Climate Change

Climate Change is the big issue. It's complex, scientific, economic and emotive, and involves everyone on the planet. There are evangelists and sceptics. The predictions they make are uncertain and probabilistic. So, if we had Interactive Democracy could the average person be trusted to decide on what is the best thing to do?
What I find inspiring by this debate is that leadership doesn't just come from those that have already decided what is the best course of action (or inaction), it also comes from teachers that show how to decide in an uncertain situation. This video by Greg Craven (with 4.25 million hits) is a great example. He shows a system of how to weight the odds (which you may use to come to your own, opposite conclusion).

Evolved to be Wrong

Laurie Santos runs the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale. In this video she explains how monkeys make the same mistakes as humans and suggests that our decision making may have evolved to make poor decisions many millions of years ago. Interactive Democracy involves many people in collective decisions, avoiding some of the bias that may be inherent in small groups, but if we all have the same problem behaviours hard wired into our brains by evolution, maybe other decision making systems are required? For example, the theory/experiment approach of science or the 6 Sigma methodology of Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control.

Infinite Information

Take a subject, any subject, and look at how much information there is on it. For example how much do you know about a fly? Do you know about the mechanisms of its body, its aerodynamics, how it makes decisions, its predators, its food, how its DNA was encoded, its family history, where it is and where it's come from. Can you predict its future?

Is there an expert that knows all of this? I think not, because there are so many areas of expertise involved, each with an infinite level of detail and interlinked with other areas.

My point is that there is too much information on any subject for elite political decision makers to process. Something bigger and better is needed: A network of discrete information processors, making decisions based on their own sphere of knowledge and experience, each predicting how policies will effect their own future and grounded in their own values and morals. In short: The electorate and voting using Interactive Democracy!