There’s a second issue here. Any ‘voting system to accurately measure preferences’ is in the class of systems trying to exact information from voters.
The fundamental issue is that individuals can be brilliant, the average of a large population does very poorly on any sort of measurement of how much information an individual can supply.
That is, you are trying to extract (oversight for a complex system) from a pool where (almost everyone is unqualified and doesn’t know anything useful).
I agree that preferences is something you would like to extract, but how can you even show that [a given politician acted to maximize those preferences] or [a proposed policy was even the one with the highest expected value against the consensus preferences]. Similarly, voters are bombarded with [outright lies as to the actual consequences of a proposed policy] and [outright lies about ground true reality].
The “what do you know and how do you know it” rationality question to me tells me that voters aren’t contributing much information. (in today’s 2 party system at most you get 1 bit per voter, not enough to run a government. Your proposal you are getting maybe 4 bits per voter)
I theorize that the actual reason democracy ‘works’ is because the actual information to run a government is coming from elites, just that instead of a single unaccountable elite (a dictatorship), voters can express preferences to stop the absolute worst behaviors by the elite. (except, uh, all the times they fail to do this)
And, like above, an elite has to get voters to vote for a policy by [convincing voters that it’s in their best interest, a children for food policy would be difficult to pass] and [spending money on such persuasion]. Since elites that are more successful have more money to spend, and [success is correlated with competence], then this system is extracting information from a pool of [statically probable to be competent] elite and this is why it works at all.
You can also predict failures. For policies where [most elite will not live to see benefits], they are unlikely to be supported. For example, most elites will be dead when climate change is predicted to get really bad. For things where the elites benefit but the average voters don’t, like tax and union and immigration and criminal justice policies, it comes out in favor of elites...
I theorize that the actual reason democracy ‘works’ is because the actual information to run a government is coming from elites, just that instead of a single unaccountable elite (a dictatorship), voters can express preferences to stop the absolute worst behaviors by the elite. (except, uh, all the times they fail to do this)
This was my background assumption. That’s why I kept the examples to legislators instead of postulating a voting public. I’m assuming you want to elect legislators rather than solve everything with direct democracy.
And I agree that democratic election of legislators is more like “keeping the devils in check by throwing out the worst” rather than true election of the best lawmakers. But repeatedly throwing out the worst can bring us to a tolerable equilibrium of quality.
We might be able to do better with Futarchy, which extracts information from elites more directly (while extracting preferences from voters by having them directly vote on which values the government should optimize). But I consider that beyond the scope of the question; here I’m interested in splitting up the problem of good legislation into (a) selecting a highly competent, but otherwise representative, legislative body (this part is not within problem scope; solve separately) and (b) designing good mechanisms for how these legislators select laws (this is the problem I’m interested in).
There’s a second issue here. Any ‘voting system to accurately measure preferences’ is in the class of systems trying to exact information from voters.
The fundamental issue is that individuals can be brilliant, the average of a large population does very poorly on any sort of measurement of how much information an individual can supply.
That is, you are trying to extract (oversight for a complex system) from a pool where (almost everyone is unqualified and doesn’t know anything useful).
I agree that preferences is something you would like to extract, but how can you even show that [a given politician acted to maximize those preferences] or [a proposed policy was even the one with the highest expected value against the consensus preferences]. Similarly, voters are bombarded with [outright lies as to the actual consequences of a proposed policy] and [outright lies about ground true reality].
The “what do you know and how do you know it” rationality question to me tells me that voters aren’t contributing much information. (in today’s 2 party system at most you get 1 bit per voter, not enough to run a government. Your proposal you are getting maybe 4 bits per voter)
I theorize that the actual reason democracy ‘works’ is because the actual information to run a government is coming from elites, just that instead of a single unaccountable elite (a dictatorship), voters can express preferences to stop the absolute worst behaviors by the elite. (except, uh, all the times they fail to do this)
And, like above, an elite has to get voters to vote for a policy by [convincing voters that it’s in their best interest, a children for food policy would be difficult to pass] and [spending money on such persuasion]. Since elites that are more successful have more money to spend, and [success is correlated with competence], then this system is extracting information from a pool of [statically probable to be competent] elite and this is why it works at all.
You can also predict failures. For policies where [most elite will not live to see benefits], they are unlikely to be supported. For example, most elites will be dead when climate change is predicted to get really bad. For things where the elites benefit but the average voters don’t, like tax and union and immigration and criminal justice policies, it comes out in favor of elites...
This was my background assumption. That’s why I kept the examples to legislators instead of postulating a voting public. I’m assuming you want to elect legislators rather than solve everything with direct democracy.
And I agree that democratic election of legislators is more like “keeping the devils in check by throwing out the worst” rather than true election of the best lawmakers. But repeatedly throwing out the worst can bring us to a tolerable equilibrium of quality.
We might be able to do better with Futarchy, which extracts information from elites more directly (while extracting preferences from voters by having them directly vote on which values the government should optimize). But I consider that beyond the scope of the question; here I’m interested in splitting up the problem of good legislation into (a) selecting a highly competent, but otherwise representative, legislative body (this part is not within problem scope; solve separately) and (b) designing good mechanisms for how these legislators select laws (this is the problem I’m interested in).