[FRIAM] Democracy and evolution

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Phil Henshaw wrote:
> I'm just suggesting that assuming every point of view has *some* valid 
> basis is as close to a guarantee of intellectual marketplace 
> efficiency as you can get.
In public decision making we need to be able to make distinctions in 
shared language.   That doesn't imply a price and a number line for idea 
quality, but it does require the ability to make distinctions and 
(implicitly) form partially-ordered sets on different dimensions.   
Luckily, ideas can be traded concurrently and multilaterally so there is 
no need.  We can simply let ideas have relevance in different situations 
without any implication of universal value until it becomes useful to 
push the idea into a larger and more critical and contextualized arena.  
On the extreme end of that are metrics like citation counts and 
patents.  I'd like to think that some great ideas will never be so measured.