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Informed Choices, Inclusive Voices: Epistemic Journeys in Democratic Decision Making

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By Adrian Haret 1 min read

We will explore the idea that democracies tend to produce good decisions, also known as epistemic democracy. According to this view, the value of democratic decision procedures lies not only in the fact that they are fair, but also in the fact that they can be good at approximating the truth, when there is a truth to be discovered. We will explore the mechanisms that make democracies efficient in this sense: laws of large numbers, diversity, deliberation. In doing so we will touch on celebrated results such as the Condorcet Jury Theorem, and get glimpse of ways in which things can go wrong through misinformation, polarization or the systematic suppression of certain voices.

Lectures

  1. Logistics [pdf]

  2. The Wisdom of Crowds [pdf]

  3. The Condorcet Jury Theorem [pdf]

  4. Beyond the Condorcet Jury Theorem [pdf]

Bibliography

  1. Bikhchandani, S., Hirshleifer, D., & Welch, I. (1992). A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades. The Journal of Political Economy, 100(5), 992–1026.
  2. Hong, L., & Page, S. E. (2004). Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(46), 16385–16389.
  3. Wolfers, J., & Zitzewitz, E. (2004). Prediction Markets. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(2), 107–126.
  4. Surowiecki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor.
  5. Anderson, E. (2006). The epistemology of democracy. Episteme, 3(1–2), 8–22
  6. Caplan, B. (2007). The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton University Press.
  7. Golub, B., & Jackson, M. O. (2010). Naïve Learning in Social Networks and the Wisdom of Crowds. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2(1), 112–149.
  8. Landemore, H. (2013). Deliberation, cognitive diversity, and democratic inclusiveness: an epistemic argument for the random selection of representatives. Synthese, 190, 1209–1231
  9. Landemore, H. (2013). Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton University Press.
  10. Thompson, A. (2014). Does Diversity Trump Ability?. Notices of the AMS, 61(9).
  11. Dietrich, F., & Spiekermann, K. (2022). Jury Theorems. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Course
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