At 09:36 AM 4/25/2007, Howard Swerdfeger wrote: >Ultimately I believe the best answer is to educate the entire population >well in advance of the decision that needs to be made. So that >correlation between "best" and preferred action approaches 1.
I think it is fairly simple to prove that this is *not* the best answer: The best answer is never an impossible one. However, the *electorate* can be made a fairly small and much more educable subset. This is what Asset Voting does. It is also what representative democracy attempts to do in general. Delegable Proxy similarly does this, to perfection, making the educable subset one which is explicitly chosen by the total population, without constraint beyond the natural one that the ultimate set of proxies is relative small (relative to the general population!). Asset used for multiwinner elections forces the reduction to a specific number. DP, as we have formulated it, allows anyone to remain in the set of electors. So, in the end, who decides who is qualified? Each and every voter decides this for himself or herself. Nobody else forces a choice, you can delegate your vote or exercise it directly. But there are huge advantages to delegating it, so great that I suspect the biggest problem in DP is finding people willing to serve! This is the one problem of DP that Demoex uncovered. They found that DP led to a very small group of people who were proxies for nearly everyone. They considered that a problem, and so did the proxies! I think the problem is actually rather easily soluble, to the extent that it is a problem at all. But that's another matter. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info