Noise, Signal and Correlation in Democratic Politics

It's straightforward to observe that good decisions can be made in noisy situations as long as the noise in general cancel out and the signal permeates through the noise.

This was basically the case before the Internet and online social media, where communities were relatively small, generally opposing views cancelled each other out, and the learned elite were networked enough that their views became the majority most of the time.

These days noise is becoming false signals because they are so inter-correlated by the internet and online social media. The system is not supposed to work as it did.