In my experience, which i prefer to call “my working life” I encountered this situation constantly. I designed large scale computer systems for large enterprises and the design process had to consider and evaluate many ideas from many people who were keenly interested in the ultimate design of the system. It was impossible to make this system work without a process that I called the hypothesis evaluation system. This process evaluated all sides of the argument and then reported its findings to the ultimate authority–the man who ran the enterprise (it was always a man in my day.) He would be the decider.

Obviously such a process does not exist in the blogosphere, and because of this the dream of the Internet as a mechanism for an explosion of useful ideas and changes to our outmoded systems is never to be realized.

But such a system can be developed. In fact, the ancient Athenians had just such a system and it worked beautifully. But ancient Greece in the United States gets about the same respect that modern Greece gets in the EU.