Can you elaborate on that? What is skilled facilitation?

Politicians are far from rationally ignorant, continually polling each other, engaging in serious deliberation, and one is very well justified in believing, perfectly placed to form a ‘coherent collective viewpoint’ and arrive at the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ . A really good question then, is how do we legislate for them to debate and act in accord with this aim?

Unfortunately politicians are also individuals whose “attitudes are subject to manipulation by powerful forces pursuing their own agendas”, namely the upper echelons of their parties whose prime goal is to have the prestige of staying in Government and not in opposition.

So this is what I see as being the main problem, one requiring a major overhaul of the political system.

I agree that the IPPC could be taken as one good model for reaching genuine collective wisdom. One way of achieving this might be for Barry Jones to use his vast influence and genius to have all politicians well trained in the processes of the scientific methods for collecting all the relevant data, and in the philosophical processes of evaluating that data.

Another suggestion for setting up a second crowd that is not as self-referential as is the political crowd, would be to legislate that politicians themselves pay for the setting up of an appropriate ”crowd”.

I cannot help but end, by asking any good political satyrists to come up with a good term that might best describe such a “crowd of politicians” as suggested above!