Archive for January, 2008

Say You Want Deliberation, Well . . .

Posted January 26, 2008 By Dave Thomer

OK, so brainstorming about the general idea of creating something deliberative juries to set policy – what are the drawbacks? A major one is participation. I think to work, this is something where you’d have to get large swaths of the population involved. You can’t let people out of it because they have very busy […]

Look Who Knows So Much

Posted January 24, 2008 By Dave Thomer

Doing some thinking out loud that may end up as a blog post regarding a paper I’m trying to put together, about people’s capacity for deliberation in democratic societies and what kind of institutions might work and not work. It starts with the problem of experts. As an empiricism-driven philosophy, pragmatism supports the idea of […]

Who Let These Crickets In?

Posted January 22, 2008 By Dave Thomer

Renewing the effort to do fairly regular blogging now that a new semester has started. Truth be told, the last semester put me in a bit of a funk regarding my teaching. My evaluations and in-class observations were generally positive, but because of what I was teaching (and what I was taking) I had to […]