submarine. In the latter case the best guesses of various experts were amalgamated together, giving a result that turned out to be far more accurate than any single expert foretold. The book is well worth a read.
Interactive Democracy amalgamates diverse views, but the problem is that wide debate on the same online system reduces diversity of decision making, even though it allows diverse opinions to be expressed. So, my proposal that the debating points, clarified by Parliament, should be required viewing before any vote is cast (even though many may click past such a screen without reading it) may diminish the effectiveness of the system as a whole.
A summary of The Wisdom of Crowds is available here, on Wikipedia.

The Wisdom of Crowds

This BBC Horizons programme, "Out of Control?", explores the role of the sub-conscious mind and concludes that it forms a bigger part of our mental activity than many may think. Interestingly it shows an experiment with a colony of ants finding a new home, introducing the phrase The Wisdom of Crowds (also a book by James Surowiecki). The ants found two suitable new nesting sites and together decided which was best. Perhaps this is a valid analogy for direct democracy, especially if our intuitions are more powerful than our rational minds would ever suppose.
In his book Surowiecki describes another experiment in which people are asked to guess the weight of something (I forget what). It was found that the average guess was far more accurate than any one guess. Perhaps this is also group intuition at work.... food for thought!


"In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future."

Random House