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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Agreed 100%. You may like this article, that has academic research to back up your thoughts— Not Everyone Should Have a Say; To speed up permitting for energy projects, we’ll need to rethink community input:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/environmen...

This sort of "participatory democracy," where the most motivated can dominate those with less time, can be traced back to the New Left, which was criticized by social democrats at the time.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/a-day-in-the-life-of...

And it goes back further to the 30-40s where communists would drag out meetings late into the night in order to thin out the crowd, and then wait until they had a majority for a vote.

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The commoner should have a say, unless they oppose the ideas of Those Who Know Best. The bureaucracy is made of Those Who Know Best. The commoner wants Things to be Better but is worried that changes will make their lot worse.

The commoner has few choices: find other commoners with reasonably similar concerns and use the power of numbers (and perhaps law) to represent their concerns to The Powers That Be (union, HOA, PAC, gang/mafia/mob/activist, some voters); capitulate to Those Who Know Best and hope Things Will Get Better (other voters, slacktivists, Eternally Online people); or, wait for Someone Else to rectify the concern (Enlightened Centrists, anarchists, 9-5ers, mostly everyone else).

Lots of other options and variations are possible, but I can't think of them at this time.

I don't have a point, I just wanted to document a stray thought you inspired.

Where I live in a town of about 100K, 46,000 people voted in the election for mayor.

If there's a hearing for some project, maybe 10 or 20 people show up, mostly old, wealthy people who 'got theirs' and want to complain about change.

People's votes are a far more inclusive way of letting 'the commoner' have their say than hearings at 11AM.

> the power of numbers

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but isn't that the point of democracy? If enough people agree with your view then that's what gets implemented. The point of the parent is that you can't let people with the loudest voices and most free time abuse the system.

Jerusalem Demsas is a fantastic writer. One of the highlights of my year was getting to meet her and say "thank you" at the YIMBYTown conference in Portland.

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