Btw, I really appreciate if people explain downvotes, and it would be great if there was some way to still allow unexplained downvotes while incentivizing adding explanations.  Maybe a way (attached to the post) for people to guess why other people downvoted?

Maybe because somebody didn't think your post qualified as a "Question"? I don't see any guidelines on what qualifies as a "question" versus a "post" -- and personally I wouldn't have downvoted because of this --- but your question seems a little long/opinionated. 

Interesting and thanks for your response!

I didn't mean there would be multiple stages of voting. I meant the first stage is a random selection and the second stage is the randomly chosen people voting. This puts the full weight of responsibility on the chosen ones and they should take it seriously. Sounds great if they are given money too.

The thing I feel is missing but this community has a sense for is that the bar to improving a decision when people have different opinions is far higher than people treat it. And if that's true then the more concentrated the responsibility the better… like no more than 10 voters for anything?

The greater the number of voters the less time it makes sense as an individual to spend researching the options. It seems a good first step would be to randomly reduce the number of voters to an amount that would maximize the overall quality of the decision. Any thoughts on this?

Interesting experiment. It reminds me of an experiment where subjects wore glasses that turned world upside down (really, right side up for the projection on our eye) and eventually they adjusted so the world looked upside down when taking off the glasses.

What do you think a "yes" or "no" in your experiment would mean?

Note, Dennett says in Quining Qualia :

On waking up and finding your visual world highly anomalous, you should exclaim "Egad! Something has happened! Either my qualia have been inverted or my memory-linked qualia-reactions have been inverted. I wonder which!"

Part of it is that person let someone else die (theoretically) to save his own life. You let someone die for the Latte.

Note: I drink the Latte (occasionally), but it's because I think I can be more effective on the big stuff and that not saving is less bad than killing (as we both agree).

The point I'm responding to is:

Why are you carrying the moral burden?

Because everyone is. I'm assuming you meant that comment as saying something like the burden is diluted since so many people touch the money, but I don't think that is valid.

Imagine a 1st world economy where nobody ever spends any money on aid. If you live in that hypothetical world you (anybody) could take $200 that is floating around and prevent a death (which is not the same as killing somebody but that's a different point). Our world is somewhat like that. I don't think things are as convenient as you're implying.

Wondrous yes, but not miraculous

Star Trek, Richard Manning & Hans Beimler, Who Watches the Watchers? (reworded)

Some of my predictions are of the sort "the stock market will fall 50% tomorrow with 20% odds" (not a real prediction!). If it did happen I should get huge credit, but would it show up as negative credit since I predicted there was only a 20% chance it would happen? Is there some way it would be possible to do this kind of prediction with PredictionBook?

I predict this comment will get less than 4 points by Oct. 19 with 75% odds.