Arbitrary demographics: lessons learned from markets

Geography is a completely arbitrary demographic filter. It represents nothing concrete and dilutes cultural characters found in large urban populations. Marketing has understood this perfectly, going as far as tending to the large-scale psychological personalities. Politics remain in complete incomprehension of this sociological knowledge other than for marketing purposes. This use is a waste of the most efficient decision-making process allowed to complex adaptive systems: distributed intelligence.

Economic markets have well adapted to these realities and are well on their way to satisfy all the primary needs of humankind. The secondary needs, important but not mandatory, can partially be met by those markets. Tertiary needs are much beyond what markets can adapt to. With these needs, competitive access is always detrimental to the overall efficiency of the socioeconomic system, especially decision-making.

Science works largely based on critical debate and multiple decision-making mechanisms. Politics usually works along such practices, but lacks the check science with which science evolves: peer review. But there must be caution about peer review, as human intelligences easily make the mistake of confounding what is true and what is believed to be true. It is completely impossible to make an intelligent decision, especially the best possible decision, without understanding all the relevant facts. Citizens, whose most fundamental responsibility is to carry out or have the most qualified individuals exercise their political power, are asked to do just that. They inevitably fail as it is a physical improbability for the best decisions to be majority if information improbabilities are too high. In other words, when critical facts are misunderstood, there are simply too many possible options and decision-making becomes gamble. While it may be amusing to some individuals, it is far from useful to anybody that political decisions are not the best possible given the resources available.

This is an obvious argument for proportional democracy. However the systems created at the Institute go much beyond electoral proportional democracy. They are capable of truly representing not only the proportional interests of a society but also its distributed intelligence. Social networks, especially those used for political decision-making, do not arise out of arbitrary demographic filters like geography, any more than race, language and sex. These filters were abundantly used by the marketing and public relations industries for several decades. After they failed miserably, they were accordingly replaced with the much more efficient dynamic of understanding its beneficiaries. There is little reason why it would make any more sense in politics.