My point, though poorly worded, was that very intelligent people with a lot of dedication routinely fail while working as senators and representatives because t

My point, though poorly worded, was that very intelligent people with a lot of dedication routinely fail while working as senators and representatives because the job is legitimately complicated and hard. We feel that we'd do good at it because most of us honestly have no idea what's actually required to work in that environment. I don't imagine that I, as an amateur with a job and social life, would really be more informed than the people in Congress. I don't think most of us would be. So the solutions to the problem need to address how to combine our effort and expertise, rather than asking us all to be experts. (If that makes sense....) I think there's a lot of promise in, say, using ML and public repos (eg, github) to let us collectively scan, annotate, and suggest edits for legislation. Why isn't Congress just the maintainers of the authoratative repo that anyone can make a PR to? That seems much more useful than having a vote about everything -- let's argue about it, lay out our best cases as the PRs merge up the hierarchy, and let the Congress people argue out the final merge of a dozen proposal PRs? I mean, that's basically what they do, but it's weirdly pay-to-play, and it seems much more democratic to, ya know, let the public in on it.