I just read Noise by Kahneman, Sibony, Sunstein, and I'm not sure that we should talk about politics at all anymore. We should think about politics, yes! Read about politics, listen about politics, and experience politics ourselves. But probably not talk too much.<p>Sharing opinions does reduce cognitive noise, but it also promotes and enforces cognitive bias. Which is a fair trade you might think, and in many practical domains it is. But under democratic system, we already have instruments to reduce noise. We have polls and elections. Democracy is well suited to mitigate cognitive noise.<p>But not bias. Imagine 100 people. 10 of them are experts in some particular field. The rest is completely clueless. Now let's hold a poll on some binary question from that field. Of 10 experts, let's say only 8 get the answer right because of the noise, let's call it a 20% noise. Of 90 non-experts, however since they all answer fully noisy anyway, roughly 45 will vote right statistically. The vote is the 53 vs 47 in favor of the right answer.<p>Now let's say, there is a bias that skews the result 10% towards the wrong call. In an expert community, this is not a big deal. 9 out of 10 experts will get the answer right. But among the general population, this would account for 9 votes in the wrong direction. The votes are now 45 vs 55, and the wrong decision is taken.<p>TL&DR Democracy is statistically more vulnerable to cognitive bias than to cognitive noise. And sharing opinions reduces noise but promotes bias.