Interesting but disturbing commentary at GMU's Marginal Revolution. Smells like a recipe for dystopia...
The wisdom of the crowds breaks down when the crowd’s errors are systematically biased rather than random. As Peter Boettke notes, Bryan Caplan makes a strong case in The Myth of the Rational Voter that better educated voters are less systematically biased than the average voter and more likely to agree with experts on questions of fact.
When voters are not equally competent some remarkable mathematical results show that the best cognitive democracy is not universal suffrage and one-person, one-vote but a specific form of weighted voting. ... weighting votes by a measure of competence, which can be estimated from past decisions, may lead to significant improvements in outcomes.
Voters have diverse preferences not just competences but we could combine cognitive and preference aggregation theories of democracy by using high competence voters from different demographics categories to estimate what people would think about issues if only they were better informed. In this way we can distinguish differences due to knowledge from those due to preferences and we could upweight the competent while maintaining demographic balance thus creating a cognitive democracy based on enlightened preferences.
