Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

It's no surprise that the 3rd time the answers were the best. I'd expect this to happen even if there was no debate (if not to the same degree).

> Each participant was provided with pen and an answer sheet linked to their seat number. The event’s speaker (author M.S.) conducted the crowd from the stage (Fig. 1A). In the first stage of the experiment, the speaker asked eight questions (Supplementary Table 1) and gave participants 20 seconds to respond to each of them (stage i1, left panel in Fig. 1A). Then, participants were instructed to organize in to groups of five based on a numerical code in their answer sheet (see Methods). The speaker repeated four of the eight questions and gave each group one minute to reach a consensus (stage c, middle panel in Fig. 1A ). Finally, the eight questions were presented again from stage and participants had 20 seconds to write down their individual estimate, which gave them a chance to revise their opinions and change their minds (stage i2, right panel in Fig. 1A). Participants also reported their confidence in their individual responses in a scale from 0 to 10.

Of course the plebes get their info through narrow, distorted filters, but I don't think it's the same here.

We don't ask the public to set policy, we ask them to pick a team that will set policy, which is very different.

I'm sure there are plenty of sources. I read about it in The Influential Mind.

It's entire point is to distribute political power to a wide powerbase with a constant churn.

This is to disable known pathologies of entrenched power bases and to discourage social stratification.

Since modern states don't have an entrenched hereditary aristocracy we don't really have a concept of what democracy shields us from, since we've not had to suffer from it - except when we do, we recognize it and shun it.

The social idea was that aristocracy had to be in power since they were the ones with the education. After public schooling became a things, suddenly just being able to read and write is not a distinguishing feature, and having an explicit hereditary elite became a socially untenable construct.

That's not to say that a human society is a fair playing field - but it's not as unjust as in past centuries.

Similarly to vacciness, when democracy works as intended you see only the "bad parts".

Possibly. I think you're assuming people were interested enough in the EU to partake in such referenda, and that big influential campaigns would not have existed, and that had certain treated been voted down that people would still be content with the EU, and so on. And excluding other issues that possibly led to Brexit like nearly a decade of manufactured austerity.

That seems too much of a leap to conclude that Brexit wouldn't have happened.