One of the first attempts to implement such a political system was perhaps Pythagoras' "city of the wise" that he planned to build in Italy together with his followers, the order of "mathematikoi".
In turn, Mikhail Epstein defined noocracy as "the thinking matter increases its mass in nature and geo- and biosphere grow into noosphere, the future of the humanity can be envisioned as noocracy—that is the power of the collective brain rather than separate individuals representing certain social groups or society as whole".
Here the opinions of a likely under-informed public and those of experts are well-known to be starkly in conflict, potentially rendering it a textbook case for setting up such a polity.
This system, espoused by the philosopher John Stuart Mill, holds that political participation helps voters feel empowered.
Membership in this deliberative body would be open to any member of society, but qualifying would require passing difficult tests and undergoing criminal background checks.
• “Simulated oracle”: In this model, all citizens are asked simultaneously to vote on policies or candidates, to take a test of basic political knowledge, and to indicate their demographics.
[4] Therefore, one person one vote mechanism proposed by democracy cannot be used to produce efficient policy outcomes, for which the transfer of power to a smaller, informed and rational group would be more appropriate.
Firstly, most of the voters think that the marginal contribution of their vote will not make a difference on election outcomes; therefore, they do not find it useful to inform themselves on political matters.
[4] This psychological phenomenon causes voters to strongly identify themselves with a certain political group, specifically find evidence to support arguments aligning with their preferred ideological inclinations, and eventually vote with a high level of bias.
In the words of the country's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore is a society based on effort and merit, not wealth or privilege depending on birth.
[6] In order to develop further Singapore's technocratic system, some thinkers, like Parag Khanna, have proposed for the country to adapt a model of direct technocracy, demanding citizen input in essential matters through online polls, referendums, etc., and asking for a committee of experts to analyze this data to determine the best course of action.
His demand that the government not discriminatorily heed the preferences of full members of the polity is abridged by Brennan's "restricted suffrage" and "plural voting" schemes of epistocracy.
"[9] Granting the full powers of citizenship based on a system like formal education attainment does not account for the other ways that people can consume information, is the commonly cited argument, and still eschews consideration for the uneducated within a group.
[4] That vulcan reflects Plato's philosopher king and, in a more realistic sense, the academic elites whom Michael Young satirized in his essay The Rise of the Meritocracy.
[4][13] The only way to correct for that seems, to many, to be to widen the circle of deliberation (as discussed above) because policy decisions that were made with more input and approval from the people last longer and even garner the agreement of the experts.
[14][12] To further illustrate that experts, too, are flawed, Crain enumerates some of the expert-endorsed political decisions that he has deemed failures in recent years: "invading Iraq, having a single European currency, grinding subprime mortgages into the sausage known as collateralized debt obligations.
[15] Even the aspects of the modes of selecting voters that are known cause many theorists concern, as both Brennan and Crain note that the majority of poor black women would be excluded from the enfranchised polity and risk seeing their needs represented even less than they currently are.
As a rejection of the unfairness argument put forward by democrats, Brennan argues that the voting electorate in modern democracies is also demographically disproportionate; based on empirical studies, it has been demonstrated that voters coming from privileged background, such as white, middle aged, higher-income men, tend to vote at a higher rate than other demographic groups.