> proposes to delegate on a per-issue basis, but the cost of expert identification is necessarily a function of the cost of expertise acquisition

Isn’t part of being an expert recognising expertise?

I'm not really sure that "expert" is objectively quantifiable. Plenty of experts have their own biases, especially when it comes to information that conflicts with positions they have long advocated for.

I'm thinking specifically here of the various stories that crop up when a grad student can't publish work that contradicts their advisor's own published work, but there are also plenty of examples in other fields as well.

At the end of the day, you have people who have either studied a thing or have direct experience working with it, and you assign them some amount of trust since they've done it more than you have. You don't need to know much about a particular sub field of biology to recognize that someone claims to have expertise in biology.

Knowing some yourself helps you see if they're making it up. Even if you don't know much, you can still pick up on whether they are open to new ideas, though.

All of this is to say that reducing "expertise" to a quantifiable binary answer is not an easy thing.

And of course asking military experts about things like if wars can be won and how is often questionable as well. Experts are often experts because they are interested in those topics, and that itself is a bias. You probably don't turn into a general because you a pacifist.

So there is already a certain selection bias in who would even become an expert and why.

I mean the cost to the non-expert voter to identify which expert to trust on a given issue. For example, we are all pretty technical here, but who would you pick as the most expert for each of the top 10 programming languages? IDing all 10 would be quite a bit of work.

It is, so how do you bootstrap that as a voter if you need an expert to recognize an expert?

edit: (I feel like Walter Lippmann went over all of this already in The Phantom Public, and came up with no good answers.)

a side note to my sibling post about the bayesian truth serum, which can be used to surface "experts", is that BTS discovers experts by rarity of knowledge in the crowd and correctness of metaknowledge of the crowd. The existence of experts is a critical assumption. A corollary is that the maximal knowledge is bound by the crowd.

But also, since it's relative to the population, the knowledge of "experts" does not need to have any bearing on truth. I thought this would be a problem in our context, but then I thought, that's not so far from reality anyway!

this is indeed a costly problem, but I suspect there are economical solutions using technology.

Expert identification can, to a degree, be bootstrapped out of a crowd using something like Prelec's Bayesian Truth Serum (https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1102081). The tldr is that it fishes out holders of unusually surprising knowledge relative to the population. I was involved in a study that used BTS effectively to identify expert dermatologists.

I imagine it's possible to find a sweet spot between voluntary querying (a-la slashdot) by a rotating, small party combined with a variant of BTS which surfaces the experts as needed.

The cost of identification will still scale with the group, but it might be doable at ratios that are similar to moderator:users in forums.

Personally I think a representative system is more workable than a direct system for exactly the reason you've highlighted it's not feasible to expect every voter to be an expert on every issue, you need to be able to delegate the responsibility to someone better informed.

The idea in theory is that it is the full time job of the elected representative to stay informed on the issues and advance the interest of their constituents.

I think this probably worked better when electorates were more homogenous, going back historically to a time when towns (and the major districts of cities) were focused around one (or a limited few) key industries. During that time I imagine it was much easier for an elected representative to know what was in the interests of their constituents. Modern cities and towns tend to be quite diverse which makes it a lot harder for a single representative to adequately advocate for the majority of their electorate.

Maybe there needs to be some thought given to organizing electoral representation around something other than geographical area.

It is a difficult problem I'm not sure if too many other options have been attempted in the past.

I'm not an expert but I suspect the roots of current system with people in a common location electing a representative for their area evolved out of feudalism where you had a land holding lord in charge of all the serfs in an area. How did other historical democracies work? (I know Greek city states used direct democracy and I think Rome Senate had some kind of rotating system where people took turns). Outside of democracy I think some communists messed around with representation along class lines during the Russian revolution the soviet councils were organized with a representative from each of the soldiers, the peasants and the workers of the area. Some dictatorships have had 'grand councils' (and the like) but no idea how people were assigned to them, I suspect not in a representative manner...

There are many other issues as well.

Modenr Governments have many levels, and how your voting power plays out on various levels is hugely complicated and matters.

Geography is clearly still important. Voting with all other butchers of the nations about what kind of public transport system should exists is of course dumb.

But in some sense, by extension voting geographically for a person in your district to discuss if going to war with X nations or how abortion should be handled makes less sense. Also if you vote geographically for somebody that then decides over the whole nation can lead to the effect of the national will being manipulated to improve individual districts to gain voting power.

The president in the US is really the only person who represents the nation, everybody else is primarily interested in their district or state. In Switzerland we don't vote for any person on federal level, only specific issues.

And that is even before you get to the question of how power, taxation and so on should be distributed over all these levels. That a whole other can of worms.

Democracy is really whole can of worms.

IIRC in Rome people voting by social class (plebe, patrician, equestrian, something like that).

> "Maybe there needs to be some thought given to organizing electoral representation around something other than geographical area."

Various thought has been. I think "party lists" are one of them. Since computers have made calculations easier I'm in favor (for things like the House of Representatives) of electing multiple candidates per district, but weighting their power within the House by the number or proportion of votes they received. And maybe making a 5% cutoff to be elected to prevent too many representatives, or doing something with ranked choice voting.

It's not a matter of small towns. It's a matter of having differing positions on taxes, abortion, police, etc, etc.