Information doesn't really "trickle up" in a situation like this, particularly if it departs to a useful degree from consensus.

After the call for questions closed at 9:30 a.m. ET Thursday, more than 90,000 people had submitted more than 104,000 questions for the president. The questions spread across several categories and more than 3.6 million site users ranked the vat of queries based on their perceived importance.

Obama answered seven of the most popular questions, according to a CNN tally.

This sort of process seems little more useful in terms of investing one's time to help the world than is investing one's money on a lottery ticket to help their financial future. To a high degree it's an illusory mechanism at best.

Indeed, at least a ticket in a fair lottery has somewhat-commensurate investment/payoff probability. It seems like this sort of situation, with a popularity filter, is more akin to a contest to "name the first family's new dog". Even if we mobilized 15% of respondents, the likelihood that we could raise the actual odds of the dog being named "Ratfuck" would be low. (By the way, I'd pay good money to see that happen, but I digress.)

Of course, using this exercise to focus our ideas as Nate suggests is fine. However, to the extent that, having done so, we feel like we've actually done something useful, it's problematic, getting into "opiate of the masses" territory.

There are ways of framing & leveraging important questions and placing them conspicuously in front of decision-makers to alter national and international policies, bypassing the cultural error-correction mechanisms. We simply aren't employing them effectively.

Mmmmm.... lotus....