Non-speculation is not necessarily any better than speculation. The wisdom of crowds requires people to think for themselves[1] rather than subscribing to the s

Non-speculation is not necessarily any better than speculation. The wisdom of crowds requires people to think for themselves[1] rather than subscribing to the status quo; only a democracy of independent thinkers avoids groupthink. In this case, we don't have any choice. People are voting, they're voting about changes, and they're voting about changes now, so it's good to see that people are coming up with original thoughts, because this aggregation of opinions is the only solution available to human society -- nobody, not Alfred Wohlstetter, not Noam Chomsky, not even Ludwig Wittgenstein -- knows what the world will look like in 200 years, and really, there isn't any[2] scientific knowledge on how borders ought to be drawn. "If you don't know how to vote, vote for nothing" -- this impulse will be the death of democracy. Simple ideas are better than no ideas; intuition is worse than reason but still better than nothing. The opinion I am espousing in this post stands in direct contrast to many previous arguments where I called for rigor and caution. This is because I think elections are a fundamentally different process than top-down policies: an election needs to incorporate the information possessed by every individual in the society, if I'm working for the NSA and -- even if I have a family to support, or ideological opposition to pulling a Snowden -- if I know what we're doing is wrong I can vote against it, because the sanctity of the voting booth is the cornerstone of [every] democracy[3]. So it's also interesting to wonder if the Internet -- all this connectedness -- might lead us into social biases that would never have previously affected us. The ideas which become popular these days are the ones that you can learn about in five minutes. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems [2] it's not rigorous [3] http://www.tv.com/m/shows/the-wire/margin-of-error-898885/trivia/ http://www.tv.com/m/shows/the-wire/margin-of-error-898885/tr...