alt Hacker NewsYou are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Replies
An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.
Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly.
I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy.
Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material.
> If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.