Hello everybody, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and on the podcast we've talked about democracy quite a bit in different contexts

We're gonna keep talking about it

I think it's very important as well as fascinating topic

But usually when you think about democracy when you have a discussion about it

There's different angles you can take you can talk about it from a political point of view obviously

Historical point of view as we've done philosophical point of view the

Justifications for democracy are generally that it's the right thing to do right?

It gives voice to the people who are in a country

But what about the question of is democracy any good at achieving whatever goals the people in the country actually have?

So this is almost a

scientific point of view of democracy or at least sort of

instrumental

computational point of view is

Democracy good at problem solving that's the question being asked by today's guest Henry Farrell

Now Henry is a well-known political theorist he writes a lot about not just democracy but international relations and so forth

But with his collaborator Cosmo Shaleizi

He's been thinking about democracy as a problem solving mechanism the cognitive aspects of democracy and

Basically what you can do is think about democracy as one kind of

Emergence right when we talk about countries we often anthropomorphize them

We say this country has these desires or these goals or something like that

A little bit sketchy because a country is not a person right but in some sense countries act as if they are

Agents that emerge out of all the people who make them up and there's different ways

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