Here's what i say: Good. Bring it. I want our collective ignorance to shine, so we can confront it head-on as the destructive force that it is.

Representative democracy was put in place when regular people were presumably MUCH more ignorant. And giving citizens power through proxy likely spurred us to become more aware as citizenry. But I imagine it was pretty jarring at first.

Delegative democracy puts us in uncomfortable territory yet again, and I think that's a good thing.

> I want our collective ignorance to shine

Ok, I present to you:

Anti-vax: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4767530/vaccine-deniers-i...

Climate change denial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial

Anti-GMO: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

Creation Science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science

> so we can confront it head-on as the destructive force that it is.

That hasn't been working so well...

I find none of those overly concerning in practice, at least not to the degree that they reflect poorly on delegative democracy.

- http://www.gallup.com/poll/168620/one-four-solidly-skeptical...

- http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/...

- http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intel...

It seems however that informing is generally slower than populismusm, so there might be an increased probability that things go wild. That might actually be an advantage of the slowness of current democracies. Maybe one could add some sort of artificial deceleration and decentralization mechanism to a Liquid Democracy to counteract this problem.

> Imagine Rush Limbaugh having the power to vote on behalf of millions of people.

If his vote is identical to what they'd vote on their own, what difference does it make?

I think that vesting direct power in him would likely lead to personality-driven polarization, where people who can't stomach him would be inclined to give their vote to whoever sticks it to him most forcefully. Or other sensationalistic and dramatic storylines, amplified by the media.

> I think that vesting direct power in him would likely lead to personality-driven polarization

That sounds exactly like the current system. A lot of people voted for/against Obama/Bush for similar reasons.

Sure but Rush Limbaugh is far more extreme and polarizing than Bush. He could never actually win a primary. But under the proposed system you don't need to.

There's also not the barrier of having to actually be a politician. Someone could make a YouTube video arguing why everyone else is an idiot and they are the only person you should trust with your vote, and the next day have incredible amounts of political power.

For example, if this system were in place right now, how many pro/anti-GamerGate ideologues would overnight go from nothing to having thousands or millions of votes?

The problem is we (actually you, since I'm not a US citizen) elect one set of people to vote on our behaves for everything. If we can delegate to different people on different issues, then it'll be very different. The whole notion of party politics may even break down.

This. At least in a representative democracy the ideologues with the huge media reach are generally not the same people who are actually making the laws.