I'm increasingly of the opinion that the "real" point of democracy is something entirely aside from the rhetoric used to support it ... but you of all people should know that averaging the estimates of how many beans are in the jar does better than any individual guess.

Systems with humans as components can, under the right conditions, do better than those humans could do alone; several insultingly trivial examples spring to mind as soon as it's phrased that way.

Is democracy such a system? Eh.