Is democracy a failure? (1861)

Yes. Consider that attractive candidates get two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Consider that most voters have very little or no knowledge of most policy and issues. Most voters can't name their representatives even. Most just blindly vote for one party or issue.

It's still better than nondemocratic systems I guess. But that's a terribly low bar to pass. That's not something to be proud of.

Everyone always says that it's the best system of government that has been tried. Well maybe we aren't trying hard enough! There are other systems, and here are a few that are my personal favorites.

My ideal system of government has no politicians. It forms a parliament or congress just like normal, but the representatives are sampled randomly from the population. Ideally they would be filtered for IQ or education, but this is optional. And then they would debate and vote on issues, without having party loyalty, and without having to pander to the general population. It's sort of like direct democracy, but the random sampling lets it scale to much larger populations.

I also really like the model of the supreme court. I have to say that every supreme court decision I've looked into, they seem remarkably rational and competent. They aren't perfect of course, but it seems so much better than congress. Statistics show that even biased judges tend to become much less biased by the time they retire.

I'm not sure how they accomplish this. My guess is the lifetime appointments, and the structure of the court being to debate issues extensively, and for the judges to at least try to weigh them objectively. I would love to try a system of government modelled after something like the Supreme court.

There is futarchy, proposed by Robin Hanson. The idea is to use prediction markets to make predictions about the future, like whether policies will actually work. Then voters can vote on values ('I approve of Brexit, conditional on it being predicted to increase median wages.') But they bet on beliefs.

Another idea I like is the "Ideological Turing Test". In this case representatives can vote on policy just like normal. But they have to pass a test that proves they fully understand the other side's point of view. By writing arguments for the other side of the argument, and blinded reviewers not being able to tell if it's authentic or not. This would be complicated to implement without people gaming the system, but I think it's worth a try.

There is also alternative voting systems. These are just small modifications of regular democracy. They modify the voting system so you can vote for third parties without being punished for splitting the vote.

"51% of people want spin-up, 49% of people want spin-down, therefore we are going to be a spin-up only society". That right there is the problem with Democracy. Democracy finds controversy, but it does absolutely nothing about it. Since the majority side is always favored, there's no incentive to actually get past the disagreements; there's no incentive to grow. It's just about mindlessly acquiring votes.

Democracy provides useful data: which topics society agrees on, which topics they disagree on. For the ~51/49 (controversial) cases, instead of enlightening ourselves, we just blindly take the majority choice. This is not the way a scientific society should be approaching government.

"...until you can come to a consensus that's acceptable to everyone."

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, democracy rarely seeems to come to any consensus that is acceptable to everyone, but rather serves as little more than a moral battering ram that the 51% can use to impose their will on the 49%. Perhaps one day people will realize that democracy, given its cultish appeals (e.g. "but don't you know other systems are worse!?") is simply barbaric.

Maybe technology will render nation-states obsolete within my lifetime. I can only hope.

> we need a democratic economy

Ah, excellent idea. Put the same people who elected Clinton and Trump in charge of the most complicated emergent system in the world. What could go wrong?

> a democratic workforce

"We voted for you to work on this cotton plantation, so get to it! We also have a democratic economy, so you don't need to worry about getting payed anymore!"

> if you believe democracy is a failure, you're saying that your ability to control your own life is a failure.

That's interesting, because last time I checked I didn't control my life via a democracy.

Based on the fact that you're using a very new account, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is some sort of incoherent troll bait. If not, this is a strong contender for the dumbest comment I've ever seen on HN; just slap the word "democratic" on random topics and pitch it as an alternative economic system, no further details required.