An individual may not be that well informed when voting but the collective of all votes is supposed to average out to something more reasonable. There was a story about a bunch of people who were guessing the weight of an ox in a state fair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_st...) where people were generally not very well informed but the average weight guessed was pretty accurate.
There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them.
Sure, and that's the core value proposition of democracy, but it doesn't address my complaint. This over-simplified model isn't quite relevant in the face of the huge incentives to screw with voters' epistemology that voting creates. There was no small-ox constituency trying to push voters towards estimating lower, because it didn't matter, while modern culture is suffused with politics, and not symmetrically with respect to every issue. There's a reason that my original comment was disgusted by the tendency I'm describing, instead of modeling it as stupidity: a voter would have to be unbelievably dumb to think that their gut feeling is even remotely useful when it comes to 1) complex topics 2) that they haven't bothered to inform themselves about, 3) for which there are a huge amount of resources dedicated to skewing their views on the issue.
> There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them.
I agree with you in that I don't think it's a "voters these days" problems as much as a "most people's moral reasoning is horrifically stunted, in any population and time period". This is a baseline flaw of democracy, and one of the things that made Churchill call it "the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried". But the inevitability of it across a population doesn't mean it can't be criticized at the individual level.
